A new escalation between Algiers and Paris comes in the crisis dating from last July, after France's recognition of Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara and while the Boualem Sansal affair is poisoning the climate between the two countries. This Sunday, December 15, several media, including the government daily El Moudjahid, announced the summons, last week, of the French ambassador, Stéphane Romatet, by the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
An “attempt to introduce large quantities of weapons”
The summons is linked, according to these media, to the broadcast, a week ago, by state television channels, of the testimony of an Algerian, ex-member of the Islamic State organization, who allegedly was recruited by a DGSE officer operating in Algiers to, in particular, “create a terrorist group in Algiers” and “destabilize the country”. Algerian diplomacy would also have criticized the ambassador for “an attempt to introduce large quantities of arms and ammunition into Algeria via the port of Béjaïa, coming from the port of Marseille in France”, according to the daily El Khabar .
Armament which was intended, according to these media, for the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylia (MAK, declared a “terrorist entity” by Algiers). Algerian Foreign Affairs also reportedly criticized the ambassador for holding “meetings bringing together, around French diplomats of various ranks, mainly consular agents reporting to the DGSE, people known for their declared and permanent hostility towards Algerian institutions”.
“Smear and disinformation campaigns”
“The Algerian authorities were keen to list [à l’ambassadeur] the recent denigration and disinformation campaigns carried out against our country from French soil and territory,” specifies El Moudjahid, referring to the solidarity campaign in France with the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. Campaign “of unprecedented virulence due to its repeated intensity and coordinated by circles of the French extreme right”, to such an extent that Algiers today says it is justified in considering it as “in direct and close link with certain spheres of the French power.
“Algerian patience has limits which, in this case, have been exceeded, our country therefore giving itself the full right to respond in urgent forms, intensity and gradation, to these aggressive, malicious acts and actions which do not have lasted too long,” a “source” told these media.
Jean-Noël Barrot, the (resigned) French Minister of Foreign Affairs, denounced, on Sunday, on France Inter, “unfounded accusations”.
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