France's Hollande in diplomatic row after saying Algeria is unsafe Mr Hollande was making a speech to the CRIF representative council of French Jewish institutions when he made the comment about Interior Minister Manuel Valls" trip this month to Algeria, which suffered a civil war in the 1990s in which more than 150,000 people died and which is still prone to deadly attacks by an Al Qaeda offshoot. Mr Hollande had previously enjoyed a good press in Algeria, where he did an internship for several months in 1978 when he was a student at ENA, France's elite school for training top civil servants and industrial leaders. Shortly after being elected in 2012, he condemned the "bloody repression" of an Algerian nationalist demonstration in Paris in 1961, and later said that France's 132-year colonial rule in Algeria was "brutal and unjust." But his joke about Mr Valls brought him a torrent of abuse on social media and harsh criticism in the Algerian newspapers. One comment on Twitter dubbed him a "fat pig" who was "a pawn in the hands of the CRIF Zionist gang." The government-controlled Algerian rights group CNCPPDH called on Mr Hollande to apologise for his "provocative remarks about Algeria." A senior figure in France's opposition UMP party, Geoffroy Didier, condemned the Socialist president's "disgraceful" remark.