President Emmanuel Macron will complete a three-day “official visit of friendship” to Algeria on Saturday.
The unusually long stay, the size of the 90-strong delegation and the fact that it includes seven high-ranking cabinet ministers, including the ministers of defence, foreign affairs, the interior and the economy, 20 deputies from the National Assembly and dozens of business executives, all indicate Mr Macron’s desire to repair tense relations with the former colony.
The presence of Catherine MacGregor, chief executive of the French gas company Engie, strengthens suspicions of an ulterior motive. Algeria is the leading producer of natural gas on the African continent. The former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi beat Mr Macron to Algiers last month. Algeria has supplanted Russia as Italy’s leading gas supplier and has this year increased gas exports to Italy by 113 per cent.
Sixty years after Algeria won independence at the end of a particularly savage war of liberation, even the most banal undertakings between the two countries provoke suspicion and misunderstanding. This visit is no exception.
After it was announced that Haïm Korsia, the grand rabbi of France, would accompany the delegation, Abderrazak Makri, the head of the Muslim Brothers in Algeria, accused the Jewish leader of “shamelessly supporting the Zionist entity”. The Algerian daily El Khabar asked “To which community will the grand rabbi speak, in a country where everything which Israel symbolises is rejected and condemned?”
Mr Korsia tested positive for Covid and cancelled his visit. The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chems-Eddine Hafiz, also cancelled his participation.
Mr Macron’s programme in Algeria was the subject of diplomatic wrangling, after Algiers attempted to replace a visit to the Disco Maghreb music recording studio in Oran with a stop at the Palais de la culture.
Relations between the two countries worsened since April 2021 when former Prime Minister Jean Castex cancelled a visit after his Algerian interlocutors were offended by the small size of his delegation.
Algiers was also angered when Paris halved the number of visas given to Algerians in an attempt to put pressure on the North African country to accept the return from France of illegal residents and convicts who have served their sentences. French officials say their presence increases the risk of crime and terrorist attacks.
The French interior ministry wants to repatriate 7,000 undocumented Algerians. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune called French interior minister Gérald Darmanin a liar for saying there are 7,000 undocumented Algerians awaiting deportation. Mr Tebboune said the true figure was 94.
France requested consular documents to deport 1,600 Algerians in the first half of this year, of which 300 were issued.
In September of last year, statements made by Mr Macron in a meeting at the Élysée with 18 young people whose families had lived through the 1954-1962 Algerian war inflamed hostility. Mr Macron said that Algeria’s “politico-military system” exploits memories of the war of independence to perpetuate its claims of legitimacy to rule. Any expert on modern Algerian history would say the same thing, but it was ill-received coming from a French president.
Mr Macron further said that the Algerian ruling class cultivates hatred of France, which is also arguably true.
The most explosive quotation of all, widely repeated in Algerian media, cast doubt upon the fundaments of Algerian nationhood. “Was there an Algerian nation before French colonisation?” Mr Macron asked. “That is the question.”
Mr Macron and President Tebboune talked for two and a half hours at the presidential palace in El Mouradia on Thursday evening. They then held a “communication” with the press which Mr Tebboune vaunted as an example of “perfect frankness”. No questions were allowed and journalists holding Algerian passports were not admitted.
Mr Macron announced the creation of a Franco-Algerian commission of historians “to consider together the entire historical period, from the beginning of colonisation (in 1830) until the war of liberation, with no taboos.”
This is at least the third historical commission created under Mr Macron to study France’s history with Algeria. An earlier commission headed by the historian Benjamin Stora, who is a member of the present delegation, recommended 20 steps to improve relations, including the establishment of a “memory and truth” commission.
Mr Macron has made at least six attempts to calm raw feelings over past misdeeds. During his first presidential campaign in February 2017, he angered French conservatives by describing the colonisation of Algeria as “a crime against humanity”.
Mr Macron has since apologised to virtually everyone involved in the Algerian war, except the French military: the families of Maurice Audin and Ali Boumendjel, both assassinated by the French in Algiers; the Harkis or Algerians who fought on the side of the French and were massacred or driven into exile, and the pieds-noirs, as the French settlers who fled en masse were known.
