Algeria has banned French military planes from its airspace in a deepening dispute with the former colonial power after President Macron accused its ruling class of fuelling “hatred of France”.
In comments that have incensed politicians and commentators in Algiers, Macron also suggested that the country’s leaders had rewritten history to blame all its current woes on Paris and colonisation.
He inflamed the row by claiming that Algerians had been manipulated by Turkey to airbrush from history the role of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the country from the 16th century to 1830, when it was taken over by the French.
He went on to suggest that far from destroying Algeria, French colonialists had brought its people together to form a nation for the first time.
Macron’s comments have reopened the festering wounds left by a colonial period which ended in 1962, when Algeria gained independence after a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
In the worst crisis in Franco-Algerian relations for at least 15 years, Algiers recalled its ambassador to Paris and refused entry to its airspace for French military planes involved in fighting Islamist terrorists in the Sahel region and
notably in neighbouring Mali.
Colonel Pascal Ianni, a French army spokesman, said the ban had “slightly impacted” flights bringing supplies to French troops on the ground but “would “not affect” military operations in the Sahel.
The argument appears to have scuppered Macron’s hopes of ending six decades of discord between Paris and Algiers.
The tensions have not only limited French influence in north Africa but nourished resentment among the two million-strong Algerian community in France, widening racial and religious splits.