Make no mistake, it is for having declared on October 2, 2024 to a French weekly that “when France colonized Algeria, the entire western part of Algeria was part of Morocco. that the great Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal has been imprisoned and that he risks a very heavy prison sentence.
With all due respect to Benjamin Stora, who believes that such a statement “hurts national sentiment Algerian“, History is History… However, before being colonized by France, the Turkish Regency of Algiers did not exist as a State, while millennia-old Morocco effectively controlled everything which, today, is become the Algerian West… But, in Algiers, the simple observation of this historical reality is punishable by life imprisonment.
Yes, Boualem Sansal is right, because, before the colonial period, Morocco was the political, religious, economic and commercial heart of the entire Western Sahara. To the south, Morocco extended its influence beyond Tagant and controlled the tracks of Western Sahara as well as its main urban and caravan centers. Economically, the Moroccan commercial complex left the cities of northern Morocco to reach the Senegal River valley and the Timbuktu region through the markets of Goulimim and Tindouf. In this set, goods circulated without customs obstacles. These were in fact internal exchanges carried out within the limits of a single State, the Moroccan State.
To the east, Touat, Tidikelt, Gourara, Tindouf, Béchar and Tabelbala, which France attributed to Algeria in 1962, were led by kingpins appointed by the Sultan of Morocco.
“Morocco was asked not only to ratify the loss of its Eastern and Southern provinces, but also to accept that they were offered to States which had never existed in the past.”
Following the colonial partitions, borders were drawn which did not take into account these socio-historical realities. And it was these artificial limits which gave birth to the borders of an Algeria born in 1962. An Algerian Algeria territorially heir to French Algeria, which its leaders refuse to admit.
In reality, Morocco was then dismembered and its historical rights violated. Both to the east, towards present-day Algeria, and to the south, where the final resistance to colonization had started with Mâe el Aïnin and El-Hiba.
During independence, Morocco was faced with an intolerable situation. He was in fact asked not only to ratify the loss of his Eastern and Southern provinces, but also to accept that they were offered to States which had never existed in the past.
For the sake of regional political settlement, Morocco renounced its legitimate territorial claims vis-à-vis Algeria, namely, among others, Tindouf, Touat, Gourara, Tidikelt, Béchar and Tabelbala, but, in exchange, he expected support from the latter in its legitimate claims about the “Spanish Sahara”. Moroccan hopes were disappointed, because Algeria became the main support of the Polisario.
With the Boualem Sansal affair, the Algerian “System” shows that it is in dire straits. Indeed, militarily, Algerian attempts via the Polisario failed, and, diplomatically, the avalanche of international recognition of the Moroccan nature of the so-called Western Sahara ruined its hopes. Fixed on obsolete postulates, the Algerian gerontocracy, at the end of its biological and political clock, now has only one last weapon at its disposal: prisons.
