At this rate, the Algerian regime will probably no longer know where to turn. In the wake of the Spanish government’s implicit recognition, chaired by the socialist Pedro Sanchez, of Morocco’s sovereignty over its Sahara, the United States’ ambassador to Madrid, Julissa Reynoso, drove home the point by reiterating that her country ” plea[d] for [the Moroccan initiative for the negotiation of a statute of autonomy] during contacts with the parties concerned”. “The United States considers the Moroccan autonomy plan for the Sahara to be reasonable and viable,” she told Spanish radio Cadena Ser, to which she was speaking on Saturday March 19, 2022. continue: “We support the process initiated by the United Nations to resolve this dispute and we support Morocco’s initiative”.
On the same day, the spokesman for the US State Department, Ned Price, had also indicated in remarks made to the official Spanish press agency EFE that Washington “continues to consider the autonomy plan presented by Morocco as serious, credible and realistic and which has a clear potential to meet the aspirations of the populations of the region”.
For Algiers, one can imagine that the blow is hard, she who has not ceased for several months to suffer diplomatic snubs vis-à-vis Morocco. His diplomacy has also admitted to having been taken aback by the Sanchez government, to such an extent that it has since recalled its ambassador to Madrid. On the Arab level, we know that the summit that Algeria was to organize in March 2022, for the moment postponed, could in fact never take place, given the insistence of the eastern neighbor to include in its agenda the question of the Moroccan Sahara, even though it is agreed between the heads of state and government of the region that this is an exclusively UN affair. There remains Africa, where Algiers has recently set up a new grouping with South Africa, Ethiopia and Nigeria which, however, could quickly falter, given that many African countries are seeing a bad eye the constitution of a group with exclusive vocation on a continental scale.
