Lhe remarks made Friday by Emmanuel Macron, targeting in particular Turkey, at the end of his visit to the Christian and Jewish cemetery of Bologhine (ex-Saint-Eugène) in Algiers, do not pass for Ankara.
The French president had called on Algerian and African youth to “not get carried away” by “the immense manipulation” of “networks” remotely controlled “underhand” by foreign powers who present France as “the enemy”. , naming Turkey, Russia and China, and assigning them an “influencer, neo-colonial and imperialist agenda”.
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Anger in Ankara
The next day, August 27, Turkish Foreign Affairs spokesman Tanju Bilgic reacted at a press conference in Ankara, saying that it is “extremely regrettable that French President Emmanuel Macron has made statements targeting Turkey, as well as other countries, during his visit to Algeria”. “It is unacceptable that French President Macron, having difficulty facing his colonial past in Africa, particularly in Algeria, tries to get rid of it by launching accusations against other countries, including Turkey,” continued Tanju Bilgic. .
For the Turkish official, “if France is of the opinion that there are reactions against it on the African continent, it should seek the source of these reactions in its own colonial past and in its efforts to continue these practices still through the different methods, and she should try to fix them”.
“We hope that France will reach as quickly as possible the maturity necessary to face its own colonial past without accusing other countries, including ours”, concluded the spokesman for Turkish diplomacy. For the moment, neither China nor Russia, key partners of Algeria, have yet reacted to Emmanuel Macron’s statements.
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Turkish mantra on colonization
This is not the first time that Ankara has invited itself into Franco-Algerian affairs or the theme of colonial history. The most recent dates back to February 2021 following a statement by Macron to the American think tank Atlantic Council calling for “the departure of Turkish troops from Libya, to obtain the departure of the thousands of jihadists sent from Syria to Libya by Turkey itself. Reacting to this exit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: “Macron asks Turkey to withdraw from Libya. I tell him to keep his advice to himself, because we only did our duty under the security and military agreement we reached with the Libyans […] Your ancestors killed a million Algerians. Account for this. As for Turkey, there is nothing like it in its past and there never will be. Our hands aren’t stained with blood, yours are! »
On September 30, 2021, and facing the young people gathered at the Elysée to discuss the memory of colonization, Macron had indicated that he was “fascinated to see Turkey’s ability to completely forget the role it played in Algeria and the dominance it exerted. And to explain that we are the only colonizers, that’s great. The Algerians believe in it”.
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