The “Black Feet” (Pieds Noirs) claim 180,000 properties in Algeria!

The Director General of State Property, Mohamed Himour, has wondered about those French returnees who now claim the properties they left behind more than half a century after the hard-won independence of Algeria.

He added: “What do they want … they want us to expel the Algerians who live in these houses and who have been paying their taxes for over 40 years …”

These “Black Feet” have even resorted to the Courts in a desperate attempt to recover their property. But nothing helped … because they abandoned them. And even if these properties remained in the name of the former owners, many of them were rejected both by the Justice and the Administration because the law governing the vacant-property is crystal clear; it precludes its de facto restitution to the “Pieds Noirs” (Black Feet) who left Algeria in 1962. These 180,000 claimed properties consist of agricultural lands, individual dwellings and industrial infrastructures.

In this context, Mr Himour Mohamed, revealed that 250,000-vacant properties of the “Pieds Noirs”, who quit Algeria after independence, were recovered by Algeria in late 2014, having been recorded between 2013 and 2014 and cannot be handed over again to foreigners. 

These properties cannot be returned or claimed, by their nature, by any foreigner. “At stake, is national sovereignty”, he underscored. 

For him, these assets belong, indeed, to the Algerian state and the situation of foreign property has already been cleared out at the level of the Land Registry.