Chikhi To MPs: “Criminalizing French Colonialism Doesn’t Require a Law”

The Adviser to the President of the Republic in charge of archives and national memory, Mr. Abdelmadjid Chikhi said in Algiers that colonization was criminalized by the Algerian people and does not require a law.

Mr. Chikhi said on the sidelines of the graduation ceremony of the 49th class of the National School of Administration (ENA) that “deputies are free to propose, debate and adopt projects,” recalling that the Algerian people had criminalized colonization which does not require a law. “The criminalisation of colonisation is not a priority in the issue of memory for which I am responsible,” he added.

In this context, the adviser to the President of the Republic called for “the pooling of efforts to highlight the outstanding historical journey of the Algerian people by making it available to ordinary citizens”.

As a reminder, representatives of the National People’s Assembly had deposited, last January, a preliminary draft law on the criminalization of the brutal French colonialism from 1830 to 1962, at the office of the speaker of the National People’s Assembly, Slimane Chenine.

In a correspondence dated March 10, MP Kamel Belarbi signed a draft on behalf of 120 deputies in the first chamber of Parliament, with the initiators demanding that the project be scheduled for discussion.
Last June, Slimane Chenine, speaker of the National People’s Assembly, responded to the controversy for the first time, stressing that criminalizing colonialism is a popular demand, and a single sovereign decision does not only concern parliamentarians.

According to the head of the lower house of parliament, “New Algeria is on the way to achieving the Secretariat of the Martyrs with a great national dimension and accurate knowledge of the transformations surrounding it”.

Last June, Minister of the Mujahideen and Rights Holders, Tayeb Zitouni, at the National People’s Assembly, confirmed that the experts in history, who were assigned two years ago, to count all kinds of crimes committed by colonial France against the Algerians from 1830 to 1962 “have not yet been able to finish counting them because there were so many heinous colonial crimes”.