The official historian of Algerian history Benjamin Stora handed over to French President Emmanuel Macron, on Wednesday January the 20 of 2021, a report of one hundred and sixty pages on memorial issues relating to the colonization and war in Algeria.

The mission was also entrusted to the Algerian side in the person of the adviser in charge of archives and memory to the Algerian colonial presidency, Abdelmadjid Chikhi, appointed by Algiers to restore the truth about the colonial period in tandem with Benjamin Stora.

As was to be expected, the Algerian side shone by its absence and silence. A non-State in advanced decomposition cannot claim to compete with its former colonist. No contribution, apart from populist statements.

In this country where the war of liberation was led mainly by Kabylia and the Kabyle people, this report is chilling. It reveals a manifest will to erase Kabylia from the official memory of both countries.

Would it be a prelude to consider Kabylia as a country apart, distinct from Algeria, or simply the logical continuation of the disastrous project Zero Kabyle being carried out by colonial Algeria.

The report tries, as best it can, to propose ways and means, how to succeed in reconciling the different memories, in conflict with each other, to turn the deep trauma and the impossible forgetting into a single common memory soothed for all the belligerents, and above all to avoid the nagging question of repentance and excuses from France which come back, like a boomerang, in the debate all the time, but impossible to admit in the eyes of the French State.

For colonial Algeria, repentance is the Alpha and Omega of the solution that will solve all the problems and evils of Algeria. Yet, as indicated in the report and admitted by Algerian historians, Algeria, to date, is incapable of producing a demand with a scientific, responsible and clear methodology to build the true colonial history. Instead, it is content to formulate simplistic populist demands, intended for the vox-populi gallery, such as the insistent need for repentance and the recovery of archives from the colonial period.

She wishes to recover the archives, knowing that these archives are embarrassing and very painful, in order to falsify them, or even destroy them completely, and moreover the archives concerning Kabylia.

While the vast majority of colonial atrocities, from cultural brutalization to the denial of rights, from torture practices to internments and summary executions, from cultural and land dispossessions to the cruelties of war and the hundreds of thousands of deaths, are suffered by Kabylia on its territory and by its people, this report has completely erased Kabylia, the Kabyle people and especially the revolutionaries who are mostly Kabyle.

The use of the appellation “Algerian people” has been used and abused to excess. It is incongruous for a history professor of the rank of Benjamin Stora to ignore, if not deliberately do so, the existence of several peoples in Algeria. The Kabyle people who aspire to independence is one of them.

Why does France insist on reconciliation, knowing that Algeria is not asking for it? It is even hostile to any prospect of peace and reconciliation, what’s more, it is using it as a business base to perpetuate the dictatorial and colonial regime in place.

The reason is well evoked in the report: “Reconciliation, because Algeria occupies a very important place in the entire Mediterranean basin. Algeria, with its 1,400 kilometers of coastline, is the longest border between Africa and Europe. Needless to say, its role in migratory developments is essential in this part of the world. On the other hand, the Algerian Sahara, the largest desert in the world, occupies hundreds of kilometers of borders with Libya, Niger, Mali… It is the largest Saharan border, where considerable confrontation is played out against jihadist groups that are trying to destabilize the sub-Saharan region. This double border, Mediterranean and Saharan, gives Algeria considerable weight in the resolution of current problems, on immigration, terrorism, or the instability that reigns in some countries in this area”. Added to this, the immense underground wealth, oil, gas, iron, gold, uranium, solar energy, etc….

For Benjamin Stora, priority is given to economic and geopolitical interests, which is not surprising. Exit the right of peoples, human rights, and especially the embarrassing and rebellious Kabylia.

Kabylia, which has already twice expressed, through Anavad (the Kabyle government in exile), its refusal to allow the Algerian colonial regime to retrieve the archives, is hardly running behind repentance, or any kind of reconciliation. For the simple reason that Kabylia is still colonized! Colonial France is defeated, but the Algerian Arab-Islamist colonization, tougher and more violent, is still there.

Kabylia wishes to return to the true history, far from the machinations, falsifications, triturations, manipulations orchestrated by France and Algeria.

The Kabyle people wants to be recognized as a people in its own right who will exercise its full right to self-determination. Kabylia wants to return to its pre-1857 independent status, before it is forcibly annexed to French Algeria, without capitulation as the Turkish deys and beys did, as did the pseudo-emir Abdelkader.
Not a follower of the policy of small measures, Kabylia is in no way interested, neither closely nor remotely, in the recommendations set out in this report for the reconciliation of the two countries. Kabylia wishes to go to the essential, that of recovering its sovereignty lost in 1857.

France, which is responsible for this situation, has a primordial role to play to repair this injustice committed against Kabylia and the Kabyle people. The free and independent Kabyle state will know, when the time comes, how to be reconciled in a responsible manner with these colonizers France and Arab-Islamist Algeria.

The passage in force that France and Algeria are trying to impose on Kabylia, that of a fabricated and triturated official history, will not pass. Independent Kabylia will never accept this affront. It will never let other peoples write its own history. It will know how to write its own history, by its own historians, who are excluded in this “reconciliatory” work between Algeria and France, but which puts Kabylia de facto OUT. Project Zero Kabyle obliges!

CLKI – Free Chroniclers of Independent Kabylia
Translated from SIWEL 290920 JAN 21