Sixty years of the Evian agreements: seen from Algeria, “the farewell to weapons and tears”


Algerian War (1954-1962), a historic conflictcase

If the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Algerian war gives rise in France to a multitude of commemorations and publications, the date is less mentioned on the other side of the Mediterranean.

Sixty years after the end of the Algerian war, the silences still weigh. While in France, the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Evian Accords, on March 18, 1962, gives rise to a myriad of official commemorations and publications, the date is little celebrated in Algeria. On this side of the Mediterranean, it is more “Red All Saints”, the day of the declaration of November 1, 1954, which is retained. That day, the National Liberation Front (FLN) committed a series of attacks and called for an insurrection by the Algerian people.

Thursday, during a ceremony organized by the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s adviser in charge of archives and memory, Abdelmadjid Chikhi, affirmed that the Evian agreements are a “a response to all the principles and objectives set by the proclamation of November 1, 1954, namely the recovery of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and the unity of the Algerian people”.

“ignoble colonial war”

In France, the agreements of March 18, 1962 mark the end of a war which will have lasted eight years. For Algeria, they mean independence, hope for change and a wind of freedom. Above all, they sign the end of 130 years of French presence, the “end of a nightmare”of a “despicable colonial war”writes Youcef Dris in the Oran Daily. “Despite the tragedies caused by warmongers and scorched earth enthusiasts, the Evian Accords were welcomed in Algeria as in France by a whole generation as a deliverance, a hope, the end of a dirty war that didn’t even dare to say its name”underlines the Algerian writer.

The daily Expression retraces the negotiations between the FLN and “the French colonial administration” started in 1956. After the “liberating fight” independence activists, “process” of decolonization aimed to make heard “the voice of a people in arms and who suffer from the pangs of a long colonization of settlement and made of massacres and smoking of the most inhuman”, relates the journalist Hocine Neffah. The end of the “war of national liberation”he notes again, signed “farewell to arms and tears”.

Sixty years after the end of the war, Algeria also pays tribute to its mujahideen, the fighters of the Algerian national liberation movement. Expression thus honors the “Martyrs of March” : Larbi Ben M’hidi, the leader of the FLN in Algiers, whom General Paul Aussaresses will admit to having hanged in a colonist’s farm near Algiers, on the night of March 3 to 4, 1957; Mouloud Feraoun, a writer friend of Camus, assassinated by an OAS commando on March 15, 1962; or Mustapha Ben Boulaïd, one of the founders of the FLN and commander of the Aurès region at the start of the war. “Martyrs with virtues and feats of arms fallen on the field of honor”reports the daily.

“We are responsible for our failures”

In the Algerian press, voices also call for turning the page on a painful past and looking to the future. The editorial director of the major daily FreedomHassane Ouali, links in his editorial of March 17 the destiny of two personalities, symbol of “the intelligence and intellectual creation of fighting Algeria” : Mouloud Feraoun and Jean Amrouche. A Kabyle and Christian writer, a man of letters opposed to colonization and an activist for the independence of Algeria, Amrouche remains a little-known figure in Algeria – a “unknown”said the writer Kateb Yacine.

According to the editor of Freedom, “the ideological and cultural construction of independent Algeria was done by throwing into oblivion” these two personalities. “If we must indeed remind France of what colonial barbarism wascontinues Hassane Ouali, we must also and above all look at what we ourselves have inflicted on those who have fertilized this land. We are responsible for our failures. And it is up to us to be responsible for our successes in inventing.”

Sixty years after the end of the war, many Algerians denounce a paralyzed political system accused of having confiscated independence for its own benefit. And maintained, to use the words of Emmanuel Macron, a “memorial rent”. Since 2019, Algerian power has been challenged in the streets, through the Hirak movement. In the Daily newspaper of Oran, Youcef Dris also calls for not making the Algerian war a “Commercial property”. “We must tell young people – the same age as those who made the revolution – to invent a new revolution.”



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