Algeria – France: The newspaper “L’Indépendant” revealed in a report that the decision taken by France to declassify the files of the national archives related to the period of its colonization of Algeria will allow Algerians to resort to justice.
Mohamed Andric, one of the eyewitnesses who survived the Seine massacres that French police carried out against Algerians, said the case has not yet been opened to French justice, noting that despite hundreds of police officers filming the murder scenes, No case has ever been filed at the level of the Courts, according to the same source.
For his part, Arezki Amaziur, another eyewitness, told the same newspaper that the archives contain a lot of information that we have not yet uncovered, noting that he has filed, along with a number of Algerians, petitions requesting the opening of the archives. , but it has been stored for a long time.
In the same context, a French government spokesperson told The Independent that the publication of the files linked to the archives is an opportunity for Paris to examine the historical facts unequivocally.
Last December, the French Minister of Culture, Roselyn Bachelot, announced that her country had decided to lift the secrecy of the Liberation Revolution archives, 15 years before the legal deadlines.
The minister explained that the decision includes records related to investigations by the police and gendarmerie during the Algerian liberation revolution.
For his part, the historian specializing in Algerian-French relations, Emmanuel Blanchard, stressed that one should not wait for the part which will be declassified from the archives to obtain “scope” or new information.
Blanchard underlined, in a statement relayed by the French media, that declassifying the archives in the investigations of the police and the gendarmerie during the Algerian editorial revolution is a positive step for historical and scientific research and nothing more.
