Algerian President Abdel Majid Taboun announced today, Thursday, that his country will receive the remains of 24 leaders of the popular resistance against the French occupation within 24 hours, after it was displayed in the Paris Museum.

During a tradition ceremony arranged for officers at the Ministry of Defense headquarters on the occasion of the July 5 Independence Day, Taboun said, "Hours later, a military plane arriving from France, with the remains of 24 people of the Popular Resistance leaders and their companions from most of the country, will land at the Houari Boumediene International Airport.

"More than 170 years have passed since they were deprived of their natural and human right to burial, led by Sharif Boubaghla and Sheikh Ahmed Bouziane, the leader of the (Oasis) uprising of Zaatache (southern Algeria) and their brothers ... and among them is a skull of a young resistance man who is no more than 18 years old."

He added that the state is determined to complete the recovery of the remains of the resistance fighters "so that all our martyrs will be reunited on the land for which they sacrificed for their dearest possession."

Accusing Paris

Taboun, who is also the Minister of Defense, stated that "this year’s celebrations of Independence Day will also be a decisive moment in the nation’s history. And 1865 ".

He continued, "The savage enemy refused to cut off their heads from their pure bodies at the time, to defame the revolutionaries, then cut off the sea so that their graves would not be a symbol of resistance."

In 2016, French media revealed that there were 18,000 skulls preserved in the "Human" museum in Paris, of which only five hundred were the identities of their owners.

And between these skulls, according to previous statements by officials of the two countries, there are between 31 and 36 skulls belonging to leaders of the Algerian resistance (before the outbreak of the revolution of November 1954), were killed by the French colonial forces and then beheaded in the mid-nineteenth century.

After months of revealing the existence of these skulls, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the readiness of his country's authorities to enact a law allowing the delivery of those skulls that the Algerian authorities are asking to transfer for burial, but the process was delayed for several years.

The Algerian authorities have continued to accuse Paris of disrupting the transfer of skulls to Algeria, while Paris says that it requires sophisticated legal procedures to ensure its exit from the Paris Museum.

Taboun pledged, after he came to power on December 19, to restore these skulls and bury them in Algeria.

In a message to him marking the 75th anniversary of the massacres of May 8, 1945, he said that France "killed half of the Algerian population from 1830 to 1962."

He added that the number of martyrs amounts to 5.5 million, indicating that the count of colonial massacres includes the entire colonial period, and not the period of the liberation revolution (1954 - 1962), which counts only 1.5 million martyrs, in addition to other crimes.

Algeria has been calling for years for France to acknowledge, apologize and compensate for its colonial crimes, but Paris calls every time to turn the page on the past and head towards the future.