France’s relationship with Algeria is perhaps the most tormented between former colonisers and colonised. It started when the last Ottoman Dey of Algiers struck the French consul with his fly whisk in 1827. A French invasion ensued, followed by 132 years of French occupation and an eight-year war of independence that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arab Muslims.
Nearly 200 years after the fly whisk insult, it is not uncommon to meet elderly French people who still consider Algeria, as a former French ambassador told me, “the flesh of France”.
Algeria’s military-backed regime was shaken by protests in 2019-2021, which were ignited by an attempt to fraudulently re-elect an incapacitated 82-year-old for a fifth term as president. The regime imagined a French hand in the protests.
President Emmanuel Macron’s earnest but perhaps naive efforts to reconcile French and Algerian memories never got off the ground. Last summer, Macron shifted his affections to Algeria’s neighbour, King Mohamed VI of Morocco, with whom Algeria had broken relations after “M6″ recognised the state of Israel.
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Macron announced that France would recognise Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed western Sahara, a move he finalised in a state visit in October. Algeria has supported the claim of the Polisario Front to the same territory since 1975. Only the US, Israel and France have recognised it as part of Morocco. Algiers withdrew the Algerian ambassador from Paris and boycotts the French ambassador to Algiers.
The arrest of the Franco-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal at Algiers airport in mid-November was interpreted as retribution for French recognition of Morocco’s claim to the western Sahara.
A slightly built man of 75 with a gentle face and a silver-grey ponytail, Sansal was a fixture of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. French literati have raged against his arrest and detention for an alleged attack on Algeria’s territorial integrity. Sansal’s “crime” was to have told an interviewer that colonial France amputated Morocco to enlarge the territory of Algeria.
In his year-end speech to the Algerian parliament, president Abdelmadjid Tebboune called Sansal, “an impostor who doesn’t know his identity ... and says that half Algeria belongs to another country”. Tebboune also revived Algerian accusations that France committed genocide in Algeria.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally this week launched a petition demanding that France end its “humiliation” by Algeria by rescinding the 1968 accord that grants favourable conditions to Algerians living and working in France
Speaking to French ambassadors in Paris a week later, Macron called Sansal “a freedom fighter who is being held arbitrarily by Algerian leaders”. Algeria, “whom we love so much, and with whom we share so many children and so much history, has started something which dishonours her, by preventing a man who is gravely ill from receiving medical care”.
The Algerian daily L’Expression said “old demons” of “colonial folly” had resurfaced. The official newspaper El Moudjahid said, “France drags her dishonour behind her, with her acts during the colonisation of Algeria: massacres of unarmed populations, razed villages, women and children burnt with napalm, nuclear bombs, torture, rape ...” The “nuclear bombs” were in fact 17 nuclear tests conducted by France in the Algerian Sahara in the 1960s. Algeria still demands compensation for resultant radioactive contamination.
An estimated 10 per cent of France’s population were born in Algeria or are the descendants of Algerian Arabs. Many of them support Algiers in the present crisis, raising fears of unrest in immigrant banlieues.
In the present war of words, the two sides conflate a host of enemies, real or imagined. Supporters of the Algerian government mistakenly associate the French Government with the extreme right, the right-wing television network C-News, Morocco, Israel and Mossad. French media and some officials blur differences between the Algiers government, the Grand Mosque in Paris and its Algerian rector, Chems-Eddine Hafiz, jihadism and terrorism.
There are documented cases of Algerian intelligence services harassing opponents living in France and using “influencers” to spread anti-French sentiment in the immigrant community through social media. A Franco-Algerian living in Brest and quoted in Le Figaro posted a video in which he said: “We’re going to screw you, piss on you, we’re going to rape you and then screw your mother ... Vive l’Algérie!” Someone using the handle @Bazooka posted a message on TikTok calling for followers to “slash the throats” of traitors to Algeria.
The French interior ministry attempted to expel Boualem Naman, a 59-year-old Algerian cleaner and social media influencer from Montpellier, on January 9th. Algerian authorities refused to accept Naman, denouncing his “arbitrary expulsion” and saying he had lived in France for 35 years, was a legal resident for 15 years and fathered two children with a French woman. Interior minister Bruno Retailleau accused Algeria of breaking the law by refusing to admit an Algerian citizen, adding that Algeria was “trying to humiliate France”. Retailleau threatened Algiers with “a whole arsenal of diplomatic reprisals”.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally this week launched a petition demanding that France end its “humiliation” by Algeria by rescinding the 1968 accord which grants favourable conditions to Algerians living and working in France. Other proposals would cut economic aid to Algiers (€132 million in 2022) and impose tariffs on trade with Algiers. That could backfire, since France imports 8 per cent of its gas and 10 per cent of its petrol from the former colony.
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