New French Step to Lure Algeria Through the Memory File

Another step by the French authorities embodies their strong desire to lure Algeria through the memory file.

This fact has become more prevalent recently among French officials and politicians, in the face of Algerian silence that tends to consolidate the rupture that has occurred in reality and practice since French President Emmanuel Macron became more supportive of the Moroccan regime in a very sensitive file, the Western Sahara issue.

The new detail in this matter is the intention of the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to inaugurate a memorial and commemorative plate on the rue de Laghouat in Paris on December 4, in the presence of several local officials, headed by the deputy mayor in charge of memory, Laurence Patrice, and the Mayor of the 18th District, Eric Lejoindre.

The Mayor of Paris acknowledged in the invitation she sent to her guests to attend the inauguration day that the memorial action she initiated was in commemoration of the victims of the French occupation army, which committed a massacre against the residents of the city of Laghouat in 1852, killing two-thirds of the city’s population, in an admission by a senior French official of Paris.

The mayor of Paris is not just a mayor like any other French city, but rather, whoever holds this position often has doors open wide to hold senior positions in the French state, and there is no better evidence of this than the former French President, Jacques Chirac, who jumped from the mayorship of the French capital to sitting on the throne of the Elysee Palace.

This commemorative gesture from the French side is the second of its kind in less than a week, and the third in less than a month, which means that the French side felt that the file that the first man in the Elysee Palace had bet on was collapsing before its eyes since he decided to throw himself into the arms of the Moroccan regime, even if he realized that a position of this kind would lead relations with Algeria to hell.

Less than a week ago, the French embassy in Algeria announced that the French president had instructed his ambassador to Algeria, Stéphane Romatet, to visit the Martyrs’ Square in the Alia Cemetery to lay a wreath on the tomb of the heroic martyr Larbi Ben M’hidi, who was assassinated by paratroopers of the French occupation army in March 1957.

On the occasion of the first of this month (November), which coincides with the outbreak of the liberation war against the French occupation, the Elysee Palace issued a statement acknowledging the responsibility of the French state for the liquidation of the heroic martyr, Larbi Ben M’hidi, after decades of deception, as the official French discourse sought to establish a false narrative that the martyr committed suicide in prison, which was denied by the war criminal, Paul Aussaresses, in 2001, when he first refuted the official narrative of the French state.

The Algerian-French Joint Commission on History and Memory was supposed to meet to discuss the memory file last July, but the Algerian authorities were aware of the development in the French position on the Western Sahara issue, which led to the suspension of Aleria’s activity in the joint commission, and since then no meeting has been held, indicating that this commission is facing an unknown future.