Ali Haroun

Mohamed Ali Haroun was born on 8 February 1927 in Bir Mourad Raïs, in what was then French Algeria, close to Algiers. He completed his primary and secondary education in Algiers and then went to France for higher education. He took a licence in law at the University of Paris (later Panthéon-Sorbonne), obtained the professional certificate required to practise as a lawyer, and went on to a state doctorate in law.

Haroun joined the National Liberation Front at the outbreak of the war of independence in November 1954. According to his biographers, Mohamed Boudiaf asked him to support Abane Ramdane in launching the clandestine newspaper Résistance algérienne, which later became El Moudjahid.

He travelled to France at the end of 1957 and in 1958 became a member of the federal committee of the FLN's Federation of France, the organisation that directed the movement among the several hundred thousand Algerians living in France. He was responsible for its political and information work and for organising the collection of contributions from Algerian workers. Reports of his death also noted his part in negotiations and diplomatic work aimed at internationalising the Algerian question, and in the defence of Algerian detainees and activists before French courts. He continued this work without being arrested until the end of the war. He sat on the National Council of the Algerian Revolution from 1960 to 1962.

After independence he was elected a deputy for Algiers to the Constituent Assembly of 1962 to 1963. He was among the deputies who called for a vote against Ahmed Ben Bella's draft constitution, and the stand led him to leave political life. From 1963 he practised as a lawyer at the Algiers court and the Supreme Court, and appeared in a number of political trials in the 1960s and 1970s.

When political pluralism arrived in 1989 he helped found the Algerian League of Human Rights. On 18 June 1991 he was appointed minister delegate for human rights in the government of Sid Ahmed Ghozali. After the Islamic Salvation Front won the first round of the December 1991 legislative elections, the army leadership halted the electoral process in January 1992 and President Chadli Bendjedid resigned. Haroun supported the interruption. With his colleague Aboubakr Belkaïd he proposed to General Khaled Nezzar that Mohamed Boudiaf, a historic leader of the revolution who had lived in exile in Morocco since the 1960s, be brought back to lead the country, and he went to see Boudiaf in Kenitra. He then served as a member of the five-member High Council of State from 14 January 1992 to 30 January 1994, alongside Boudiaf, Ali Kafi, Khaled Nezzar and Tedjini Haddam, and later Redha Malek. Boudiaf was assassinated in Annaba in June 1992.

In 1995 Haroun co-founded the National Republican Alliance with Redha Malek, a party that campaigned for democracy and secularism. He was also a historian of the struggle he had lived through. His books include La 7e wilaya: la guerre du FLN en France 1954 to 1962 (Seuil, 1986), L'été de la discorde (2000), L'éclaircie (2011), Le rempart (2014), on the suspension of the 1992 elections, and Le second front (2021), a collection of writings and documents of the Federation of France.

Haroun kept his private life largely out of public view. In later years he gave interviews as a witness to history, including a 2013 account for the Algeria Press Service of the 17 October 1961 demonstrations in Paris, which the Federation of France had organised. He spoke openly of the weight he felt after Boudiaf's assassination, telling Le Soir d'Algérie that he felt in some way responsible for the death, since he had visited Boudiaf to discuss his return, and that for days he lost sleep asking himself whether he had done the right thing.

Ali Haroun died on Saturday 24 October 2026, aged 99. His death was reported that day by Algerian public television and by outlets including El Khabar, TSA and Echorouk. The place and cause of death were not made public in the first reports.

The minister of moudjahidine and rights holders, Abdelmalek Tacherift, offered his condolences to Haroun's family, to his comrades in the struggle and to the wider revolutionary family. TSA noted that he was the last surviving member of the High Council of State. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Haroun was remembered as a key witness to two turning points in Algerian history: the war of liberation, and the halting of the electoral process and the resignation of President Chadli in 1992. His role in that decision remained a subject of debate in Algeria, and he defended it to the end in his book Le rempart. His history of the Federation of France, La 7e wilaya, drew on his own experience and on the organisation's records, and remains a reference for historians of the war of independence in France.