Algerian historians demand access to war archives in Algeria
Photo taken on May 15, 1962. A French soldier in a street in Oran.
AP - Horst Faas
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
While Paris has decided to facilitate access to the archives of the Algerian war in France, Algerian historians are demanding access to the archives of this period in Algeria.
They have just sent, Thursday, March 25, an open letter to the President of the Republic, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, where they denounce the bureaucratic obstacles to their research.
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As long as these Algerian archives are not open, the historian Fouad Soufi believes that we will not be able to dispel the gray areas of the war of independence, on the Algerian side.
"
Those who do not want to open the archives have not understood that when a former actor writes his memoirs, he gives us his point of view on such and such an event which would still deserve to be able to read the archives of the 'ALN
[National Liberation Army]
, for example
”.
"
Behave like the French army -
I mean from the point of view of the drafting of documents
- there has always been a copy in the archives, a copy in the archives ... and then, of course, there are always gray areas. .
The struggle, the problems that there were between the
wilayas
, this history of the border army and the fights which took place in Wilaya IV between the border army and what remained at the time of the
Wilaya
IV … Some minimize and others, on the contrary, estimate that it was… Alas, there were a thousand deaths.
Others say no.
But there, indeed, as long as we do not have the archives of the ALN, we will not be able to really work seriously
”.
Read also: France: Emmanuel Macron facilitates access to classified archives
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