French president Emmanuel Macron will establish a “memories and truth” commission to address the history of France’s colonial past in Algeria, but has stopped short of issuing an official apology, reports the Financial Times.
The commission was a central recommendation of a report presented to Mr Macron last week that marks another attempt to try to come to terms with one of the most sensitive periods of French history.
Torture, disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths scarred the eight-year war that saw the establishment of the French Fifth Republic and led to Algeria’s independence in 1962.
It remains a deeply divisive subject on both sides of the Mediterranean. France is home to millions of people with links to Algeria — including descendants of former French colonists and a large Muslim population — many of whom find themselves caught between competing identities. In Algeria, meanwhile, rebukes to Paris are a way for a regime rooted in the independence movement to shore up its legitimacy.
“I am surprised every time I see that young Algerians . . . hate France more than my parents, who lived through the suffering of colonisation,” said Kamel Daoud, an author and journalist living in Oran.
The report aimed at a “reconciliation of memories” between Algeria and France was written by historian Benjamin Stora, the child of a Jewish family that fled Algeria at independence.