Chengriha and the Amgala Malfunction Complex

We desperately exhaust ourselves trying to understand, for the simple reason, what motivates General Said Chengriha, who was fed on primary anti-Moroccanism, to become the provocateur against our country! The man who does not accept defeat never consoles himself with the humiliating situation he found himself in on a certain day in February 1976 in the heart of the liberated Moroccan Sahara by the Forces Armées Royales, when he was sent by Boumediene to Amgala to spy on the advance of the FARs and, in case, prevent the return of the province of the Red Triangle to Morocco.

At the time, Captain of the ANP (National Popular Army), today a general of his state, adorned with the title of Minister Delegate for Defense in Algeria, shrouded in a prestige entirely in line with his convulsive and conflictual psychopathology, Said Chengriha embodies the hatred of the Kingdom of Morocco. His career is summed up by this mental disposition, no more, no less. This hatred has origins that date back to January-February 1976 when he was captured along with the troops he commanded by the Royal Armed Forces (FAR) during the Battle of Amgala.

A battalion of Algerian soldiers and the Polisario mercenaries was simply defeated in late January 1976. Their elements were presented to the international press, and their weapons were displayed to show how deeply Algeria was already directly involved, reducing its false propaganda to nothing. Amgala had thus delivered the final blow to Captain Chengriha, an event he will never forget. Chengriha then fled, abandoning his men without remorse, nurturing already the lie of a title and deeds usurped.

From the battle, let's say from the humiliating defeat of Amgala, Said Chengriha will carry the bitterness of it for his entire life. He certainly has no merit and even the slightest hope of a tiny recognition from Colonel Houari Boumediene, his president and chief of staff, who died two years later, on December 27, 1978, and was replaced by Colonel Chadli Bendjedid. One would certainly be at fault if the corpse he embodies did not play the role of the all-powerful firebrand, a pyromaniac just good for destruction. Here, the part of madness, the irresponsible reliance on the myth of a powerful Algeria, which is of course illusory, tells us a lot about the fascist drift of a power that has lost its reason!

Chengriha is a constable, surviving today in a kind of twilight bitterness, the end of a journey, barely able to gesture, his neck stiff and his already bent stature from pride and ill-repute, a type of Latin American military from the last century, at best Videla of Argentina, at worst Pinochet in Chile, or, a caricature of an African, Mengistu in Ethiopia, who believed he had reinvented communism in Africa and imposed his grip on the Ethiopians through purges. Said Chengriha, who is currently in power in Algeria, is what a Centurion—nobility minus—was once in the power of Rome, relentlessly creating a national narrative of Algeria, with gestures and provocations concentrated exclusively on the Kingdom of Morocco and also on France and the State of Israel. Traitor to Gaid Salah, who made him, to his country and people, the general adorned with stars and trinkets cultivates the dream of a herald at eighty years old in a country where youth not only seeks a future but also seems increasingly more desperate, and, in waves of hundreds, leaves the country and plunges into the Mediterranean, which has become their sole horizon...

We will, however, recall that the Amgala episode has never been or could be mentioned by Algerian leaders for the simple reason that it illustrates, beyond the defeat of the Algerian army, a betrayal of Boumediene towards Morocco and especially King Hassan II. During the Arab League summit held in Rabat in October 1974, Boumediene, amid his power, made a speech to his peers where he stated that his country not only supported Morocco's claim to its Sahara but was ready to militarily engage alongside it against Spain. This solemn declaration is recorded, and documented in the Arab summit archives, in this case...

If Boumediene and his successors forget it so easily and bury it, it would not surprise us. We are so accustomed to it that the sad tradition of renegades and betrayals has always been the hallmark of Algerian leaders, taken up with astonishing cynicism by a press in the pocket of the army. King Hassan II had, in July 1961, received in Rabat the president of the GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), Farhat Abbas, both to renew Morocco's support for the struggle of the Algerian people and to agree together on the principle of a settlement after the liberation of the issue of the Moroccan-Algerian border. Farhat Abbas, the first Algerian leader of independence, an upright and peaceful man, will later be eliminated by Ben Bella and the army.

Indeed, the July 6, 1961, agreement protocol, a fragile outline of a peaceful vision of a good neighborhood that will never come to fruition—at least it will be fought against—stipulates in paragraph 5 that "The Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic acknowledges (...) that the territorial problem posed by the arbitrary boundary imposed by France between the two countries will find its resolution in the negotiations between the Government of the Kingdom of Morocco and the Government of independent Algeria...". After Ferhat Abbas, the president of the GPRA was subsequently eliminated, his successors, who came to power by force and now hold the power, simply renounced such commitments.

When certain minds venture to speak of a fifty-year Moroccan-Algerian conflict, would we be forced to correct the aim? It is indeed a 60-year "war" that the Algerian military power relentlessly pursues against countries, exhausting a treasure of dilatory maneuvers, trampling the beautiful principles of brotherhood and solidarity shown by Morocco, shattering the dreams of our youth, erecting the lie of the state as a model. Chengriha, clearly embodies the brutal face of this regime, repressive, authoritarian, and violent, even by the sinister image of hundreds of thousands of deaths during the dark decade, the suicidal temptation of expansionism at the expense of neighboring states, and finally the dark, Stalinian, violent dictatorship against intellectuals—most notably Boualem Sensal—and democrats, or simply the citizens stripped of their rights, violated in their conscience, and enslaved to a totalitarian order...

In the wake of a defeat of all principles and an Algerian model, at the brink of a collapsing regime, Chengriha, this retrograde Stalinist, is launched into a mad dash... He bears the indelible mark of the Moroccan kingdom's restrictive complex as a totem on his skin.