Algeria has renewed its demands for reparations from France after formally declaring 132 years of its historic colonial rule as criminal, adding further tension to the execrable relationship between the two countries.
The French government reacted with anger to the Algerian parliament unanimously voting for a bill that says France is legally “responsible for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused”, and demands a formal apology.
The law lists French “crimes of state” committed in its presence in the country from 1830 to 1962, including hundreds of thousands of dead in the bloody 1954-62 war for independence, nuclear weapons tests, extrajudicial killings, “physical and psychological torture” and the “systematic plundering of resources”.
The law carries no legal weight outside Algeria, but France has condemned it as a “manifestly hostile initiative” at a time that Paris is seeking to mend fences with its former colony, whose political system has been controlled by an opaque military-political elite since President de Gaulle ended French rule there.
Charles de Gaulle in June 1958 during a march for a French Algeria
MAURICE ZALEWSKI/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES
De Gaulle touring the colony in December 1960
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Relations between Paris and Algeria have been fraught in the decades since independence, and they worsened last year when President Macron switched from France’s neutral position and recognised Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara. Relations were also strained by the imprisonment in Algeria of Boualem Sansal, a respected Franco-Algerian writer, for a year until his release to France last month.
At the start of his presidency in 2017, Macron sought rapprochement with Algiers, initiating a series of “memorial gestures” over France’s harsh occupation of the north African territory. He acknowledged that some French actions in the colonial period amounted to a “crime against humanity,” but he has refused Algeria’s demands for formal repentance and reparations.
Xavier Driencourt, a former French ambassador to Algeria, said France should not bow to ever-increasing demands from the Algerian regime. “In France, we have always set a limit by saying: recognition of the misdeeds of colonisation, yes; but repentance, no. Therefore, we are not going to enter into this debate over apologies,” he said.
Xavier Driencourt
ABACA PRESS/ALAMY
Driencourt is among French experts on Algeria urging the government to exert pressure by reducing immigration privileges enjoyed by Algerian citizens, granted in 1968 at a time when France wanted to attract Algerian workers during a labour shortage.
France’s conservative and populist right is urging Macron and the minority government to take a much tougher line towards the Algiers government and parliament, which they regard as undemocratic.
Max Brisson, a senator with the conservative Republicans party, said: “The Algerian regime may pronounce as many condemnations as it wishes but that will not erase history. That history has both its dark and its lighter chapters … this is a law from a parliament that lacks democratic legitimacy.”