Tomorrow is the 21st anniversary of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), founded in the Moroccan city of Marrakech in 1989. The union is a grouping five North African countries – Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania – in response to “our peoples’ aspirations in unity and economic integration”, as its inaugural official statement stated.
However, more than 20 years later there is less economic integration, and far less unity, among the AMU members than at the outset. In fact, outright enmity between two of the founding states, Algeria and Morocco, has made the news far more often than their promised unity.
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