Mohammed Harbi, "a maverick historian of Algeria whose perspective--that of an insider turned outsider--shattered myths about his country's break from France," died January 1, the New York Times reported. He was 92.
Harbi "saw Algeria's bloody split with France from within, as a high official in the early revolutionary government," the Times wrote. "Then, when he denounced widespread torture and other abuses, he was imprisoned after the military seized power in 1965, before escaping into exile after a period of house arrest and beginning a long second career as a historian who rewrote the story of his country's flawed independence."
He contended that contemporary Algeria had its roots in the country's troubled birth, saying: "Usually, every country has an army. In Algeria, it is the opposite: It's the army that has the country."
French historian Pierre Vermeren wrote in Le Figaro that Harbi was "the most brilliant and implacable historian of independent Algeria." In the magazine L'Histoire, historian Benjamin Stora said that Harbi was a "pioneer in deconstructing the official ideology."
In The Origins of the F.L.N. (1975), the French acronym for the ruling National Liberation Front, and The F.L.N.: Mirage and Reality (1980), both of which were begun during his imprisonment and completed in exile, Harbi, "using documents he had patiently assembled for several decades, demonstrated that the revolutionary F.L.N. party was not really a political party at all," the Times noted.
"In the days after the cease-fire" with France, Harbi wrote in Une Vie Debout: Mémoires Politiques (2020), "behind the divided forces of the armed resistance, what stirred above all were groups of partisan camp followers seeking rewards, and with no other goal but the personal appropriation of the colonial heritage left behind by the fleeing Europeans."
Harbi's books were banned in Algeria until the early 1990s, and he did not return to his country until 1991. "We won our independence, but we left behind one crisis to enter into another. The militarization of our society took place because of these crises," he told Le Monde in 2019. "Our independence was stolen by armed men who have robbed the inhabitants of their country."