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PARIS, Dec 4: France has decided to proclaim 2003 as “The Year of Algeria,” and under the official label of “Djazair 2003 — Algerie au Coeur (Algeria at Heart),” will soon set in motion a series of year-long events to mark Franco-Algerian friendship.
The decision to devote next year to Algeria, and France’s often turbulent relationship with its former colony, comes a few days before the decision to proclaim Dec 5th as the date on which France is to celebrate the end of its war with Algeria, and this only a month after announcing that it had dropped the idea of a national holiday — originally to have been observed annually on March 19 — the day of the signing of the Evian accords which put an end to the bloody war in 1962.
Eighteen hundred different events will figure in the official calendar to mark Djazair 2003: musical concerts, film screenings, theatrical representations of Algerian plays, conferences and exhibitions, notably at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and these to be held all over France, not only in the French capital, but also out in the provinces, especially in those parts of the country, Marseilles and Lyons, for example, which have significant Algerian populations.
The year-long event will also highlight the idea of “Algeria of a thousand faces: Arab, Kabyle and Francophone,” with the French tongue having apparently made a return in the hearts of official Algeria, as for many years French had been little by little abandoned as a national tongue, its place somewhat informally replaced by English over the years.
In announcing the event jointly with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, Algerian Foreign Affairs Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem, who came to Paris especially for the occasion, quoted from Jacques Berque, the great French specialist of the Arab world, who had noted that it behoved the two countries to “convert the past,” no matter how difficult it has been, “into a force of sharing.”
MEMORIAL: Although it will be an informal holiday, Dec 5th this year will be used to unveil in Paris a special memorial to Algerians — the Harkis — who fought on the side of France in the Franco-Algerian war that ended in 1962 with the signing of the Evian accords.
The memorial — officially named the “National Memorial of the Algerian War and of the combat of Morocco and Tunisia” — is also to honour the memories of combatants from Tunisia and Morocco who also fought on the side of France.
During a ceremony to be presided over by President Chirac, a three-column structure is to be unveiled at Quai Branly in Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower and the site where a major international museum devoted to African and Oceanian art is to be unveiled in 2004.
The memorial will bear a special electronic screen that will sequentially display the names of all veterans from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco on a year-by-year basis.
