No agreement on memory file between France and Algeria except under conditions. 

Professor Oudjerteni Mohamed from the University of Emir Abdelkader for Islamic Sciences believes that a shared memory between the French and Algerian sides cannot be achieved without France acknowledging its military and political transgressions against the Algerians since 1830, especially since the issue of opening the archives has become a demand of the French elite.

Mr. Mohamed Oudjerteni said in an interview with Algeria Radio from Constantine, “The demand for the necessity of opening the archives and returning them to Algeria has become a request from many French elites, especially after discovering that the exploits of their ancestors in the colonies were nothing but genocide and that they were merely war criminals.”

He added in the same context, “What France smuggled from the Ottoman archives that it stole from Algeria has an obligation to return, and President Abdelmadjid Tebboune had indicated the possibility of resorting to international arbitration or presenting the issue to international judicial bodies if the French government does not meet Algeria’s demands.”

The latter also pointed out that the Algerian National Archive is an integral part of the country’s memory; it is a repository of popular memory and a meeting point of the major historical eras that Algeria has gone through. Therefore, it requires a national policy to protect it from various imminent dangers such as natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, and human-made disasters like fires, wars, and deliberate thefts.

In discussing the most important stages of organizing the archive, Mr Oudjerteni highlighted the historical value of the archive in uncovering events, as it enables historians and researchers to return to the original sources of historical events, read them, analyze their elements, and reconstruct events within an objective framework.

On the other hand, the professor at the Emir Abdelkader University for Islamic Sciences mentioned that in light of the profound transformations the world is witnessing today in the field of information processing and archival documents, and with the strength of nations being measured by their archives and their scientific and technological standing, there are diligent efforts to preserve the archives from elements of loss and neglect, to safeguard them with modern data, and to utilize them with modern systems to enable researchers and interested parties to access them with ease and convenience.