Abdelhamid Mehri, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetAbdelhamid Mehri
Algerian politician
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: El Khroub, Constantine Province, Algeria
About Abdelhamid Mehri
- Abdelhamid Mehri (April 1926 – 30 January 2012) was an Algerian resistance fighter, soldier and politician.Born into a destitute family in Constantine, Algeria, Abdelhamid Mehri joined the Algerian People's Party (PPA) at an early age.
- He studied in Tunisia, and developed contacts with the nationalist Neo Destour party.
- In Algeria, he became a prominent member of the PPA's successor organization Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD), and continued into the Front de libération nationale (FLN), a guerrilla movement fighting for independence from French colonial rule.
- He was elected member of the GPRA, the FLN's exile government, as minister for Maghreb affairs in 1958; in 1961, he became minister of social and cultural affairs.
- After Algeria's independence in 1962, he briefly left politics, but gradually gained influence after the 1965 military coup d'état by col.
- Houari Boumédiène.
- In 1979, soon after Boumédiène's death, he was made member of the FLN's central committee and slowly rose in the ranks under president Chadli Bendjedid.
- After the 1988 October riots in Algeria, he succeeded hardliner Mohamed Cherif Messaâdia as FLN secretary-general. After the subsequent change to a multiparty system, and the 1992 military coup, he brought the FLN into the opposition, and supported the Sant'Egidio platform urging national reconciliation with the Islamist current and the FIS as a solution for the Algerian Civil War, in a clear challenge to the éradicateur military elite that influenced Algerian politics behind the scenes.
- Soon after, he was gradually ousted from the party's central committee, which thereafter returned to supporting the security establishment.
- He died, aged 85, in Algiers.
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