There was a studied solemnity to Thursday’s ceremony marking Algeria’s National Diplomacy Day, and Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf had been expected to use it for a fairly safe exercise: marking the United Nations’ 81st anniversary with the usual tributes to multilateralism. Instead, by most accounts, he spent much of his address circling back to the one file Algiers would rather not discuss in public these days — the Moroccan Sahara.
The shift in tone was hard to miss. Attaf warned, somewhat defensively, that the international community appeared to be treating the dispute as settled fact rather than an open disagreement, a framing that reads less like confidence and more like an acknowledgment that momentum has already moved against Algiers. Morocco’s autonomy proposal, offered under Moroccan sovereignty, has in recent years picked up backing from Washington, Madrid and Paris, and in a matter of months the UN Security Council’s Resolution 2797 went further still, naming the Moroccan plan the sole basis for any political settlement going forward.
The Security Council is due to weigh in again on October 30, and that approaching deadline appears to explain much of the minister’s unease. Attaf tried to keep the debate anchored to humanitarian ground, arguing that a right does not expire simply because time has passed. Critics were quick to turn the line against him: if that principle holds, they ask, why has Algeria spent decades blocking any independent census of the people held in the Tindouf camps?
Perhaps the more telling blow came from Algeria’s own president. Abdelmadjid Tebboune was recently quoted saying Algerians are « no more Sahrawi than the Sahrawis themselves » — a remark widely read in Rabat and beyond as the first public sign that Algiers is quietly stepping back from the Polisario Front after roughly fifty years of bankrolling the separatist movement. With regional alliances thinning and the diplomatic clock running down, Algeria’s position increasingly looks less like a negotiating strategy than a holding pattern ahead of a vote it is unlikely to win.
