EU-Africa summit: the blackmail of Algiers, Pretoria

The South African and Algerian regimes, fervent advocates of the separatist theses of the Polisario Front and its chimerical republic “SADR”, threaten to thwart the Africa-EU Summit scheduled for November 29-30 in Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire.

The two regimes that demand the participation of the pseudo-“SADR”, an entity not recognized as a “sovereign State” by the United Nations, went as far as threatening Côte d’Ivoire to transfer the summit from Abidjan to the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, as if the continental organization was their own preserve. It is arrogance in the extreme!

 To counter the ??sidelining of the so-called Sahrawi republic at the 5th Euro-African Summit, Algerian and South African diplomats pulled out their heavy artillery. Actually, they want to impose the presence of the Polisario mercenaries at this summit and at the same time snatch a de facto recognition of the “SADR” by the European Union, killing thus two birds with one stone.

Pretoria and Algiers have pressured the AU Executive Council, which held a special session in Addis Ababa on Monday (October 16), to reaffirm the “right of all African Union member states to take part in the activities and meetings of the Pan-African Organization”. Had they forgotten that the European Union has never recognized the” SADR “as a sovereign State?

 The Algerian Foreign Ministry, acting as if it were the spokesman for all Africans, issued a statement warning that “Decision 942 of the 31st Ordinary Session of the Executive Council of July 2017, which reaffirms the right of all member states to participate in meetings where the African Union is involved, also provides for a sanction”. The sanction, the statement said, consists in “depriving member states that do not comply with the decision of the right to host AU meetings”. Algeria’s message is clear: transfer the Summit to the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa.

On its part, Pretoria gave Côte d’Ivoire an ultimatum: invite before October 27 all states recognized as such by the AU, including of course the pseudo-SADR.

 The whole question is whether the European Union and the Ivorian government will or will not give in to this blackmail, whose geo-strategic motives are barely veiled.