Symbolic Measures Crown The Meetings Of The “Memory Committee ” In Paris

The last meeting of the joint Algerian-French committee to discuss the memory file, which took place in Paris on the 25th of last month, resulted in measures related to the rehabilitation of Algerian victims of the crime of the French occupation of Algeria, who were transferred to French prisons, died and were buried there in conditions incompatible with human values.
The committee of historians decided to “value” the graves of the Algerians who died after being imprisoned in France in the 19th century, at the beginning of colonialism, and who were arrested and “neutralized” by the occupying army with the aim of imposing the colonial regime in Algeria, as the historian Benjamin Stora explained.
At the end of its fourth meeting, held last week in France, the committee, chaired by researchers Mohamed Lahcen Zeghidi on the Algerian side and Benjamin Stora on the French side, decided to “continue to identify and inventory the graves and names of Algerian prisoners of the nineteenth century who died and were buried in France,” according to the statement reported by the French news agency, Agence France-Presse.
Historians also agreed to “restore the memory of the places of memory (where Algerian resistance fighters lie) by placing plaques” in many places, from the city of “Toulon” in southeastern France to “Pau” in the southwest, passing through each of the islands. Corsica or the island of New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean, or Guyana in the Caribbean Sea (northern South America).
The meeting in Constantine, held last November 22, ended with the adoption of measures, including the recovery of the property of Emir Abdelkader and the completion of the “chronology of colonial crimes” during the nineteenth century. The members of the committee also agreed to “recover all the property that symbolizes the sovereignty of Emir Abdelkader and the leaders of the state”. Resistance and remaining skulls and continue to identify remains dating back to the nineteenth century”.
It was also agreed to hand over two million digitized documents related to the colonial period, in addition to “29 scrolls and 13 records” that constitute 5 linear meters of the remaining archive of the Ottoman period, i.e. from the beginning of the sixteenth century until French colonialism, according to what was announced by Algerian official television.
The remains of the resistance fighters involved in the proceedings of the Mixed Committee date back to the beginning of the French occupation of Algeria, between 1830 and 1962. After the battles of 1847 and the end of Emir Abdelkader’s resistance, France arrested many Algerians in an attempt to “impose the French occupation regime by force”.
Those who resisted the occupation were imprisoned in prisons in Cayenne, Guyana, or on the island of St. Margaret, off the coast of Cannes. “In the south of France, between 3,000 and 4,000 Algerians were arrested between 1841 and 1884, according to Agence France-Presse.
In the statement, the members of the joint committee, composed of ten historians, five from each party, propose to complete the digitization of the records of Christian (French) cemeteries in Algeria. They also reiterated proposals made during their three previous meetings, including the recovery of Algeria’s Ottoman-era archives and “symbolic possessions” once owned by Emir Abdelkader, who was exiled in Amboise between 1848 and 1852, including his sword and holy Koran.