Frontiers in North Africa

2.1 Introduction

Most of the regional problems in North Africa trace their origins back to the process of frontier creation during the colonial period. This is certainly true of the two major conflicts that dominate the region - the Western Sahara conflict and the Libyan occupation of the Aozou Strip in Chad. However, it also applies to past tensions with Tunisia over the Jafara plain and the Ghadames tripoint; to tensions between Libya and Niger over Toummo oasis; to the recent crisis in relations between Libya and Algeria over the Ghat border region; to the 1963 'war of the sands' between Algeria and Morocco; to the issue of Moroccan recognition of the existence of an independent Mauritanian state; and to the Algerian problems with Niger and Mali until the border demarcation in 1983. Even the issue of Maghrebi unity - currently an issue of considerable social and political significance in North Africa despite the failure of the Maghrib Arab Union (UMA) in the 1990s - had suffered from the problem of ill-defined borders, with the result that in the 1980s there were two different unity treaties in operation in the Maghreb which, in practice, only worked to prevent unity - the Algerian inspired Treaty of Fraternity and Concord, to which Tunisia and Mauritania belong, and the Arab-African Union, created by Morocco and Libya but in theory open to any other state to join.

In reality, however, the border problems of North Africa arise from the inherent confusion between concepts of sovereignty imported by colonising powers and those inherent in Islamic political theory. This is compounded by European administrative practice and the development of a colonialist-nationalist dialogue which presumed on a political vocabulary based on European style concepts of territorial sovereignty and precisely defined territorial administrative delimitations. It is the dissonance between precolonial and colonial concepts of border which has been responsible for the regional problems that face North Africa today. This has been intensified by the development of modern nationalism in the North African successor states to the original colonial regimes, a nationalism also expressed in territorial terms and that has exacerbated border problems. The most acute consequence of these developments has been the conflict over regional hegemony between Morocco and Algeria, which currently finds its most acute expression in conflicts over border issues such as the Western Sahara problem and, in the recent past, even the Libya-Chad dispute over which both Morocco and Algeria, as regional powers, have expressed interest and concern.

As is the case throughout the African continent and in large parts of the Middle East, the frontiers of modern North Africa are colonial creations. On superficial observation, there is little difference between the locations of the administrative divisions of the French, Italian and Spanish colonial empires in the region and the locations of frontiers today. In any case, the last word on such frontiers appears to have been said by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) (OAU Cairo Assembly Resolution AHG/Res 17(1) July 17-21, 1964 and Article 3(3) of the OAU Charter) when the principle of the intangibility of colonial frontiers was established. The issue of principle having thus been resolved, only minor and technical problems can remain - or so it would appear.

In reality, however, until the mid-1990s, there were still probIems of jurisdiction over the Ghat region of the Algerian-Libyan border zone and disputes over sovereignty between Libya and Chad - to name but the most important territorial disputes together with a mass of potential disagreements over maritime jurisdiction. In fact, although the formal dispute between Libya and Chad was settled in 1994 at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, many Libyans still do not accept the decision. These problems existed and continue to exist not merely because of inadequate delimitation and demarcation in the colonial period, but also because of the problem of nation building in independent North Africa and because of the ideological contradictions between colonial and precolonial concepts of the state that have persisted through the colonial experience and the advent of independence into a world of western style nation-states. Interestingly enough, they continue despite the advent of political Islam with its holistic vision of an Islamic umma in which sovereignty is a divine attribute so that the nation-state becomes at best an irrelevance and at worst a blasphemous usurpation.