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Le pen alleged tortured algerian militants { May 8 1945 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050509-110435-6818r.htmNor is Setif the only unhealed historical wound. In recent years, confessions of former French generals about atrocities committed during the Algerian war -- along with allegations that far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen tortured Algerian militants during the period -- have rocked both nations.
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050509-110435-6818r.htm
France's unfinished business
By Elizabeth Bryant
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Paris, France, May. 9 (UPI) -- France has a hard time saying "sorry." It took half a century for the first French leader -- President Jacques Chirac, as it happens -- to apologize for France's role in the Holocaust. Only two years later, in 1997, did the country's Roman Catholic Church follow suit for keeping silent during the Vichy-era deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from France to Nazi concentration camps.
Now, with 60th anniversary celebrations ongoing across Europe this week, new demands are percolating for Paris to express formal regret for a less glorious footnote of VE Day.
At issue is the killing by French forces of thousands of Algerians as they took to the streets on May 8, 1945 to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany -- and to demand Algerian independence from France. Known as the "Setif massacre," after one of the eastern Algerian towns where the killings took place -- the incident remains one of the biggest thorns in still-complicated relations between Paris and its former territory.
During weekend commemorations of the killings, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika issued a less-than-veiled request for a formal mea culpa from Paris.
"The Algerian people have not stopped waiting for a recognition from France of all the acts committed during the colonization," he said, "including the war of liberation, so that large and new perspectives of friendship and cooperation between the two people can be opened."
To be sure, French-Algerian ties have improved dramatically in recent years. In 2003 Chirac paid the first official visit to Algeria of a French leader since 1962, when the North African country won its bitterly fought independence. Bouteflika paid his own, groundbreaking visit to France, in 2000.
France and Algeria are also expected to sign a friendship treaty by year's end. And a new generation of Algerians today view France more as an emigration Mecca than as hated ex-colonizer.
Still, ugly memories of the Setif killings simmer alongside a host of under examined scars of French colonialism, for which France has yet to apologize.
"We still feel traumatized now," said Rabah Mahiout, author of a recently published book on Algeria's war of independence, and head of a French-Algerian association in Paris. "May 8, 1945 wasn't that long ago."
French and Algerian accounts differ wildly on just how many people were killed when French soldiers opened fire, 60 years ago, but most agree on basic facts. The troops targeted protesters in several Algerian cities after roughly 100 Europeans were killed in the demonstrations. Between 15,000 and 45,000 Algerians were gunned down in various places in the following weeks.
According to Mahiout, the protesters embodied aspirations of most of Algerians at the end of World War II. Hundreds had fought alongside Free French forces against Nazi Germany. Now it was payback time. Or so they thought.
"This participation in the liberation of France and Europe made them hope their own fate would be addressed after the victory," Mahiout said. "That their status would be changed -- either through complete equality between Algerians and French, no discrimination -- or by giving Algeria a large amount of autonomy from France."
"Instead," he added, "there was repression."
It took many more uprisings, capped by the 1954-1962 war of independence, before Algeria finally won its freedom.
In February, France's ambassador to Algiers described the Setif killings as "inexcusable tragedies." And French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier has suggested the incident might be mentioned in some way in the bilateral friendship agreement.
Still activists -- and not only Algerians -- argue vague gestures aren't enough.
"France, which recognized its responsibility toward the Jews delivered to the Nazis ... which was opposed to the war against Iraq, would honor itself by recognizing its responsibility in the massacres of May 8 and its debt toward the Algerian people," Jacques Verges, a prominent lawyer, declared in published remarks.
Nor is Setif the only unhealed historical wound. In recent years, confessions of former French generals about atrocities committed during the Algerian war -- along with allegations that far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen tortured Algerian militants during the period -- have rocked both nations.
Such disclosures offer a stark contrast from 20 years ago, when France's colonial legacy was simply not discussed, says French historian Benjamin Stora.
"Today, Algeria is talked about enormously in France," Stora said, drawing parallels with Japan's own checkered history in China. "There's a new generation that wants to know everything. The more distant an event grows, the more it gets closer to us."
"It's slowly exploding within French society," Stora said, "through the Harkis (Algerians who fought for France during the independence war), the pieds noirs (French colonizers), and through all the colonial massacres."
France's colonial legacy remains deeply problematic elsewhere as well. It accounts for a key reason why Paris failed to portray itself as an impartial mediator in the current conflict in the Ivory Coast.
And it is partly why its support for Faure Gnassingbe as the winner of last month's highly contested presidential elections in Togo -- another former colony -- has drawn scorn from critics at home and in Africa.
A newly passed bill by France's National Assembly has only fueled the debate. It includes an amendment for educational programs to recognize the "positive role" France played in North Africa and in other former colonies.
Meanwhile, activists from Algeria and other former French colonies continue to fight to right another war-related wrong: Pensions granted to foreign veterans that remain a fraction of those showered on native French troops.
"France refused to pay when the money was due," said Mahiout, whose World War II-veteran father fell into the category. "Now France will have to pay up, and that's that. Like with its moral debt."
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