Rumblings from Ukraine war felt in western Mediterranean
The Eastern European conflict has strained the traditional Russian alliance with Algeria, while Morocco tries to use the Abraham Accords to finalize its hold on Western Sahara.
PARIS — The shock waves of the Abraham Accords and Ukraine war have unsettled the western Mediterranean, as the European nations of Spain, France Italy are pulled in conflicting directions from North Africa — while Algeria and Morocco face their own tensions.
North African independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s saw European settlers flee back to their homelands, together with much of the indigenous Sephardi Jewish population. They were followed by waves of Muslim labor migration to Europe.
Early on, independent Algeria aligned with the USSR. The fall of the Soviet system in 1989 was echoed locally by a civil-war-cum-jihad, lasting until 1997, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. During the Abdelaziz Bouteflika presidency (1999-2019), a political compromise between the military top brass and Islamists led to a social dead end – and steady illegal migration to France and Southern Europe.
The revolt of 2019 brought the ailing president down, but COVID-19 allowed the regime to maintain its hold. Though Algeria abstained from voting at the UN against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the leadership is now unsure whether Russia, faced with a huge military equipment shortage because of the Ukraine war, will be able to refurbish its ally. Hence, it has to diversify and turn to other, more costly suppliers, some of them Western.
