ISPI - Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale

09/04/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/04/2024 09:05

Algeria’s Regional Geopolitics: An Uphill Road Ahead

The upcoming first-round vote for Algeria's next president, slated for 7 September, is widely expected to result in the reelection of Abdelmadjid Tebboune. Tebboune appears to be the favored candidate of the technocratic corps of administrative, security, and party bureaucrats who succeeded in re-securing hegemony over Algerian politics in 2019 with the populist-backed ouster of longstanding President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his inner circle of enablers.

Even if the electoral machinery backing Tebboune somehow fails to secure a second term for the seventy-eight-year-old incumbent, Algeria's next head of state will nonetheless confront a region that has grown significantly less secure. Above all, relations with neighboring Morocco appear to be at an all-time low, largely as a result of the deteriorating political climate around the Western Sahara conflict and, relatedly, the growing military-political alliance between Rabat and Tel Aviv.

A recent battle in Northern Mali near the border with Algeria underscores the heightened insecurity facing Algeria in the Maghrib and Sahara-Sahel areas. Not only were Malian armed forces routed by a coalition of rebel forces, but the participation of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner organization (backing the Malian state) and, apparently, Ukrainian advisors (on the side of the rebels) further highlights the increasingly transregional dimensions of these "local" conflicts.

To understand how dramatically regional insecurity has progressed, it is worth taking a snapshot of the situation when Tebboune first came to power in December 2019 during the massive Hirak protests that ended Bouteflika's two decades of rule. At that time, the primary source of regional insecurity was the Libyan civil war, which was trending towards a bloody climax in late 2019 as eastern-based forces laid siege to Tripoli in a bid to end the conflict militarily.

In the Sahel region, various armed resistance groups continued to operate across the vast swathes of territory, though the presence of French and American militaries aimed to augment the capacities of government forces. However, starting with Mali in 2020 (and again in 2021), the emergence of a "coup belt" in the Sahel would see governments in Chad in 2021, Burkina in 2022, and then Niger in 2023 largely replaced by military authorities. In this political-security environment, hostility towards French and American military assistance grew, eventually resulting in their withdrawal and replacement, in some areas, by Russian forces from the Wagner organization, which had also been on the ground in Libya for several years already.

The Western Sahara file likewise went from stable to concerning during this period as well. At that time in 2019, then UN envoy Horst Köhler, the former German President, had succeeded in organizing two rounds of meetings between Morocco, which claims and occupies most of Western Sahara, and the indigenous independence movement, led by the Polisario Front, which has received major backing from Algiers since 1975. Köhler, however, resigned after the second round due to the intransigence and impertinence of the Moroccan side. Over a year later, the Polisario Front resumed armed attacks against Morocco, breaking with the 1991 UN ceasefire.

As the political and military situation in Western Sahara deteriorated, tensions between Algiers and Rabat also increased, eventually leading the former to sever all relations with Morocco, including natural gas exports via a pipeline running through Morocco to Spain.

Morocco, however, scored major victories in its decades-long effort to legitimate its illegal annexation of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara. In late 2020, the outgoing Donald Trump administration recognized Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara, making it the first - and so far only - major North Atlantic power to do so officially. Making matters worse for Algeria, Morocco agreed in return to normalize relations with Israel, which has led to increasing levels of military cooperation between Rabat and Tel Aviv. Spain and, more recently, France have opted instead to insist that autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty is the only way to resolve the Western Sahara conflict, moves that have also increased Algerian dissatisfaction with those neighbors as well.

In the past few years, one of the few bright spots for Algeria has been the relative subsidence of the civil war in Libya, which has reduced concerns about trans-border insecurity in their shared Saharan frontiers. This "peace," however, has come without any substantive political breakthroughs to end the Libyan conflict definitively. The manner by which the civil war in Libya was arrested in early 2020 was nonetheless a cause of concern for the Algerians, as it came about as a result of a decisive Turkish military intervention at the behest of their political clients in the Tripoli-based side of Libya's divided government, a move that counterbalanced the Egyptian, Emirati, and Russian support for the eastern Libyan forces besieging Tripoli . The previous decade had seen Turkey and Algeria on opposite sides of many questions facing the wider Middle East and Southwest Asia region, notably Ankara's backing of anti-regime forces in the Syrian civil war. Where Turkey saw opportunities to reshape the region in Syria and Libya, Algeria saw a heightened international campaign against secular Arab republicanism backed by the North Atlantic powers. Since Egypt's "betrayal" of the Palestinian cause in the 1979 Camp David agreements, Algeria has witnessed the steady replacement, overthrow, or encirclement of progressive Arab regimes. Whereas the cause of pan-Arab solidarity was ascendant in the first decades following Algeria's independence from France, Algeria - which still clings to those old values - now finds itself increasingly isolated in a region fragmented by the power of monarchism, Islamic revival, and the US-China "cold war."

As Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Mali began to descend into protracted internal conflicts from 2011 onward, Algeria's experiences with civil strife in the 1990s played an important role in shaping their responses to the multiple regional crises that unfolded after the Arab Spring. Some Algerians were quick to say that they had their "Spring" in 1988 and all it did was lead to the "dark decade" of the 1990s, when Islamist guerrillas attempted to mount an insurgency against the state, often by attacking civilians in urban and rural areas. Tens of thousands eventually died as a result, though President Bouteflika, in his first two terms (1999-2004, 2004-2009) largely succeeded in overseeing a quelling of this violence in the north of the country. The deep Saharan south was a different matter, where Islamist groups began to implant themselves in the frontier region between Algeria and its Sahelian neighbors (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and - to a lesser degree - Chad).

The NATO-backed destruction of the Libyan state in 2011 then unleashed a torrent of small arms across the region, adding fuel to the fire of local insurgencies. The most notable were the collapse of central state authority in Northern Mali in 2012, the rise of an Islamic State in that area, and the threatened collapse of Bamako to these forces.

In early 2013, Algeria begrudgingly allowed the French military to fly through its airspace to send forces to bolster the Malian state. This was the beginning of the nearly decade-long French effort, which ended in 2022, to shore up its allied states in the region against the armed resistance based in their vast Saharan interiors.

For Algiers, the low point in the Libyan civil war and the Sahara-Sahel crisis was undoubtedly the complex armed assault against a natural gas production facility in Algeria's eastern Sahara region near the Libyan border in early 2013, which resulted in many fatalities, especially among the foreign workers. Despite the widespread insecurity that gripped Algeria internally in the 1990s, never had any of the armed opposition groups obtained the capacity to disrupt Algeria's petroleum production in such a manner.

In the years since the violence of the 1990s and the growing instability of the Bouteflika presidency, Algeria's military and administrative elites are committed to making sure that those mistakes are never repeated again. This explains to some degree the continuing high rates of military acquisitions, though recent foreign interventions to oust the Libyan and Syrian regimes, alongside French and American military interventions in the Sahel, have likewise shaped Algeria's internal and external national security priories. Recent history also explains why Algeria's administrative and military elites were eager to use the corona virus pandemic to shut down the Hirak uprising in 2020 and are highly sensitive towards foreign support for the cause of Amazigh (Berber) rights in Algeria's ethnic-minority Kabyle region. In other cases, Algeria has seen its regional neighbors and Western powers champion mass uprisings and repressed minorities as a justification for isolation and intervention. While no country in the region maintains an explicit policy of regime change towards Algiers, Algeria's steadfast support for Western Saharan and Palestinian nationalism makes it a continuing antagonist of both Moroccan and Israeli expansionism, as well as the North Atlantic powers backing those projects. In the wider context of the emerging US-China cold war, these geopolitical forces appear to be bifurcating the Middle East into two blocs: one aligned with North Atlantic priorities, led by Israel and the UAE, and another more sympathetic to a new polycentric global order, with Iran and, to a lesser extent, Türkiye, as the keystones. That Algeria is firmly on the side of the latter is further reason for the regime to approach regional and international politics with extreme caution and much suspicion about the motives of Morocco and the North Atlantic powers. Concerns about regional instability fueled by foreign interference will continue to animate Algerian security policy for years to come, regardless of who claims the Presidency this fall.