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King Mohammed VI’s advisor Fouad Ali El Himma and Foreign Affairs Minister Nasser Bourita headed, Wednesday, to Riyadh to prepare for a potential visit of the Moroccan sovereign, Saudi newspaper Elaph reported.
The same newspaper indicated that the King’s advisor and the Minister were received by King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohamed bin Salman. This visit comes as Morocco and Saudi Arabia have been working on strengthening their diplomatic ties after a period that was marked by tensions.
Indeed, on Tuesday, December 3, a Moroccan-Saudi joint military commission held a meeting in Rabat to discuss the conclusions of a military cooperation agreement signed in December 2015.
During this meeting, the two parties discussed the activities planned for 2020. The session was preceded by the Moroccan-Saudi Business Council, held on November 21, 2019 in Casablanca at the General Confederation of Moroccan Enterprises (CGEM).
Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that high-level visits between the two parties have been resumed. Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud visited Rabat on December 12 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding act of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
On February 24, the president of the Saudi Shura Council, Abdullah Ibn Muhammad Al-Sheikh, was received in the capital by the president of the House of Representatives Habib El Malki, Foreign Affairs minister Nasser Bourita and the head of the government Saadeddine El Othmani.
Abdelmajid Tebboune and Ould Ghazouani are also in Saudi Arabia
While El Himma and Bourita were in Saudi Arabia, the Algerian and Mauritanian presidents were also in Riyadh. Mauritania’s Mohammed Ould El Ghazouani held talks with King Salman on Wednesday. The two heads of state presided the signing ceremony of four cooperation agreements and memoranda of understanding, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.
During the same day, Algeria’s Abdelmajid Tebboune landed in Riyadh for his first official visit to Saudi Arabia. His visit could lead to possible Saudi mediation between Rabat and Algiers like the one carried before by King Fahd in 1980s.
«It is still early to speak of an upcoming high-level meeting. Algeria's political positions did not change after the election of Tebboune. Currently, leaders in Saudi Arabia are much more interested in the fifth Arab League-African Union summit they are planning to host this year. They do not want Morocco to boycott it because of the Polisario's participation», a well-informed source told Yabiladi.
For the record, during the fourth edition of the same summit held in 2016 in Malabo, eight states including Saudi Arabia withdrew for the same reason. However, the question of the participation of the movement of Brahim Ghali to the upcoming meeting was already examined, on February 6 in Algiers, during the talks between Abdelmajid Tebboune and the Saudi minister of Foreign Affairs.
