Meeting of the AMU foreign ministers: Pious wishes… while waiting for concrete action

The meeting of the foreign ministers of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) in Rabat ended as it had begun. The officials of the five Maghreb countries once again insisted on the imperative of achieving economic integration in the region, by taking advantage of the factors of complementarity and the great potential available to the countries of this group. Concretely, it is still not known how the AMU countries intend to go about it. It should be specified that the foreign ministers were meeting as part of the 31st session of their council. Economic as well as security topics were on the agenda of this meeting, notably the crisis that has shaken Mali and the Sahel-Saharan region as a whole over the last few months. In a statement, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Saâd Eddine El Otmani, called for laying the foundations for "a new Maghreb governance capable of allowing optimal u…