(Algiers and Rabat) Algeria on Tuesday announced the severance of diplomatic relations with neighboring Morocco, accusing the kingdom of “hostile actions” towards Algiers after months of heightened tensions between these two Maghreb countries in traditionally difficult relations, a “unilateral” decision denounced as “unjustified” by Rabat.
“Algeria has decided to sever diplomatic relations with Morocco from today,” Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra said at a press conference.
Mr. Lamamra criticized Rabat for “never having ceased to carry out hostile actions against Algeria”.
“The Moroccan security services and propaganda are waging a vile war against Algeria, its people and its leaders,” he accused.
In a statement released late Tuesday, the Moroccan Foreign Ministry regretted Algeria’s “completely unjustified, but expected” decision, condemning a “logic of escalation” and rejecting “the fallacious, even absurd, pretexts which underlie it. -tendent ”.
At the end of July, King Mohamed VI deplored the “tensions” with Algeria, calling on Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune “to uphold wisdom” and “work in unison for the development of relations” between the two countries.
“It’s a bad decision, it’s like severing relations with the neighbor of your house,” said Mohamed, a Moroccan bus driver interviewed by AFP.
Traditionally difficult, relations between Algeria and its Moroccan neighbor have suffered a recent deterioration due, in particular, to the thorny issue of Western Sahara.
Israeli threats
The normalization of diplomatic relations between Morocco and Israel – in return for an American recognition of Moroccan “sovereignty” over this territory – has further heightened tensions with Algeria, support for the Palestinian cause, which denounced “maneuvers”. foreign countries ”aimed at destabilizing it.
Algiers took very badly the words of the head of Israeli diplomacy Yair Lapid who expressed, during an official visit on August 12 in Casablanca, his “concerns about the role played by Algeria in the region, its rapprochement with Iran and its campaign against Israel’s admission as an observer member of the African Union (AU) ”.
“Foolish accusations and thinly veiled threats,” Lamamra said.
Diplomatic ties had been severed for the first time between the two countries when on March 7, 1976, Rabat ended its relations with Algiers, which had recognized the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), self-proclaimed by the separatists of the Polisario Front.
“The Moroccan provocation reached its climax when a Moroccan delegate to the United Nations called for the independence of the people of the Kabylia region”, Mr. Lamamra said on Tuesday, an approach he described as “dangerous and irresponsible ”.
“Hostile acts”
Algiers had recalled in July its ambassador to Rabat for “consultations with immediate effect”, following “the drift of the Moroccan diplomatic representation in New York which distributed an official note to the member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement in which the Morocco “publicly and explicitly supports an alleged right to self-determination of the Kabyle people” ”.
During a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement on July 13 and 14 in New York, Morocco’s ambassador to the UN, Omar Hilale, passed a note in which he considered that “the valiant Kabyle people deserve […] to fully enjoy their right to self-determination ”.
A red line for Algiers which opposes any desire for independence in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region in northeastern Algeria.
The Moroccan diplomat then expressed his support for Kabyle separatism in reaction to the support given by Algiers to the Saharawi separatists of the Polisario who are fighting Morocco.
Last Wednesday, Algiers had already accused Morocco of “hostile acts”, saying “revising” relations between the two countries and “stepping up security controls at the western borders”. The border between Algeria and Morocco has been officially closed since August 16, 1994.
These announcements by the presidency followed an extraordinary meeting of the Algerian High Security Council devoted to the gigantic forest fires which killed at least 90 people in the north of the country.
Algerian leaders accused the MAK (Movement for Self-Determination of Kabylia), an independentist organization, of being responsible for the fires and lynching on August 11 of a young man wrongly accused of pyromania in Kabylia, a region ravaged by fires.
The Algerian High Security Council had accused Morocco as well as Israel of supporting
