The beautiful game is often able to unite the world, but when it comes to Algeria and Morocco, even football is failing to bridge the decades-long rivalry between the North African neighbours.
The latest controversy occurred this month when Morocco withdrew from the African Nations Championship, held in Algeria.
The Moroccans announced hours before the tournament began on January 13 that they would not be going because they had not been given permission to fly directly from Rabat to the Algerian city of Constantine and they refused to travel by an indirect route.
Moroccan aircraft have been banned from entering Algerian airspace since August 2021 after Algiers broke off relations with Rabat for what it called “hostile actions” against Algeria.
The decision occurred after forest fires engulfed the Kabylie region of Algeria, its government blamed “terrorist” groups and accused Morocco of supporting one of them.
Many Algerians have reacted to Morocco pulling out of the tournament with incredulity.
“The Moroccan government used their recent media exposure after the World Cup to leverage their way into opening the airspace,” Ahmed Zadi, an Algerian student, told Al Jazeera, referring to the regional and continental support for Morocco after its strong showing at the World Cup in Qatar.
“They didn’t make such claims in the [2022] Mediterranean Games previously as they flew in normally from Tunisia.” Zadi said, “so it is now more apparent that they are trying to sully our image”.
The tournament’s opening ceremony added more fuel to the fire when the grandson of South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, made a speech that was angrily received in Morocco. Mandla Mandela made reference to Western Sahara, where an Algeria-backed resistance movement has long called for the territory’s independence from Morocco.
Algeria-Morocco relations have been “in a very precarious position for a while”, said Intissar Fakir, senior fellow and director of the North Africa and Sahel Program at the Middle East Institute.
“But the break that happened in 2021 ushered in one of the most tense periods of this relationship that we have seen, probably since the border skirmishes of the 60s and late 70s,” Fakir said, referring to the 1963 Sand War and Algerian support for the Western Saharan armed struggle against Morocco.
More recently, two big developments have led to a rapid diplomatic deterioration between Algeria and Morocco,…