The debate in France on border deportations and the execution of OQTFs has been relaunched since the murder of a young 19-year-old French student. The alleged killer is a Moroccan awaiting deportation, who was arrested in Switzerland.
The new Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau makes the execution of the OQTF (obligation to leave French territory) one of his priorities.
To the comments made so far concerning them, Algeria and Morocco have provided responses. If Rabat was content with rather technical details, Algiers posed the problem in its political dimension. Both countries have expressed their disagreement with the French government.
There is emphasis in the internal debate in France on Algerian immigration, the attitude of the Algerian government in relation to the issuance of consular passes or even the revocation of the 1968 bilateral agreement on immigration.
Algeria ready for rupture
The far right and the hard right, from which Retailleau comes, make Algeria a focal point, whether on the question of immigration or memory. In the midst of a political crisis between the two countries, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune reframed the debate, refusing to enter “into trivialities”.
In an interview broadcast on Saturday October 5 by Algerian television, President Tebboune brushed aside everything that extremists in France are currently harping on.
“It’s completely false,” he said of the 1968 agreement, held up as a “scarecrow” and “standard behind which the army of extremists marches,” or even regarding the accusations made against it. Algeria to refuse to take back its nationals in an irregular situation.
“Your tendency is known, you seek to make the French hate Algeria,” said the Head of State to the French Minister of the Interior.
In the message he wanted to convey, the President of the Republic did not put President Emmanuel Macron in the same category who is part of “another generation” and who “did not take part in colonialism” , and the “extremists” who “seek revenge” and want to “make the French hate Algeria”.
The two countries are in crisis and Abdelmadjid Tebboune assured that he is preserving the last link with Macron, “Muawiya’s hair”, to avoid a total rupture. But all this animosity towards Algeria must stop and we must not let “the kids” destroy what remains of the bilateral relationship. For political purposes, political response.
OQTF: Morocco returns the ball to France
Morocco, on the other hand, reacted to the prevailing discourse in France with a very technical response on the execution of the OQTFs. It is true that the kingdom has no strong reason to suspect any political aim with the current honeymoon between the two countries.
In an interview with Le Figaro on Thursday, October 3, Bruno Retailleau proposed, on this issue of consular passes, a “dialogue” in Morocco and promised a “standoff” with Algeria.
Nasser Bourita, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Morocco, addressed the subject following a meeting with the president of the regional government of the Canary Islands (Spain), Tuesday October 8 in Rabat.
The head of Moroccan diplomacy barely accused certain parties in Europe of making immigration “a political business”.
His response to the grievances of the French side was technical. In France, some had argued that the Moroccan undocumented migrant who killed the young student last September was not deported because the Moroccan authorities had not issued the consular pass necessary for the execution of the OQTF .
The head of Moroccan diplomacy assured that his country “is ready to repatriate any irregular migrant who is certified to be Moroccan and has left from Moroccan territory”, believing that the problem lies rather at the level of the administration countries which request consular passes, without mentioning France by name.
“If these migrants do not return, it is because of obstacles from the other party” who therefore, according to him, must “find solutions to the gaps in the laws and procedures which create a gap for migrants “Morocco cannot learn lessons in the fight against illegal immigration,” Bourita said.
Morocco returns the ball to European countries
“The obstacles did not come from Morocco but from the procedures of these countries,” he insisted, thus marking Rabat’s disagreement with Paris on the issue relating to the execution of the OQTFs.
According to Bruno Retailleai, France has issued 205,853 visas to Algerians, and Algeria “has only taken back 2191 of its nationals, including 1680 in forced removal. This is not acceptable.”
Morocco did not do better. During the same year, France issued a few more visas to Moroccans (238,750) while the Kingdom only issued 725 passes, according to the same Retailleau who gave these figures in an interview with Figaro Magazine published at the beginning october.
