Messages To those Beyond The Sea About The Mission Expected From Him!

The French historian, Benjamin Stora, is striving to consolidate his image as the best historian who can lead the joint work on memory, which was commissioned  along with his Algerian counterpart, Abdelmadjid Chikhi, by the presidents of the two countries.

Benjamin Stora took advantage of the death of Malika Boumendjel, the wife of the lofty Algerian martyr Ali Boumendjel, to return to the case of the martyrdom of this hero, who staunchly faced the hateful French occupation forces, who tried to mislead public opinion through the illusion that he committed suicide, while he was actually tortured and then assassinated, just as happened with the hero martyr, Larbi Ben M’hidi, by savage French paratroopers.

Describing Ali Boumendjel as “a man of exceptional courage”, he says that he was “held in solitary confinement, tortured for 43 days, and did not speak. This was during the terrible” Battle of Algeria “in February and March 1957. He died under torture on March 23, 1957. He was buried  under the  close supervision of French paratroopers, it took a quarter of an hour to bury him, in defiance of Islamic customs, and that was on March 26, 1957, in the Sidi M’hamed cemetery in Belcourt, “in the capital Algiers.

The French historian, and in his contribution on his own page on the social network, Facebook, said that Boumendjel was “the world of commitments and desires for transformation  yearned by the Algerian elite,” and he was “a man of convictions who carried a great, open and generous culture, drawn from the sources of French rationality and the enlightenment of Islam”.

According to Stora, Ali Boumendjel was imbued with the spirit of “revolution against the colonial system, not to destroy everything that exists, but to promote a rebirth in his country.” The French historian describes the Boumendjel family as “rich in talent, mired in political battles, travel, literature and culture,” and this is information he said he gleaned from his wife Malika Rahal’s book.

Ali Boumendjel was spotted by the colonial administration, added Stora, as a “dangerous element”, due to his participation in the secret activities of the Algerian patriots during World War II, and he joined the Movement for the Beloved of the Statement and Freedom (AML), before joining the party founded by Farhat Abbas in 1946, The Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA).

Stora also described Boumendjel as “a pragmatist who strives for the best in each of the disputed trends, sometimes without good reason, within the Algerian national movement … his passion only appears when his stubborn vision of a truly free Algeria is manifested. Before the outbreak of the War of Independence, he was one of the few who enjoyed the confidence of the Algerian trends, which were divided in the face of the outbreak of the November 1954 uprising triggered off by the National Liberation Front.

The French historian considers martyr Ali Boumendjel  as “one of the most listened political leaders. This is why the French paratroopers quickly became interested in him, as the head of the potential thinking of the National Liberation Front, and sought by all means to get him to speak out.”

Benjamin Stora ends his post with phrases that have connotations to the Algerian public opinion, which is waiting for the results of his joint memory work to be carried out with his counterpart Mr Chikhi, writing, “It is the story of a brave man who was involved in a terrible time, from World War II to the war in Algeria (the liberation revolution). It shows how the youth were. The Algerian hopes in French culture, and wages a battle against an unjust colonial system, how did a generation think that it gives birth to another world, got rid of colonial racism, and faced the advent of evil and its vulgarity, during the national liberation war that led to the independence and sovereignty of Algeria on July 5th 1962”.