France will seek a “strategic partnership” with Algeria when President François Hollande goes there in December but not a “friendship treaty”, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Sunday.
French War Veterans Minister Kader Arif told the Journal du Dimanche Sunday paper that he hoped that a pact signed during Hollande’s visit “would carry the name of friendship”.
But Fabius said that such a move was unikely, adding that the Algerians did not want it any more than France.
“Our Algerian friends don’t wants to enter into this sort of judicial arrangement,” he told journalists. “They want a strategic partnership with us and that’s our approach, too.”
Hollande, who is to visit Algeria in December, hopes to improve Franco-Algerian relations and took a step in that direction this week when he condemned a massacre of pro-independence demonstrators by French police in Paris in 1961.
Fabius said that Hollande will not make a general apology for France’s colonial past during his trip, Fabius said.
“The Algerians really don’t want a visit turned towards the past,” he said.
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