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The captives were taken to a center where masked Algerian informants chose suspicious rebels. “These were detained, questioned, with great violence. The others were released.”
Worse followed. Kihn was in service when he saw a suspect for the first time being tortured with electricity from a generator in hand. “It was unbearable. The man shouted, jerked off. I had tears in his eyes,” he said, his eyes filling again while he was reviving the moment.
When he was released, no one in his village wanted to hear his war stories, so for decades, he relied. But memories, nightmares and panic attacks continued to torment it. When he was 70 years old, a filmmaker cajolized him in an interview. He then wrote a book and found a relief measure.
Kihn, disgusted by his experiences, would not touch his military pension. Instead, he and other former soldiers send money to local NGOs in Algeria.
“What we need is to recognize the truth,” he said. “Yes, we were criminals in Algeria.”
France has tried to turn the page, but the past will not die.
It took France until 1999 to officially recognize that its struggle in Algeria had been a “war”, even if it had mobilized up to two million conscripts so that “the operations restore order” against the independence of the National Liberation Front (FLN).
The French campaign has led to generalized torture, the forced displacement of two million civilians to cut the FLN from its rural base and countless summary and “disappearances”.
The FLN was also ruthless, terrorizing French and Algerian civilians and eliminating its political rivals and possibly factions in its own ranks.
The conflict, which provoked violence on both sides of the Mediterranean, explained deep divisions in France, overthrew the fourth republic of the country and raised the specter of the civil war.
After President Charles de Gaulle put Algeria in the process of independence with a 1961 referendum, some French fans trained the organization of the secret army (OEA), an armed group that has set up bombs and assassinations, including at least one attempt to kill the French chief.
The members of the OAS finally benefited from post-war amnesty scanning. France has sought to pull a veil and forget, but the past has refused to die.
Keep the past
Suzy Simon-Nicise, 67, who runs one of the main associations of black feetis determined to preserve a particular vision of the lost world of French Algeria, its culture, its history and its lifestyle.
In his memory, it was a cosmopolitan place where Europeans mixed freely with Muslims based on mutual respect, where French colonists had promoted development from zero.
France, she concedes, may have committed “not very glorious” acts from the start of its conquest of Algeria. “But Algeria has done certain things that were just as unbearable, if not more,” she said.
During a commemorative event in Perpignan, Simon-Nicise, wearing a dress as brilliant as her red hair, told a massacre of black feet In the mainly European city of Oran on July 5, 1962, Algeria day became independent.
She said that 700 to 1,200 people had been killed that day while French troops, in their barracks from the cease-fire in March, made the order not to intervene. An exact toll has never been established. Macron, in his address at black feet This year, said that “hundreds” were dead.
Simon-Nicise’s family had planned to stay after independence, but an Algerian friend working with her father warned them to leave urgently, advice at home by a French official who told her father that his name was on a FLN death list. The family ran to the port with four suitcases.
About 800,000 black feet, The vast majority of Europeans living in Algeria also voted with their feet, believing that their only choice was “The suitcase or the coffin (the suitcase or the coffin). »»
The French government had not anticipated such an exodus, and the flood of new arrivals encountered a chaotic and cold reception.
“We were treated worse than foreigners,” said Simon-Nicise, recalling how she, then five years, and her family were settled in a holiday village. “My family was crying and everyone was dancing torsion.”
Later, his family had to share a worthy and sordid apartment with another family in Le Havre. Simon-Nicise went to school there, where she heard a classmate declare: “Do not speak to her. It’s dirt drum. “”
The allies rejected in France in Algeria
If the black feet were mainly independent in France, the Harkis – Algerians who had served with the French army – were doubly. De Gaulle had rejected any idea to welcome them, effectively abandoning tens of thousands of men and their families to revenge.
Nevertheless, up to 90,000 harkis went to France, a lot helped by their French commanders. They have been recorded in the sinister army camps behind barbed wire, most of many years.
“There was no toilet, a sink for 10 families,” said Abdelkrim Sid, who was six years old when he arrived and spent the next 15 years with his sprawling family in isolated camps.
His father, like many others harkis, was then put to work in forest colonies on the minimum wage but never fully integrated into the wider economy.
“My father was a Spahija (rider). He really believed in France, “Sid told the Dark Rivesaltes camp near Perpignan.
In Rivesaltes, a museum now commemorates successive waves of detainees who were thrown there from 1939, including refugees from the Spanish civil war, gypsies and Jews made by the war regime in wartime, German prisoners of war, then harkis.
Sid, a strong retired truck driver, says that he cannot forget how the harkis were treated in the camps, which he compared to the pens for animals. “It was as if we had the plague.”
Troubled identity
The war deeply marked the Algerian diaspora, swollen by a migration which also attracted Moroccans and Tunisians whose work was in demand when the French economy revived after the Second World War.
Today, North Africans represent the majority of 5 to 6 million Muslim citizens in France, around 8% of its total population, the largest ratio of any European country.
France, which prides itself on its principle of secularismWhat makes the secular state neutral towards religion, had difficulty in reconciling with its Muslim minority. The complex relationship is not easier by mutual distrust that has focused from the colonial enterprise in Algeria.
Magyd Cherfi tried to integrate into his native France, with an external success as a musician and songwriter, devotee of French literature and full-fledged author.
However, as he explained in a cafe in a mainly Arabic quarter of Toulouse, the city where he grew up, he never fully felt as French. Ironically, he knows that many in the disadvantaged environment of his childhood feel him as a traitor at his origins.
“It is as if the Frenchman was a top of the mountain. You go up and go up, and it’s never far enough,” he said.
“In the street, they ask:” Oh, where are you from? ” This means that you are not French, because if you are, no one asks this question. »»
Cherfi’s father, a building worker, fled to France after four of his brothers were killed by fighting in the maquisOr underground, during the war of Algeria. “He only told us fragments of what happened then, about bad things that the French have done to his family, raped girls, cousins killed, imprisoned, tortured.”
Cherfi therefore grew up with a difficult feeling of difference from its French friends because France had been the enemy in Algeria. However, when his parents decided to stay in France, when he was about 15 years old, they said to him: “You must respect the French. They give us work. They feed us. “
He admires a large part of what France offers, in particular freedom and secularism, but says that it cannot honor its own principles with regard to its non -white citizens.
“It is the great scam of the Republic. France is unable to build a story that is something other than exclusively white. We are barely in French history,” he said.
“France is therefore still sausages, accordions, traditions, villages and now, with millions of Muslims here, you feel that they are clinging even more. So it’s quick, take out the accordions! ”
Questions to consider:
• What was Algeria’s relationship with France before winning independence in 1962?
• How were post-war experiences black feet And harkis similar and different?
• Why do you think that it took until 1999 for France to recognize the conflict on Algeria as a war?
• What would you do to improve the integration of Arab / African citizens of France?
