One of the many open wounds remaining from the bloody 1954-1962 Algerian war of independence is the miserable fate of the “Harkis”, a paramilitary force of Algerians who fought alongside, and under the orders of, the French army against the armed pro-independence movement led by the National Liberation Front (FLN).
The North African country, which became a French colony from 1830, finally gained independence in July 1962, following a negotiated ceasefire signed between France and the FLN in the French town of Évian-les-Bains and since known as the Évian Accords.
Regarded as traitors by the FLN, tens of thousands of Harkis, who numbered around 200,000, were subjected to imprisonment, torture and execution. Between 1962 and 1965, about 90,000 of the auxiliaries and their family members managed to flee to France, where more than half of them were kept for decades in camps in dire conditions, abandoned by successive governments to a life of social exclusion.
On Monday, 59 years after the Évian Accords, French President Emmanuel Macron, at an official reception at the Elysée Palace attended by some 300 people, mostly from associations representing the Harki community in France, asked for “pardon” for their treatment, what he called “a terrible fate”.
“To the abandoned combatants, to the families who suffered the camps, prison, denial, I ask for pardon, we will not forget,” he said. France had offered them “not asylum but a yoke, not hospitality but hostility”. He asked pardon for “the bars and the barbed wire, the curfews, rationing, the cold, hunger, living on top of one another, illnesses, exclusion, the arbitrary and racism”, all of which, he said, were meted out to them “in contempt of all the founding values of France, in contempt of the law, in contempt of all justice”. Pardon, also, for the barring of their children from “the school gates, in contempt of their future”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Macron, 43, who is the first French president to have been born after the Algerian war, announced imminent measures for “reparation”, adding that the moment had arrived to “take a new step” for “the recognition of the dereliction” of the French state’s duties towards the Harkis.
During the ceremony, some interrupted Macron’s speech, their feelings of anger, pain and frustration overspilling. One woman cried out “We have no past, my heart is wounded […] we’re like beggars”, adding that she constantly thinks of “those who have died, who committed suicide”.
“There is no word that will repair your hurt and what you have endured,” said Macron.
For the past 20 years, successive French presidents have paid lip service to the suffering of the Harkis. In 2001, on the occasion of the first yearly official day of homage to the Harkis, held every September 25th since, the then president Jacques Chirac spoke of his regret that France had not “saved its children”. In 2012, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy recognised that France had not given protection to the auxiliaries, and in 2016, then socialist president François Hollande spoke of “the responsibilities of French governments in the abandoning of the Harkis, the massacres of those who remained in Algeria and the inhuman conditions of the reception of families transferred to camps in France ”.
After so much hand-wringing, Macron this week announced concrete action when he promised to introduce draft legislation “before the end of the year” to lay the terms for “recognition and reparation”, as demanded for decades by associations representing the Harki community. The draft legislation, which Macron promised would be submitted before Parliament before next February, will notably propose the creation of a national commission tasked with collecting and evaluating requests for compensation from the former French army auxiliaries and their descendants.
Under the auspices of France’s national office for army veterans and war victims, the commission is to address both the first generation – the veterans of the Algerian war and their widows – and the second generation who endured assignment to camps, forestry hamlets (rural camps where Harki families were used for work maintaining national forests), and hostels. Under the scheme, the commission is also to at last ensure equal schooling rights for the generation of grandchildren.
Speaking to news agency AFP, Dalila Kerchouche, a journalist who is the daughter of a Harki who fought in the Algerian war, said the announcement was “a historic step”, adding that “for the first time, a president has understood the gravity” of the fate of the Harkis, who she said were “betrayed by the French state”.
Presented by Macron’s staff as the latest step in his programme of a memorial review of France’s recent history, the move comes eight months after historian Benjamin Stora, regarded as an authority on the Algerian war, submitted a report, commissioned by Macron, on the colonisation of Algeria and the independence war on the colonisation of Algeria and the independence war, with recommendations for how France should come to terms with the still bitterly divisive subject .
The contents of that report infuriated many Harkis. An association of wives and children of the former auxiliaries notably denounced one of Stora’s principal recommendations, which was that the remains of the late feminist, anti-colonialist and lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who acted as a legal representative for Algerian independence militants, should be transferred to the Paris Panthéon monument, an honour reserved for the heroes and heroines of French history. Macron’s office says he is still undecided about Stora’s proposal, adding that the idea is still an open possibility “which the president is working on”.
Little more than seven months before France’s presidential election next year, some among opposition parties in France have described Macron’s move to compensate the Harki community as being merely an electoral ploy – he is widely tipped as likely to seek re-election, although he has not officially announced his bid. The former French army auxiliaries and their families have long been the target of political courting, especially by the far-right and mainstream Right.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National party (the former Front National), posted a message on Twitter mocking “the electoral generosity of Emmanuel Macron”, and denouncing “the outrage committed by the president towards these combatants for France [who were] accused in 2017, along with others, of [a] ‘crime against humanity’”. Le Pen was referring to comments made by Macron in February 2017, on a visit to Algeria during his presidential election campaign, when he described French colonisation of Algeria as a “crime against humanity” which was marked by “true barbarity”.
Among conservatives, Senator Bruno Retailleau, member of the Républicains party, welcomed Macron’s proposed legislation in a post on Twitter, but attacked what he called “the electoral ulterior motive” behind it. Retailleau’s conservative colleague, Senator Valérie Boyer, commented that it was “a pity that it was necessary to wait that he [Macron] was an undeclared candidate for the presidential election to see propositions that were however rejected these past years when they came from the Right”.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse
-------------------------