Relations between France and Algeria are unlikely to benefit from the confectioners' truce. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune made history by evoking for the first time the arrest in mid-November in Algiers of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, calling him an “impostor sent” by France, according to the site Algerian information service TSA.
“You send an impostor who does not know his identity, does not know his father and comes to say that half of Algeria belongs to another state,” declared the Algerian head of state, in an extract from a official speech, reported by TSA.
Critic of Algerian power, Boualem Sansal, 80, born to a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother, has been incarcerated since mid-November for endangering state security and has been in a care unit since mid-December. According to the French daily Le Monde, the authorities in Algiers would have taken badly statements by the writer to the French media Frontières, reputed to be far-right, taking up Morocco's position according to which the country's territory would have been truncated under French colonization in benefit of Algeria.
The author of “2084: the end of the world”, naturalized French in 2024, is prosecuted under article 87 bis of the Algerian Penal Code, which sanctions “as a terrorist or subversive act, any act aimed at the security of State, territorial integrity, stability and normal functioning of institutions. According to his French lawyer François Zimeray, Boualem Sansal, detained at Koléa prison, was transferred to the prison wing of the Mustapha-Bacha hospital in Algiers because of his state of health and his age (75 years old).
“colonization left Algeria in ruins”
In a “speech to the nation” delivered before both houses of Parliament, Tebboune, re-elected for a second term in early September, strongly attacked France, according to extracts in Arabic published on the official website of the presidency. ” Those (In France) who say that we left a paradise to Algeria should know that 90% of the Algerian people were illiterate at the time of independence”, underlined the president, estimating that “colonization (1830-1962) left Algeria in ruins (…) they must admit that they killed and massacred Algerians.”
On the issue of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony of which Morocco controls 80% of the territory but which is claimed by the separatists of the Polisario Front supported by Algeria, Abdelmadjid Tebboune considered that it was “a question of decolonization and self-determination.
According to him, the autonomy plan “under Moroccan sovereignty” defended by Rabat is “a French idea, not a Moroccan one”.
Algiers withdrew its ambassador from Paris at the end of July when French President Emmanuel Macron gave strong support to Moroccan proposals on Western Sahara, before going to Rabat at the end of October.
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