ALGIERS (Reuters) – Emmanuel Macron called on Friday to look “in the face” at the common history between Algeria and France, a former colonial power, stressing that he preferred “truth” and “recognition” to a choice between “pride and repentance”.
On the second day of a visit that he intends to turn “towards the future”, the 44-year-old French president stressed that he was not himself a “child of the Algerian war” (1954 -1962), whose sixtieth anniversary is being marked this year.
“I often hear that, on the question of memory and the Franco-Algerian question, we are constantly summoned to choose between pride and repentance. I want the truth and recognition. Otherwise, we will never move forward. I am not a child of the Algerian war. We say that we face this story with courage and lucidity. This is what I have been doing for five years, “said Emmanuel Macron, recently re-elected to the press, to the press. a second five-year term.
For the French president, whose remarks made in September 2021 on Algerian power and the “memorial rent” have strained bilateral relations, “this story cannot be based on lies, oversights and stories that we want to oppose to each other. Otherwise we construct the impossibility of a Franco-Algerian friendship.”
“This youth has never experienced war. It is a work of trust”, insisted the president, whose program includes the visit of a cemetery but also meetings with entrepreneurs and young Algerians, in Algiers and Oran.
“We made a commitment in good faith. I believe in the word of the president. For the first time we decided it together and our historians will move forward together”, he added in reference to his talks with his Algerian counterpart. Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
Wednesday evening in Algiers, Emmanuel Macron had evoked the “complex” and “painful” past between the two countries and announced the creation of a joint commission of historians which will make it possible to “look at the whole of this historical period which is decisive for us, from the beginning of colonization to the War of Liberation, without taboo”.
The Algerian historian Benjamin Stora, author of a report on the “reconciliation of memories”, is part of the presidential delegation.
(Lamine Chikhi report with Dominique Vidalon and Elizabeth Pineau in Paris, edited by Sophie Louet)