60 ans des accords d’Evian...
In France, 60 years ago, the government finally accepted to end the war on Algerians.
Until March 1962, France had lost most of its colonies in Asia and Africa, but still considered Algeria as its due property, despite its local population of 11,5 million indigenous people.
To this day, the largest narrative is that the war wasn’t justified, that Algerians were cruel to the French and took a land that belonged to the settlers. But these settlers had taken this land against people’s will, from 1830, in one of the most violent and longest conquest.
It’s a unique case of apology of colonialism.
I can’t imagine Britain today, crying in public over the loss of Ghana or Nigeria as a legitimate possessions. This idea that French Algeria was a tolerable political possibility is madness.
And it continues to foster neocolonialism.
*
It's hard for me to write about this, as my entire family was colonised, reduced to poverty, suffered immensely from violence before, during and after the war, but I was the first child to be born in France.
I did write this piece recently though, - for Al Jazeera English last October:
'60 years on, France must face its colonial past'
Extracts:
"In France, where I was born to Algerian parents a few decades later, the Algerian war was for a long time designated with the understatement “les événements” or “the events of Algeria”. It was, however, one of the most important decolonisation wars; a complex conflict characterised by guerrilla warfare and the use of torture by the French authorities that lasted almost eight years and resulted in between 1 million and 1.5 million deaths."
"Most of modern-day Algeria then belonged not only to the French Empire in Africa but to France itself, as proper départements or counties and with Paris as its capital. Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France had only a few months earlier completed the liquidation of France’s empire in Indochina, but he declared in the National Assembly: “The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French. … Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession.” Previous French governments had already ordered the massacres of Muslim Indigenous protesters in Algeria in Sétif in 1945, and Mendès’s France was ready to do it again."
"Several decades later, Algerians living in France – both bi-nationals and second-generation immigrants – feel that we do not exist in this country where right-wing rhetoric and Islamophobia are dominant and those with multiple heritage are required to renounce their other culture in order to be considered French."
*
I’ve also discussed this with the American radio NPR:
And more recently in the brilliant Discriminology podcast. Episodes to come in April: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/discriminology/id1521770510
*
I'd like to write more... But it's not easy. And few newspapers / websites / media are covering the subject outside of France, where the narrative is still to not recognise the horror of colonialism but to try to understand "all sides".
As I wrote in October, "at this stage, what I wish for is not ceremonies or even a plan for reparations. The ongoing discrimination and racism against North Africans, the recent decision to reduce the number of visas for people coming from the former colonies, the cases of police brutality resulting in the deaths of people of colour, and the constant discourse feeding Islamophobia show that what we need is a major anti-fascist movement. A few voices have emerged to denounce these developments; they must be amplified not silenced."
