French Prime Minister Jean Castex was due to visit Algiers on Sunday April 11. The meeting was postponed indefinitely for reasons related to the “health crisis,” according to a sober statement from Matignon released Thursday, April 8 amid the wildest rumors of deep disagreement. The El Mouradia palace would not have appreciated the composition of the French delegation, of barely 4 members instead of the 10 planned. Insufficient to bury the memorial quarrel paradoxically revived since the Benjamin Stora report, supposed to extinguish it, was made public. The format of the delegation is not up to par, “according to Algiers, a French source with knowledge of the matter told Agence France Presse. The visit was reduced to one day and the delegation to four ministers. This is a sub-format when there were a lot of bilateral issues to study, “confirmed an Algerian source.
The visit of the French Prime Minister was to mark a new stage in the warming initiated by Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Abdelmadjid Tebboune, two moderates who both gave pledges of a new start but who are not followed by their respective entourage , we suspect. The meeting was to devote for the first time since December 2017 a “high-level intergovernmental committee” (CIHN), co-chaired by Jean Castex and his counterpart, Abdelaziz Djerad, in order to take stock in particular of economic cooperation between the two countries.
Almost 60 years after the end of the Algerian war (March 19, 1962) and the independence of Algeria (July 5, 1962), nothing has yet been settled on either side of the Mediterranean. Resentment is still stubborn, like the lyrical soaring of the Algerian Minister of Labor and Social Security, Hachemi Djaâboub, who launched Thursday before the Senate a virulent attack against France, described as “traditional and eternal enemy According to the TSA online site. In the eyes of the Algerian authorities, the Hirak movement, a vast social protest led by Algerian civil society, is controlled by Paris. Thursday, the Republic on the move announced to open a branch in Dakhla, in Western Sahara, a territory claimed by Morocco and that the Polisario, a small group sheltered by Algiers, also claims.
