French, Germans Continue Their Campaign Against Algiers Grande Mosque

Housing and Construction Minister, Abdelmadjd Teboune, will visit, here on Saturday, Algiers Grande Mosque workshop in Mohamedia, to determine the extent of progress and the pace of works, and defend the President’s project because it is facing criticism by the French media, and the German Office of Studies “Engel und Zimmermann” which said, the project will not see the light before 2018, contrary to the date that was given by the Minister, before the end of 2016 or the first four months of 2017 at the latest estimate.

Housing Ministry links in that between the two sides, when it said that the French company Bouygue wanted to acquire the project, and win transactions for the completion of the mosque, in agreement with the German office which conducts the studies, and believes that the two sides were not satisfied, after excluding the German Office on July,31, 2015, and handed it over to the Algerian offices, because the German office did not respect the deadlines that were agreed upon before. 

Abdelmaguid Taboun thinks that the criticism has known and is expected because they are not the result of today, but it is back to six years ago, when the idea raised a controversy over priorities, and stir that was classified in the category of ideological conflict between supporters and opponents. 

Previously, President Bouteflika decided, upon the studies which he received the selected site, which was a center for missionaries and a chamber of wines, to be offset by an historic milestone, and a cultural, religious and tourism place, that protects the religious authority, and would contribute to the revenues of the public treasury after its receipt.

But the irony is that the criticism began to increase in the recent months not only by specialists in Algeria, who suspected the capacity of the third largest mosque in the world, after the Two Holy Mosques, to withstand, as the project’s completion reached 65%, because of the land’s quality, but criticism continued pursuing the mosque from the outside, which made the Housing Ministry find itself in defence of the the great mosque, stressing that it provided all the technical procedures for the success of “President’s project”.