Another meeting of the “Committee of Memory” in the French capital Paris next Thursday

The Algerian-French joint committee in charge of studying the memory file will meet again on Thursday, January 25, in the French capital, Paris, in the hope of making progress in this sensitive file, which for more than six decades has been one of the reasons contributing to the poisoning of bilateral relations.
This information was shared by the head of the joint Commission from the French side, historian Benjamin Stora, through his personal account on the social networking site Facebook, placing a link to the French international radio station, France Inter, which published this news on its website, citing its own sources.
This meeting is considered the second of its kind in two months, after the last one organized by the city of Constantine, the birthplace of the historian Benjamin Stora, during the French occupation of Algeria, which he left on the eve of independence in the summer of 1962, after doubts arose in his family about the Algerians’ treatment of the Jews and the Pied Noirs. Who chose to be in the wrong place when the situation became serious and the Algerian people decided to expel the French occupation by all means.
According to the source that brought the news of the meeting of the joint committee in Paris, the ten historians who are members of the committee will visit many French institutions during their stay there. While the members of the committee from the Algerian side, according to France Inter, had expressed their desire to hold the meeting in one of the cities located in the south of France, such as “Marseille” and “Aix-en-Provence”, which contain the largest number of archives and documents that France stole from Algeria during the dark colonial period that lasted until the last hours of the occupation.
Regarding the failure to organize the meeting in one of the two cities in the south of France because of the aforementioned considerations and its stability in the capital, Paris, the same source says that the issue is related to “practical reasons”. France Inter also reported that the mixed committee, headed by the historian Mohamed Lahcen Zeghidi on the Algerian side and Benjamin Stora on the French side, said that the meeting will be hosted by the (French) National Archives on January 25, a place that involves symbolic considerations, since the issue of the archive is at the heart of discussions between Algerian and French historians.
The memory file is considered one of the most sensitive files in Algerian-French relations, and the current French president was eager to continue it, trying to break the taboos to which all his predecessors remained hostage under the pressure of the deep state in France, which still has not got rid of the complex of the colonial past, and this despite the passage of more than six decades.
Although the last meeting of the Mixed Committee in the city of Constantine last November led to the adoption of decisions to return some of the archives looted from Algeria, the issue goes far beyond the recovery of the archive, despite its importance, to other more sensitive issues and questions, and this is the conclusion that the joint Committee comes to. The French state must face up to its historical responsibility, which consists of acknowledging the crimes of the occupation and then providing material and moral compensation for these crimes. This also applies to the consequences of the nuclear and chemical explosions in the south of the country, since Paris must clean up the areas affected by nuclear radiation and compensate the people who were exposed to serious diseases caused by these radiations, especially since there is a law passed by Paris in 2010, the “Morin Law”, which allows compensation for these victims.