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Algeria: minister demands French own up to ‘crimes’

Algerians want "frank acknowledgement" of crimes committed against them during the French colonization of the country, a minister said on Tuesday, ahead of the 58th anniversary of the war for independence.

Published: 30 October 2012 17:48 CET

"In view of the crimes committed by this colonizer against a defenceless people… the Algerians want frank acknowledgement (of them)," Mohamed Cherif Abbas, minister of the mujahedeen (veterans of the war), told news agency APS.

Cherif spoke after French President Francois Hollande recognized earlier this month the "bloody repression" of Algerian protesters by police in Paris in October 1961, which historians killed dozens, possibly hundreds.

At the call of Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN), which was fighting for independence, between 20,000 and 30,000 men, women and children from Algeria protested in Paris against a police curfew.

Ordered to halt the demonstration, police waded into the crowd in a hail of blows and bodies were thrown into the river.

The official toll was given as three dead, including two Algerians, but historians have said that between 50 and 200 people were killed.

"The recognition of the October 17, 1961 massacre is primarily political, given the manner in which it was carried out," Cherif said, two days before the anniversary of the war, which started November 1 1954.

Hollande is set to visit Algeria in December and hopes to improve relations between the two countries and achieve a "strategic partnership," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has said.

The FLN won independence for the north African country in July 1962.

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France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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