Ferhat Mehenni confronts the Kafkaesque Franco-Algerian complicity behind a backdrop of global rivalries.

A philosopher is one who proposes a vision of the world, and if we were to summon Hegel, by way of intertext to his account of the dialectic, he would tell us that history does not happen at random, that there is a direction to events, what Karl Marx, after him, called the meaning of history. The difference between direction and sense with regard to history is that the former considers it guided by a spiritual precept above the world, and the latter, by a purely material principle included in the world. From the point of view of economic relations, we can only agree with Marx when he said that human history is the history of class struggle, i.e., between the dominated and the dominant. In the reading of history, there is nothing but conflict and war. As Hegel put it so well, evolution is conditioned by the idea of conflict. We could say that Marx inherited from Hegel the idea that conflict is the driving force of history. All historical evolution has its origins in a succession of conflicts, themselves engendered by the notion of competition between nations, and it is indeed commercial battles that are reflected in today’s military interactions the world over.
NB: Jacques Attali, far from being a communist, devoted a laudatory essay to Karl Marx on this subject, and it was he who first turned the sunlight on Emmanuel Macron. It was he who suggested Édouard Philippe as Prime Minister. Let’s move on.
Today, mankind is afraid of nuclear war. It won’t happen, because it would never occur to a single man to extinguish the world. The war goes on, via small peoples, and it won’t be long before school curricula focus on knowledge of the past, as long as there are irresponsible people like Volodymyr Zelensky, inclined to dispense with the new neuronal connections that would have made him less stupid and less dangerous for his people.
Faced with Russia’s movements, some French politicians are bursting with a pathology that bites the sky. Beyond political interest and strategic measures, their affects sometimes get in the way of medical emergencies. For months, they delayed the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) validation of the Russian anti-covid vaccine Sputnik V, to the point of excluding it from the European health pass.
The deterioration of the situation has led to a rotting of emotions and has led Europe to a negative democracy which, little by little, is leading to the abandonment of common perspectives between Europeans. This is exactly the major problem of French democracy, which is still struggling to give up this negative passion for interests. On the international stage, against the current of De Gaulle’s political legacy in foreign policy, some French politicians are only stepping outside the EU to face challenges that the American Zeus takes seriously. However, the Russian invasion of part of the Ukraine does not worry the Elysée as much as the Sahel, which remains its major issue. The exponential increase in security spending in the region, at the expense of its development, begs the question of France’s political – rather commercial – objectives, and how it intends to achieve them. It takes a brain rinsed with dishwater to believe that France’s presence in the Sahel has no other motive than the annihilation of jihadist clans. Terrorism’s political mindset is at pot and burp with the Western powers, its table is set and it’s eating at its ease. And in the Sahel, over 10 million people live with insecurity on a daily basis and face a spectacular rise in hunger.
France has always been in pole position in the growing competition for strategic minerals in Africa, and it was perhaps with its help that Canadian companies took over Mali’s mining sector. The entire Sahel region is rich in gold, bauxite, copper, cobalt, lithium, uranium and possible oil and gas deposits. Today, thanks to Algiers, Russia’s influence in the region is unquestionable, and the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company with direct access to military chiefs and key sub-Saharan leaders, is giving President Macron plenty to worry about.
Since July 5, Moscow has cunningly annexed the militarized framework of the Algerian state, which is of great interest to Macron. The Sahel: this is the subject of his visit to Algiers and of the famous “renewed and ambitious partnership” he welcomed on Friday August 26, during a speech to the French community in Algiers. Let’s not be fooled: he’s not going to discuss the future of Algeria’s youth with Algerian army chiefs and a bewildered Tebboune! The constitution of the Algerian regime is in line with Spinoza’s rhetoric on mind and body: there is no political head of state on the one hand, and the army on the other. The two are one and the same.
After the military-led coup in Mali, French soldiers were pushed out and replaced by the Wagner group, which President Macron describes as a mercenary group, which is far from the truth. This is the same group that provides the close guard to the President of the Since July 5, Moscow has cunningly annexed the militarized framework of the Algerian state, which is of great interest to Macron. The Sahel: this is the subject of his visit to Algiers and of the famous “renewed and ambitious partnership” he welcomed on Friday August 26, during a speech to the French community in Algiers. Let’s not be fooled: he’s not going to discuss the future of Algeria’s youth with Algerian army chiefs and a bewildered Tebboune! The constitution of the Algerian regime is in line with Spinoza’s rhetoric on mind and body: there is no political head of state on the one hand, and the army on the other. The two are one and the same.
After the military-led coup in Mali, French soldiers were pushed out and replaced by the Wagner group, which President Macron describes as a mercenary group, which is far from the truth. This is the same group that provides the close guard to the President of the Central African Republic, which has long been a French preserve. The day after the putsch in Burkina Faso, the French embassy in Ouagadougou and the French institute in Bobo Dioulasso were attacked by mobs. In Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa, French flags continue to burn against the backdrop of a war of influence between Moscow and Paris, with the thinly veiled complicity of governments in the region.
In order to prolong its military involvement in the Sahelian strip and profit from its riches, France must reactivate the dialogue with Bamako to avoid leaving the field open to Russia. Legitimate or not, it depends. With this in mind, France needs Algeria’s support. Difficult, almost inconceivable support from a country considered a traditional friend of Russia, which arms and supports it. But President Macron knows that the anguish that is making Tebboune and his generals sweat has a name: Ferhat Mehenni. And his invitation by the CNEW channel came at just the right time.
Questions arise. Let’s try to answer them lucidly.
1- President Macron had called on the French public media, specialists in international affairs, to counter Russian propaganda, which they had not accepted, going so far as to denounce in a press release “his interventionism in media that are supposed to be free in their editorial and working methods”. Why, then, have these journalists substituted arbitrariness for the honor of duty when it comes to Ferhat Mehenni? Pride, presumption or arrogance?
2- The moment Ferhat Mehenni was invited for an interview as president of the provisional Kabyle government, l’Elisée knew about it. Two minutes before he was due to appear on CNEWS, the channel’s management pulled the plug. Why wait until the last minute?
3- If the order was given from the Elysée Palace, France would be entering into the memory of General Jacques Randon with regard to Kabylia. If not, why did the denial come from the French ambassador to Morocco?
Djaffar Ben