Xavier Driencourt, diplomat, former director general of the administration of the Quai d’Orsay, head of the General Inspectorate of Foreign Affairs, former French ambassador to Algiers twice, between 2008 and 2012, then between 2017 and 2020 in the columns of the French media “Le Figaro”, an article published under the title “Algeria is collapsing: will it lead France? “. Driencourt, who claims to be familiar with the workings of the Algerian state and the “system” in place, has addressed several aspects of Algeria in this article.
The former diplomat begins by addressing the subject of the new Algeria, affirming that the latter is collapsing, he declares “If I had to summarize briefly and brutally, I would say that the” new Algeria “, according to the formula in vogue in Algiers is in the process of collapsing before our eyes and is dragging France down in its fall, no doubt more strongly and subtly than the Algerian tragedy brought down the Fourth Republic in 1958”.
Xavier Driencourt describes Algeria as “a military system (formed, we forget, in the methods of the former USSR), brutal, lurking in the shadow of a civilian power, no doubt as much wheeler-dealer as the one he hunted, obsessed with maintaining his privileges and his income, indifferent to the difficulties of the Algerian people”.
According to him, what is not this military-business class that thinks and moves is in prison: “the politicians, civil servants and soldiers linked to the old regime – and to whom the People’s National Army owes its current status -, but also the journalists who were wrong to write hostile or reserved articles on the regime, and those who, naively, posted on social networks a judgment or a dissenting opinion”.
Driencourt talks about the press in Algeria
The Covid-19 epidemic and the war in Ukraine would, according to him, have helped the army “to bring the country definitively to heel”. This means that “the press is muzzled, journalists arrested or deprived of their passports, newspapers like Liberté closed, El Watan placed under guardianship and, at the end of December, when Western chancelleries were on New Year’s Eve, it was the last square, Radio M . and the emerging Maghreb site, which are banned, while their director, Ihsane el-Kadi, was arrested overnight. Saturday, January 7, it was the turn of the Algeria Part site to be accused of receiving funds from abroad to disseminate fake news in order to “destabilize the country”. Associations like Caritas, founded by the Catholic Church before 1962, are dissolved, others accused of receiving funds from abroad. »
The opportunism of France pointed out by Driencourt
In addition, Xavier Driencourt also incriminates the French government, declaring that by “comfort or opportunism, but above all by blindness, in Paris, we close our eyes to the Algerian reality. Our blindness is a historical error: believing in Paris that by going to Algiers, by yielding to the Algerians on the files that are dear to them, memory and visas, we will win them over to our cause and lead them towards more cooperation is a decoy. »
The ex-ambassador of France in Algiers, also affirms that the Algerians want to flee their country, saying that: “45 million Algerians have only one obsession: to leave and flee. Go where, if not to France, where every Algerian has family? The price of our blindness or our compromises will therefore be called massive immigration, unrelated to what it is today, conquering Islamism, ghettoization of our suburbs, remembrance repentance. »
