It is hoped the 10-member body – set up in August 2022 by presidents Emmanuel Macron and Abdelmadjid Tebboune – will help the countries turn the page on a shared and painful past.
Radio France International (RFI) spoke with commission co-chair Benjamin Stora, who hopes France will this year be able to return highly symbolic records to Algeria. RFI: Algerian historians are demanding that France return its archives. You prefer to focus on allowing free access to those archives. Can you explain the difference? Benjamin Stora: ‘There’s a new element in relation to the old problem of restitution and that is the digital revolution.
These days requests for restitution are much less important than those for the digitisation, transfer and sharing of archives.
This does not prevent the restitution of authentic documents that have symbolic value – for example the Tafna treaty of 1836 to 1837.
Handwritten documents from Emir Abdelkader recorded certain reflections relating to the Muslim religion in personal notebooks.’
Earlier, France widened access to declassified Algeria war archives by authorising the consultation of files involving minors. The new legal order, published on Sunday but dated 25 August 2023, removes the exclusion of files involving a minor from being consulted.
