FRI 29 - 3 - 2024
 
Date: Jun 16, 2015
Source: The Daily Star
Hollande in Algeria discusses terrorism, economy

ALGIERS: French President Francois Hollande made a seven-hour visit to Algeria Monday for talks on security issues, calling the fight against terrorism a “common battle.”


France’s economic partnership with Algerian authorities also was being discussed during separate visits with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria’s 78-year-old leader, and Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal.


Hollande said the issues that France and Algeria, its former colony, are working on include security and “security is fighting terrorism.”


Algeria shares borders with both chaotic Libya and with Mali, where France intervened in 2013 to rout Al-Qaeda-linked militants controlling the vast north.


“I ... want to highlight the common fight against ... this terrible and implacable enemy, to which we have struck a blow, even just in the past hours,” Hollande said, referring to reports that Algerian extremist Mokhbar Belmokhtar was among 17 killed over the weekend by U.S. airstrikes in eastern Libya. Belmokhtar claimed responsibility for a gas plant attack in Algeria in 2013 that left at least 35 hostages dead.


In a rare concession to France, Algeria had let French fighter planes overfly its territory to intervene in Mali to uproot militants like Belmokhtar, who was widely thought to have fled to Libya, along with other fighters chased from Mali.


Bouteflika, who is in poor health, has been almost totally absent since his April 2013 stroke, yet was re-elected in April for a fourth term. Hollande denied any involvement in Algeria’s internal politics and the pending succession battle.


Libya is also where tens of thousands of migrants have been leaving in smugglers’ boats to try to cross the Mediterranean and get into Europe.


“France is Algeria’s first trade partner and expects to further boost its presence ... with the installation soon of important companies such as Renault, Sanofi, Alstom and Peugeot,” Hollande said.


He said ties with Algeria, despite the two countries’ prickly past, were “exceptional” and built on “real and fraternal friendship.”


Mutual concern over rampant jihadism in North Africa has brought the former foes closer together in recent years.


Algeria shares a border with Mali’s north, which is still fragile after a French-led operation in 2013 ousted jihadis who had seized the upper half of the West African nation.


While French troops patrol northern Mali, Algiers has mediated a peace accord between Mali’s main Tuareg-led rebel groups and Bamako, which will be signed on June 20.


Algeria has also hosted talks between rival political factions from chaos-torn Libya, with which it also shares a long border.


Despite a trouble past, both Algeria and France has sought to put a gloss over the visit.


“I attach great importance to the political dialogue between France and Algeria as our two countries contribute to stability and security in the region,” Hollande wrote in Algeria’s French-language newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran ahead of his visit.


A statement from the Algerian presidency said Hollande’s visit was “marked by a significant deepening of dialogue and political consultation between the two countries.”


Hollande paid his first visit as president to Algeria in December 2012, when he recognized France’s century of “brutal” rule over the former colony that ended in a bloody war of independence.


Some 1.5 million Algerians died fighting for self-rule in the 1957-1962 conflict. Today more than half a million Algerians live in France.


On Monday, Hollande also praised Algeria’s role “for peace in Mali” and renewed his “gratitude” for tracking down the Islamist militants who kidnapped and beheaded Frenchman Herve Gourdel last year. 


Algeria, which witnessed a bloody civil war in the 1990s, was also the birthplace of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb that played a key role in the takeover of northern Mali in 2012.




 
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