The Algerian war ended in 1962. It was a conflict in which France used all the means at its disposal to retain the last bastion of its empire, even committing, as Macron punctually called, ‘crimes against humanity’. Today, there are still many wounds to heal.
“Memory has its own language, texture, archeology, and limitations. It can also be adulterated and stolen (…) It is up to us to rescue it and prevent it from becoming something cheap, trivial and sterile”. Elie Wiesel, memoirs (nineteen ninety six).
In 2006, speaking on behalf of his party, François Hollande, then the Socialist candidate for president, acknowledged that the French Section of the Workers’ International, the predecessor of the French Socialist Party, “lost its soul” in the Algerian war. “He had his justifications, but we still owe the Algerian people an apology,” he said. In 1956, it was a socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, who launched a “pacification” campaign against the guerrillas of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN).
Until 1999, France considered the Algerian War –or the Algerian War of Independence– (1954-1962) a mere “police operation” despite the fact that it was its biggest war since World War II, the ferocious repression and its innumerable atrocities. The time that has elapsed has only given greater relevance to Algerian independence in the history of the second half of the 20th century and the decolonization process.
A century ago, Algeria was the cornerstone of the French empire, as central to its existence as India was to the British. At the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Algeria took on an unusual role, being a country devastated by the passage through its territory of the Allied and Axis armies and whose colonial authorities remained loyal to the collaborationist Vichy regime.
French historians estimate that the war claimed half a million lives, 400,000 of them Algerian Muslims, civilians, and combatants. According to the official Algerian version, the victims exceeded 1.5 million during the war and a total of 5.6 million since 1830, when France invaded what until then was an Ottoman domain.
Sixty years after the end of the war, its consequences continue to weigh on both shores of the Mediterranean. It is not weird. Algeria was one of the last Arab countries to gain independence and the one that suffered the most to achieve it.
unhealed wounds
Some seven million residents of the Hexagon are linked to that history: the so-called pied noirs (blackfeet), former settlers and their families, ex-soldiers and harkis, Muslims who fought for France, about 150,000. The new authorities in Algiers showed no contemplations. Those who were tried, convicted and executed were lucky. Others, perhaps more than 100,000, died in acts of revenge committed by squads of ex-combatants.
Samia Lokmane, Paris correspondent for the Algerian daily I releasedremember that the rapes –of women and men, who were sodomized with bottles– became systematic since 1956. A trop long silencea recent comic and animated short film by the world Y La Revue Dessineeportrays the life of Louisette Ighilahriz, who at the age of 20 was tortured and raped by the French military who captured her in 1957. She saved her life through the intervention of a military doctor who ordered her to be transferred in extremis to a hospital.
France broke away from Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 because they were protectorates. In Algeria she used all means and force at her disposal to hold back the last bastion of her dying empire. In 1947, Paris made Algeria a department and therefore a sovereign French territory.
The war became inevitable. In the wretched of the earth (1961), which Jean-Paul Sartre prefaced, Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist who joined the FLN, denounced the “absolute racism” of French imperialism and justified revolutionary violence as a form of mass redemption. Algerians celebrate the anniversaries of the beginning and end of the war every year with festive marches, the only event that brings together almost everyone.
“France broke away from Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 because they were protectorates. In Algeria she used all means and force at her disposal to hold back the last bastion of her dying empire.”
Some wounds have begun to heal. During his term, Nicolas Sarkozy authorized the delivery to Algeria of a map with the location of 11 million French mines. In December 2012, at his visit to Algiers, Hollande acknowledged that Algeria was subjected to an “unfair and brutal” system, although he did not apologize. “It’s better to tell the truth,” he said.
On his last visit to Algeria in August, two months after the 60th anniversary of independence, Emmanuel Macron, the first French president born after it, expressed hope that one day both countries could look at their “complex and painful” past with “humility”, aware that their respective historical memories may be irreconcilable.
As a 2017 candidate in Algiers, Macron called French colonialism a “crime against humanity,” a phrase he later vowed never to use again. In 2021, however, he questioned whether Algeria was a nation before 1830 and accused his government of fanning “hatred of France.” Algiers withdrew its ambassador and prohibited the overflight of French military planes in its airspace.
‘Pas de deux’
In this minefield, Macron has shown himself to be a virtuoso of the diplomatic ballet. In dance, a pass de deux consists of several steps: entrée, adagio, allegro and coda. In Algiers, he executed a grand pas de deux, by announcing the creation of a commission of French and Algerian historians who will have unrestricted access to the archives of the colonial period. In May 2021, he had already created the Memory and Truth commission chaired by the Franco-Algerian Sephardic historian Benjamin Stora.
In March 2021, at the Élysée, Macron admitted to his descendants that Ali Boumendjel, an Algerian nationalist lawyer, did not commit suicide in 1957 after his arrest, but was tortured and killed in a French military barracks. France, he told them, has not yet resolved the traumas of its colonial past. But although remembering is difficult, forgetting is impossible.
Paris has reasons to want to look forward. Algeria is the world’s tenth largest producer of natural gas and sends 80% of its exports to Europe. Its role is key in Libya and the Sahel, which explains the persistent courtship of Beijing and Moscow, dangerous friendships from which Macron wants to distance Algeria, one of the 10 countries that spend the most on defense: 5.6% of GDP, compared to 4.2% in Morocco. Russia is its main arms supplier.
Speaking to a group of Algerian and African students in Algiers, Macron denounced propaganda portraying France as the enemy and the “neocolonial” ambitions of Turkey, China and Russia in Africa. After signing various agreements on energy, medical and sports matters with Macron, the Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, praised his “personal” efforts to bring his countries closer together.
Transmission of silence in an outdated world
According to the Franco-Algerian novelist Faïza Guène, from now on a lot depends on not continuing the “transmission of silence”, including the one that surrounds Algeria today. Income from hydrocarbons will increase this year by 45%, but so will the prices of food and medicine in a country that imports almost everything. In 2019, the hirak –a peaceful, popular and spontaneous movement– led protests that forced the fall of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika after 20 years in power and when he was trying to perpetuate himself.
But what the Algerians call Le pouvoir – the de facto one-party regime heir to the FLN – remains largely intact. The opposition boycotted last year’s legislatures. The protests, however, changed a few things. Two former prime ministers and several former governors are in jail. A former president of Sonatrach, the powerful state hydrocarbons company, is on trial.
In Algeria: France’s undeclared war (2011), Martin Evans writes that the perspective of time makes it even more difficult to understand “French Algeria” amid the unstoppable anti-colonialist tide of the postwar period. Once the violence broke out, the governments in Paris never had a chance to win over the Algerians or the pied noirswho ended up supporting the coup military of the Secret Army Organization because, among other things, they believed that only the Mediterranean separated them from France.
The reality was far from that fiction. Arabs and Berbers had no civil or political rights. The military experience of the Algerian soldiers in the imperial army and then in the Free French army changed everything, creating in them a national self-awareness. In 1919, the Paris peace conference showed that self-determination wilsonian it was reserved only for white European peoples, refusing to recognize racial equality in the statutes of the League of Nations that Tokyo demanded, something that Japanese nationalists never forgot.
rat hunting
On May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, a massive demonstration broke out in Sétif that was immediately and brutally suppressed, including aerial bombardments of nearby towns and “rat hunts”. In August 1955, following the murder of 123 French settlers in Constantine, French soldiers killed nearly 12,000 Muslims.
The repression fanned the flames of the fire. But only one side had legitimacy on their side. The FLN attended the 1955 Bandung Conference (Indonesia) as a special guest. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt provided him with weapons, military advice and diplomatic cover.
Despite the gulf that separated them on other issues, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed that the era of colonial empires was over. In the end, the French got tired of the war, of the racism of the pied noirs and the deaths of young people who were doing military service.
The solution came in the most unexpected way and from the hands: those of Charles de Gaulle, who, after ruling out military escalation, opted for peace negotiations, which crystallized in 1962 with the so-called Evián agreements.
France has avoided making a formal apology, among other things so as not to open legal loopholes to demands for compensation for the 17 nuclear tests that it carried out between 1960 and 1966 in the Sahara desert today in Algeria. The radioactive sequelae continue to affect the health of the area’s residents, who have a high incidence of cancer and birth defects. All information in the public domain is limited to an inventory of radioactive materials buried somewhere in the Sahara.
