Because of the increasing demand for gas in Ukraine, Europe has made it more important to maintain good relations with Algiers.
President Emmanuel Macron said France and Algeria should move beyond their “painful” shared history and look to the future as he began a three-day visit to the former colony.
“We have a complex, painful common past, and it has at times prevented us from looking at the future,” Macron said after meeting Algerian counterpart President Abdelmadjid Tebboune on Thursday.
Speaking at a press conference, Tebboune responded by saying the visit yielded “encouraging results” and he hoped it would “open up new perspectives for partnership and cooperation with France”.
He said that they discussed how to bring stability in Libya, the Sahel area, and the disputed territories of Western Sahara.
Relations between the two countries have been strained for decades by the French colonial rule of Algeria and the bitter independence conflict that ended it in 1962.
Paris has made it more important to maintain ties with Algiers because of the war in Ukraine, which has increased Europe’s demand for North African gas and a surge in migration to the Mediterranean.
European nations are looking to Algeria — Africa’s biggest gas exporter with direct pipelines to Spain and Italy — to end their dependence on Russian hydrocarbons.
Algiers is trying to capitalize on rising energy prices to lock-in European investment.
Macron has attempted to turn the page several times with its former colony. In 2017, before his election, he described French actions during the 1954-62 war that killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians as a “crime against humanity”.
This declaration won him popularity in Algeria, but was controversial in France, where there are more than four million Algerian-born citizens.
He did however provoke a storm in Algeria last summer when he refused to issue an official apology and suggested that Algerian national identity didn’t exist before French rule.
He also appeared to accuse Algeria’s ruling elite — which is still dominated by the generation that fought for independence — of rewriting the history of the independence struggle based on a hatred of France.
Algeria withdrew the ambassador for consultations to France and closed its airspace, complicating the French military mission within the Sahel.
Macron paid a visit to the monument honoring the sacrifices of Algerians during World War II, before meeting with Tebboune. He stated that the two governments would create a joint committee to study archives from the colonial period.
French historians say half a million civilians and combatants died during Algeria’s bloody war for independence, 400,000 of them Algerian. 1.5 million were killed, according to Algerian authorities.
Tebboune’s office said in October more than 5.6 million Algerians were killed during the colonial period.
Human rights groups from Algeria have asked Macron to not overlook abuses committed by the government that came into power in 2019 after long-serving leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected.
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