Recent migration crisis in Ceuta and the ensuing sovereignty debate has laid bare Algeria’s hypocrisy in claiming to be the heirs of global anti-colonialism, while defending Spanish centuries-old occupation of Moroccan lands.
Algeria has long marketed itself as the uncompromising champion of anti-colonialism and African liberation, while its leaders invoke the memory of the war against France, wave the banner of self-determination, and lecture the world on historical justice, especially when the target is Morocco’s southern provinces.
Yet when the issue turns to Spain’s centuries-old enclaves of Ceuta (Sebta) and Melilla on Morocco’s northern coast, Algiers suddenly discovers the virtues of colonial borders and Spanish sovereignty.
This is pure, calculated hypocrisy driven by pathological hostility toward Morocco.
Recent events around Ceuta have laid this double standard bare. As migrant pressures and border crises exposed the unresolved status of the Spanish enclaves, territories Morocco has consistently regarded as occupied parts of its national territory since independence.
Algeria’s military regime rather than stand with its “Maghreb brother” against lingering European colonial footholds, its media outlets rushed to score points against Rabat.
They framed the crisis as evidence of Moroccan failure or manipulation, while carefully avoiding any challenge to Spanish control.
In the words of historian Bernard Lugan, writing in Le360, the migrant rush on Ceuta was “opportunely used by Algeria to plant a dagger in the back of the ‘Moroccan brothers.’” What a remarkable forgetting of history.
Morocco’s record of Maghreb solidarity toward Algeria is long and costly. In the 1840s, Morocco supported Abdelkader against French expansion at the price of its own defeat at Isly and territorial losses.
Between 1954 and 1962, Morocco carried the FLN when its forces had been nearly annihilated by the French army.
In 1959–1960, King Mohammed V refused de Gaulle’s offer to restore Béchar and Tindouf precisely so as not to betray Algerian “brothers.”
During the Sand War, Moroccan forces, though victorious, did not press to reclaim provinces absorbed into the new Algerian state.
Time and again, Rabat subordinated its own interests to the ideal of Maghreb unity.
However, Algiers repaid that solidarity by consolidating the colonial borders it inherited from France, hosting and arming the Polisario Front to create a separatist proxy on Morocco’s southern flank, and working tirelessly to block any resolution that would affirm Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara.
The same regime that demands “self-determination” for a manufactured Sahrawi nationalism refuses to apply any such logic to Ceuta and Melilla.
Algeria has never supported Morocco’s legitimate claims to these enclaves. On the contrary, when the Arab Parliament once backed Morocco’s rights regarding the Spanish-held cities, Algiers stood against its neighbors to defend the colonial status quo.
As North Africa Post and others have documented, this is no accident. Algeria’s entire territorial legitimacy rests on the sanctity of French-drawn borders. Challenging Spanish rule in Ceuta would undermine the very principle Algiers uses to justify its own map and its proxy war in the Sahara.
Algeria’s anti-colonial rhetoric is deployed ferociously against Morocco’s recovery of its Sahara, framed as an unfinished decolonization that conveniently opens Algeria a path to the Atlantic.
It falls silent when the colonial leftover is Spanish and the claimant is Morocco. The recent opportunistic exploitation of the Ceuta crisis fits perfectly into this strategy.
As Lugan notes, Algiers has not abandoned its goal of detaching the former Spanish colony from Morocco to create a dependent entity serving Algerian interests.
Any opportunity to damage Rabat’s image is therefore seized, regardless of the contradiction with Algeria’s self-proclaimed principles.
