Knife Attack in France Exacerbates Ongoing Quarrel With Algiers

When, once again, innocent French people were attacked by yet another knife-wielding North African, the country’s shock and sorrow soon gave way to anger at the suspect’s native country, Algeria. France was still reeling from the killing spree of Brahim Abdessemed in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse on Feb. 22, when its minister of the interior, Bruno Retailleau, had the unenviable task of informing the nation that he and his predecessor had vainly tried to extradite the man to Algeria no fewer than fourteen times.

At every turn, the authorities of the former French colony refused to provide Abdessemed with the required legal documents to allow him back into the country he had left in 2014 to settle in France. There, he remained an illegal immigrant and kept his Algerian identity documents. Algeria’s refusal to take him back was therefore widely seen in the French media as an affront to the former “colonial power.”

Bruno Retailleau, known for his tough-talking on the need to curb non-western immigration, cut a pathetic figure when admitting that France was being led by the nose by the authoritarian regime in Algiers, which had refused to take back at least 30 other Algerian illegal immigrants suspected of Islamist or criminal activities.

Besides Abdessemed, France also wanted to be shot of an Algerian Islamist “influencer” whose violent rants had earned him a certain notoriety among young Muslims in France. The regime refused to let him disembark at Algiers airport, where France had deported him, and forced Air France to put him on the next flight back. France, vilified as a racist, Islamophobic hellhole by the influencer, who nonetheless does not want to leave it, was seething with anger and shame.

After the tragedy in Mulhouse, journalist Elisabeth Levy of the magazine Causeur accused Algeria, where her Jewish family hails from, of having blood on its hands. That fateful day, Brahim Abdessemed should not even have been in France, she argued, but in his home country. Or, failing that, in French custody for being a menace to French society.

As it turns out, Brahim had been sentenced in 2023 to six months in jail for “glorifying Islamic terrorism.” After his release from prison, he was told to be ready to be expelled to Algeria. In the meantime, the 37-year-old was obliged to register at a police station in Mulhouse every day but could otherwise go about his business with fatal consequences on that awful day in February when he attacked police officers at a weekly market in the town, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Seven officers suffered serious but non-lethal stab wounds. A 69-year-old Portuguese gentleman, also an immigrant to Mulhouse, but a legal one, was fatally stabbed whilst trying to protect the officers.

French Prime Minister François Bayrou, under pressure from the nationalist right to finally get tough with Algiers, issued an ultimatum on Feb. 27, giving Algeria between four and six weeks to take back all its citizens France wants gone. Otherwise, diplomatic retributions are … well, a possibility.

Bayrou’s unimpressive proposed countermeasures include the scrapping of the 1968 immigration pact between the two countries that makes it easier for Algerians than citizens of other former colonies to settle in France. The pact is a remnant of the era when General De Gaulle wanted to mend fences with Algeria after it had acquired its independence in 1962 after an eight-year struggle, of which the wounds have failed to heal on either side of the Mediterranean.

The hard right in France, a political force to be reckoned with in Parliament and beyond, has never forgiven De Gaulle for his “betrayal” by granting Algeria its independence. Some of the mayors of various French towns still balk at celebrations of Algeria’s Independence Day among the immigrant communities.

While France’s relations with its other North African former colonies, Morocco and Tunisia, are generally cordial, those with Algeria have mostly remained tetchy. After independence, it joined Communist and Socialist countries in their struggle against Western “imperialism,” and it continued to blame France for many of its woes. Oddly enough, ordinary Algerians shrug off their masters’ constant banging on about France’s duty to repent for its colonial sins.

On an official visit to Algiers, the late President Jacques Chirac was at first summoned by the ruling elite to make amends, only to discover during a walkabout that friendly citizens didn’t want excuses but more visas to travel to or settle in France.

That country has, over the past decades, gone out of its way to appease the ever touchy Algerians and hushed stories in French media about its leaders preferring to undergo medical treatment in much-maligned France rather than in their own country. Algerians of a certain cultural level have always resisted attempts by their autocratic rulers to completely Arabize society, refusing to phase out the French language and culture, which maintain their links to Western civilization. Algeria’s haughty attitude towards France has, over the years, become all the more unpalatable as many of its emigrated citizens, legally or otherwise, earned themselves a reputation for meddling in ordinary criminality or Islamic terrorism, such as Brahim Abdessemed in Mulhouse.

Algiers’ refusal to take him and tens of others of his ilk back seems to be linked to a diplomatic snub that France is possibly unaware of. In July last year, Algeria reacted furiously when President Emmanuel Macron gave up his balancing act between Algeria and Morocco on the subject of the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that both countries claim.

Morocco illegally annexed it in 1975, and since then, Algiers has supported an anti-Moroccan guerrilla movement and a Saharan government in exile. (Both countries fought a brief border war in 1963.) France finally came out on the side of Morocco, just as the United States, which infuriated Algiers. Out of sheer spite, it uses its misfits to get back at France, French commentators think.

These days, the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, who recently acquired French citizenship, is paying the price for his audacity to ridicule Algiers’ territorial claims and its stifling of dissent. In an interview with a right-wing French news outlet, Mr Sansal argued that western Algeria, including the city of Oran, should have been ceded to Morocco at the break-up of French colonial rule in the region.

In November last year, Sansal was arrested at Algiers airport after arriving from France. Although in frail health, the 80-year-old has been incarcerated on accusations of “attacking national unity and integrity.” According to his French publisher, Sansal has refused “requests” from his jailers to part with his “French, Jewish” lawyer and choose an Algerian counsel instead.

President Macron insisted that Algeria has “dishonored” itself by arresting the novelist, who has reportedly gone on a hunger strike in prison. Reconciliation with Algeria was Macron’s stated aim when he came to power in 2017. Now that Algiers’ refusal to take back one of its delinquent citizens has led to yet another terrorist bloodbath on French soil, Macron faces demands to break off relations with the country he has unsuccessfully tried to reason with.

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