Algeria - SANA
France's colonial history is full of violations that represent clear hostility to the slogans of the "values of freedom" that it claims and raises. Despite its crimes, Paris refused once again to acknowledge its massacres against humanity in Algeria during the occupation era and to apologize for it amid a state of discontent and condemnation among Algerians.
The Elysee explicitly declared its refusal to recognize the brutal crimes of France during its destructive colonial era for Algeria, making the voices loud by the Algerian parliament representatives to approve a bill criminalizing French colonialism and obligating Paris to provide compensation for its crimes during the occupation era.
Representative in the Algerian Parliament, Kamal Belarbi, who proposed a “bill criminalizing colonialism,” said in press statements that the French presidency’s statement included an explicit French declaration refusing to submit any official apology on behalf of the French state to Algeria for its crimes during the colonial period, as well as the report prepared by the French historian Benjamin Stora on “How Addressing the memory file “includes a new political provocation and an attempt to confiscate the historical right of Algeria.
Belarbi added, “This position confirms once again France’s bad intentions and its disavowal of all the terrible crimes that Algeria has witnessed and the long plundering of its wealth and the thousands who are still exposed to this day to the mines planted along the borders in addition to the toxic effects of nuclear explosions .. The French president seeks to exploit this. The event is an election to attract the votes of the extreme right, whose presence is increasing in France.
French President Emmanuel Macron, before his election, described his country's colonization of Algeria, which lasted 132 years, as a crime against humanity, but he quickly retracted his statements after months of assuming the presidency.
The leader of the National Liberation Front, Ibrahim Boulehia, said, "There was never hope that France would recognize its crimes in Algeria. The last attempt was what the French President Macron did when he appointed Benjamin Stora and came out with a meager report far from reality and from the recognition of the crimes committed by France."
Algerian writers and intellectuals considered that France's refusal to apologize and acknowledge its crimes would remain a bleeding wound in the Algerian collective memory and would prevent the building of real relations between the two peoples.
The French newspaper Le Monde, in turn, acknowledged that, despite the passage of six decades, the subject of French colonialism still poisons Paris’s relations with Algeria, considering that getting out of what it described as the “memory struggle” has become more than ever a political necessity and that social rifts are increasing in the “capital of art and fashion,” while Macron insists This time, he is facing part of his potential electoral bloc, which is the right’s rules, with a series of denials and lies.
The French occupying forces committed heinous murders against the Algerian people during the colonial era, especially on May 8, 1945, when the French forces killed more than 45,000 Algerian martyrs, according to official figures, at that time, they went out in a peaceful demonstration to demand the independence of their country.
Nidal al-Suwaidani