The International Collective in Support of Moroccan Families Expelled from Algeria in 1975 (CiMEA-75) has called on the Algerian authorities to recognize the human tragedy of Moroccan families expelled from Algeria in December 1975.
In a press release signed by its president, Mohammed Cherfaoui, the Collective underlines that although 46 years have passed, these events must be tirelessly recalled as a duty of remembrance.
In December 1975, 45,000 Moroccan families were, arbitrarily and without warning, expelled from Algeria when the Muslim world celebrated Aid El Kebir, the collective recalls, adding that these people found themselves either in the homes of family members who offered them shelter out of solidarity or in tents hastily set up by the Moroccan authorities.
The CiMEA-75 stresses that these families owned nothing but their eyes to cry as for the rest, all their movable and real property have remained outside the Moroccan borders, there, on the other side of the borders, in Algeria, “a country to which they gave much love and enormous solidarity during the struggle for independence.”
The Collective calls for paying tribute to those thousands of people “who have been stripped, beyond material belongings, of their human dignity,” as well as to the associations that brought this chapter out of the darkness in which it had been plunged.
“A sustained tribute must be paid to these associations that have been lavishly fighting with limited financial and human resources,” it says, noting that it fully supports these actions and calls for the culmination of this engagement by pooling efforts and coordinating with all associations on the basis of a clear and shared charter.
The CiMEA-75 pleads for seeking work paths through the legal route and political advocacy in order to shed light objectively on the facts and reconstruct them in their entirety to rehabilitate and preserve the memory of the direct and indirect victims of this tragedy.
It also calls for considering the moral and material remedy for this injustice and opening the borders between the two concerned countries to allow families and relatives to reunite.
The CiMEA-75 welcomes the active and supportive collaboration that has been forged with the Moroccan Organisation of Human Rights (OMDH), “which will be publicly and officially materialized in the coming days.”
The Collective urges all civil society organisations to join it to bring this mobilization to success and protect the human rights of the victims.
