Le pillage colonial – La Nouvelle République Algérie

Colonial plunder

If the French colonialists could have taken and transported to France the 600,000 books and documents that were in the Library of the University of Algiers in 1962 before independence, they would have done so. But as this was not possible, they set fire to this establishment. On June 7, 1962, to show that they still had a great capacity for nuisance, OAS commandos set fire to the library which burned to the applause of excited supporters of French Algeria. Commenting on this fact, the director of the National Book Center, Djamel Yahiaoui, indicated that the French occupier “committed, upon his accession, a cultural crime in Algeria by destroying mosques, Koranic schools and zaouïas, in addition to looting and the ransacking of books, manuscripts and contracts.”

It should also be noted that the elements of the OAS carried out systematic looting of housing abandoned by Algerians, particularly in Algiers, who fled to avoid being killed by the criminal French colonialists, and went to find refuge in the Muslim neighborhoods or in the countryside where they were safe. In the same way, the French colonialists used and plundered historical properties throughout the period of occupation to take them to France.
“The recovery of both cultural and artistic heritage as well as administrative, military and Ottoman period archives, pillaged by colonial France, is a major question of national sovereignty for Algeria,” Dr Youssef Girard told Radio Sputnik Africa. , French historian and author, specialist in the Algerian National Movement and the Algerian War.

“It is all the more important for Algerians to recover what was stolen, when we know the extent of the destruction of national heritage by colonization,” he indicates. And to explain that “the French colonization of Algeria was not content to monopolize agricultural land and mineral wealth, but it carried out a genocidal policy which hit hard the Algerian population and all its cultural heritage, architectural, religious, symbolic and civilizational. It was ethnocide in full form. We must remember that between 1830, the year of the arrival of the French army in Algeria, and 1872, between a third and 58% of the Algerian population disappeared. As an example, if we take the Algerian capital Algiers, all that remains of its precolonial architectural heritage is the La Casbah district. The entire lower part of the city which goes to the port, for those who know Algiers, was destroyed.
Lakhdar A.