Two French government ministers and a former head of the executive are speaking out in the increasingly heated exchanges between Paris and Algiers.
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French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau on Friday accused Algeria of “seeking to humiliate France” after the North African country refused to welcome one of its nationals currently being expelled.
Naâman Boualem, better known under the nickname “Doualemn” or “Boualem Dz”, 59-year-old Algerian tiktoker, was arrested in Montpellier Sunday last for inciting violence in videos he posted on social media.
French immigration services placed him on a flight to Algiers THURSDAYbut Algeria refused to admit him, saying he was prohibited from entering its territory. It was finally sent back to France in the eveningindicated the French Ministry of the Interior.
In recent days, French police have arrested four other Algerian nationalsdescribed by authorities as influencers on social networks, accused of having published videos inciting violence, in a context of strained relations.
“I want to express my amazement,” Mr. Retailleau said on Friday. “We have reached an extremely worrying threshold with Algeria. Algeria seeks to humiliate France ».
« It is a new act of aggression… We must examine all the means of retaliation that are at our disposal,” he insisted, thinking for example of « lever » development aid or the reduction of visas for countries « who do not apply reciprocity ».
Bruno Retailleau directly invoked the responsibility of the head of state : “All this must be studied at the highest level, in the government and by the president,” insists the tenant of Place Beauvau, according to whom Emmanuel Macron “clearly pointed out Algeria’s responsibility » during the Conference of Ambassadors.
The same sound of the Quai d’Orsay and or ex-Matignon
France will have “no other possibility than to retaliate » if “the Algerians continue this posture of escalation”, declared, for his part, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot.
Among “the levers that we could activate” include “visas (…), development aid” or even “a certain number of other cooperation subjects”, Barrot detailed on LCI, saying he was “stunned” that the Algerian authorities “refused to take back one of their nationals”, whose case is now “judicialized” in France.
As for the former French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, he believes in a column for Le Figaro that France must “set limits and assume the balance of power”, in particular, by denouncing the Franco-Algerian agreement of 1968 which provides for specific advantages for Algerian immigrants. “Even if it is increasingly criticized, no government until now has been able to renegotiate its substance with Algiers,” notes this right-wing and center-right newspaper in another article.
“It is time to get rid of guilt trials and memorial rent… It is a question of respect for France”, underlines Attal, while welcoming “a historic opportunity to establish a normal, dispassionate relationship”: “So let’s seize it to open a new page in our relations with Algeria, made of mutual respect.”
Boualem Sansal affair… and others
The influencer affair, denounced in Algiers as “yet another controversy” and a “blackmail of the French”represents only yet another – indeed, yet another – turning point in the downward spiral of Franco-Algerian relations.
Exchanges between Paris and Algiers, never very simple, deteriorated particularly after the detention, on November 16, and the incarceration “without any form of trial”, according to his supporters, of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal.
This virulent critic of the Algerian government, aged 80, is accused of “undermining the integrity of the national territory”.
The maximum penalty, provided for under article 87 bis of the Algerian Penal Code which prosecutes “terrorist or subversive” acts, is the death penalty, even if, due to the moratorium practiced in fact by Algeria, it is systematically commuted to life imprisonment.
ADVERTISEMENTThe words of Emmanuel Macron, according to whom Algeria has “disgraced itself” in the Boualem Sansal affair, have, unsurprisingly, difficulty crossing to the other side of the Mediterranean.
Algerian diplomacy condemned these remarks made during the Conference of Ambassadors, Monday January 6, as “a shameless and unacceptable interference in an internal Algerian affair.
Many in France denounce the deterioration of Sansal’s health in detention and the fact that, after two months of confinement, the latter has still not received a visit from his French lawyer, whose visa was refused by the Algerian authorities.
But, faced with French concerns in this matter, Algiers, shortly after Sansal’s arrest, responded through its press agency that Paris would be plagued by a lobby ” anti-Algerian » et « pro-Zionist ».
ADVERTISEMENTThe country’s public press agency, “Algérie Presse Service”, noted on Friday, November 22, that “ Macronito-Zionist France (…) obscures the arrest of Sansal.
This case adds to the ever-growing list of areas of friction between the former metropolis and its former colony, which freed itself from the yoke of Paris in 1962 after a brutal war.
Emmanuel Macron’s support for the Moroccan solution of an autonomy plan for the Western Saharaas well as the absence of symmetry in terms of visas or the frequent policy of the Algerian authorities of suspend recovery nationals of the country subject to the OQTF (obligation to leave French territory) are added to numerous commercial disputesnot to mention the thorny question of painful colonial past.
