Mohamed Harbi

Mohamed Harbi (born June 16, 1933) is an Algerian historian who was a member of the National Liberation Front (Algeria) (FLN) during the Algerian War of Independence.

Mohamed Harbi was born in 1933 into a wealthy family in El Harrouch, Algeria. At the age of 15, he joined the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties. According to his memoirs, Harbi lived underground in France and gathered support for the Algerian independence. From 1954 to 1962 he was in a prominent position in the FLN.

After the Algerian War of Independence, he became an advisor to the new president, Ahmed Ben Bella, and later a member of his cabinet. Harbi's Marxism was fiercely opposed by many veterans of the war, as well as by the army. According to his memoirs, Harbi tried to resist the increasingly authoritarian approach of the new government and urged Ben Bella to arm the people to avert a military coup. He believed, like many Marxists in his generation, that popular militias were needed to revolutionise society as well as resist the impending coup. However, his own insistence on Marxist dogma helped fuel popular as well as political opposition toward him, which culminated in the very coup he had feared.

In June 1965 Houari Boumedienne seized power and arrested Ben Bella. Two months later Harbi was also imprisoned. For the next five years he was transferred between prisons, without trial, until he was placed in house arrest in 1971. In 1973 he escaped to Tunisia with a false Turkish passport and from there moved to Paris.

In France, Harbi began to teach political science in the University of Paris.

During his house arrest, Harbi had begun to write the history of the independence movement and in 1975 published a book The history of FLN. His inside view of the movement was not one the FLN cherished and he began to receive death threats from three sides; Algerian secret police, Algerian Islamic militants and French ultra-nationalists.

Currently Harbi lives in Paris, retired from the university. The first part of his memoirs was published in 2003.

Books

 * La guerre d'Algérie : de la mémoire à l'histoire (2004), with Benjamin Stora