Algiers cancels José Manuel Albares' visit at the last minute
An unprecedented event in international relations. A few hours before his trip to Algeria, the host country asked José Manuel Albares to cancel his visit. The reason? According to a Spanish diplomatic source, "his Algerian counterpart has a full agenda". A stupid reason.
On the Algerian side, there has been no announcement at the time of writing. On the other hand, the Algerian authorities have not made any announcement about José Manuel Albares' visit. There is therefore no reason to speak of a cancellation. The Algerian authorities never publicly announce visits of foreign personalities to Algeria or trips of Algerian officials abroad. This started with the cancellation of President Tebboune's visit to Paris, originally scheduled for 2 May 2013. The visit was cancelled a fortnight before it was due to take place, following a telephone conversation between Ahmed Attaf and the French minister, Catherine Colonna. However, the visit was practically set in stone during the phone call between Emmanuel Macron and the Algerian head of state on 24 March. The day before the announcement of the "postponement to a later date", not to say cancellation, a delegation of experts from the Elysée and the Quai d'Orsay had stayed in Algiers to finalise the protocolary programme of the Algerian head of state's visit to Paris. Since then, no date has been set for Tebboune's visit to France, although the Algerian side has tried in vain to raise the issue with the French side.
Today, history repeats itself with Spain, but in a more brutal way. The Spanish minister's plane was delayed for almost eight hours before take-off in order to "postpone" a visit that had been planned for several days.
In reality, it was not a postponement, but simply a cancellation. No alternative date has been proposed or agreed upon to justify calling it a postponement. The Algerians have simply bent the rules of diplomacy.
Are the military opposed to José Manuel Albares' visit?
According to sources close to the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the reason is the joint communiqué that the two sides are due to sign at the end of the meeting between the two ministers to seal the normalisation of relations between the two countries. Discussions between the cabinets of the Algerian and Spanish ministers have failed to reach a common position on the question of the former Spanish colony, Western Sahara. This issue continues to poison Algeria's relations with Spain, and is at the root of the diplomatic dispute between the two countries.
Other sources indicate that on his return from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he had attended the World Defence Exhibition in Riyadh, "General Chengriha objected to the Spanish minister's visit". The latter "was close to Moroccan views on the issue of the former Spanish colony", according to the Algerian military. As a result, the rift between the two countries has resurfaced.
A dispute that was thought to have been overcome, after a period of frostiness that lasted more than twenty months, and three months after the beginning of normalisation between the two capitals with the appointment of a new Algerian ambassador to Spain last November. The visit of Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, scheduled for Monday 12 February at the invitation of his Algerian counterpart Ahmed Attaf, was supposed to open a new page between the two countries.
In reality, it is Algiers that is doing and undoing as it pleases, with great clumsiness, in relations between the two countries. Judge for yourselves.
Almost two years ago, the Algerian government dismissed its ambassador, Saïd Moussi, for what it considered 'a reversal of the Spanish position on the Western Sahara issue'. This was followed by the freezing of the treaty of friendship and good neighbourliness with Spain, which led to the blocking of numerous commercial contracts between economic operators in the two countries. This was detrimental both to some Spanish companies and to the Algerian market, which suffered a severe shortage of basic necessities.
Madrid, for its part, did not react in the slightest to the hostile measures taken by Algiers. The Spanish government, whose fall was expected by Algerians on the eve of the legislative elections, has remained unperturbed. Its president, Pedro Sánchez, who in Algiers' eyes is responsible for the rift between the two countries, has been re-elected, against Algiers' wishes.
In November 2023, acting as if nothing had happened, Algiers requested the accreditation of Abdelfettah Deghmoune, who knows Spain well having been number 2 in the Algerian embassy there, as the new representative of the Algerian state in the Iberian Peninsula. The agreement was quickly reached and the process of normalising relations was set in motion. A few weeks later, economic and trade relations thawed. With the Algerian market in high demand due to the lack of local production, and one month before the beginning of the month of Ramadan, the Algerian authorities authorised the import of fresh red meat, just a few weeks after authorising the import of poultry inputs, namely replacement chicks, replacement chicks and hatching eggs, from Spain.
What has changed to make Algiers review its position and reverse a decision that has done nothing but harm its economic interests, which are as dependent on Spain as on many European countries? According to Minister Ahmed Attaf, appointed head of Algerian diplomacy a year after the dispute began on 18 March 2023, in an interview granted on 28 December to the Qatari channel Al Jazeera, "Spain has changed its position 180 degrees". He added, referring to "Pedro Sánchez's speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2023", that "Spain has returned to a position in line with that of the European Union on Western Sahara".
But this is not true. Spain has not changed its position one iota. On the contrary, its position has clearly tilted in favour of Morocco. The recent vote, on 14 February 2023, in the Spanish Congress, of a law granting Spanish nationality to Saharawis born in the Sahara before its decolonisation in 1976, means that Algeria has lost the famous refugee status charter for Saharawis in the Polisario-controlled Tindouf camps. Thanks to this law, all these "refugees" become Spanish citizens who no longer need to live in tents in inhuman conditions. So far, the Algerian authorities have not reacted to the vote on this law, which continues its legislative path by being sent to the competent committee for the presentation of amendments and its examination in committee before being sent to the Senate.
In addition to this bill, which aims to grant Sahrawis Spanish nationality "by letter of nature, even if they do not reside in Spain", the official gazette of the Spanish kingdom published on 29 August an official decree in which it implicitly considers the town of Layoune, in Western Sahara, as a Moroccan town. Has Algiers taken this into account? Apparently not.
The dispute with Spain has been yet another slap in the face for Algerian diplomacy. A diplomacy that has been deployed again in recent days due to the pilgrimages of its leader, Ahmed Attaf, which took him from Tunis to Nouakchott via Tripoli. In a sense, it is a tour of neighbouring countries, with the exception, of course, of Morocco. The Algerian foreign minister was to complete this tour with his Spanish counterpart, José Manuel Albares, not only to warm up relations between the two countries, but also with a view to reorienting Algeria's policy towards its neighbours.
Is this the prelude to a repositioning on the Saharawi issue, given the increasing pressure from the US? It is difficult to answer, given the versatility and incoherence of the Algerian regime's positions. The last-minute cancellation of José Manuel Albares' visit is a case in point.