Colonial atrocities: belated reckoning

On October 16, 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron commemorated the 60th anniversary of a massacre of Algerian independence protestors by Paris police by characterising the state bloodshed as 'crimes'. He admitted several dozen protestors were killed. The precise numbers of victims remains unclear, not the least because the police threw many bodies into the River Seine. The protest rally was called in 1961, the final year of France's increasingly violent attempt to retain Algeria as a colony. However, as expected, President Macron failed to issue a formal apology for this (or any other) atrocity against Algerians fighting for their inherent right to independence.

France occupied Algeria in 1830. By 1959 more than one million European (largely French) settlers constituted 10 percent of the country's population. These settlers, dubbed Pieds-noirs, had a sense of entitlement to be seen as superior to the natives to the extent of instituting an apartheid-like system. By the 20th century, a proliferation of nationalist Algerian parties and movements were incrementally radicalised as the understanding sank in that peaceful means of struggle were not enough, especially after World War II when protestors demanding independence were massacred in Setif on May 8, 1945. With the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam (another colony the French attempted to hold on to by force after World War II) in 1954, the emboldened Algerian resistance turned to armed struggle under the leadership of the National Liberation Front (FLN). This struggle lasted from 1954 to 1962, starting from the rural areas but soon moving on to urban guerrilla struggle in 1956-7 in what came to be known as the Battle of Algiers (immortalised in a film of the same name, which shows the first three bomb attacks that sparked off the Battle being planted by women).

The French colonialists' response to any manifestation of resistance, peaceful or armed, was mass atrocities, massacres, torture, and summary executions. This unwittingly fed into the resistance, since the populace increasingly became convinced that there was no other way to get rid of the French colonisers drunk on their so-called 'civilising mission' and unable to see Algeria as anything other than part of Metropolitan France.

A major turning point was the May 1958 storming of the offices of the Governor-General in Algiers by a mob of Pieds-noirs angered by their government's inability to crush the resistance. With the support of French army officers, they clamoured for World War II hero Charles de Gaulle to be installed as leader of France. But de Gaulle turned out to be a realist who recognized by September 1959 that French continued control of Algeria was untenable and declared self-determination necessary for Algeria. The Pieds-noir extremists were aghast, the FLN wary. The former supported a French Generals' colonialist revolt against de Gaulle under the rubric Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS) in April 1961 but the putsch was unsuccessful. The latter eventually chose to enter into talks with the de Gaulle government.

May 1961 witnessed the first (and unsuccessful) round of negotiations between the French government and the FLN in Evian, but the second round in March 1962 yielded a French ceasefire. On July 1, 1962, a referendum was held in Algeria to approve the Evian Agreements, which called for an Algerie algerienne. Six million Algerians cast their ballots for independence, which soon followed.

The bravery and courage with which the Algerian people fought French colonial occupation amidst massacres, torture, summary executions and other atrocities is both an inspiring and tragic tale. Colonialism across the globe was guilty of similar atrocities wherever it found lands to conquer. Its victims, running into the millions, included indigenous peoples (some wiped out, others reduced to a miserable state), black African slaves, and even relatively developed civilisations such as the Subcontinent and China. For at least three quarters of a century since independence was incrementally granted to the subject peoples of the erstwhile colonies and even longer in the case of the victims of slavery, the western developed countries responsible for these colonial atrocities remained 'oblivious' to their guilt, having brushed this criminal history under the carpet amidst a nauseating repetition of their stubbornly claimed 'civilising' role in the former colonies.

Only in recent years, and especially since the turn of the 21st century, a better educated, knowledgeable series of generations in both east and west have brought to the fore in stark daylight this atrocious period of world history. As a result, slavers' statues are being demolished, the 'heroes' of the slavery and colonial causes are literally being 'unseated' from statue plinths and horses and their much lauded status critiqued, as an increasingly assertive movement insists on removing these vestiges of a shameful past.

Had such atrocities been committed in reverse, i.e. if the shoe were on the other foot, the (unlikely) perpetrators would have been subjected to insistent demands to be brought to justice. Instead, the peoples of the erstwhile colonies cannot even receive a decent apology from the perpetrators of these injustices and atrocities. So much for a fair and just world where every human being, let alone whole peoples, can expect to be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.

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Copyright Business Recorder, 2021