Algeria Remains a French Wound Despite Rapprochement

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

French President Emmanuel Macron visited Algeria Aug. 25-27. He laid a wreath at a monument for Algerians killed in the struggle for independence before a meeting with Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.

Macron expressed the hope that France and Algeria would be able to “look back at the past with humility” in order to establish trust and cooperation. “We have a complex, painful common past. And it has at times prevented us from looking at the future,” Macron said at a joint press conference alongside Tebboune.

The Algerian leader declared the visit a “rapprochement which would not have been possible without the personality of President Macron himself.”

France is struggling economically in Algeria, where it holds 10 per cent of market share and has now been overtaken by China as the country’s leading supplier. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Algeria, which is Africa’s biggest gas exporter, with direct pipelines to Spain and Italy, has become a highly coveted partner for Europeans anxious to reduce their dependence on Russian gas.

Meanwhile, Algiers is seeking to capitalise on higher energy prices to lock in European investment.

Macron has broken the long-time taboo surrounding discussion of the war. He called colonization “a crime against humanity” while visiting Algiers Feb.15, 2017.  “The Algerian War is today absent from our political memory and the subject of a conflict of memories like the Holocaust was,” he stated on Jan. 25, 2020.

This has been complicated by the adamant refusal of successive French governments before his to apologise for their country’s bloody past in Algeria. Until 1999 France did not even officially recognise the Algerian War as a full-scale war, but as an issue of “law and order.”

The brutal Algerian war, lasting from 1954 to 1962, is a wound from which France, six decades later, has still not completely healed. The North African region was colonized by France beginning in 1830 and was considered a sovereign part of France.

The brutal struggle so destabilized French politics in the 1950s that it led to the fall of the Fourth Republic and the creation of Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic; it also gave rise to the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Across the Mediterranean, the conflict gave birth to an independent Algeria, once lionized by the French and international Left as a revolutionary icon. The anti-colonial struggle led by Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) became the cornerstone of the new state.

Inscribed in the 1963 constitution as a “war of one and a half million martyrs,” this sacrosanct status became an anti-colonial hyper-memory, one where the fallen are a constant presence, from monuments to street names, soccer stadiums and airports.

Most Muslims Algerians were at the time impoverished. In 1954, 25 per cent of land was owned by two percent of the agricultural population. At the same time, ninety per cent of wealth was held by 10 per cent, few of whom were Algerian Muslims.

Through terrorism the FLN aimed to bring the plight of Algeria to the attention of the world, and in 1956 this campaign spread to the colonial capital, Algiers. Confronted with spiraling violence the French government gave its paratroopers a free hand to restore law and order.

What followed were summary executions, the raping of women prisoners, the dropping of bodies from helicopters. Le Pen, a paratroop officer during the Battle of Algiers, was himself later accused of torture.

The terror even extended to mainland France. On Oct. 17, 1961, the French National Police attacked a demonstration by 30,000 pro-FLN Algerians in Paris. Between 200 and 300 Algerians died, due to police beatings as well as mass drownings, as police officers threw demonstrators into the river Seine.

The French government covered it up. Only in 1998 did it finally acknowledge what happened. On the 60^th anniversary of the Paris massacre, Macron laid a wreath for the victims and said it had been inexcusable.

It was difficult for France to disengage from Algeria, due to the long colonial history and physical proximity. As well, in 1960 there were 1,050,000 non-Muslim civilians in Algeria, 10 per cent of the population.

These colons or pieds-noirs were vehemently opposed to a sovereign Algeria, and formed their own death squads, the Secret Army Organization (OAS). They even tried to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, after he had agreed to grant independence to Algeria.

Virtually all of them left after 1962, mainly settling in the south of France, and many joined the nascent National Front (now National Rally) when it was formed 10 years later.

The human cost of the war remains unknown. Some estimates put French military losses at 27,000 killed and civilian losses at 5,000 to 6,000. French sources suggest that casualties among Algerians totaled between 300,000 and 500,000, while Algerians claim as many as 1,500,000.

The history of Algeria’s long battle for liberation constitutes a contested terrain that is fought over in Algeria and France even now. On both sides of the Mediterranean histories of this struggle have been the subject of heated debates and tensions.

But today Algeria is just another North African autocracy. In fact it already was when I visited the country in 1978. Along with the waning of revolutionary ardor, the passage of time has diminished the animosity towards France.