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The French Presidency announced yesterday in a statement that President Emmanuel Macron decided to facilitate access to the contents of secret archives that are more than 50 years old, especially those related to the Algerian war, in accordance with the recommendation of historian Benjamin Stora. . .
The historian Stora’s report on the Algerian war memory, which he presented to the French president on January 20, recommended sending these gestures of truce.
The announcement by the French presidency came a week after President Macron admitted “on behalf of France” that the French army had “tortured and murdered” the Algerian militant Ali Boumendjel during the Algerian war in 1957.
The Algerian authorities welcomed Macron’s recent decisions, but they have been calling for years to open the French colonial archives and settle the issue of those missing in the War of Independence, whose number exceeds 2,200 according to Algeria, as well as the French nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara.
The presidency said that the president “made the decision to allow the files to advance, as of Wednesday, and to implicitly lift the confidentiality of the documents covered by the National Defense Secretariat until the 1970 files.”
The statement said that “this decision would shorten the waiting times associated with the procedures for lifting secrecy, especially in relation to the war in Algeria.”
The Elysee Palace stressed that the decision on the archives “shows that we are moving very fast.”
But the impact of the decision goes beyond the framework of the Algerian war, as Macron “listened to the demands of the university community” who complained of difficulties in accessing the secret archive dating back more than 50 years due to the literal application of a memorandum on the protection of national defense secrets.
