{"id":119461,"date":"2020-11-17T10:16:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-17T10:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sahara-occidental.net\/2020\/11\/march-algerie-monthly-report-3-4\/"},"modified":"2020-11-17T10:16:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-17T10:16:00","slug":"march-algerie-monthly-report-3-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/2020\/11\/17\/march-algerie-monthly-report-3-4\/","title":{"rendered":"March Algerie monthly report (3\/4)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Foreign Relations<\/b><\/div>\n

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As France’s Operation Serval in northern Mali continues to unfold, fighting is increasingly concentrated in the Adrar des Ifoghas uplands north of Kidal to which AQMI and its allies had fallen back after their tactical retreat from the main towns in the early days of the French intervention. Consequently, French troops have taken control of the remote town of Tessalit, just 70 km from Algeria’s southern border, and are conducting operations in a mountain range that actually extends northwards into Algerian territory \u2013 uncomfortably close, from the Algerian point of view. With the jihadist groups under pressure from French air strikes and ground offensives by Chadian forces, this puts Algeria, and its armed forces in particular, in role of gatekeeper. It is in this context that French army general Henri Poncet (an Africa specialist who coincidentally was born in Oran) was quoted by French news magazine Marianne at the end of February as lauding in no uncertain terms Algeria’s \u201ccourageous\u201d support for the French war effort. \u201cAt a time when the joint European defence effort is conspicuous by its absence, Algeria has turned out to be our best ally in our intervention in Mali,\u201d opined the general, going on to argue that the time has come for Algeria and France \u201cto march ahead together \u2013 History has just given us the opportunity to do so, by designating a common enemy.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Algiers’ position is not without ambiguity, however. After receiving Sergei Lavrov on Feb. 11, for example, President Bouteflika made no comments to the press himself, leaving the talking to the Russian Foreign Minister \u2013 who naturally seized the opportunity to restate Russia’s traditional opposition to outside (and especially Western) intervention in the affairs of sovereign states and to emphasise the harmony of views between Algiers and Moscow on the need for negotiated, \u201cpolitical and diplomatic\u201d solutions to conflicts in countries \u201csuch as Mali and Syria\u201d. In Mali, grumbled Lavrov, the French now found themselves fighting \u201cthe same people they armed in Libya\u201d. Even though in reality Algeria, by force of circumstance, now has little choice but to collaborate with the French against AQMI and its allies, there can be little doubt that Algiers shares the view that what is now happening in Mali is in large part the consequence of former French President Sarkozy’s adventurism in Libya.<\/div>\n
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The upheavals in Mali and Libya having creating immense problems for Algeria on its southern and eastern borders, the Algerian leadership has, as we indicated in our last report, expressed interest in acquiring advanced, US-made killer drones (specifically the MQ-9 Reaper) with which to patrol these vast and almost uncontrollable frontiers. However, it would appear that such efforts \u2013 be they directly with the US authorities or via the British \u2013 have led nowhere (perhaps unsurprisingly given the sensitive nature of the technology which has not even been made available as yet to the United States’ closest Arab allies in the Gulf). In the wake of this failure, the Algerian media has claimed that the first prototype Algerian-made drone, which has apparently been in development since President Bouteflika launched the idea during a visit to Ouargla in 2010, will be ready \u201cby the end of this year\u201d. There is no indication however that the future Algerian drone will be armed, and even if a prototype does fly before the end of 2013, mass production and deployment would still be a long way off, leaving the Algerian military dependent on other means for patrolling the vast desert badlands \u2013 and perhaps tempted to envisage closer cooperation with the US military’s newly established drone capability in neighbouring Niger.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreign Relations As France’s Operation Serval in northern Mali continues to unfold, fighting is increasingly concentrated in the Adrar des Ifoghas uplands north of Kidal to which AQMI and its allies had fallen back after their tactical retreat from the main towns in the early days of the French intervention. Consequently, French troops have taken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2684],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-western-sahara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xnalgrt.cluster100.hosting.ovh.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}