Xavier Driencourt, diplomat, former director general of the administration of the Quai d’Orsay, head of the General Inspectorate of Foreign Affairs, and former French ambassador to Algiers twice, between 2008 and 2012, then between 2017 and 2020, has just dropped a bombshell in Le Figaro. “The “New Algeria”, according to the formula in vogue in Algiers, is collapsing before our eyes and it is dragging France down with it,” he wrote in a column published on Sunday, January 8, 2023.
Xavier Driencourt describes Algeria as “a military system (formed, we forget, in the methods of the former USSR), brutal, lurking in the shadow of a civilian power, no doubt as much wheeler-dealer as the one he hunted, obsessed with maintaining his privileges and his income, indifferent to the difficulties of the Algerian people”.
Everything that is not this military-business class and which thinks and moves is in prison: “the politicians, civil servants and soldiers linked to the old regime – and to whom the People’s National Army owes its current status -, but also the journalists who were wrong to write hostile or reserved articles on the regime, and those who, naively, posted on social networks a judgment or a dissenting opinion”.
The Covid and the war in Ukraine would have helped the army “to bring the country definitively to heel”. This means that “the press is muzzled, journalists arrested or deprived of their passports, newspapers like Liberté closed, El Watan placed under guardianship and, at the end of December, when Western chancelleries were on New Year’s Eve, it was the last four, Radio M. and the emerging Maghreb site which are banned, while their director, Ihsane el-Kadi, was arrested overnight. On Saturday, January 7, it was the turn of the AlgériePart site to be accused of receiving funds from abroad to disseminate fake news in order to “destabilize the country”. Associations like Caritas, founded by the Catholic Church before 1962, are dissolved, and others are accused of receiving funds from abroad.
A single obsession: to leave
Xavier Driencourt’s column does not only incriminate the Algerian power. It calls into question the pusillanimity and the short-term tactics of the French government. ” Out of comfort or opportunism, but above all out of blindness, in Paris we close our eyes to the Algerian reality (…) Our blindness is a historical error: to believe in Paris that by going to Algiers, by yielding to the Algerians on the issues that are dear to them, memory and visas, we will win them over to our cause and lead them towards more cooperation is a decoy. »
No doubt because of the gas that France needs, French diplomacy closes its eyes to the Algerian reality. But Xavier Driencourt warns us: “45 million Algerians have only one obsession: to leave and flee. Go where, if not to France, where every Algerian has family? (…) The price of our blindness or our compromises will therefore be called massive immigration, unrelated to what it is today, conquering Islamism, ghettoization of our suburbs, and remembrance repentance.
Everyone sees it, the process has already begun.
