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France celebrates on Friday the 60th anniversary of the Evian Agreements, signed on March 18, 1962, which led to the application of a ceasefire the following day and marked the end of the Algerian war. This commemoration, which falls in the middle of the presidential campaign, allows the candidates to express themselves on this still sensitive issue.
The 60th anniversary of the Evian Agreements, commemorated at the height of the French presidential campaign, offers candidates the opportunity to reaffirm their point of view on this dark part of French history. Especially on the far right.
Refusing to “flagellate against Algeria” and denouncing the March 19 election to commemorate the end of the war, the candidate of the National Rally (RN), Marine Le Pen, unsurprisingly chose to wink at the French returnees from Algeria that are closely linked to the history of his party, co-founded by supporters of the OAS, a clandestine organization opposed to Algerian independence.
“This date … was not the end of the Algerian war, because there were tens of thousands of harkis – Muslims who fought alongside the French army in the Algerian war – who were brutally killed,” said Marine Le Pen. The mayors of the municipalities of the RN or those close to the RN have already chosen to change the name of their streets that were called “March 19, 1962”.
This speech against “repentance” is also regularly declaimed by Éric Zemmour, who comes from a family of French Jews from Algeria.
For the researcher Emmanuelle Comtat, author of a thesis on the so-called ‘black feet’ (people of French or European origin who were born in Algeria during the colonial period) and politics, “Marine Le Pen is today less interested in those marked by end of empire than by the losers of globalization”. As for Éric Zemmour, she considers that she uses this past to demonstrate that cohabitation between different groups is not possible.
In Perpignan, where, as in the entire south, there is an important community of blackfeet and their descendants, the mayor of the RN, Louis Aliot, will inaugurate an exhibition on Saturday paying tribute to the ‘blackfeet’ and harkis victims from the war.
A story that fades
Some 800,000 Europeans left Algeria after the Evian Agreements. Some say that they and their descendants today represent between two and three million French people. This figure is impossible to verify “in a city like mine,” says Mayor Louis Aliot, whose mother was repatriated. Several controversial monuments were built under the mandates of his right-wing predecessors.
However, the mayor agrees that the ‘blackfeet’ vote “counts less than it used to.” “The generations that lived through this drama are fewer and fewer. It is a story that is going to die out,” laments Louis Aliot.
President of the Cercle Algérianiste, an association whose objective is “to safeguard and defend the culture and memory of the French in Algeria”, Suzy Simon-Nicaise, considers that “the elected representatives on the right and in the center are nevertheless attentive to the memory of the French of Algeria”.
Through her association, Simon-Nicaise, who was deputy to the former mayor of LR in Perpignan, Jean-Marc Pujol, sent a letter to the candidates for the Presidency. Four of them responded. All of them are from the right or from the extreme right: Valérie Pécresse, Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.
On the other hand, she lashes out at Emmanuel Macron, whose comments on colonization as a “crime against humanity” during the 2017 campaign she has not yet accepted.
The blackfeet vote “never existed”
On January 26, Suzy Simon-Nicaise had chosen not to go to the Elysée Palace, where Emmanuel Macron, following his commemorative reconciliation project, had acknowledged the “massacre” of the Isly street shooting in Algiers, in which dozens of of supporters of French Algeria were killed by the Army on March 26, 1962, seven days after the ceasefire came into force.
He criticized Macron, who will preside over a ceremony for the 60th anniversary of the Evian Accords at the Elysee Palace on Saturday.
“My parents stopped voting in 1962, they never registered to vote,” recalls New Caledonia MP Philippe Gomes, whose family fled Algeria. But he thanks Emmanuel Macron for having put “words to things that have never been put into words” and promoted a text for the recognition and reparation of the harkis.
“The generation that is disappearing today was very marked by decolonization. Some of those who had experienced the shock of repatriation were also more intolerant of immigration,” Comtat observes.
The Blackfoot vote “never existed,” “it was very diverse, like that of their children,” he adds. According to her, it is “a memory of the loss that has been transmitted”, not a political legacy.
*Article adapted from its original in French
with AFP
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