French colonization in Algeria considered as a “state crime” on the other side of the Mediterranean. The Algerian Parliament, which adopted a bill to this effect on Wednesday, will now demand “official apology” to France, as well as compensation. The text, of which AFP obtained a copy, sends to the French State “the legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused”. Requests that have little chance of succeeding…
If in Algiers, the emotion aroused by this vote is great, legally, this law has no international scope and cannot therefore oblige France to do anything. Asked last week about its possible adoption, the spokesperson for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pascal Confavreux, was careful not to make any comments, “regarding political debates taking place in foreign countries”. Symbolically, however, a new step has been taken in the war of memory in which the two countries are engaged.
The question of French colonization in Algeria remains one of the main sources of tension between Paris and Algiers. The conquest of Algeria, from 1830, was marked by massive killings and the destruction of its socio-economic structures as well as large-scale deportations according to historians. Numerous revolts were suppressed before a bloody war of independence (1954-1962) which left 1.5 million Algerians dead according to Algeria, 500,000 including 400,000 Algerians according to French historians.
An electrical context
The bill states in particular that“complete and fair compensation for all material and moral damage caused by French colonization is an inalienable right for the Algerian State and people”. According to the text, the Algerian state will also seek to demand that France decontaminate the nuclear test sites. Between 1960 and 1966, France carried out 17 nuclear tests on several sites in the Algerian Sahara. The text also calls for the restitution of all property transferred outside Algeria, including the national archives. Finally, it provides for prison sentences and a ban on civil and political rights for any person “promoting” colonization or denying that it is a crime.
In January 2021, Emmanuel Macron committed to “symbolic acts” to try to reconcile the two countries, after the publication of a report by the French historian Benjamin Stora. The president, however, had ruled out an “apology”, demanded today by the regime of Abdelmadjid Tebboune in the midst of a diplomatic crisis. Since the recognition in the summer of 2024 by France of an autonomy plan “under Moroccan sovereignty” for Western Sahara, relations between the two countries have continued to worsen. Between the incarceration of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, finally pardoned thanks to a German intervention, the almost systematic refusal of Algiers to take back its nationals expelled from French territory, the recent conviction of the journalist Christophe Gleizes, and this new law, reconciliation is clearly not for this year.
