Dyears The world from Thursday March 18, 2021, I read an article on a double page titled “Algerian War: the taboo of rapes” (committed by some French soldiers). We discover these unworthy behaviors, these inhuman acts committed by men belonging to the army of a republican country carrying high human values. It is unacceptable, intolerable, as were also a number of aspects of French colonization.
The historical reality of this period is, however, more complex. A new generation of anti-colonialists has arisen, leading the fight to denounce this capital fault that we must all expiate: our colonial past and its procession of crimes. It is a version of history written in black and white: on the one hand the “good guys” (the FLN, the ALN, the partisans of independence and their supporters); on the other, the “wicked” (the pieds-noirs, the French army).
We are placed in a form of very simplifying memory Manichaeism. Of course, it is not a question of justifying one violence over another. But to recognize that the historical truth (if it exists in a definitive and sure way…) is difficult, complex, has gray areas.
Because the terrorism of the FLN, this hard and extremist branch of the Algerian independence movement, was very murderous. It manifests itself in 1945, then by the assassinations of All Saints’ Day red, on November 1, 1954 (including this young teacher who joined his post in the Aurès), massacres in Constantinois in 1955 (Europeans and Algerians pro-French), massacres of ‘Oran in July 1962, two days after independence (a hundred killed among the Pieds-Noirs). Terrorism directed indiscriminately, including on metropolitan territory, against the entire European population or its supporters in the Algerian population: rape, torture, mutilation of captured French soldiers, families of murdered settlers, etc.
When are these facts mentioned in the national press, on the radio, on television? Never. Is it also a taboo? Repentance is one way. Algerians shun the Stora report. The Algerian government is asking France for an apology. The duty of memory is essential to restore all the facts, by comparing testimonies and historical research.
It is not acceptable to denounce the crimes committed by the French army without denouncing those committed by Algerian nationalists (before the war, during the war, after the war). This duty of remembrance cannot be a one-way street. So I’m waiting to be able to read in The world a page on the violence and atrocities committed by some of the Algerian nationalists during this dark period.
Michel Lécuyer, Mont-Saint-Vincent (Saône-et-Loire)