The Cradle drew attention the other day to a report by Algeria’s Dzair Tube citing unnamed sources who alleged that an Indo-French conspiracy capsized their country’s bid to join BRICS. The former’s summary can be read here while the original source in Arabic can be read here. This popular outlet, which boasts five million followers on Facebook and is therefore by no means a fringe media force in Algeria, portrayed India as a French proxy and also speculated that it’s doing Israel’s bidding in BRICS too.
Around the same time that Dzair Tube published their provocative piece, “RT Took Care To Clarify India’s Approach To BRICS In Order To Avoid Misunderstandings” by publishing three of their own pieces to this end, including one from former Indian Ambassador to Russia Kanwal Sibal. His article asking “Will the BRICS expansion stumble over internal divisions or help bridge them?” will soon be discussed in the present one, but for now observers should first take note of these two’s editorial differences.
Dzair Tube and their unnamed domestic sources have an interest in explaining this disappointing decision to their audience in a way that avoids having them become disillusioned with BRICS. Hopes were very high leading into last week’s summit after top Algerian officials and even Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov strongly suggested that this country would likely join. After that didn’t happen, there was a natural need to account for this, ergo the conspiracy theory that was concocted.
It appeals to average Algerians by pinning the blame on their country’s former colonizer and Israel, both of which are reviled in their society, simultaneously with referencing the debunked but newly viral narrative that India is the West’s “Trojan Horse” in BRICS. About that, a top influencer from the non-Mainstream Media community generated over 125,000 views after tweeting that out to their followers in late July, but it was thoroughly discredited by RT’s previously cited article series about India and BRICS.
Segueing into the aforesaid and returning to Ambassador Sibal’s piece, he pointed out how the inclusion of competing pairs of countries in BRICS could impede its overall effectiveness. This esteemed expert’s assessment complements an earlier analysis “Explaining China’s & India’s Reported Differences Over Expanding BRICS”. Both of them touch upon the two informal schools of thought that have formed within BRICS over the pace and scope of this group’s expansion as represented by China and India.
BRICS’ historic expansion that more than doubled its number of official members represents a compromise between these two but also importantly led to the inclusion of several more pairs of competing countries that Ambassador Sibal analyzed in his article. These are “Saudi Arabia and Iran, the UAE and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Egypt and Iran, and also to a degree between Brazil and Argentina”. The pattern at play appears to have been the same one that the SCO applied in 2015.
Back then, a compromise was reached between Russia and China over India and Pakistan’s ascension whereby those two second-mentioned competing countries would either join at the same time or not at all. Likewise, it’s compellingly the case that this approach was also employed during the latest round of BRICS’ expansion whereby the competing pairs of Saudi Arabia-Iran, the UAE-Iran, Egypt-Ethiopia, Egypt-Iran, and also to a degree Saudi Arabia-UAE joined at the same time too instead of none joining at all.
Had a different policy been implemented and only one country from each competing pair joined, then they could have either vetoed the other joining sometime in the future or their competitor might have soured on BRICS for good after feeling snubbed. It therefore made sense for the group to unofficially replicate the Sino-Russo SCO compromise in BRICS last week by either admitting competing pairs of countries at the same time or neither of them at all.
Algeria’s competitor is Morocco, which claimed in the run-up to the latest BRICS Summit that the group’s South African host was acting on behalf of BRICS without its permission by inviting an unprecedented number of high-level guests. Readers can learn more about that scandal here, but the pertinence to this piece is that Rabat clarified that it hadn’t applied to join BRICS, though it still reaffirmed the Kingdom’s close ties with all of its members apart from South Africa.
Since there was no chance of Morocco joining the group last week, the decision was made not to admit Algeria. Had they accepted Algiers’ membership bid, then Rabat would likely have soured on BRICS for good, while the group’s four founding members would have also risked complicating their excellent relations with the Kingdom. Additionally, inviting Algeria to join without Morocco would have gone against their informal SCO-inspired formula regarding the admission of competing pairs of countries.
Ambassador Sibal’s insight, which was deemed important enough by RT’s publicly financed editors to publish right after the latest BRICS Summit for the purpose of clarifying India’s approach to the group, indirectly answers the question of why Algeria wasn’t asked to join last week. As a founding member of BRICS, the views that Russia decides to platform about this group via its international media flagship should be considered much more reputable than those shared by non-members’ unnamed sources.
With this reasonable observation in mind and reflecting on the logic contained in Ambassador Sibal’s article for RT, Dzair Tube’s report is exposed as a self-interested information warfare operation aimed at allaying Algerians’ disappointment after their country wasn’t invited to join BRICS despite expectations. For reasons of narrative convenience, it references debunked claims about India to pin the blame on France and Israel, all to avoid admitting that BRICS regards Algeria and Morocco as international equals.
