The North Africa Journal’s WhatsApp Group
By Abdellah Cheballah:
Algeria recalled on Wednesday its envoy to France “for consultations” after Paris intervened to fly out via Tunisia an activist and journalist who is wanted by Algiers, the presidency said. The Amira Bouraoui affair threatens renewed ties between Algeria and its former colonial ruler. In an official note, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune “firmly protested against the clandestine and illegal exfiltration of an Algerian citizen” via Tunisia to France, a statement said. It said that Tebboune had ordered ambassador Said Moussi to be recalled from Paris “with immediate effect”.
Bouraoui, 46, had been arrested in Tunisia on Friday and risked being deported to Algeria, but she was finally able to board a flight to France on Monday evening. A doctor by training, she was sentenced in Algeria in May 2021 to two years n jail for “offending Islam” and for insulting the president. She was not placed under arrest pending an appeal. Bouraoui was banned from leaving Algeria, and was arrested in Tunisia when trying to board a flight for France, using her French passport. But a judge released her on Monday and she was then taken away by police before obtaining protection from French diplomats in Tunis.
– ‘Very unfriendly’ –
French daily Le Monde reported that she was made welcome at the French embassy in Tunis before being given “President Kais Saied’s authorisation to return to France”. Shortly before Moussi was recalled on Wednesday, the Algerian foreign ministry said it had sent an official note to the French embassy expressing “the firm condemnation by Algeria of the violation of national sovereignty by diplomatic, consular and security personnel of the French State”. It said these French personnel in Tunisia “engaged in a clandestine and illegal operation to exfiltrate an Algerian national”. In the note, Algeria said the incident had caused “great damage” to Algerian-French relations.
On Wednesday, the French-language government newspaper El Moudjahid in an editorial denounced what it called a “very unfriendly” act towards both Algeria and Tunisia. “This French policy, of one step forward and 10 steps back, throws cold water on bilateral relations a few weeks before the state visit President Tebboune is due to make to France,” it said. Tebboune is scheduled to visit Paris in May, following a January phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron. Ties between the two countries had been frosty since autumn 2021, but warmed when Macron visited Algiers last August. To great fanfare, the two presidents signed a declaration on relaunching bilateral cooperation. French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne then led a delegation of 15 ministers to the North African country in October to bolster that reconciliation.
– Editor arrested –
Bouraoui made a name for herself in 2014 with her involvement in a movement that campaigned against a fourth term for the late president Abdelaziz Bouteflika. She had tried several times in recent months to leave Algeria to visit her son, who lives in France. On Wednesday on Facebook she thanked all those who made sure that did not find herself “behind bars again”. Bouraoui had already served a short prison term in Algeria before being provisionally released in July 2020. She wrote that she was not going into exile in France and that she would be “back very soon” in Algeria.
Authorities on Wednesday arrested the chief editor of Le Provincial newspaper, Algerian media reported, triggering a protest from media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Colleagues of Mustapha Bendjama at the newspaper in the northeastern city of Annaba said he had been held in connection with Bouraoui’s departure, according to local news website Interlignes. The report quoted employees who said Bendjama had told them before the arrest he had been contacted by intelligence officers and told them he had “nothing to do with the case”. RSF called “for his immediate release”.
