Lakhdar Brahimi: “The French Occupation’s Exit From Algeria Was Not A Military Defeat!”

Media statements by the former Algerian Foreign Minister, Lakhdar Brahimi, about the liberation war and the humiliating defeat of the French occupation and its exit from Algeria, created a great controversy on social networks, where Algerians strongly criticized what was issued by Brahimi, considering this to be sceptical of France’s defeat by the Algerians.

In an interview with the French daily Le Monde, Brahimi likened the US army’s departure from Afghanistan to what he described as “France’s exit from Algeria.” He said: “The American exit from Afghanistan after 20 years of war cannot be considered a military defeat. It is the same as what happened with France leaving Algeria.

“It was the United States that decided to leave. The Americans started thinking about leaving after the killing of Bin Laden, but the circumstances did not help them”, he added.

“The countries that fought the Afghan people came out defeated, such as the Soviet Union in 1989, and the British in the 19th century”.

In the answer of the former Algerian diplomat, there is a tendency that the Americans were not defeated in Afghanistan, but rather they decided to voluntarily leave this country, and he tries to compare the Americans’ exit from Afghanistan to the end of the French occupation of Algeria as if he says that France is the one who decided to leave Algeria voluntarily and that this was not the result of a devastating war that lasted for seven years, during which one and a half million Algerians were martyred, and in which tens of thousands of the French army soldiers, collaborators, pieds-noirs and Harkis perished.

Such statements surprised many Algerians, because Brahimi was not an ordinary man, but is considered one of the frames of the Liberation Front and one of its men who worked in the diplomacy of the Liberation Front and attended the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which described the Algerian uprising against the French occupation, as the legitimate liberation process carried out by a people who suffered from persecution and injustice.

The statements of a man with the characteristics of Brahimi, known for his diplomatic and international weight, that France was not defeated in Algeria, raise more than one question about the background and timing of these incomprehensible “statements” which constitutes a questioning of the sacrifices of the Algerians over a period of more than a century, and an underestimation of the value of the revolution that the whole world witnessed, and the enemy recognized it before the friend, that it is one of the greatest revolutions of the twentieth century, if not the greatest at all.

The strange thing about Lakhdar Brahimi’s statement is that it is completely inconsistent with the various reports and confessions, including those issued by the Western and American media in particular, which concluded that twenty years of sacrifices of blood and money by the Americans and with the NATO presence in The “cemetery of empires” as it is called, ended in the starting square, which is the return of the Taliban movement to power after it was expelled from it in 2001, which means that the comparison of the former foreign minister about the defeat of France in Algeria and the defeat of the United States in Afghanistan, was not correct at all, but rather it was not a correct assessment, the analogy would have been correct if the man had dared to admit the defeat of the two superpowers, in two exhausted countries where the will of their people is indomitable”.