Page 363 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

360 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Schumann, let it be known that France would not be bound, in arriving at a
settlement with Algeria, by any agreement that might be reached with OPEC

at Tehran. The French government, he said, would still seek to conclude a
bilateral engagement, so as to preserve the ‘special relationship’ between
France and Algeria.
As might have been foreseen, all that Schumann’s statement succeeded in
doing was to encourage the Algerians to persist in their campaign of harass­
ment against the oil companies, and to extend it to Franco-Algerian relations in
general, as they did by such tactics as refusing to grant exit visas to some 10,000

French technicians, teachers and others working in Algeria. The tactics
worked. Talks were reopened in Paris on 19 January between the French
minister for industrial development, Francois-Xavier Ortoli, and the Algerian
foreign minister, Abdul Aziz Bouteflika. On 24 January ELF-ERAP

announced that it would not align itself with the united front which the major
and independent oil companies were presenting to OPEC. Instead, a day or so
later it joined with CFP in making a new offer to the Algerian government, the
main features of which were a posted price of $2.77 a barrel and the sum of
FF675 million as an advance on back taxes for 1969 and 1970. (As the two sides
had not yet agreed upon the exact amount owed, the proffered payment was
purely an act of goodwill on the part of the French companies.)

The response of the Algerian president, Houari Boumedienne, was to tell
the French government at the beginning of February that France had belter
start looking elsewhere for her oil supplies if she did not want to pay what
Algeria considered to be a fair price for her oil. It was transparently clear that

Boumedienne was simply filling in the time with a little sniping at the French
while he awaited the outcome of the Tehran negotiations, when he would know
just how high to go with his demands. The Tehran settlement was everything
that his heart could desire. Henceforth, with the Western oil companies and
the Western governments in ignominious retreat, he knew that he could be as
outrageous in his behaviour as he wished. With a melodramatic flourish he
announced on 24 February 1971 ‘the entry of the revolution into the oil sector ,

and he proceeded to embellish this statement with some familiar crypto­
Marxist rhetoric.

We consider that questions of nationalization and control... are part of the sovereignty
of our country and its fundamental options. ... We will never trade away these options.
Today the hour has come for these fundamental options to be turned into accomp s

fact.

After a good deal more of this dreary newspeak Boumedienne at length got to
the point. Algeria, he said, would be taking an immediate 51 per cen
, in CRP’s and ELF-ERAP’s operations. The country s natural g
resources would be nationalized, along with the pipelines which ran rom t e

oilfields to the coast.