Maghreb Madness
How a football match has become an international incident... again.
On Sunday, 50,000 fans packed into the Stade du 5 Juillet (5th of July Stadium) in Algiers, one of the cathedrals of African football, as CAF Confederation holders USM Alger faced off against two-time winners RS Berkane in the first leg of the semifinal clash, a match that promised to be one of the great nights of African football. It was an empty promise.
The game never took place as the RS Berkane players remained in their dressing room. The USMA players went onto the pitch by themselves and warmed up before going home. The reason that the Berkane players refused to leave their dressing room was because they didn’t have their football kits.
The players did not have their kits as the Algerian authorities had seized them at the airport the day before the game because Berkane’s shirt features a map of Morocco, a map including Western Sahara.
Frustrated that they did not have their kits, the Moroccan club protested the decision and held a sit-in for about 10 hours in the airport before being reassured by CAF that they would get their shirts back. Fast forward a day and after refusing to give up the shirts, the Algerians provided Berkane with identical kits that had the map removed.
The players refused to play in those kits, went home to Morocco and now CAF have awarded a 3-0 win to Berkane and the return leg is scheduled for this Sunday. USMA have already said they will go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and have said that they will go to Berkane on Sunday but will refuse to play if Berkane wear their usual shirts.
What a mess.
Moroccan Algerian relations for dummies
You might be asking yourself why Algeria would be so dramatic about a map on a shirt and why Morocco would be equally staunch in their defence of it? It’s a valid question but one that needs a lot of context to answer.
Morocco and Algeria’s history is phenomenally complex, stretches back centuries and is, like most conflicts in Africa, inseparably tied to colonisation and the decolonisation process. What follows is my naïve guide.
The issues between the two countries are very much about political power. Why I say this is that there is almost no enmity between the people of the two countries, who are linguistically, culturally, and religiously the same. As with most African countries, those near the border in Morocco and Algeria are the same people and have more in common with each other than others on the opposite side of their respective countries.
The first time political tensions flared was in October 1963 in the Sand War. A year after the formation of an independent Algeria, the two countries skirmished over land at the border. Predictably both countries claim each other as the aggressor, something that has become a theme between any conflicts between the nations, whether on the battle field, political field or football field.
One of the arenas of conflict between the two Maghreb nations centres on the Western Sahara. Western Sahara is a non-self-governing territory (see Gibraltar) between Morocco and Mauritania in the (you guessed it) Sahara desert, home to the Sahrawi people.
The territory was owned by Spain until 1975 when the UN ordered the Europeans to decolonise the land, stating that it had the right to self-rule. In November 1975, the Moroccan people and government entered the territory, eventually claiming up to 80% of the territory with Mauritania claiming the rest. The move by Morocco was condemned by the UN and most of the international community as a violation of the self-rule that of the Sahrawi people, the purpose of the Spanish withdrawal.
Initially, there was little resistance to Morocco but over the next 16 years, led by the Polisario Front, people in the region would resist Moroccan rule. The conflict would claim thousands of lives and not find any peace until 1991 when a cease-fire was called with the help of the UN on the grounds that a peaceful referendum would be held. That referendum never happened, leaving the territory in a state of suspended animation with Morocco controlling roughly 75% percent of the country and the other 25% in the south-east is left as a buffer zone and controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), a partially recognised state.
Where Algeria comes into the conflict is as a supporter of the SADR and an independent Western Sahara. Algeria isn’t necessarily a nation that is pro-independence movements, they are in constant tensions with their own internal independence movement in Kabylie. But Algeria sees Morocco’s moves into Western Sahara as another example of its neighbour’s expansionist plans and power grabbing, a policy that threatens Algeria’s own interests in the region and on the global stage.
And so tensions have been tight between the two countries with the nations at various points accusing each other of supporting acts of terror within each other’s borders or undermining each other politically and diplomatically. Finally, in 2021 Algeria officially severed diplomatic ties with Morocco, a move immediately reciprocated.
This is where the football comes in. Both countries are home to extraordinarily passionate football fans and football is tied very closely to the identities of the nations.
Raja Casablanca was founded by the Moroccan resistance and played a key role in independence. Across the border, Le onze de l'indépendance was a team made up of Algerians playing in France who gave up professional careers in Europe to return to Algeria and play friendlies around the world (including in Morocco) to promote the independence movement of Algeria.
Both governments recognise the power of football and are trying to leverage it. They have ambitious football infrastructure projects and are trying to host as many games and tournaments as possible. Morocco is hosting the next men’s and women’s AFCON as well as co-hosting the 2030 World Cup. Algeria hosted the 2022 Mediterranean games, the recent FIFA series in March and the 2022 African Nations Championship (CHAN), an AFCON where only African based players can play.
It was at the 2022 CHAN where the first instance of footballing political tensions arose between the two nations. Algeria refused to allow the Moroccan team (the competition holders) to fly via Royal Maroc Air from Rabat into Constantine, insisting that the team must fly from another country. Eventually the Moroccan team pulled out of the tournament and Algeria would reach the final, losing to Senegal.
18 months later and we’re back in a similar situation.
No winners, only losers
The reason CAF gave for awarding Berkane a 3-0 win is that a) Berkane were approved to play in that shirt at the beginning of the season and so they must play in that kit and b) CAF asked the Algerian FA to release the kits.
The Algerian FA and USMA argue that by CAF and FIFA’s own statutes, the club shouldn’t have a map on their kit.
FIFA’s Equipment Regulations Article 10.3.6 says “A decorative element must not portray, or give the impression of, a person’s face or identity, or the shape of a country or territory.”
And while both CAF and FIFA have been generally lax about applying the rule (at the AFCON a number of countries including Mauritania and Cape Verde had maps on their kits) they have been stricter whenever there is any controversy about those maps.
And that map is controversial. The map on Berkane’s kit included the “Southern Provinces” AKA Western Sahara which is not recognised as part of Morocco by the UN and so it is not an official map.
It’s for this reason that the FAF and USMA are not protesting CAF’s decision aggressively and instead planning on taking the case to CAS with confidence that they will rule in USMA’s favour.
It seems that the big losers in this case, like in many African footballing cases, is once again CAF. By failing to impose their own statutes on Berkane at the beginning of the season and ruling in their favour they have seemingly lost credibility as impartial governors of the African game.
It is not helped by the fact that RS Berkane are the team of Fouzi Lekjaa. Lekjaa, who was the president of Berkane for eleven years, is now the Moroccan Football Federation president as well as the Minister Delegate for the Budget in the Moroccan government and a member of the CAF and FIFA councils.
It is not a good look for CAF that they seemingly have disregarded their own rules to go in favour of someone who by many is seen as one of their own and is a part of the Moroccan government.
But the ultimate losers in this conflict are the Moroccan and Algerian people, even beyond the thousands of fans robbed of a brilliant semi final.
In many ways this conflict is entirely political and imagined and something only really rears its head in the public domain online and in government offices. Most Algerians and Moroccans see each other as brothers and sisters and that expressly is seen in football. When I was in Côte d'Ivoire at the Morocco 3-0 win over Tanzania, Moroccans were displaying Algerian flags along with their own flag.
Berkane in particular is a city that embodies the unity of Moroccans and Algerians. It is a city on the border of the two countries, is home to thousands of people who prior to colonial borders would have been equally comfortable 25 kilometres east in what is modern-day Algeria.
But the fear is that now that the tensions between the two countries are entering the public sphere via football, that those tensions will remain and become a part of Moroccan and Algerian and social culture in a way that it never was previously.
Anyway, stay tuned for what happens on Sunday.
Excellent read! CAF is at it again...
classic CAF incompetance