"Cool and osom"

Malika Aikido

"The Ain El Beida cemetery in Oran is located in the Ain El Beida municipality, part of the Senia district of Oran. Due to the near depletion of burial plots and the exhaustion of the total area, the Oran provincial authorities were forced to relocate more than 200 families from the informal settlement known as "El Virage." This relocation was undertaken to reclaim land and annex it to the Ain El Beida cemetery, which is threatened with overcrowding. The governor of Oran himself acknowledged, "Within six months, we will not find a place to bury the dead of Oran municipality."

The relocation of families living in makeshift shacks in the informal settlement adjacent to the cemetery, known as "El Virage" (meaning "the bend" or "the curve"), due to its location on a winding road connecting the city of Oran to the village of Ain El Beida in the Senia municipality, has freed up land. The municipality is expected to begin preparing and enclosing this land with a wall to incorporate it into the existing cemetery.

Sources from the Oran Municipality's Funeral and Cemetery Management Department estimated the area of ​​reclaimed land at 14 hectares, but the department has yet to receive any official instructions to begin preparing and using it for burials.

Currently, the old cemetery has 7 hectares of empty space out of the total 130 hectares that comprise the Ain El Beida cemetery since its opening in April 1956 by the colonial authorities.

Based on the death rates recorded in the Oran municipality, estimated at 12 deaths per day in winter and 25 deaths per day in summer, it appears that filling the remaining 7 hectares will take approximately ten years.

As a reminder, the Ain El Beida cemetery was established by the French colonial authorities to bury Algerian soldiers killed in the French army during the early years of the War of Independence. The section dedicated to these victims still exists in the old part of the cemetery, and some of these victims are unknown, having been killed in various parts of the region. In the old city of Oran, there are several local cemeteries, such as the Moul Douma cemetery in the El Sanouber district, the Sidi Laghrib cemetery in Ras El Ain, and the El Melh cemetery in the Es Salam district, where residents of El Hamri bury their dead. There is also the Jewish cemetery in the new city and the Christian cemetery, "Tamchout," in the El Hamri district, to which the remains of Christian graves were transferred from cemeteries in other municipalities of Oran and neighboring cities in other provinces in the last two years.

The possibility of repurposing the overcrowded Muslim cemeteries to address the scarcity of land remains off the table for local authorities due to ethical considerations, given the symbolic importance of the graves to families and the difficulty of removing them. Regarding the 5-hectare section of the reclaimed Christian cemetery in the El Hamri district, which was cleared of remains from mass graves, authorities have yet to decide its fate due to its location within the urban area. This is despite a proposal to allocate a portion of the cemetery for the burial of Chinese workers, following 30 deaths recorded in various construction sites in Oran since the influx of Chinese labor into Algeria. Companies prefer to bury the Chinese workers in Oran cemeteries rather than repatriate their bodies to China, given the high cost of such an operation."

ناصر الدين الجزائري Naser Bakhti

"Cemetery is a place of reckoning; you must respect that place and our dead.
- Don't leave the plastic bottles inside you and the others dirty.
- Cemetery is a sacred place and must maintain peace and serenity.
- Cemetery is not a market; it is a place that must be respected for its true value.
- We must follow the teachings of our true religion and our noble Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace. Visiting the graves has its own etiquette and rules.
- Our cemeteries have turned into quasi-markets filled with heresies and superstitions. We must respect the place.
Visiting graves is pointless if it doesn't remind us to pray for and show mercy to our dead, and to reflect on the importance of striving to do good deeds for our afterlife.

My advice"

kh khalil