The day of July 5, 1962: an important document to add to the file of the reconciliation of memories

Conference

The day of July 5, 1962: an important document to add to the file of the reconciliation of memories

Thursday July 6, 2023 at 10 a.m. at CRASC headquarters

 
Presented by: Saddek Benkada, Sociologist and Historian, associate researcher at CRASC.
Moderated by: Halima Moulai, Permanent Researcher at CRASC

Summary of the conference:

       This conference is intended first of all to be a duty of testimony which was, in short, to use the expression of B. Stora, "a difficult but necessary exercise", it is intended to be the culmination of a difficult work of memory delayed too long.

       Among the contentious points of the memorial liabilities between France and Algeria put forward in the Report presented in January 2021 by Benjamin Stora to the President of the French Republic Emmanuel MACRON, is prominently the file of "July 5 in Oran", for which the author of the Report, proposes ‒ "The establishment of a joint commission of French and Algerian historians, to shed light on the kidnappings and murders of Europeans in Oran in July 1962, to hear the words of witnesses of this tragedy. »
It was therefore necessary to wait 40 years, in 1992, thanks to the policy of openness initiated following the popular uprising of October 1988; so that tongues finally begin to loosen and consciences to free themselves; hence, a profusion of unpublished testimonies that we were able to collect on the bloody events of this Thursday, July 5, 1962.

Based on testimonies that we were able to collect from trustworthy people who held positions of responsibility within the ZAO, OPM/FLN or ALN networks, we more or less succeeded in reconstructing the version Algerian of what happened that day.