On Thursday, September 10, 2026, Algeria announced that it was severing diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and closing its airspace to Emirati military and civilian aircraft. This decision, which leaves Algeria even more diplomatically isolated, is not the subject of this column. Rather, its purpose is to examine the historically surreal and decidedly undiplomatic remarks made by President Tebboune in his warning to the United Arab Emirates, as reported by Mondafrique on September 11, 2026.
According to the publication, the Algerian president told Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan earlier this year, “If you think you can behave towards us as you do towards others, you are mistaken. We have 5,630,000 martyrs who died for this country. Those who want to come at us are welcome to try.”
Beyond wording that once again reveals the Algerian leadership’s shaky grasp of even the most basic diplomatic conventions, the figure cited by the Algerian president has no scientific basis whatsoever. Unsupported by any study, it is a rhetorical weapon at the heart of the politics of memory on which the Algerian “System” bases its “legitimacy.”
According to President Tebboune, then, French colonialism caused the deaths of 5.6 million Algerians between 1830 and 1962. A few figures are worth recalling before getting to the heart of the matter. The earliest demographic estimates, produced around 1835, put the “indigenous” population, to use the terminology of the period, at roughly three million. Yet by July 1962, at the time of independence, Algeria’s population, excluding Europeans, stood at 11 million—almost four times as high. To reach a toll of 5.6 million victims would have required massive and sustained mortality throughout the 132 years of French rule. The known demographic data point in precisely the opposite direction: Algeria’s population grew during the colonial period, making such figures mathematically impossible.
The conquest and repression of the 19th century were certainly violent, but they were not an uninterrupted succession of genocides. The 1945 massacres in Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata left between 15,000 and 20,000 people dead, according to academic research. As for the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962, the most serious estimates put the Algerian death toll at around 300,000. In every case, that remains a very long way from 5.6 million deaths.
«The figure of 5.6 million dead, a claim unsupported by any source, had until now served to underpin the ‘legitimacy’ of the regime while allowing it to maintain pressure on France. Now, however, it has become a ‘diplomatic’ argument against the United Arab Emirates...»
— Bernard Lugan
But the Algerian System has long accustomed us to inflated figures. A reminder is in order. In 2008, Noureddine Aït Hamouda, then an MP for the RCD (Rally for Culture and Democracy) and the son of Colonel Amirouche Aït Hamouda, the emblematic leader of the Kabyle resistance in Wilaya III who was killed in combat on March 29, 1959, caused an uproar in parliament when he denounced the scandal of fake mujahideen and shattered the myth of the 1.5 million people supposedly killed during the War of Independence—a figure which, he argued, allowed the “System” to justify the number of beneficiaries, particularly widows and orphans.
According to Noureddine Aït Hamouda, three-quarters of the two million holders of mujahid cards and registered beneficiaries were bogus. This was echoed in 2015 by former minister Abdeslam Ali Rachidi, who declared that “everyone knows that 90% of these former fighters, the ‘mujahideen,’ are fake” (El Watan, December 12, 2015).
The relentless pursuit of former mujahid status is easily explained: holders of the coveted card, along with their dependants, receive a state pension, enjoy privileges and perks, and benefit from preferential treatment.
Cardholders form the popular backbone of the “System,” exercising political influence through a nationwide network of associations. These include the ONM (National Organisation of Mujahideen), the ONEC (National Organisation of the Children of Chouhada, or martyrs), the CNEC (National Coordination of the Children of Chouhada) and the ONEM (National Organisation of the Children of Mujahideen).
Another reminder: in 2003, a number of genuine former fighters from across Algeria formed the Association for the Fight Against Fake Mujahideen because, according to them, 80% of the members of the ONM at the time were fake resistance fighters—including, according to Liberté-Algérie on October 28, 2003, none other than the minister of Mujahideen himself!!!
The figure of 5.6 million dead, a claim unsupported by any source, had until now served to underpin the “legitimacy” of the regime while allowing it to maintain pressure on France. Now, however, it has become a “diplomatic” argument against the United Arab Emirates...
