Algeria Buys Its Archive At A French Auction

Algeria acquired 600 historical documents dating back to the Ottoman period that were auctioned at the Marambat of Malafoss in Toulouse, in order to make them available to historians.

A statement that was issued by the Culture Ministry on Sunday, said that the documents, which were acquired last Friday, concern “the period of Ottoman presence in Algeria and the early years of the French occupation”, and it is a collection of “manuscripts, pictures, maps and rare books”.
Same statement said Algeria is represented the Foreign and Culture Ministries in the process which was known as the “great competition by many French bodies and institutions”, in addition to the foreign collectors of old documents.
General-Director of the National Foundation for Print Arts, Acting General-Director of the Algerian National Library and the representative of the Algerian Consulate in Toulouse, participated in the operation, and assessed “the scientific importance of these documents”.
Culture Ministry said that the acquisition of documents “is a step that has sovereign dimension in the efforts of the senior authorities in the state, to retrieve the archives”, and “to enable Algerian researchers to conduct historical studies on the basis of reliable documents to valuate the collective memory”.
File of the Algerian archives in France is one of the files that were a source of tension and conflict between the two countries for decades.
After the independence, Algeria asked France to handover all the deported archives, but its demands remained suspended until the early 1980s, when negotiations between Algeria and Paris began through the formation of joint committees, as the Algerian side adopted the legal texts that were issued by the United Nations, UNESCO and the International Symposium Of the archives, which states; “the right of the independent states in exercising their sovereignty retroactively on the archives that were written and preserved on their territory, and the need to keep the archives in the land where they were written and preserved for the first time”.
French Senate recently entered the “archive crisis” through a report that was prepared by council members, André Gattolin and Vincent Eblé, claiming that “there is no way to restore the archives that were transferred from Algeria to France after independence in 1962, which is up to 10 Kilometers, and the author of this archive is the French administration under which Algeria was subject, and therefore it belongs to the French public property, which is “the same position that was defended by the General Manager of the French archives, Hérvé Lemoine.
Algeria says that the archive’s location in France remains unknown, as the French authorities have been flattening, since five years, the national archives, and many of them have been transferred to other unknown places.
Previously, the Minister of Mujahedeen, Tayeb Zitouni, said that the Algerian-French relationships were marked by a “memory file” and that Algeria would not relinquish its legitimate demands to restore the entire archive without increasing or decreasing since the occupation began in 1830, noting that Algeria received only two percent of the archive, while 98 percent remained in France.