Algeria severs ties with the UAE

Abdelmadjid Tebboune had said that he regarded the United Arab Emirates as “a tiny state” which “spills blood as soon as it arrives”. The Algerian president’s tone of derision and defiance turned on Thursday into an unprecedented decision: the severing of diplomatic relations with Abu Dhabi and the Emirati ambassador being forced to leave Algiers within 48 hours. “Faced with the growing number of provocative and hostile actions on the part of the United Arab Emirates, Algeria has shown great restraint and a high sense of responsibility,” says a statement from the Foreign Ministry. “In accordance with the principles governing relations between states, it has consistently drawn their attention to the matter and warned them of the serious consequences of their deplorable and unjustifiable behaviour.” The United Arab Emirates’ response has so far been measured. “We hope this is a temporary decision,” officials in Abu Dhabi said. However, on Thursday evening, the Algerian Ministry of Defence closed its airspace to military and commercial flights registered in the Emirates. Anwar Gargash, an influential diplomatic adviser to President Mohamed bin Zayed, spoke in his usual elegant yet incisive manner: “Diplomatic relations are managed through reason, communication and clarity of interests, not through riddles and signals to be deciphered.”

Whilst no details have been provided regarding the reasons for the severing of diplomatic relations, suspicions centre on the political and economic support which, in Algeria’s view, the Emirates are providing to the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylie, the Berber region that stretches eastwards from Algiers, encompassing the entire coastline. The movement’s leader, Ferhat Mehenni, is in exile in France, from where he has unilaterally declared the independence of Kabylia. Since 2021, Algiers has classified the Movement as a terrorist organisation and, according to intelligence reports, the UAE is said to be pressuring France to in turn support Mehenni by funding the Kabylian independence movement. The Algerians have never provided concrete evidence of this plan, but the issue of Emirati influence over independence movements across the Arab world is a source of great concern. Abu Dhabi provides financial and military support to the Tuareg separatists in Mali, the unrecognised government in Benghazi, Libya, the Southern Yemen Transitional Council, Somaliland and Jubaland in Somalia, and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. Wherever there are ‘secessionist’ forces, the Gulf state mobilises its diplomatic and economic machinery to support them, both in the Middle East and in Africa.

The events leading up to the breakdown in relations with Algeria go back a long way, at least to 2020. In November of that year, Abu Dhabi decided to open a consulate in El Aaiun, the capital of Western Sahara, thereby effectively recognising Morocco’s sovereignty over the region – a sovereignty contested by Algeria, which instead supports the Sahrawi independence claims of the Polisario Front. During the same period, the UAE and Israel signed the Abraham Accords, a normalisation of relations contested by Algiers. Without explicitly mentioning Abu Dhabi, Tebboune raised the issue again a few years later, when he accused the ‘microstate’ of destabilising the Sahel, where a series of coups in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – supported by the Emirates – had dealt a severe blow to Algeria’s political influence in the region. The first consequence was the decision by the military junta that had seized control of Mali to withdraw from the 2015 Algiers Agreements – those signed between the previous government and the Tuareg separatists under Algerian mediation. This decision has had a devastating impact on the stability of Algeria’s southern borders, where al-Qaeda and the Tuaregs are now allies in a never-ending war against the military junta in Bamako, which is backed by the UAE. The same rift is also re-emerging in Libya, where Abu Dhabi supports Khalifa Haftar’s forces in the east whilst Algiers backs the government in Tripoli.

A clash is therefore unfolding between two visions that are, at heart, similar in their aims – to speak and deal with everyone, provided it serves their own interests – but differ in their methods: Algeria, with its traditionally anti-Israeli and Third Worldist, ‘non-aligned’ approach; and the Emirates, with the power of money, the West’s favoured partner. Tebboune hopes that other countries will follow Algeria’s ‘example’ and sever ties with Abu Dhabi. It is a risky gamble because, for the time being, between him and bin Zayed, it is the Algerian president who appears to be the more isolated of the two.