ALGIERS – The Algerian President, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, reiterated Sunday, in Algiers, his great attachment to the preservation of the national Memory and dignity of the ancestors, Mujahedeen and Shuhada (martyrs) of the popular resistance and the glorious liberation revolution.
In a speech delivered to the nation before the parliament’s two houses in the Palace of Nations, the Algerian President discussed at length “our country’s honourable history and the national Memory of the Algerian nation.” “I consider myself as a son of Shahid, the son of Boubaghla, Sheikh Amoud, colonel Amirouche, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, colonel Lotfi and all the Shuhada of Algeria. We will never renounce our dignity and that of our ancestors, Shuhadaa and Mujahedeen, and will preserve it.”
“We preserve our national Memory and we attach great importance to it,” said the Algerian President, recalling that “when the coloniser set foot on Algeria’s soil, the Algerian people were educated and Algeria was a corn-field, but the colonisation committed massacre after another nationwide, causing only destruction, ruin and extermination of the people.”
President Tebboune mentioned “the genocide committed against the Algerian people during the colonial period in various regions such as Zaatcha and Laghouat, the 45,000 martyrs of 8 May 1945 demonstrations, the other perpetrated massacres, the incinerators, as well as the 500 skulls held by France of which we have only recovered 24,” the President of the Republic affirmed that “the value of our martyrs who fell during the resistance and the glorious Liberation Revolution is far more precious than billions of dollars. I am not asking the former colonizer for material reparations but rather the recognition of its crimes.”
And he added that “the former colonizer subsequently became a nuclear power, but left in Algeria diseases resulting from its nuclear tests that our compatriots in the South still suffer from today.”
Addressing the former colonizer, the Algerian President declared: “Don’t give us money, but come clean up the sites that you have contaminated.”
In this regard, he emphasized that “the dispute with yesterday’s colonizer about memory has no hidden agenda.” “Algerians have an imprescriptible right and they demand recognition of the massacres committed by the colonizer,” he said.
“We cannot trust those who deny the message of the Shouhada and Mujahideen,” he stated.
In this respect, the Algerian President expressed his gratitude to all the leaders who governed Algeria after independence for their loyalty to the message of the Shouhada and the principles of the 1 November 1954 Revolution, particularly through establishing the foundations of the social State.
In this regard, he reaffirmed his strong determination to continue efforts to build and consolidate the achievements made, thanks to the trust of Algerian women and men and their constant mobilization in service of their homeland.
