Algeria: reconciliation with France and break with the Alliance of Sahel States

Through the visit to Algiers last weekend of the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, who, as well as holding a long meeting with his counterpart Ahmed Attaf, was received by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.

The files containing the numerous Franco-Algerian disagreements have not been closed as a sign of settlement or agreement. Two dossiers are therefore still pending, one concerning the special visas that Paris granted to travellers from its former colony and, above all, the other relating to Algerian citizens convicted of serious crimes, whom France wants to repatriate to Algeria and whom the North African government has been systematically rejecting since President Emmanuel Macron recognised Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Diplomatic and trade relations were broken off, and Algeria dusted off for public consumption all the grievances and disputes from the colonial era and the war of independence that it holds in its memory, also reopening the door to demanding substantial financial compensation for the nuclear tests carried out by France in the Algerian desert.

Minister Barrot paved the way for an upcoming, more solemn meeting between Macron and Tebboune, but above all it allowed the heads of their respective secret services to resume their working sessions, all the more so because the ‘exiled’ France in its former Sahelian colonies of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger has just found itself in almost the same situation as Algeria itself. The three countries, ruled by military juntas since their successive coups d'état, jointly decided last Sunday to withdraw their ambassadors from Algeria, after accusing it of shooting down a Malian drone, supposedly in territory under the authority and control of Bamako. The incident, described as a ‘premeditated hostile action’, is said to have occurred on 1 April.

The communiqué issued by the three military juntas is particularly virulent, pointing to the Algerian regime as the ‘sponsor of international terrorism’. For its part, Algeria, which acknowledges having shot down the aforementioned drone, of the Akinci class and manufactured by Turkey, argues that the drone was shot down by its army as it had penetrated two kilometres into its territory.

All kinds of hypotheses and speculations have been unleashed as a result of these events, given the extremely delicate geopolitical situation in the Sahel. Of all of them, the biggest unknown is to verify the real intentions that may be behind this incident. As is well known, in the three former colonies, the place occupied by French troops to reinforce the security of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger is now under the control of the Wagner Group militias, renamed Africa Corps (what a throwback to the Hitlerian Afrika Korps commanded by Field Marshal Rommel!) and with the full recognition of the Kremlin.

It is also well known that Russia is the main, if not almost the only, supplier of arms to the Algerian Armed Forces, just as President Vladimir Putin's ambitions to gain access to the Atlantic are no secret. The removal of France and the EU, including Spain, from the security bodies in this part of the Sahel has left us with practically no intelligence.

The confrontation between Algeria and Morocco also persists, with the Sahara as a particular point of friction. Far from subsiding, the clash between the two North African countries seems to be accentuated precisely because of the worsening of the situation in the Sahel. A report broadcast by the Malian television station ORTM1, according to which Morocco had been training 165 Malian soldiers, with new contingents to follow, has provoked the anger of Algiers, which has added fuel to the fire by claiming that ‘such training would include the use of drones’.

In any case, given the situation, it seems more than likely that Rabat is taking advantage of the gaps left by the absence of France and Algeria to increase its influence, and certainly to become the main dam against the overflow of jihadist terrorism and the consequent increase in insecurity and its projection towards southern Europe.