The “Harkis” Pressure Stora And Chikhi Postpones Coordination With Him

• The French National Day for the “Harkis”, which was celebrated last Friday, witnessed demands that were dominated by skepticism, in the mission to be carried out by the historian Benjamin Stora, assigned by French President Emmanuel Macron, to manage the “Memory of Colonialism and the Algerian War”, and to provide a summary to be done by the end of the year.

• Many elements of the French right-wing movement and its circles, headed by the National Assembly of the Movement, look at Benjamin Stora with suspicion. Rather, they went so far as to describe him as a fighter in the “National Liberation Front,” which is a description that places the work in charge of a mission to the French presidency, suspicious, in front of extremist French circles.

• The movement’s associations have been active recently, and formed terrible pressure on Stora, in order to pressure him, hoping to prepare a report that serves the interests of these extremist groups, known for their great noise in the French media, and inside the corridors of the two chambers of the French Parliament.

These are pressures that are considered an extension of the movement’s positions about Stora, as this extremist movement was among the skeptics about the number of deaths of this group of Algerians who fought on the side of the French army during the national liberation war.

• It seems that Stora is not only facing great pressures in France, but is living in a state of frustration. He disclosed it in an interview with the famous French newspaper “MediaPart”, in which he complained about the lack of cooperation of the Algerian party, represented by Abdelmajid Chikhi, who was assigned by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune the same work that Stora was assigned to, but only with regard to Algeria.

• According to the French historian, he called on Chikhi to cooperate in the completion of the memory-related report, but he did not get the required response: “I contacted Chikhi after I was assigned this task, but he preferred to work alone,” waiting to meet with him at the end of the mission to search for harmony in the common work, according to Stora’s account.

• Stora says that his mission is to reach a consensus on the shared memory between Algeria and France, and he admits that he found great difficulties in achieving harmony at the level of the other side of the Mediterranean (France), due to the diversity and multiplicity of the parties involved in the memory file in this country, such as the far-right movement and the ”Black Feet”.

• Among the biggest obstacles that Stora faces in wrapping up his mission, he said, is the large number of activist associations, black feet and immigrants that asked to meet him, and their demands were outside the mission assigned to him, such as retrieving a cannon stolen from the capital Algiers, the key to the city of Laghouat, and rehabilitating Christian and Jewish cemeteries.

In Algeria .. Nevertheless, he says that he is nearing the end of his mission, leaving nothing but some frills related to those parties that overlooked his mission.

• Stora also complained about the political trends in France ignoring the task he was assigned to, and if he considered the matter to be normal with regard to the right and the extreme right hostile to Algeria, he was shocked, as he said, by the abuse of the French traditional left, socialists, communists, the Greens, and supporters of the Father France Party.