Algeria grabs Moroccan earthquake to settle political scores

Algeria made so much fuss about sending unsolicited aid to Morocco, mobilizing its mouthpieces in the media and its own reporters working for foreign media to show rescuers waiting for Rabat’s green light.

Even when Morocco thanked all the countries that offered aid and accepted help only from the UK, Spain, the UAE and Qatar, only Algeria and France complained in total disrespect for Rabat’s sovereign decisions.

Algeria has sent no formal request to send aid to Moroccan authorities and was content with a media show of rescuers in an airport.

Maghreb Intelligence news website said the rescuers were preparing to go to Libya but the regime was intent on performing a set up that fooled no body.

The same day Algeria pretended to be ready to send aid, the state news agency was publishing diatribes in the form of news stories on Polisario separatist attacks.

The same day Algeria failed to convince international media to cover its mascarade of uninvited rescuers in the airport, the Algerian regime let Polisario separatists violate Morocco’s Sahara borders to claim to attack the defense wall.

Few days later, Algeria made another set up bringing together a handful of so-called Rif separatists in a fabricated event for which all Algerian state media was mobilized.

Algeria fell short of showing real solidarity and kept land borders closed as well as its ban on all Moroccan aircrafts, while ignoring Morocco’s repetitive sincere calls for normal ties.

Hostility to Morocco has reached pathological levels under the current military leadership and its civilian façade in Algeria auguring ill for the region’s stability. The earthquake was another missed opportunity for Algerian leaders to live up to the oath of the genuine founders of the Algerian state who believed in a united Maghreb before their dream was aborted by a bunch of military commanders, who ironically have been hosted in Morocco and turned their backs to the Moroccan people once they seized power by force.

While Morocco is rising up, patching up its wounds and building on spontaneous solidarity of its people, history will remember that the Algerian military regime used the tragedy to add salt to injury amid a resounding silence of the country’s co-opted elites and impoverished people.