On October 25, Algeria’s parliament unanimously approved, as it always does, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s decision to send units of the People’s National Army (ANP) to Niger. It is the first deployment of Algerian troops abroad since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. A regime that has made “non-interference” a dogma for half a century and invokes it whenever it faces criticism is now sending soldiers into a neighboring country.
On October 30, during the European Commission’s daily press briefing, a journalist asked the EU’s foreign affairs spokesperson, Anouar El Anouni, about the deployment. His answer was a routine diplomatic response, delivered in just a few words. Brussels was following the situation, wanted to know the scope, purpose and legal basis of the operation, and called for measures to be “transparent” and “proportionate.” This is the bare minimum one would expect from a partner when an army crosses a border in the Sahel.
For Algiers, even that was too much. On November 8, Algeria’s official news agency APS published an article titled “Algeria-Niger: When fabrication takes the place of European diplomacy.” From its very first line, the EU’s official spokesperson was described as “an individual presenting himself as the spokesperson for the European Union.” The agency denied that a request for clarification had been made, although no such request had been announced. Then came the central argument, the only one that apparently mattered to it: “El Anouni is of Franco-Moroccan origin.” That says it all. For a state news agency, a man’s origins are enough to serve as a rebuttal.
The signal had been sent, and the pack followed. Echorouk spoke of a “myth” and linked the spokesperson’s remarks to his origins. L’Espoir Libéré ran a headline about “the European spokesperson serving a Franco-Moroccan agenda.” Algérie Patriotique applauded APS’s “scathing editorial,” described El Anouni as being “instrumentalized” by Paris and Rabat, and was already calling for the departure of the French ambassador. Within 48 hours, a journalist’s question in Brussels had been turned into a Franco-Moroccan conspiracy against Algeria.
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Let us call this what it is. This is not a diplomatic dispute; it is racial profiling turned into the official editorial line of a state. The regime does not challenge what the spokesperson said; it challenges who he supposedly is. It does not answer the question; it investigates the family tree of the person who asked it. Moroccan ancestry, real or alleged, is enough to turn a European official into an enemy agent. If a European official used the same language about an Algerian, Algiers would cry racism, and rightly so.
What is unfolding here is a public lynching. A man is singled out for public condemnation, named and targeted by a state news agency and then by an entire media network, not for what he has done but for what he is supposedly descended from. The pattern is familiar: an article gives way to insults, insults give way to threats, and social media does the rest. By handing the name and alleged origins of a European official over to the crowd, APS assumes responsibility for whatever may follow. This is not the first time the Algerian regime has used such tactics. In December 1975, it expelled tens of thousands of Moroccans living in Algeria overnight, their only supposed crime being that they were Moroccan. Half a century later, the same logic is being applied to a man in Brussels: ancestry becomes a conviction.
This logic does not stop with one man. Thousands of European civil servants and dozens of political figures across Europe have Maghrebi roots, including Algerian ones. Under APS’s doctrine, none of them could speak about the Maghreb without being suspected of treason. The European Union speaks through its spokespersons, not through their grandparents. As for Morocco, dragged into every line of the story, it has no involvement in Niger, in the question or in the answer. It exists only in the minds of those governing in Algiers.
Meanwhile, the questions remain unanswered, and no one in Algiers has addressed them. How many soldiers? What mission are they being sent to carry out? What is the legal basis, beyond a bilateral memorandum whose contents remain secret? For how long? Members of parliament voted without knowing. Algerians, whose sons are being sent to the Sahel, know no more. A government that withholds these answers from its own people was never going to provide them to Brussels.
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The Algerian regime has answered nothing about Niger. It has merely found a name to smear and an ancestry to denounce. This is the language of a government running out of arguments, and it knows it: when it has nothing to say about its soldiers, it talks about other people’s blood.
