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French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday he hoped tensions with Algeria would ease following his critical comments on the country’s leadership and a dispute over visas.
“My wish is appeasement because I think it is better to speak and progress,” Macron told France Inter, adding that his relations with Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune were “really cordial”.
Algeria recalled this weekend its ambassador from Paris and banned French military planes from its airspace, which France regularly uses to reach its forces fighting jihadists in the Sahel region to the south.
The measures came after France announced it would halve the number of visas granted to Algerians, along with reported comments from Macron that Algeria’s post-independence “politico-military system” had “completely rewrites “the history of the country.
Macron told descendants of Algeria’s war of independence last week that the story passed on to Algerians was “not based on truths” but “on hate speech against France,” according to reported comments by the newspaper Le Monde on Saturday.
The Algerian president’s office responded by saying that the comments, which were not denied, were “interference” in the country’s internal affairs.
“War of memory”
Macron has gone further than previous French presidents in seeking to address the legacy of France’s colonial history, which he sees as part of efforts to create a sense of national unity given the millions of French citizens of African origin.
He told France Inter that there were many different memories and “wounds” from French colonialism, but his ambition was “to try to recognize all of those memories and allow them to coexist”.
“There will inevitably be other tensions, but I think our duty is to try to move this work forward,” he said.
Map showing France and Algeria and the countries of the Sahelo-Saharan region. By Aude GENET (AFP) In 2018, Macron admitted that France had created a “system” that facilitated torture during the war and admitted that the French mathematician Maurice Audin, a famous pro-independence communist activist, had been assassinated by French forces in Algiers.
During his presidential campaign in 2017, he declared the colonization of Algeria a “crime against humanity”, and last month he asked for “forgiveness” from the families of Algerians who fought alongside the French. in Algeria.
Many of these fighters, known as Harkis, were massacred by Algerian troops after being abandoned by France before the independence of the North African state in 1962.
In July last year, Macron also commissioned French historian Benjamin Stora to assess how France handled its colonial legacy in Algeria, but the final report has since become a sore point between nations.
The Algerian government called it “not objective” and “below expectations”.
Stora described a “never-ending memory war” between the former colonial power and the former colony, which were locked into “competing (claims of) victimization”.
Visa line
Algeria was also outraged last week at France’s decision to reduce the number of visas for Algerians by 50%, while those granted to Moroccans are expected to drop by 50% and for Tunisians by 33%.
The French move has been described as retaliation for countries’ refusal to take back illegal immigrants.
According to figures from the French Ministry of the Interior, Algeria only issued papers to 31 Algerians subject to deportation orders from January to July, out of a total of 7,731.
In Algeria, the daily Liberté said this week that relations between Paris and Algiers had “never known such a deterioration, despite regular episodes of turbulence”.
Algerian journalist Ali Bahmane wrote in the French-language daily El Watan that Macron was “desperately” trying to win the elections scheduled for April next year, with the issue of immigration featured prominently at the start of the campaign.
“To do this, he takes the insane risk of getting lost in questions of extreme sensitivity, such as French colonization in Algeria (in order to) win over part of the right and the far right,” Bahmane writes.
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