French Senate: “The Archives Pertaining To Algeria Belong To France… They Won’t Be Returned”

A report by the French Senate on the status of the archives transferred from Algeria to France after the hard-won independence of Algeria stated that there is no way to return these history-related documents, saying that these archives were compiled by the French Administration at a time when Algeria was still subject to this Administration and therefore, it said, the latter belong to French public property.

The relevant report, which was worked out by two members of the French Senate, namely Vanson Ebley and Andrey Gatoulane, and registered with the French Senate on February 1st 2017, said there was a clear diplomatic wrangle with Algeria over the claim of the archives, which France had deported from Algeria and kept up to now in the city of Aix en Provence, (southern France).

The report said that the Algerian archives stockpiled in Aix-en-Provence, with a length of about 10 kilometers, can’t be retrieved by the Algerian side, arguing  that many parts of these archives address the private lives of many people and thus cannot be disclosed and cannot be made accessible to the large public.

In response to the French authorities’ categorical refusal to hand over the deported Algerian archives, the MPs  said that working relations with the Algerian government  were established about two years ago in order to be able to access certain archives  kept by Algeria itself, and which weren’t available previously.

In this regard, the Director-General of the French Archives, Mr. Hervé Lamouane, who was among those officials who expressed their opinion in this Senate report, asserted that the French authorities secured a year and a half ago from the relevant Algerian authorities the go-ahead for sending research teams allowed to get an inkling about the features of memory-related archives kept in Algeria, adding that he had no idea about the features of these archives or about their status.

The French official also said that the two countries share information today, especially with regard to research instruments, in an attempt to scrap lingering hurdles to the Algerian authorities’ ownership of the registered archives held in France, which Algeria repeatedly called for their retrieval.