Algeria's Minister of Foreign Affairs has defended the idea of creating a Maghreb bloc excluding Morocco. The plan was initiated by his country, which seeks the support of Mauritania. After it kicked off in Algiers on March 3, a Maghreb grouping without Morocco, Algeria is defending its project, Algerian media reported. «The Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) has been inactive», the Algerian Foreign Minister said in a press briefing Tuesday. The regional grouping, created on February 17, 1989 in Marrakech, «has no activity, not even a Secretary General with the prerogatives of a Secretary General», noted Ahmed Attaf. For the record, Algiers no longer recognizes the Tunisian Taïeb Baccouche as Secretary-General of the Arab Maghreb Union, arguing that his mandate ended in August 2022. Algiers had, moreover, refused to invite him to the Arab summit, held in November 2022 in Algiers. The Algerian head of diplomacy asserted that he had taken the initiative of convincing the states of the region, except Morocco, to «accept the idea of filling the void», stressing that this objective was at the heart of his most recent trips, in February, to Libya, Tunisia and Mauritania. «When I visited the Maghreb countries as the President's special envoy, my mission was to explain this issue to them», he acknowledged. Algeria is confident that Mauritania will support its project Following these efforts, on March 3, the presidents of Tunisia and Libya accepted Abdelmadjid Tebboune's invitation to take part in the launch of Algeria's Maghreb project without Morocco. Mauritania did not attend the launch, even though its President, Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani, took part in the 7th Summit of the Forum of Gas Exporting Countries the previous day. Since then, Algiers has launched an offensive aimed at persuading Nouakchott to join the group, thereby isolating the kingdom from its Maghreb neighbors. This is demonstrated by the frequent official meetings between Ahmed Attaf and his Mauritanian counterpart, Mohamed Salem Ould Merzoug, since March 3. Their last meeting took place on March 15 in Addis Ababa, on the sidelines of an ordinary session of the African Union's Executive Council. The Algerian Foreign Minister expressed his optimism that Mauritania would join the Algerian project. Indeed, he advised those who spoke of Mauritania's reluctance to follow in the footsteps of Tunisia and Libya to «follow the news». On the other hand, the head of diplomacy was cautious about the date and place of the group's next summit. «It will take place in the near future», he replied. It is worth mentioning that at the end of the Algiers meeting on March 3, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, Kaïs Saïed and Mohamed Younes El-Menfi promised to hold the first meeting of this new Maghreb grouping in Tunisia, after the month of Ramadan, as announced by the Algerian presidency in a press release.
