In an interview with the French daily Le Figaro, the Head of State Abdelmadjid Tebboune invites France to move on 60 years after the war of national liberation. In fact, in this interview, the Algerian president mentioned as many subjects as visas, the memorial question, and Algerian-French relations.
Abdelmadjid Tebboune did not miss this opportunity to raise the issue of restoring the usual flow of visas, believing that it is quite simple in the logic of things. ” The movement of people between our two countries was regulated by the Evian Agreements of 1962 and the Agreement of 1968″, he recalled, noting the Algerian specificity, including compared to other Maghreb countries. “It was negotiated and it should be respected,” he insisted.
Abdelmadjid Tebboune will travel to France in 2023
For relations between the two countries, the Head of State stressed that it was “urgent” to open a new era. “It is urgent to open a new era of bilateral relations between Algeria and France. More than 60 years after the war, we must move on. If memory is part of our common genes, we also share a good number of fundamental interests, even if our points of view may diverge”, said President Tebboune.
He thus considered that “France must free itself from its colonizer complex and Algeria from its colonized complex. Algeria is an African power which no longer resembles at all what it was in 1962”. The Head of State announced on the occasion that he would go to France in 2023 on a state visit, noting an “understanding” with the French President, Emmanuel Macron.
Melbourne wants to depoliticize part of the colonization
With regard to the question of memory, Abdelmadjid Tebboune recalled that the decision to set up a Commission of historians on both sides was taken by him and the French President. This is why, he continued, a “part of colonization must be depoliticized and returned to history”. “We must take into account the 132 years of occupation because everything does not start with the war of independence. There are proven, archived, documented facts, which we cannot hide, writings attest to them”, he asserted.
A little further on, he mentioned the nuclear tests carried out by France in southern Algeria. He, as such, called on France to clean up the sites of these tests, in particular Reggane and Tamanrasset, where the pollution is enormous, hoping that it would also take charge of the medical care needed by the people there.
