Khaled Melhaa (1955-2019)
Birthplace:
Mostaganem, Algéria
Born:
January 25, 1955
Died:
September 4, 2019
Khaled Melhaa, born in 1955 in Mostaganem in Algeria, is a journalist, documentarian, activist for numerous causes, he participated in the launch of Radio Beur in 1982. In the 1980s, Khaled was one of those young people still raised with the idea of “returning” to the country. However, he became directly involved in French political life, becoming a Trotskyist activist, of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), then of the Internationalist Communist Organization (OCI), which he left in 1985. He moved forward with a politicized guard alongside the Maghrebi political movements in France, in the struggles of the Sonacotra homes or in the committees in favor of a Palestinian state. The “children of immigration”, as they were called then, fight on the front of anti-racism, against the murders of adolescents in the cities and for equal civil rights. Khaled was one of those who wanted to honor their fathers by raising their heads, by committing themselves with passion. Among his countless commitments: the march for equality in 1983 and 1984; the entertainment at Radio Beur (now Beur FM), which he helped to found with Mouloud Challa and Nacer Kettane, in 1982; the meetings in Paris for the defense of political prisoners in Algeria or the fight for women's rights against the family code; the alerts launched around the death of Malik Oussekine in 1986; political meetings against the reform of the nationality code or attacks on immigrants' rights in the creation of the first detention centers in 1985-1988; and the demands for justice, for the truth for the massacres of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961, with the association In the Name of Memory, which he co-founded with Mehdi Lallaoui, Samia Messaoudi... Khaled Melhaa, who never renounced his convictions for a free and democratic society, in France and in Algeria, the country where he was born, then worked as a journalist, making several documentaries for the ARTE or Canal + channels in the 2000s. Suffering from Alzheimer's, he disappeared on July 31, 2019, his body was found five weeks later, 4 km from the place of his disappearance in the middle of an isolated field in Isère, on September 4, 2019.