Brussels, 21/01/2013 (Agence Europe) - On a working visit to Brussels, Secretary General of the MAU (Maghreb Arab Union) Habib Ben Yahia held long discussions on the afternoon of Thursday 17 January with European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and on Friday 18 with Neighbourhood Policy Commissioner Stefan Füle, with whom he then held a press briefing. They spoke of their joint desire to set in place Maghreb cooperation, which would be “in everybody's interests”, the commissioner said.
These talks came further to the proposal (communication) adopted by the Commission in December of last year sketching out the broad outlines of the desired cooperation with the Maghreb entity, “a region with considerable potential” but one which remains “the least integrated of the world”. No high-level meeting has been held since 1994, and a summit announced for late 2012 ended up being postponed, but sectoral meetings and inter-state meetings focusing on security have taken place under the pressure of events. The European Commission has nonetheless decided to take a gamble on helping the MAU out of its state of latency. Borders, particularly those between Morocco and Algeria, remain closed and economic trade is still fairly low. The level of inter-regional trade was barely 3% of the total external trade of the five countries.
“We did not just discuss the philosophy of the cooperation, but we also tackled a number of issues of an operational nature” for which an agenda has been set, but Commissioner Füle and his visitor declined to specify the operational framework within which future actions will be set in place. However, the commissioner referred to the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) and the “5+5” dialogue, in which the European and southern-shore countries of the Western Mediterranean take part. These action frameworks will not prevent direct institutional dialogue between the EU and the MAU from continuing: “The EU has carried out several initiatives to reinforce its bilateral relations with each of the countries of the Maghreb. Today, we are thinking about a '5+27' approach to tackle the new challenges we have to face”.
The main priority in this institutional cooperation are security issues, the importance of which is clear against the backdrop of conflict in Mali and recent events in Algeria, and more broadly of fears over security in the Maghreb as a whole, where states are faced with growing instability; many seizures of weapons have been made, notably in southern Tunisia, and the Moroccan authorities were reported in the local media as having stated, on Saturday 19 January, that they had “dismantled a new Al Qaidi recruitment cell, the fifth since last autumn”.
The countries of the Maghreb themselves are keenly aware of the need for common responses to the new common challenges, said Ben Yahia, who reiterated that these issues “were the subject of many discussions in 2012”. “We are not sitting twiddling our thumbs” at the MAU, said Ben Yahia, noting that ministerial meetings had taken place in Algiers to discuss “the security challenges and, in particular, Mali”. A further meeting will be held in Rabat in February to create a Maghreb platform on security “so that the region does not become a new Afghanistan”.
Füle detailed the potential areas of cooperation as energy, transport, shoring up the private sector, rural development and, more broadly, all issues which may be able to strengthen job creation, training and the scope of action of the civil societies. It is the EU's aim to provide a response to the latest developments in the countries of the southern shore of the Mediterranean and also, with particular reference to the Maghreb, to “promote its integration”. The interest is a shared one, he stressed. Amongst other things, there are plans to launch a Maghreb development bank in March 2013, with which the European financial institutions will open talks on potential synergies. (FB/trans.fl)