Morocco's Foreign Minister on Fence-mending Trip to Algeria
Morocco's new foreign minister Saad Eddine Othmani will visit Algiers next week, his ministry said Friday, as Rabat seeks to normalize ties strained for decades over the disputed Western Sahara region.
The two-day visit starting Monday will include talks with his counterpart Mourad Medelci and a meeting with Algeria's veteran President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, it said.
The border between the two countries was closed in 1994 following an Islamist militant attack in Marrakesh that Morocco blamed on the Algerian secret services.
Tensions in the border region occasionally flare and a July clash between Moroccan border guards and armed men coming from Algeria left one soldier dead.
But relations between Morocco and Algeria have been strained for decades by the long-running dispute over the Western Sahara.
Morocco's 1975 annexation of the territory, a former Spanish colony, sparked a war between its forces and Algerian-backed Polisario guerrillas.
The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 1991 but U.N.-sponsored talks on Western Sahara's future have since made no headway.
"Whatever the differences, it's abnormal not to have a normal relationship with a neighboring country", Othmani's predecessor Taeib Fassi Fihri said in November following talks with Medelci on the sidelines of an Arab League meeting in Rabat.
Source: Agence France Presse
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