Algeria once again calls France to account for its nuclear tests

Its sudden re-emergence now shows that the ties between the two countries are going through one of their worst moments.

The fact is that it is sixty-five years since the first nuclear tests carried out by France on Algerian territory.

Between February 1960 and April 1961 the French carried out four atmospheric explosions at the Reggane test site and another thirteen underground at the In Ekker site in the wilaya of Tamannrasset, the latter over the five-year period from November 1961 to February 1966.

Most of these tests were carried out after the signing of the Evian Accords on 18 March 1962, which ended the eight-year war and initiated the independence of Algeria.

Despite the concessions stipulated at the time in favour of the French state, Algeria has never stopped demanding both material compensation and the transfer of the scientific and military documentation accumulated during that period of nuclear testing, which made France the third western nuclear power, together with the United States and the United Kingdom, and the fifth in the world if Russia and China are included.

But if this Franco-Algerian dispute was developing behind the scenes, it has now re-emerged with force, thanks to the sessions on [French] ‘nuclear crimes’, organised by the National People's Assembly, the lower house of the Algerian parliament. The president of the latter, Ibrahim Boughali, who opened the debates, used this expression to refer to this commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the atomic tests on its territory, before reiterating the main points of the claims to Paris: the complete decontamination of the sites affected by those atmospheric and underground tests; the collection and definitive burial of the waste that still lies under the sands of the Sahara; and compensation for the victims.

Boughali, who is said to have the backing of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, is demanding that France take responsibility for cleaning up all the areas affected by radiation and nuclear waste. He also maintains that Paris must hand over the complete archives of the places where the tests were carried out ‘so that our own experts can assess the damage and take the appropriate measures to alleviate it’.

Although Algiers has not established an official figure for those affected, it estimates that around 30,000 people have suffered the consequences of those nuclear tests and should therefore be compensated. But here the serious differences of opinion between Paris and Algiers become accentuated. France decreed a system to compensate the victims of its tests financially, both in Africa and in Polynesia. And to date, the Compensation Committee, created in 2010 by the so-called Morin Law, has only included one Algerian among the 545 victims who have already received their respective compensations. During the same period, France carried out 193 nuclear tests in the Polynesian archipelagos of Mururoa and Fangataufa, in the South Pacific, which is why the inhabitants of these islands have registered the highest number of victims eligible for compensation, in Paris's opinion.

Algeria therefore rejects the system established by France of giving the money directly to the victims and demands that, once the list of those affected has been agreed, the compensation be paid from state to state, with Algeria then proceeding to distribute the aid.

This dispute, perhaps the most difficult of all those poisoning Algerian-French relations to resolve, was to be addressed from 2007, on the occasion of the visit to Algeria by President Nicolas Sarkozy. It was then decided to create a bilateral committee ‘to draw up an inventory of contaminated sites in order to diagnose their radioactivity, determine the risks to the inhabitants and the environment and propose rehabilitation measures’. It didn't work.

Nor would the new working group created in application of the Declaration of Friendship and Cooperation between France and Algeria signed during the visit of President François Hollande in 2012. Nor would the recommendation of the report by the historian Benjamin Stora in 2021, drawn up at the request of President Emmanuel Macron, to agree on the consequences of French nuclear tests in Algeria have any practical results.

Franco-Algerian relations have seriously deteriorated since last summer, following President Macron's recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. Tensions were heightened this year by the imprisonment of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, accused of attacking Algeria's territorial sovereignty in favour of Morocco, for statements made to the French weekly Frontières.