During a speech to the nation delivered before both houses of Parliament, the Algerian president, re-elected for a second term in early September, strongly attacked France on December 29, 2024. Abdelmadjid Tebboune also spoke for the first time the arrest in mid-November in Algiers of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. Details.
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President Abdelmadjid Tebboune addressed Algerians on Sunday and strongly attacked France. He returned to questions of memory in a “speech to the nation” delivered before both houses of Parliament. According to extracts from his speech published on the official website of the presidency, the Algerian leader calls on Paris to recognize its crimes in Algeria. While relations between Paris and Algiers are at their lowest, he demands certain gestures from France relating to the colonial period (1830-1962).
“ The French must admit that they killed and massacred the Algerians », underlined the president Abdelmadjid Tebboune returning to the colonial period and the Algerian war of independence.
The Head of State also called on France to clean up contaminated nuclear test sites in the south of the country : “ You became a nuclear power and left us with diseases. Come clean! » He specifies that his country is not demanding compensation, “ but the dignity of our ancestors and our citizens”, he clarified.
To those who, today, in France, praise the benefits of colonization, the Algerian leader responds that it “ left Algeria in ruins »: 90% of Algerians were illiterate at independence, he added.
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Referring to the Sahrawi question, he affirmed that “ the idea of autonomy is a French idea and not a Moroccan one “, stressing that the settlement options they propose for the question of Western Sahara are ” choices between bad and worse when it is a question of decolonization and self-determination “.
For the first time, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune also returned to the arrest in mid-November in Algiers of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal.
The head of state describes the author as an imposter with an unknown father. He says Sansal is sent by France to assert that half of Algeria belongs to another state, Morocco. The writer has been incarcerated since November for endangering state security.
Also readAlgeria: writer Boualem Sansal remains in detention, his lawyer cannot travel to Algeria