Melilla Tragedy Reveals Wide Scope of Morocco-Algeria Friction

Rabat – With most of the latest updates on last week’s tragic events in Melilla suggesting that there is still so much to unveil or unpack in this affair as local authorities continue their investigations, the whole thing is inevitably turning into yet another geopolitical bout between Algeria and Morocco.

Following migrants’ storming of the Melilla border on Friday last week, a tragic incident in which at least 23 Sub-Saharan migrants were killed, the Moroccan Embassy in Spain accused Algeria of allowing “extremely violent” migrants to enter Morocco.

The latest attempt to jump the border fence of Melilla was organized by “attackers” with expertise in combat zones, the embassy said in a statement released on Tuesday, noting that many of the migrants had entered Moroccan territory from Algeria due to the country’s “deliberate laxity” in border control.

Friday’s “real drama,” as the embassy put it in its statement, resulted in the death of 23 migrants and the injury of 76 others, 18 of whom are still receiving medical treatment. Meanwhile, nearly 150 Moroccan and Spanish border guards sustained moderate and severe injuries.

Migration management has been a key priority for the Moroccan government in the past decade. With the North African Kingdom being at once a departure, transit, and destination country for growing waves of migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, the migration crisis is increasingly presenting Rabat with a priority dilemma.

While striving on the one hand to adopt what it has long called a humane, responsible, and pan-African approach to curbing the flow of irregular sub-Saharan migrants, the embassy suggested, Morocco is on the other hand increasingly having to honor its border-security agreement with the EU by mounting a “merciless and relentless” fight against human trafficking networks preying on the desperation and plight of migrants.

‘Unprecedented’ migration tragedy

But the embassy’s statement got more interesting or revealing when, in addition to describing migrants’ fence crossing tactics on Friday as “unprecedented,” it suggested that the Melilla tragedy might never have happened had Algeria’s lax border security not facilitated “the massive influx of attackers” into Moroccan territory.

In the embassy’s telling, Friday’s “extremely violent” and “planned attacks” on the Melilla border fence were organized by human trafficking networks determined to make a lucrative business off migrants’ backs.

But, it suggested, the unprecedentedly confrontational clashes with security boards were only possible because Algeria’s “deliberate laxity” allowed “assailants” with a “militiaman” profile and “former soldiers from countries destabilized by war and conflict” to enter Morocco.

Addressing the storm of criticism that Morocco has received from some quarters in the aftermath of the Melilla tragedy, the embassy stressed: “This situation cannot be at the center of the controversies that call into question the commitment and efforts made by Morocco to deal with this migratory pressure orchestrated by the mafias.”

Ever keen to engage in a wrestling bout with a neighbor it has long presented as an “existential threat” to its interests, Algeria appeared more than eager to yet again take Morocco to the edge of what is rapidly becoming an extension of its well-documented discontent with the newfound rapprochement between Rabat and Madrid.

Mere hours following the Moroccan embassy’s allegations, Algeria was prompt to rise to the challenge by summarily dismissing the embassy’s statement as an act of pure geopolitical hand-waving aimed at saving face.

In a finger-waving rebuke, Amar Belani, Algeria’s special envoy for the Maghreb and Western Sahara, told the Algerian state-owned media Echorouk on Tuesday that Morocco is now looking for scapegoats to placate the pain and shame its reputation has had to endure in the aftermath of the Melilla events.

“The Moroccan regime does not have the courage to bear shame. It is therefore always looking for a scapegoat to shirk its responsibilities,” Belani fumed, unmistakably rejoicing in recounting the accusations and condemnation Morocco has faced of late as advocacy groups call for a probe into Friday’s tragic incidents. Instead of “throwing stones dishonestly at its neighbors,” Belani added, Morocco should have confessed its “wrongful” treatment of migrants and its obvious mismanagement of the migration crisis.

Making sense of this exchange of tirades requires putting things in a proper context: The increasingly souring tensions in the historically fraught Algeria-Spain-Morocco triangle. While tense for decades, relations in this complex Mediterranean triangle have turned irretrievably sour since Madrid endorsed in March Rabat’s Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara.

As the Western Sahara dispute is a sensitive topic for Algiers and Rabat, the fragile relations between Algeria and Spain appeared to irreparably break down when Spain abruptly revealed its support for Morocco’s Western Sahara stance.

Algeria’s campaign of retaliation

Algeria has notably suspended a 20-year-old friendship treaty with Spain and barred imports from the European country, deepening what appears to be an escalating bilateral feud driven by Algeria’s frustration with Madrid’s new position on the Western Sahara dispute.

In this sense, while the Moroccan embassy’s statement did not explicitly suggest it, one possible reading of its underlying message would be that Algeria’s “deliberate laxity” in the buildup to Friday’s Melilla tragedy could be the latest retaliatory move in Algiers’ determination to sabotage the increasingly warming Spain-Morocco relationship.

Of particular relevance here is that the embassy’s statement came as the Melilla tragedy inevitably turned into a political football, with pro-Polisario — and therefore pro-Algeria — Spanish MPs accusing Morocco of cruelty toward migrants and mismanagement of its border with Spain.

Other than the embassy’s allegations, Rabat is yet to officially address such criticisms. From Morocco’s perspective, local authorities in both Melilla and the Moroccan city of Nador are still conducting further investigations to shed more light on the Melilla tragedy.

The suggestion appears to be that until the ongoing investigations establish what really happened in Melilla on Friday, any observers’ rehearsal of the usual speculative conclusions and histrionic invectives will be of little, if any, help.

International support for Morocco

In the meantime, amid Rabat’s traditional exercise in diplomatic caution, a number of African diplomats were prompt to rise to the country’s defense on Monday following a barrage of Morocco-bashing comments in some quarters.

Mohamadou Youssifou, Cameroon’s ambassador to Morocco, said: “We stand, as in the past, alongside the Moroccan authorities to curb this situation which does not honor our countries and which does not honor Africa. The African diplomatic corps is ready to work with Morocco to create a synergy of cooperation actions with African countries.”

Another senior African diplomat in Rabat commended Morocco’s migration policy for its “openness” and hospitality, describing the North African country as “a land of reception.”

“We live in Morocco and we know how the Moroccan brothers carry out their policy vis-a-vis our students, our migrants, and our workers in the Kingdom,” stressed Mahamat Abdel Rassoul, Chad’s ambassador to Morocco.

More fundamentally, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been one of Morocco’s most outspoken advocates in the ongoing political melee around the Melilla events. In his latest comments, Sanchez told a Spanish radio show yesterday that, rather than using what happened in Melilla as a pretext to engage in the usual game of settling political scores with Morocco, Spain and the EU should make sure to strengthen their migration cooperation with Rabat.

“Morocco, as a country of transit, suffers from the problem of illegal migration, and we must help Moroccan authorities manage the mafias of human trafficking and control migration flow that arrives at Spanish borders,” Sanchez said.

Both the Spanish PM’s constant pleas in favor of Morocco and the African diplomats’ laudatory comments on the effectiveness, hospitality, and pan-Africanism of Morocco’s migration policy are a painful sight for Algerian diplomacy.

They point to two of the humiliating diplomatic defeats Rabat has inflicted on Algiers in the past few years and months: Returning to the AU to regain its continental primacy at the expanse of Algeria, and taking advantage of Algeria’s ill-advised oil diplomacy to engineer a historic breakthrough with Spain on the Western Sahara question.

As such, if Algeria’s recent retaliatory moves — reviving its pipeline project with Nigeria to drown a similar Moroccan endeavor, as well as ending its friendship treaty with Spain and suspending all flights to the country — are any indication, this week’s trade of diatribes over Melilla might turn out to have only offered a fleeting glimpse of future, fiercer diplomatic fist fights between Algiers and Rabat over the sustainability and significance of the newfound Moroccan-Spanish rapprochement.

François Koundouno contributed to this article.