Algiers recalled for “consultations” its ambassador in Paris after the role played by French diplomacy to avoid the extradition to Algeria of Amira Bouraoui, an opponent who had taken refuge in Tunis.
The relationship between Paris and Algiers, subject to cyclical fluctuations, entered a new period of crisis with the decision of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, announced on Wednesday, February 8, to recall the Algerian ambassador to France “for consultations”. This bad-tempered gesture responds to the intervention on Monday by the French Embassy in Tunis intended to prevent the Algerian opponent Amira Bouraoui, also holder of a French passport, from being extradited to Algeria from Tunisia where she had entered illegally three days earlier in order to take refuge there.
Thanks to diplomatic assistance from Paris, which obtained authorization from the Tunisian President, Kaïs Saïed, to let her leave Tunisian territory, the journalist was able to board a flight bound for Lyon. His exile is just one manifestation among many of the intensification of the ongoing repression in Algeria against the residual nuclei of Hirak, the protest movement which had fevered the country in 2019 and 2020, and whose M me Bouraoui was part of it.
In the eyes of Algiers, the role played by France is a “clandestine and illegal exfiltration of an Algerian national” demanded by the justice of his country, denounces a press release from President Tebboune. For its part, the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “Algeria’s firm condemnation of the violation of national sovereignty by diplomatic, consular, and security personnel under the responsibility of the French State”. Sign of the anger that reigns on this subject in official Algerian circles, the daily L’Expression, close to the government, castigated “the ‘barbouzeries’ of French diplomacy”.
