• The Portrait: Abdelmayid Tebune, an old dinosaur faithful to power

When the columns of young protesters go down the steep streets of the Casbah to converge in the massive concentrations of the modern center of Algiers, the old city stands silently and lonely looking at the Mediterranean. And it is, stripped of everyday life, when it exhibits its wounds more clearly. Its white facades threaten ruin and the revolution - which since February convulses Algeria and that keeps the country in an administrative paralysis - only worsens its desperate situation.

The residents of the historic neighborhood live drowned in fear since the collapse of a house in the rainy morning of November 13. There were no regrets, but the collapse affected two adjoining buildings, in which seven and 13 families live respectively. "Every time it rains we tremble with the idea of ​​seeing our houses collapse on our heads," confesses one of its inhabitants. In April, a construction collapsed like a house of cards, in heavy storms, killing five members of a family.

The Casbah Foundation, an association created in 1991 to preserve the old town of Algiers, has issued a report in which 300 buildings that threaten ruin are censored. In a recent appeal, its president, Ali Mebtuche, demands that action be taken to tackle the problem after decades of inaction . It also requires transparency on the budgets allocated to the restoration of the Casbah since 1962, the funds for the repair of 364 houses and the mobilization of 54 specialized architects. Some tasks that have not yielded results.

The inhabitants of the Casbah have been denouncing their precarious situation before the authorities for years. Without getting much. Last year, UNESCO came to hold an international conference to discuss how to save the citadel, although it has refused to include it in the list of endangered heritage. At the end of 2018, Algiers Prefecture commissioned the famous French architect Jean Nouvel , winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize, a plan to "revitalize" the neighborhood. Nouvel traveled several times to the enclave of whitewashed facades to discover its weaknesses and meet with the main actors of the project. This summer, the bases of the rehabilitation program should have been ready, but in February the wave of social response halted time for the Casbah.

The appointment of the Gallic architect to restore the pearl of Algiers generated a great controversy in a country that has lived a traumatic colonial experience with France, culminated in a bloody War of Independence between 1954 and 1962 . Up to 400 personalities - Algerian and French - signed a petition so that Nouvel would not accept the project, dominated by the fear that the French urbanist could propose risky transformations for an emblematic place of the so-called Battle of Algiers of 1958 (then immortalized in a film of worship), during the war against the metropolis. "I was surprised, but I replied that they do not know me: I am anti-colonialist," Nouvel said in an interview with Afp. "My mission is not to restore the neighborhood but to give ideas," he said, asking that his intervention be seen as an "affirmation of respect for the built heritage and its inhabitants."

From Barbarroja to Monet

The Islamic citadel of the 10th century was built on the vestiges of the ancient Phoenician Icosium, raised on a hill, and extends its labyrinthine passages to the sea. It was Mezghana for the Berbers, Almoravid medina, bastion of the pirate Barbarroja and enclave of beautiful Ottoman palaces. The painter Claude Monet discovered the color between its streets, when in 1861 he was destined to do military service to the cavalry regiment of the hunters of Africa. His twenties sketches in the Casbah have barely been preserved. The writer Alphonse Daudet described it this way in 1872: "Algiers the White, with its little houses of a matt white that descend towards the sea, pressed against each other. An immense clothesline of white clothes, on the slope of the Maudon. Above, an immense blue satin sky. "

Among its vericuetos hid the 'muyahidin' who fought against France in the War of Independence, who used them to prepare their guerrilla war against the colonizer. And when the Algerians defeated, their inhabitants ran down the hill to occupy the buildings that the French, more modern and elegant, abandoned. The regime that built independent Algeria never paid attention to this treasure. And in the 90s its corners were the most dangerous in the city, infiltrated by Islamist militiamen who sowed terror in the civil war.

Today, some 50,000 people reside among their pale facades, but emigration has left many houses uninhabited. Others have been abandoned by their owners, who cannot pay to restore them. It is the case of 80% of the owners. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1992 , a cultural heritage protection law prohibits the modification of its buildings without authorization from a technical expert. But many ignore the restrictions.

"Traditional materials, such as earth and lime, have been replaced by modern materials that do not adapt, such as cement," complains the president of the Casbah Foundation, Ali Mebtuche, a former combatant of the anti-colonial war. "Heights have also been raised that embrittle the foundations of old buildings," he continues. The spaces that used to occupy homes that have disappeared today have become garbage dumps or parking lots .

Children continue to play on their slopes and women tend clothes on the rooftops. Down there is a revolution in progress that asks leaders to end an exhausted regime, but the Casbah continues its own battle against time impassively.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • UNESCO
  • Algeria
  • France
  • Africa

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