France expels Algerian diplomats in tit-for-tat decision as their feud deepens
The Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs said in a statement it had summoned Algerian officials to inform them of the decision, describing it as 'strict reciprocity' after 15 French officials were expelled from Algiers on Sunday.
France did not say how many Algerians holding diplomatic passports had been expelled. It called on Algerian authorities to 'demonstrate responsibility and to return to a demanding and constructive dialogue that had been initiated by our authorities, in the interest of both countries.'
The measures are the latest sign of deteriorating relations between France and Algeria. They go against a 2013 deal allowing individuals with diplomatic passports to travel between the countries without needing visas.
Algeria said it expelled French officials on Sunday because France had broken procedures, including in how it assigned new diplomats to replace a different set that were expelled last month.
Despite economic ties and security cooperation, France and Algeria for decades have clashed over issues ranging from immigration to the painful legacy of French colonialism.
Tensions flared last year when France shifted its longstanding position and backed Morocco 's plan for sovereignty over disputed Western Sahara. Algeria views the Morocco-controlled territory as Africa's last colony and supports the pro-independence Polisario Front materially and politically.
The tensions jeopardize more than $12 billion in annual bilateral trade and could create hurdles for the hundreds of thousands of Algerian-born residents of France who travel between the countries.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
How postwar Germans tried to censor films with Nazi villains
Running throughout the middle of the 1960s, Combat! was one of the most vivid and successful Second World War dramas yet aired on the small screen. Its fictional but meticulously realistic account of an American infantry unit battling through German-occupied France after D-Day left millions, from Toronto to Taiwan, Los Angeles to Lima, glued to their black-and-white television sets every week. Yet it stuck in the craw for one group of viewers: West German officialdom. Two decades after the end of the war, diplomats and civil servants were horrified by what they saw as a flood of 'anti-German' films and television series that slandered the Wehrmacht soldiers as villains. 'You see them plundering, committing arson and murdering women and children,' the West German outpost in Caracas wrote in a cable to the foreign ministry, adding that it was quietly lobbying to have Combat! taken off the airwaves. This was part of a clandestine international campaign to try to suppress unflattering depictions of the Third Reich's war machine, which is detailed in a landmark historical study of the postwar West German government. It was an era in which Germans still widely believed in the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht', which maintained that the Nazi military and its generals were mere soldiers doing their jobs and innocent of war crimes. Where atrocities had been committed, the theory held, the Nazi dictatorship and its 'party soldiers' in the SS were to blame. Later scholarship demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case: the Wehrmacht had in fact committed numerous war crimes on its own initiative, including the massacres of thousands of prisoners of war, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the rape of as many as ten million women. However, the West German state under Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor from 1949 to 1963, insisted on its innocence as a matter of policy. This was not just a political strategy to court the votes of millions of Wehrmacht veterans; it was also viewed as an essential part of the justification for West Germany's rearmament against the threat from the Soviet bloc from the early 1950s. • Secret files reveal the Nazis chosen to run West Germany In 1951 Adenauer had even persuaded Dwight Eisenhower, who had led the Allied assault on Nazi Germany and then became the supreme commander of Nato forces in Europe, to issue a statement absolving the 'great majority' of German soldiers. This belief was so entrenched that West German officials were outraged by postwar films that shed light on the Third Reich's crimes against humanity. Some of these incidents are already notorious: in 1956, for example, the West German interior ministry and embassy in Paris tried to have Night and Fog, the French director Alain Resnais' award-winning documentary about the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, withdrawn from the programme at the Cannes film festival. Jutta Braun, a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, has uncovered evidence that these efforts were much more extensive than previously known, and lasted until well into the 1970s. Sifting through the archives of the German Federal Press Office (BPA), Braun found officials had not only maintained a list of 'anti-German propaganda' in war films but also used underhand means to try to get them pulled from cinemas and television schedules. Its targets were numerous: not only Combat! and Night and Fog but also other popular American series such as The Rat Patrol, which told the story of American and British soldiers trying to sabotage Rommel's Afrika Korps, and Jericho, which followed British, American and French spies behind enemy lines. In 1965 the West German embassy in Washington, led by an ambassador who had previously headed the anti-American propaganda section in the Nazi German foreign ministry, went so far as to blame 'the type of Jewish liberal who has great influence in the modern communications industry' for the tide of 'hate-films' that had added murderous German soldiers to the pantheon of 'bad guys'. The campaign also affected Canada, where the public broadcaster, CBC, had aired a documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 and a film from 1944 that imagined the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. The West German embassy complained that it was 'defaming' a Nato ally and secured an apology from the head of CBC, who said the scheduling had been a mistake by his staff. Other diplomats suggested using threats and financial pressure to bully the films' sponsors and distributors into backing out. 'We do not wish to impose a political burden on our export sector, but the embassy regards an intensified pressure in this area as promising,' the embassy in Guatemala wrote back to Bonn in 1967, as the central American state was gripped by enthusiasm for Combat!. One member of staff in the Washington embassy boasted of having persuaded a Kentucky-based tobacco company to pull its sponsorship for an unspecified Second World War television series. In 1965 the embassy planted articles in the Staats-Zeitung und Herold, one of the biggest German-language newspapers in the US, that called on Americans with German roots to lodge protests with the broadcasters, the sponsors and their local congressmen. It explicitly called this a 'campaign … with the goal of curbing anti-German television broadcasts'. Not even WGBH, a worthy public broadcaster in Boston that relayed programmes from West Germany, was spared. The embassy criticised it for making an English-language version of a German documentary about everyday life in a concentration camp instead of picking up an 'excellent' television adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's play Don Carlos. 'This 'defensive battle' against so-called 'anti-German' films, especially in the United States, shows how hard the BPA was working to uphold the 'honour of the German soldier',' Braun said, adding that it 'reveals the authoritarian understanding of the state' and lack of a 'pluralistic view of the world'. Britain got off lightly. The embassy in London kept a watchful eye on popular series such as Colditz, an early 1970s drama about Allied prisoners of war trying to escape from Colditz Castle in Saxony, and Fawlty Towers. This was not always a comfortable experience: when the West German broadcaster WDR syndicated Fawlty Towers in 1978, it omitted the famous 'Don't mention the war' episode in which Basil Fawlty cannot keep himself from abusing a family of German hotel guests. Yet the West German diplomats in the UK were on the whole much more restrained than their counterparts in the Americas, praising the quality of television shows such as the documentary series Inside Germany and Thames Television's 1975 programme The Final Solution: Auschwitz. In fact the embassy was sanguine when the BBC broadcast a strident wartime propaganda film called 49th Parallel in 1974, more than 30 years after it was a hit in cinemas, and a London correspondent for the Welt newspaper published an apoplectic editorial calling on the West German government to defend its veterans. Karl-Günther von Hase, the West German ambassador in London and a previous head of the BPA, was forgiving of the British public's taste in war films and saw the issue in a more nuanced light. Most of the commentary in the British press, he noted, had come out against the 'glut of 'stupid-Hun' films'. He cabled to Bonn: 'There is scarcely any western country where the experience of the war has remained so alive as it has here. Britain had to fiercely defend its existence and mobilise the very last of its strength in two world wars.' Braun also found intriguing evidence that Britain might have meddled in the German media on at least one occasion. In the 1950s the Overseas News Agency, a New York-based entity that was secretly funded by what is now known as MI6, approached the BPA with a plan to plant positive articles about the history of soldiery, from Alexander the Great to the present day, in dozens of local newspapers. The BPA, which thought the idea fit with its own secret strategy of 'counter-infiltration', handed the agency 2,700 deutschmarks (a little over €8,000 in today's terms) to help it deliver the texts to 90 West German publications. Braun said it was not entirely clear whether the articles about soldiers were a covert British attempt to tilt the West German population towards supporting rearmament, or simply an opportunistic scheme dreamt up by the agency's go-between with the government in Bonn. However, she said these dark arts and the murky nexus of intelligence, spin and journalism were characteristic of the postwar years. Early in his chancellorship, Adenauer told Otto Lenz, his chief of staff, that the 'most urgent' priority was 'the establishment of appealing propaganda' for the state. Various proposals circulated at the highest level of his government for upgrading the BPA into a 'propaganda ministry' reminiscent of its Nazi predecessor under Joseph Goebbels, but in the service of democratic ideals. Although these plans were ultimately discarded, the BPA still 'stood in the shadow' of Goebbels's super-ministry, according to Braun. It stooped to methods such as suppressing its own opinion polling whenever the results cast the Germans in an unfavourable light, such as a study that found only 12 per cent of them had a positive opinion of Jews. It also hired several senior officials who had previously worked in Goebbels's propaganda apparatus. Felix von Eckardt, who ran the office from 1952 to 1955, had written more than 25 screenplays during the Third Reich, including The Dismissal (1942), which implied Hitler was Bismarck's true heir. Hans Schirmer, director of its overseas department in the 1950s, had joined the Nazi party weeks after Hitler seized power in 1933 and worked for Goebbels's ministry. A number of others had worked for the regime's newspapers. 'I was astonished how easy it was even for former journalists at Nazi, antisemitic hate-sheets such as Der Angriff or the Völkischer Beobachter to get jobs at the press office,' Braun said. 'And how simple it seems to have been for these people to 'write in any direction' — before 1945 in the service of the Nazi war of aggression, and then in the young Federal Republic to improve the image of the postwar democracy.' In the end, however, the BPA never attained anything like the level of power or influence that the propaganda ministry had wielded under the Third Reich, and democratically minded officials in its upper echelons often shot down the more outlandish plans for manipulating the public. Braun cited a 'witticism' from Von Hase: 'Goebbels sold criminal policies dangerously well. You could plausibly claim that our policies weren't criminal, but you also have to admit that they weren't dangerously well sold either.' 'That is correct,' Braun added. 'And, of course, it's a good thing.' The study is published in Das Kanzleramt: Bundesdeutsche Demokratie und NS Vergangenheit (The Chancellery: West German Democracy and the Nazi Past) by Jutta Braun, Nadine Freund, Christian Mentel and Gunnar Take
The National
8 hours ago
- The National
Home Office to return Iraqi migrants to 'deter small boats'
The deal, signed by Home Office minister Dan Jarvis, will set up a formal process to return Iraqis who have arrived in the UK with no right to stay in the country. It comes after an £800,000 deal last year with Baghdad to help the country crack down on smuggling networks and organised crime. Earlier this year, Keir Starmer and Iraq's prime minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani agreed to strengthen co-operation on migration. READ MORE: Nigel Farage claims court ruling removing asylum seekers from hotel as 'victory' Jarvis (below) signed the agreement during a visit to the UK by Iraq's deputy foreign minister Faud Hussein. The Home Office said the accord would allow the 'swift' return of "illegal" migrants. Home Office statistics said that since previous deals, the number of Iraqis arriving in the UK by small boat has fallen to 1900 in the year to March 2025, down from 2600 in the previous year. Jarvis said: 'By working together on security, development and migration challenges, we are building stronger relationships that benefit both our countries whilst tackling shared challenges like organised crime and irregular migration.' What is the Home Office's policy on small boat returns? The returns deal is the latest as part of the Home Office's policies to stop small boats crossing the channel. Similar agreements have already been made with Albania and Vietnam since Labour came into power. Another deal with France recently came into force, where people who have arrived over the English Channel from the French coast can be returned to the country. The person will then be exchanged for a "legitimate asylum seeker" in France who can demonstrate a genuine family link to the UK. The number has been capped, but it is hoped it will act as a deterrent to those crossing the Channel. The latest figures from the Home Office showed 116 people arrived aboard two small boats on August 15. Jarvis said: 'This visit reinforces the strength of the UK-Iraq partnership and demonstrates our government's commitment to serious diplomacy that delivers real results. 'As someone who served in Iraq, I understand first-hand the importance of building enduring relationships in the region, and the new agreement we have signed is a testament to the trust and co-operation we've built with our Iraqi counterparts.' READ MORE: How does the UK-France 'one in, one out' asylum deal work? However, the announcement was criticised by Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp. He said: 'Over 50,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the Channel in Labour's short time in power, the worst illegal immigration crisis in our history. 'Labour has surrendered our borders, and the consequences are being felt in our communities, from rising crime to shocking cases of rape and sexual assault by recent arrivals. 'Now they boast about a measly returns deal with Iraq, but barely any small boat arrivals are Iraqi, and most would qualify for asylum anyway. It's a sham designed to look tough while crossings keep soaring. 'Labour has scrapped Conservative deterrents and created the conditions for chaos, leaving the British people to foot the bill. Only the Conservatives will stop the crossings and restore control of Britain's borders.'
The Independent
18 hours ago
- The Independent
France's Macron reveals why he had to sue far-right podcaster Candace Owens over ‘nonsense' Brigitte conspiracy theory
French President Emmanuel Macron sued far-right influencer Candace Owens to combat her 'nonsense' claims about his wife Brigitte Macron, he said in a new interview. The couple filed a defamation lawsuit last month against Owens over her 'relentless and unjustified smear campaign' falsely accusing Brigitte of being born a man. The Macrons are seeking damages after suing her on 22 counts, including defamation and false light. In his first remarks about the matter since suing Owens, the French president touched upon the lawsuit in a wide-ranging Paris Match interview that he felt compelled to sue because the false claims have taken on a life of their own in the U.S. 'This has become so widespread in the United States that we had to react,' Macron said in French. 'It's a question of having the truth respected.' The French leader said he will pursue the lawsuit to the end because her allegations were 'nonsense.' Owens first made the unfounded claim in March 2024 and expanded upon it in her eight-part podcast series called 'Becoming Brigitte,' the complaint filed in Delaware state court alleges. Her lies have caused 'tremendous damage' to the Macrons, the filing says. The couple was initially advised not to file a complaint against Owens to avoid the"Streisand effect," attracting more attention to a matter by trying to conceal it, the French president told Paris Match. But because of the magnitude of attention the claims have garnered, they felt the need to respond, he said. Asked about the hostility he and Brigitte have gotten stateside in the wake of Owens' remarks, Macron said: 'It is not freedom of speech to want to prevent the restoration of the truth. Those who talk to you about this so-called freedom of speech are the ones who ban journalists from the Oval Office. I do not accept this.' Owens' remarks subjected the couple to a 'campaign of global humiliation, turning their lives into fodder for profit-driven lies,' the complaint says. 'The result is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale. Every time the Macrons leave their home, they do so knowing that countless people have heard, and many believe, these vile fabrications. It is invasive, dehumanizing, and deeply unjust,' the filing states. The Macrons also took aim at Owens' credibility. The lawsuit accused her of having 'built a brand on provocation, not truth' and 'routinely peddling misinformation under the guise of legitimate reporting,' like promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. She has described the Covid-19 vaccines as 'pure evil.' The far-right podcaster has emphasized that she 'would stake my entire professional reputation on' these claims targeting Brigitte Macron. 'I am fully prepared to take on this battle,' Owens said after she was sued. 'On behalf of the entire world, I will see you in court.' A spokesperson for Owens said last month: "This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist.' Last month, Owens claimed that President Donald Trump personally called her and told her to back off the baseless claims about the French first lady, she told Tucker Carlson. She alleged the French President flew to D.C., where he urged Trump 'to ask me to shut up, to just stop speaking about his wife,' she told Carlson. Speaking of Trump, she continued: 'He said he was very confused when the leader of France took him aside during negotiations for Ukraine and Russia to inquire about whether or not he knew Candace Owens.' The U.S. president allegedly said of Brigitte: 'I saw her up close and she looks like a woman to me, I had dinner with her at the top of the Eiffel Tower.'
