Algeria Ignores “Lightning Meeting” Promoted By The French Side

In a baffling development, the French Press Agency reported that the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, met his Algerian counterpart, Ramtane Lamamra, on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting of the African Union and the European Union, in the Rwandan capital Kigali.

The reasons for this “snatching” meeting were leaked from the French side, as the French agency is the only media outlet that reported the news, and the statement came from the French side as well, and exactly from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Le Drian, and the evidence is that all the media outlets that reported this news, quoted it from one source that is the “Agence France-Presse”.

The strange thing is that the Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra, who used to announce every little thing he does, through his own account on the micro-blogging site “Twitter”, did not mention his meeting with the head of French diplomacy in Kigali.

The French press agency quoted Le Drian as saying, “I met Lamamra by chance and we exchanged a compliment conversation,” focusing in particular on the unfolding political transition process in Libya, which will form the focus of an international conference on November 12th 2021 in the French capital, Paris.

Returning to Lamamra’s account on Twitter, we find many tweets in which he talked about meetings with European and African officials, including those in which he spoke about a “fruitful meeting with my colleagues, the foreign ministers of Angola and South Africa on the main results of the ministerial meeting of the African Union and the European Union”.

He also tweeted in another, in which he referred to “working sessions and meetings with several African and European colleagues on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting of the African Union and the European Union,” and published pictures of him with five African and European officials, not including the French Foreign Minister.

In addition to other tweets accompanied by pictures, they included meetings with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, his Foreign Minister Vincent Perrota, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Central African Republic, Sylvie Baibo Timon.
Among all these tweets, not a single picture was found of the Algerian Foreign Minister together with his French counterpart.

The French press agency spoke about the meeting of the foreign ministers of the two countries on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meetings in September in New York, that is, before the outbreak of the diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

It did not indicate that they met, which means that the “coincidence” of Kigali is the first between the diplomacy chiefs of Algeria and Paris since the outbreak of the crisis about a month ago.

France intends to organize an international conference on Libya in the French capital, Paris, on November 12, and the French press agency said that Algeria had not confirmed its participation in it, an implicit indication that France had invited Algeria, but did not receive a positive response from it.

The memory of Algerian-French relations reminds of an incident that occurred in the nineties of the last century, between the former president, Liamine Zeroual, and his then French counterpart, Jacques Chirac, on the sidelines of the proceedings of the United Nations General Assembly, where the French president wanted to meet his Algerian counterpart away from the lenses of the cameras, but President Zeroual refused that meeting because of the French prior condition.

Algerian-French relations are witnessing unprecedented tension, after the provocative and irresponsible statements of French President Emmanuel Macron, in which he questioned the existence of an Algerian nation before the brutal French occupation of Algeria in 1830.

In a reaction, Algeria responded by recalling its ambassador from France and preventing French warplanes from passing through Algerian airspace, and this development means that the French side’s leakage of the Kigali meeting of the two countries’ diplomacy chiefs is intentional.