What Is Bouteflika's Message To Saudi Arabia King?

Justice Minister, Tayeb Louh, paid an official visit to Saudi Arabia at a time when relationships between Riyadh and Tehran witnessed an unprecedented escalation between the two countries’ officials due to the crisis in both Yemen and Syria.

Tayeb Louh carried a letter from President Bouteflika to Saudi King Salman Bin Abdul-Aziz, who was accompanied by the Interior Minister, Prince Abdul Aziz Bin Saud Bin Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz and the Foreign Minister, Adel Bin Ahmed Al-Jubair, but without information about the visit’s agenda or the he talks’ content.

Saudi Arabia news agency said President Bouteflika’s envoy was received upon arrival at King Khalid International Airport by the Interior Minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Saud Bin Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz, Interior Ministry’s Undersecretary, Nasser Bin Abdul Aziz al-Daoud, and Saudi Ambassador to Algeria Sami bin Abdullah al-Saleh, and the Ambassador of Algeria to the Kingdom, Ahmed Abdessadouk.

The visit comes one day after the extraordinary meeting of Arab Foreign Ministers, from which Algeria Foreign Minister, Abdelkader Messahel, was absent because the meeting was called by Saudi Arabia and was devoted to discussing what the Arab League statement called “Iranian interference in the Arab region.”

Over the years of its struggle with Iran, Saudi Arabia worked to get all Arab countries to adopt a strict stance on Iranian policy in the Arab region. However, it succeeded in persuading some countries and failed to convince other countries, including Algeria, which maintained one distance from Saudi Arabia and Iran, which seems to have disliked the kingdom.

A few days ago, Algeria abstained from voting in favor of a proposal by Riyadh at the level of the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly to condemn what it called “human rights violations in Iran”, along with other Arab countries, including Egypt, Kuwait and Jordan, a position that Saudi Arabia’s media described as an “Arab humiliation”.

Algeria also opposed Saudi attitudes at the level of the Arab League, including the establishment of an Arab military force to intervene in Yemen, and Libya accepted it, as Algeria opposed to the plans to intervene in Syria and Iraq, and asserted that dialogue with Iran is the best way to overcome differences.

Saudi Arabia tried to discourage Algeria from neutralizing its crisis with Iran on more than one occasion and this was manifested by the visit of the Foreign Minister, Adil Al-Jubeir, to Algeria in December 2016, and a month later by its ambassador to Algeria, Mahmoud Ben Hussein Kattan, who was appointed only a few months away, and his predecessor, Ambassador Sami Abdullah Al-Saleh, who held this post for 13 years, but all these arrangements did not change the reality of Algeria’s position on Iran.

The Algerian-Iranian relationship is a symbol of stability, and even if it was damaged during the 1990s but it soon returned to normal when President Bouteflika came to the presidency in 1999. But this stability is not at the expense of relationships with Saudi Arabia, which are also described as stable, despite the clouds that sometimes appear, out of sight.