In a world deafened by bombs — the Strait of Hormuz blockaded, Gaza in ruins, Ukraine bleeding, walls rising on every meridian — a woman from a university campus on the eastern outskirts of Algiers has just received one of the most prestigious scientific prizes in Europe.
She directs the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Her father was murdered by terrorists in 1995.
One grandmother could not read or write. The other was the first woman in her region of France to earn a scientific degree.
Her name isYasmine Belkaid. And what she carries — across three continents, through three citizenships, into the highest laboratory in the world — is Algeria.
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To understand Yasmine Belkaid, you must first stand in Port Saïd Square in Algiers on a September morning in 1995. Algeria is at the nadir of its Black Decade — a civil conflict that would ultimately claim between 100,000 and 200,000 lives. Intellectuals, physicians, journalists, imams: they are being killed with numbing regularity by armed groups that have declared war not only on the Algerian state, but on the very idea of a literate, plural Algeria.
Image: Aboubakr Belkaid (Public Domain)
Among those cut down that morning isAboubakr Belkaid:former Minister of the Interior, former Minister of Justice, FLN veteran — a self-taught man from Tlemcen who had joined the anti-colonial guerrilla at 15, gone underground, worked clandestinely as a delegate for Algerian workers at the Régie Renault factories in France, and spent his entire adult life building the state his generation had bled to create. He is shot dead in the street.
On his tomb at El Alia Cemetery, his family inscribes the words by which he lived:“The battles we lose are the ones we do not fight.”
Source: Global Research
