Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: El Harrouch, Skikda Province, Algeria
About Mohamed Harbi
- Mohamed Harbi (born 1933) is an Algerian historian who was a member of the 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 FLN.
- According to his later memoirs, Harbi lived underground in France and gathered support for the Algerian independence.
- 1954-1962 he was in a prominent position in the FLN. After the Algerian War of Independence, he became an advisor to new president, Ahmed Ben Bella and later a member of his cabinet.
- 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. In June 1965 Houari Boumedienne seized power and arrested Ben Bella.
- Two months later Harbi was also imprisoned.
- For the next six years he was transferred between prisons 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 the one 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.
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