Algeria Suspends Spain Co-operation Over W.Sahara Dispute

Algiers, June 8 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Jun, 2022 ) :Algeria has suspended a 20-year-old co-operation treaty with Spain, the presidency said Wednesday, after Madrid reversed decades of neutrality on the Western Sahara conflict.

"Algeria has decided to immediately suspend the treaty of friendship, good neighbourliness and co-operation" signed with Madrid in 2002, the presidency said in a statement.

Spain had in March publicly recognised Morocco's autonomy plan for the disputed territory to end a diplomatic spat with the kingdom, Algeria's arch-rival.

But Algiers said Wednesday that move had been "in violation of (Spain's) legal, moral and political obligations" towards the territory, a former Spanish colony largely controlled by Morocco.

In response, it suspended a deal meant to promote dialogue and cooperation on political, economic, financial, education and defence issues.

Wednesday's move reflects Spain's complex challenge of balancing relations with arch-rivals Morocco and Algeria, which in August last year broke off diplomatic ties with Rabat over "hostile acts".

Morocco controls 80 percent of the Western Sahara.

The rest is held by the Algerian-backed Polisario movement, which fought a 15-year war with Morocco after Spanish forces withdrew in 1975 and demands a referendum on independence.

Morocco has offered limited autonomy but insists the phosphate and fisheries-rich territory must remain under its sovereignty.

Spain officially endorsed that position in March to help resolve a year-long diplomatic dispute after it had admitted the Polisario's leader Ibrahim Ait Ghali to be treated for Covid-19.

Weeks after Ghali's hospitalisation, more than 10,000 migrants had surged into Spain's tiny North African enclave of Ceuta as Moroccan border forces looked the other way, in an incident seen as meant to pressure Madrid.

In April Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez travelled to Morocco on an official visit to patch up ties, after his government backed Rabat's 2007 autonomy plan.

Algiers said Wednesday that Madrid had thereby "given its full support to an illegal and illegitimate formula... advocated by the occupying power".

Spain's position is complicated because it depends partly on Algeria for natural gas.

That dependence that has become more acute due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but also because Algeria in October last year stopped pumping gas to Spain through a pipeline traversing Morocco.

Algeria and Morocco have seen months of tensions since Morocco re-established ties with Israel in December 2020 in exchange for Washington also recognising Rabat's sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

That came just weeks after the Polisario had declared a 1991 ceasefire null and void, stepping up attacks on Moroccan forces.