Messages Against Racism, Colonialism To Paris And The Extreme Right

The French MP from a Congolese background, Carlos Martens Bilongo, ended a visit to Algeria that he started last Saturday, in the context of his search for support for his legislative initiative aimed at enabling Algeria to recover the skulls of its righteous martyrs, which were stolen and placed in French museums, in a scene that lacks the morals of humanity.

MP Bilongo, who belongs to the leftist France Unbowed party (LFI), was recently the victim of racist remarks within the French sovereign institution, the National Assembly (the lower chamber of Parliament), in which a newly elected MP belonging to the extreme-right anti-immigration National Rally (RN), Gregoire de Fournas, said: “You should go back to Africa”, and was involved before he was punished by depriving him of entering the French Parliament for two weeks, in a disciplinary measure, for his heinous act.

The French MP, Carlos Martens Bilongo, launched a legislative initiative last October 5, at the level of the lower chamber of the French Parliament, calling on the authorities of his country to return the skulls of the Algerian resistance Martyrs that are placed in Paris museum, after they were smuggled during the colonial era.

During his visit to Algeria, he met with Algerian MPs and parliamentary officials and received all the support and cooperation in this file.

In his legal draft, MP Bilongo confirmed that returning the skulls to their homeland would open the way for their families to bury them properly, as well as considerations related to the human and political dimensions so that this step could be considered an acknowledgement by the French authorities of the inhumane practices they committed in their former colony, which is among the demands raised by Algeria in the face of Paris over many years.

The visit of the French MP to Algeria comes during a controversy over the skulls of the Algerian resistance, especially the statements made by the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, who said that the skulls handed over by Paris to Algeria in 2020 were not all restituted and that they were transferred to Algeria temporarily by the Musée de l’Homme (an anthropology museum in Paris), which caused a stir in political and media circles in both countries.

If the visit that led Carlos Martens Bilongo to Algeria, came out of solidarity with Algeria in its quest to restore its looted rights during the colonial era, and then work to push Paris to recognize its responsibility in everything it did for more than 130 years, there is another dimension of this visit that is well understood by the parties that organized this visit, as well as the target groups, represented by the far right.

French MP Bilongo and Algeria share a profound disagreement with the French far right, which is considered a fierce defender of France’s colonial crimes in Algeria, as well as another ugly trait, which is the practice of abhorrent racism in its worst forms, as happened recently in the French Parliament, when an MP from the “National Front” previously, called the National Rally “now”, asked Bilongo to return to Africa from where he came, in a public session that everyone witnessed.

The strange thing is that the extremist party led by Marine Le Pen, to which the racist deputy, Gregoire de Fournas belongs, is now headed by a French of Algerian origin, Jordan Bardella, a grandson of an Algerian named Mohand Seghir Mada, who had left Algeria for France in 1930 and his grand-mother Rejane Mada was also an immigrant, which seems a clear message that Algeria welcomed and accommodated French known for their courageous stances in support of human values, and in return, it refuses extremist faces who do not take into account the human values, and even if the matter concerns this politician, who is of Algerian origin but denies the origins of his fathers and grandfathers.