Joint Memory Commission: Paris’s Lack of Seriousness

Accountability in the French National Assembly revealed Paris’s lack of seriousness about the Joint Memory Commission, which was assigned the task of discussing the memory file with Algeria, as this body has not yet obtained financial support from the government despite the passage of more than six months since its creation, which raises questions about the readiness of Paris to open outstanding historical issues that carry an explicit condemnation of France.

The impeachment of MP Sophia Chikirou representing the LFI alliance and the new eco-social popular union NUPES, dated June 27, 2023, checked out by Echorouk, came as a warning to the Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs about the absence of financial resources allocated to the mixed commission of historians appointed to confront the Franco-Algerian memory file.

It pointed out that the commission held its inaugural meeting on April 19, 2023, at the Arab World Institute in Paris, but so far no financial or human resources have been allocated to historians to carry out this work, which was supposed to be based on a major study on the French colonization of Algeria since 1830, and topics related to the sequence of war and decolonization and the preparation of an inventory of the archives that deal with this period, as well as the file of nuclear tests in the Algerian desert and the restitution of skulls of the martyrs of the resistance.
MP Chikirou stressed the urgent need to give historians real means to conduct their investigations and research, explaining that the French president wanted to see the first work of the commission ready in August 2023, and demanded that the ministry disclose the amount of the budget allocated to the historians’ commission.

The member of the French National Assembly expressed her “surprise” that the five members of the commission, who are French intellectuals, are now working voluntarily, and the historian Benjamin Stora, who was commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron to prepare a report on the era of colonialism and war in Algeria in July 2020, continued to do so for three years at his own expense, as he said.

As it is known, among the five historians who are members of the commission from the French side, at least three are pieds-noirs, meaning that they were born in Algeria during the occupation era, and in addition to Benjamin Stora, who was born in Constantine (eastern Algeria), there is also Jacques Frémeaux, who was born in Algiers and left it in 1962 when he was 13, as well as Jean-Jacques Jordi, who was born in Algiers’ Fort-de-l’Eau neighbourhood and was educated by a Jew of Algerian origin called Emile Tamine, which means that the word will be for those historians who were born in Algeria because the majority of them are in the mixed commission.