Her Royal Highness Karima Chami, known to the Algerian public media for five years as the granddaughter of Emir Abdelkader, who speaks on all occasions with her beautiful Levantine accent (she lived for a long time in Syria and Lebanon after being born in Algeria), collecting along the way honors for her rank, donations for hypothetical orphanage, promises of high positions and material benefits including a luxury apartment in Algeria, has just revealed pot aux roses live on YouTube.
She would only have a pretension of being a princess, supported by connections forged with members of the Algerian embassy in Washington from her Houston residence, her corruption of everything that could be corrupted, including a member of the Emir’s family based in London. , in addition to the complicity of the intelligence services despite the accusations of fraud launched by the Emir Abdelkader Foundation, while all the antennae of the state apparatus would see nothing but fire.
Enough to add a scandal for the neighboring regime to this Annus Horribilis!
The story of this usurping princess comes just as I was completing my investigation into the authentic prince whose hectic life, strangely unknown, resembles a soap opera composed of intrigue, espionage and secret agents.
His story is even more interesting for us, Moroccans, because of his disturbing positions, because of which he lost the battle against the troops of Mohamed ben Abdelkrim Khattabi.
This is Abdelmalek, the last son of Emir Abdelkader.
Trained in Damascus, his hometown, he was promoted within the Ottoman army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and the title of aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdülhamid II.
But, writes Pierre Bardin, “Disappointed in his ambitions, in 1900 he asked to be restored to French citizenship. In connection with the Young Turk party in Constantinople, he considered that his life was threatened, he fled to Egypt and from there he arrived in Tangier in 1902. We found him in Morocco with the agitator Bou Amama…”.
In 1903, he was admitted to Zaouia and to the sheikh’s staff headquarters in Figuig before joining the ranks of the rebel army of Jilali Zerhouni, alias Bouhmar, who appointed him leader of his cavalry.
Moving from an alliance to its opposite, Abdelmalek quickly appeared in the service of the French army as a colonel and wasted no time in serving French interests in Morocco after the conference in Algeciras, dedicated to the Moroccan question, then that the wishes of Europe were intensified in the context of colonial expansion and French – German diplomatic tensions.
In Article 3 of the Conference in Algeciras, it is prescribed that they will help the sultan in organizing the police, “Spanish officers and non-commissioned instructors, French officers and non-commissioned instructors, will be placed at his disposal by their respective governments, who will submit their appointment for the approval of His Highness the Sheriff.”
Abdelmalek was thus appointed commander of the police camps in Tangier.
“This position allowed the emir to realize some of his ambitions,” writes Algerian writer and historian Aboul-Kassem Saadallah, continuing, a few lines later, that Abdelmalek appears to have been “dissatisfied with the position he occupied, considering it lower than the rank which his pride demanded. The French, he told Harris, were constantly putting obstacles in the way of his ambitions..
But, as the famous proverb would say: “Whoever has only one door, let it be closed forever”!
The Germans were there, in constant contact, from their base in Tangier.
Abdelmalek even secretly warned them, with the outbreak of war in 1914, to expel the ministers of the Central Powers, giving them the opportunity to remove any damaging written traces.
Then, “yielding to their entreaties, writes Jean Sauly, he has agreed to withdraw to the mountains, to the eastern borders of Morocco, and his mission seems to be to cause a disturbance east of Taza that could break relations between Morocco and Algeria..
So here he was, leaving his Tabor camp in Tangier and declaring it, in December 1914, an enemy of France, calling for a general uprising and engaging in several battles after bringing his family to safety.
Living first in the regions of Taza and then Melilla, he mobilized several tribes, established contact with Moroccan leaders of the anti-colonial struggle, and continued ties with the man by the nickname “Lawrence of Morocco”German agent Barthels Hermann, alias Albert Barres.
Abdelmalek is also close to Mohamed ben Abdelkrim Khattabi, who collaborated with him since 1915 in the name of holy war, before the latter turned into open war by distance…
It must be said that, in his thirst for power, Abdelmalek, seeing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Germany from which he aspired for political-military support, now turned his gaze towards another occupying power, Spain, which seized his ambitions by providing him in Melilla with the means to organizing Harka.
Abdelmalek has just dealt a heavy blow to the so-called jihad and made a great enemy.
During one of his battles, armed by Spain, against the troops of Abdelkrim Khattabi, he was to die on August 7, 1924, killed near the camp of ‘Azib Midar by a bullet to the heart.
A Notable Panegyric: Excerpt from the Spanish Press, taken from an article published under the title “La Muerte del Cherif Abd-el-Malek” saluting his “a noble struggle for civilization and for the protection of the people”!