The capital of the third world and the home of the liberation movements from colonialism .. the time of international militants in Algeria

In the 1960s, Algeria was a destination for freedom fighters, intellectuals, activists of the liberation movements, and even its exiled fighters who flocked to it from all over the world.

The American journalist Eileen Makhfouf met with all of them to write her book, "Algeria .. Capital of the Third World," recently published by Firtho Publishing (American).

Mkhkhfi, who was born in New York, was living in what was known as a time of revolutionary optimism and "cross-border solidarity", and at the beginning of the fifties she moved to Paris.

By 1960, when at least 17 African countries declared their independence, invisibly involved in the anti-colonial struggle and instigated the independence of Algeria and an end to the brutal war waged by France.

Mukhafiqi believed in the slogans of the French liberation revolution, but after French police officers shot and killed 7 Algerian protesters and wounded hundreds of others, she chanted with the demonstrators, "Every day .. Bastille Day."

At the beginning of the thirties, the disappeared was shocked by what happened, and she got acquainted with the French anti-colonial thinker Franz Fanon. The shantytowns in which thousands of immigrants lived outside Paris were another shock to her. The war soon erupted in Algeria and resulted in the deaths of nearly 1.5 million Algerians, and hundreds of thousands of people. Displaced, missing and injured.

The relationship of a disappeared has strengthened with the human rights movement founded by black activists in America after the murder of Malcolm X

Falling in love with Algeria

and disappeared in love with an Algerian activist, Mokhtar Mukhtar, who married him and got her title from him, but she returned to New York to contribute to the internationalization of the case from a small office that considered the temporary headquarters of the Algerian independence government and the National Liberation Front in New York, and also participated in arranging interviews with officials He collected donations and mobilized support. Senator John F. Kennedy was one of the biggest supporters of Algeria's independence.

The small office contributed to facing France's huge diplomatic and media machine, which has strong relations with the circles of government and influence in America, the United Nations and NATO, and the French lost the vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the independence of Algeria.

When the Algerians declared independence in the summer of 1962, she returned to Algeria to witness these historical moments with the person she loved, and as she said, she would be "one of the dreamers who came to build a more perfect world," according to a report by the British Guardian newspaper.

Mukhtefe found that her knowledge of both French and English was beneficial to the newly independent Algeria, so she set about translating publications and receiving guests, including Oliver Tambo, a fighter against the apartheid regime in South Africa, Joshua Nkomo, the fighter and ancient Zimbabwean leader, and Nujoma founder of Namibia in Algiers.

She was disappearing, sure - whenever a guest of this type came to Algeria - she would receive a call to help them translate.

Of all her activities during her stay in Algiers, the participation of the disappeared with the "Black Panthers" was the most exciting. When the African American activist Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the United States civil rights movement and the global African movement, arrived in Algeria in September 1967, she was He disappeared next to him to translate his first unforgettable words on African soil, "Here I am at last, in the motherland."

The disappeared’s relationship with the human rights movement founded by black activists in America after the killing of Malcolm X, and one night in June 1967, the representative of Zimbabwe in Algeria called the disappeared, saying, “Eldridge Cleaver is in the city and needs help, go and meet him.”

Cleaver, the media official for the Black Panther, had fled from America to Cuba via Canada, and across the Atlantic to Algeria.

It was really a new country.

Mkhtefe said that Algeria after independence was a new country, and it was no longer the rural colony that was looted by generations of French settlers. They had almost all left at the end of the war, and "the Algerians had to become a real country, not just an appendix of France."

In the midst of the liberation war, oil and gas were discovered in Algeria.

"They did not know that they would become one of the exporters of gas and oil to the world," Mukhtafi says, "so they had to build this industry and other industries," Imagine a country without doctors, without teachers, and a university without professors .. It was difficult times but very exciting, and when it worked it would be Very cool. "

Unlike Cuba, which was an ally of the Soviet Union, Algeria's image as a member of the "non-aligned" movement contributed to being an inspiring model for the future of anti-colonial movements around the world.

In light of the revival of the cultural and political situation in the Algerian capital, the country hosted members, representatives and offices of the liberation movements from colonialism, from Vietnam, South Africa, Angola, Germany and Latin America.

Disappeared in Algeria also recognized exiles fleeing the hell of the military dictators of Spain and Portugal, Franco and Salazar, fighters fleeing the regimes of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Central America, and political opponents and fighters in the liberation movements.

The author says that every liberation organization imaginable had an office in Algiers, from the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Viet Cong) to the African National Congress, the Namibian Swapo Independence Movement, the Mozambique Liberation Front Frelimo, the Congo Liberation Front, and of course the Palestine Liberation Organization that was It has an influential and long presence in Algeria.

Like the experience of many national liberation movements around the world, the participation of the disappeared in the Algerian struggle and the romantic ideas of liberation ended in sorrow and estrangement from the country in which she had lived for a long time, and went out to return to New York and only recently obtained a permit from the Algerian consulate in New York to enter Algeria again, after he I waited 44 years to get back at it.

Although Mukhtafi says that she does not feel any grudge, it seems that the world that she and others fought to build has gone in another direction, and she lived with many of her generation in disillusionment, and she did not return to Algeria and did not escape the pain of its collapse in the civil war. In the 1990s, we were left with these eloquent notes, written with strong emotion and fine detail.