N. Africa Tries Something Radical: Cooperation : Economic Need, Diplomacy and Locusts Spur Unity Among 5 Maghreb Nations

Until recently, no one would have thought it possible. But a combination of economic necessity and deft diplomacy is slowly beginning to forge what ideology alone has never been able to achieve in this politically fissured part of the world--a measure of unity among the five countries that make up the northern area of Africa known as the Maghreb.

A plague of locusts has been a big help, giving Morocco and Algeria, long the region’s two biggest rivals, an urgent reason to cooperate.

Indeed, the past six months have borne witness to several improbable events that no one was predicting even six months earlier:

-- Morocco and Algeria have re-established diplomatic relations, which were severed in 1976 over Algeria’s support for the Polisario Front guerrillas’ challenge to Moroccan claims to Western Sahara, the former Spanish territory ceded to Morocco.

-- More significantly, rumors are rife in diplomatic circles of a secret Moroccan-Algerian deal to end the 12-year-old guerrilla war. Although nothing has been announced yet, an Asian diplomat in Algiers said his country has been asked by Algeria to suspend the “humanitarian aid” it gives to the Polisario Front. “I think,” he added, “that the Polisario are about to be sold out by the Algerians.”

-- Tunisia and Libya have restored diplomatic relations following a decade-old conflict that at one point brought them close to open warfare.

-- With characteristic flair, if not much sincerity, Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi has patched up his highly public quarrel with Morocco’s King Hassan II. Until recently, their enmity had been such that at the start of an Arab League summit meeting in Algiers this month, Kadafi wore a white glove so that, in the words of a Libyan official, he “would not have to soil himself” if forced to shake Hassan’s hand. A few days later, however, Kadafi, gloveless, was posing arm in arm with Hassan for the cameras.

Algeria Is Driving Force

The driving force behind this new regional rapprochement is Algeria itself. The largest of the countries in the region, it was until only a decade ago also the most radical.

However, since assuming power in 1978, with the death of Houari Boumedienne, President Chadli Bendjedid has gradually moderated Algeria’s foreign policies as he wrestles with the now-familiar Third World dilemma of declining revenues and an already large population that is quickly multiplying.

There are more than 23 million Algerians, nearly 60% of them under the age of 25. This means, according to one Western embassy’s calculations, that Algeria will have to create as many jobs over the next 10 years as it now has just to keep its unemployment rate where it stands today, at well over 20%.

“The Algerians realize,” a diplomat said, “that it’s no longer a question of keeping the revolution alive. It’s a question of keeping another revolution from breaking out.”

This has had a profound impact on Algeria’s foreign policies, diplomats say, because of Bendjedid’s conviction that increased regional cooperation offers the only long-term solution to its economic difficulties.

Morocco, for instance, grows enough food to help feed agriculturally poor Algeria. And Algeria would like to put a pipeline through Morocco to export its oil and gas. But cooperation in this, as in other fields, has been stymied by the dispute over the Western Sahara territory.

Kadafi’s quarrels with his neighbors have been another stumbling block to regional unity. Morocco and Tunisia in particular have had a history of stormy relations with Libya stemming from Kadafi’s unsuccessful attempts to merge with them.

Decade of Tension

In 1974, then-Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba abrogated a merger agreement less than 24 hours after it was signed, ushering in a decade of tension that climaxed in Tunisia’s breaking relations with Libya in 1985 after Kadafi summarily expelled tens of thousands of Tunisian workers.

Moroccan-Libyan enmity has shorter but similar roots. A two-year union accord collapsed in 1986 following King Hassan’s invitation to Shimon Peres, then Israel’s prime minister, to visit Morocco.

Arguing that isolating Kadafi only made him more of a threat to his neighbors, Algeria played a key role in mediating between Libya and Tunisia, resulting in the two countries’ resuming diplomatic ties last December.

However, a subsequent Algerian effort to integrate Libya into a regional friendship treaty linking three of the Maghreb’s five states--Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania--failed.

Had it worked, this would have isolated Morocco, an objective that was then still a major preoccupation of Algerian diplomacy. However, Tunisia balked at any anti-Moroccan moves and Kadafi, who at first was eager to join the pact, cooled to the idea when it became clear that too many strings were to be attached.

“The failure of Algerian diplomacy in this respect made Bendjedid think twice,” a Western diplomat said. “He found he had underestimated Tunisia’s resolve not to isolate Morocco. He also found you can never take what Kadafi says at face value.”

Since then, Algerian diplomacy has done an about-face.

Bendjedid has not given up on trying to moderate Kadafi. The Algerians “still see him as a neighbor with whom they have to deal, and they think that accommodating him is far less dangerous than isolating him,” one diplomat said.

But more important, the diplomat said, “the Algerians also realized that regional cooperation was not going to be possible without Morocco.”

Thus, when King Hassan steamed into Algiers harbor aboard his royal yacht for the recent Arab summit conference, he was given an official welcome far more lavish than that accorded the other heads of state.

“It was a signal,” a Moroccan official said, that “the Algerians want more than just correct relations with us in the future.”

However much they want it, Algerian support for the Polisario guerrillas is likely to remain, for the time being at least, an impediment to better relations, diplomats agree.

In the end, economic realities are also likely to outweigh what many Algerians are coming to see as an outdated and costly commitment to what seems in any case like a lost cause, the diplomats said.

Thus, some face-saving solution will have to be formulated for the Western Sahara territory, if it has not already been worked out in secret. The Polisario Front has several thousand men under arms, and they could become a major problem for the Algerians if they are not somehow accommodated in a settlement.

Still, there is little doubt among diplomats in Algiers that the Sahara war is winding down. The Polisario’s last major operation against Moroccan troops was on Jan. 30.

And lately Morocco and Algeria have discovered another reason for cooperating over Western Sahara--the plague of locusts devastating much of North Africa is breeding there.

Even as the Polisario, with Algerian support, fights the Moroccans, the Moroccans and the Algerians have begun coordinating their efforts in the battle against the locusts.