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“Tribute to Abdelhamid Mehri: a statesman, a national conscience”
A time of reflection
“They will fight the Arabity of Algeria on the pretext that there are minorities with non -Arab specificities. Then, they will fight Islam by pretending that there are Christian and Jewish minorities ”.
Then they will attack all the religions by affirming that there are atheists in Algeria. And so on, until the dissolution of all the foundations of our national and cultural identity, as defined in the declaration of November 1 ”.
In this quote, Abdelhamid Mehri, former boss of the FLN and emblematic figure of post-independence Algerian policy, is not expressed by nostalgia, nor for fear of change.
He speaks in visionary, as a statesman who saw the mechanisms by which a nation can be slowly decomposed. He denounces a pernicious, gradual strategy, which begins by sowing doubt about Arabity, Islam, then any form of shared landmarks. It is an alert: to want to be everything too much, a country may no longer be anything.
Mehri, the rampart against identity dilution
What Abdelhamid Mehri reminds us is that Algeria can only be strong by assuming its memory, its roots, its historical choices. The declaration of November 1, 1954, founding act of the Revolution, is not a fixed document.
It’s a compass. It defines Algeria as an Arab, Muslim, sovereign nation.
Hamid Sahnoun