What is behind the crisis in Guerguerat?

The crisis unleashed in Guerguerat, which began with the blocking of the border crossing by Sahrawi civilian commandos, and ended, so far, by the intervention of the Moroccan Army to restore the previous status quo, hides interests that go beyond the geographical situation.
As Algerian President Abdelmayid Tebboune finds himself hospitalized in Germany infected with Covid-19, this crisis raises profound questions in Algeria. The president is the supreme head of the Armed Forces and Minister of Defense, and is the only one who has constitutional power to face a warlike scenario, in case the crisis in Guerguerat degenerates. The question then is: who has promoted the crisis and for what purpose?

Some see in the evolution of this crisis an expression of the struggles between the different factions of power in Algeria, similar in a way to the scenario originated with the attack by an obscure and unknown terrorist commando from Libya on the Algerian gas platform of Tinguentourine in January 2013, which led to an internal confrontation and an assault on the base carried out by the Special Intervention Group, an elite body of the secret services led by General Mohamed Mediene, leaving dozens of deaths among western hostages and the terrorist commando.

According to this approach to the origin of the crisis in Guerguerat, a faction of the Algerian military and security power, which has been harshly purged since the arrival to power of General Chengriha, supporter of President Tebboune, has manipulated the leadership of the Polisario Front so that Renounce the 1991 Ceasefire Agreement, and put the Algerian Army in the position of facing the crisis in the forefront.

A former Polisario leader has declared to ATALAYAR that "it seems to me crazy, inexplicable and beyond all logic, that the Front caused this crisis while the Algerian president was ill and out of the country."

Indeed, the secessionist movement has turned a deaf ear to the three calls made by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to withdraw the Polisario troops deployed in Guerguerat that were blocking the passage of civilian trucks and goods. However, in the first Guerguerat crisis, in 2016/2017, the Polisario did withdraw its militiamen from the buffer zone while Morocco paralyzed the paving of the 5-kilometer track that connects the Saharan territory with Mauritania through this passage. The then Algerian Chief of Staff, General Gaid Salah, ordered Brahim Ghali to withdraw his militiamen, and he did so.

This time, apparently, the “orders” arriving from Algiers to Tindouf have been different and they have intensified the blockade knowing that this would inevitably provoke the Moroccan military intervention to restore the previous status quo.
The procedure used to transmit the orders is also unclear: who gave them in Algiers, and who received them in Tindouf. Some sources have pointed out the absence of the general secretary of the Polisario Front Brahim Ghali, who has not appeared in public since the beginning of this second crisis.
It is not excluded that Ghali disagreed with Algiers, and that his lieutenants, those in charge of Defense and the secret services, Mohamed Lamine Buhali, Brahim Biadillah and Abdallahi Lehbib Balal, have complied with the Algiers directives. Ghali could be set aside, detained or neutralized.
Neither Morocco nor Algeria want open war between the two countries. They both have the best armies in the entire African continent, equipped with modern, structured and well-trained technologies, and with several hundred thousand troops each. Entering into the dynamics of the warlike tension would be effectively "madness" with disastrous consequences for both peoples. Those responsible for this crisis will one day be held accountable.