By Christopher Black
A few months earlier, as a presidential candidate, Macron described colonialism as a crime against humanity, but not much later ruled out any chance of reparations being paid to Algeria as a state or to any individual families or citizens who had suffered at the hands of the French forces and police during the war.
This refusal is difficult to reconcile with history as eleven years earlier, in February 2005, France’s ambassador to Algeria, Hubert Colin de Veridiere apologised for the Sétif and Guelma massacres that took place on May 8, 1945, the very day France and its allies saw the final surrender of Nazi Germany. France was liberated, but Algeria remained under French occupation.
Most historians agree to the facts related to the massacres but a dispute remains as to how many people were killed. The killings began on May 8 when 5,000 people in a small town marched to celebrate the victory of the Allies in Europe. But some of them carried anti-colonial banners. The police attacked them. People were shot. A similar event took place in the town of Guelma. French gendarmes shot more people. Up to a thousand people were killed. In revenge some local people attacked local pieds-noirs, European settlers living in the area, killing a hundred or so, and in reprisals, the French army and police attacked a number of towns and villages killing indiscriminately, using ground forces and aircraft as well as shelling from French Navy ships positioned off the coast. Some estimates stating as many as 30,000 killed, some 6,000, though it seems the general accepted number is approximately 20,000. Many who were not killed by French forces, were murdered by local vigilantes, who lynched or randomly shot victims who were then buried in mass graves, all with the approval of the French authorities.
Those massacres are seen by historians as a key moment leading to the war for independence that broke out nine years later for it revealed in stark terms that, while France had been liberated from the brutal German occupation, the French occupation of Algeria, presented as a “civilising” presence, and maintained by a century of brutality was to continue unabated. The French cries for the freedom of their own country and liberty for all were just a charade, meant to apply only to them, not to their colonial possessions in Africa or Indo-China.
So, France was liberated, but Algeria remained under French occupation, and we remember that as soon as the Japanese were defeated in now Vietnam, the French re-established their colonial rule there as if the world war had never happened and soon faced the war with the Vietnamese that would lead to the defeat of France at Dien Bien Phu.
France’s occupation of Algeria began in 1830 when the French Army invaded on a pretext, partly to satisfy French ambitions among the former Napoleonists who had failed to maintain control over Egypt after Napoleon’s failed expedition for that purpose conducted in 1798 to 1801. That campaign had the purpose of ripping Egypt from the control of the Ottoman Empire and turning it into a French colony to advance French mercantile and financial interests. Due to conflict with the British, the mission failed and the French withdrew. Algeria was the second prize they wanted in North Africa.
Over the three decades after 1830, as the French consolidated their grip, they killed a third of the population of three million in a scorched earth military campaign.
In 1848 it was declared to be an integral part of France itself, a unique status among France’s other African colonies, a status that exemplified the importance of Algeria to France for Algeria’s natural resources, such as oil, minerals, and land, were essential to the French. France needed to control this lucrative resource to retain it is military and economic power.
The struggle for independence by the Algerians in the bloody war that raged from 1954 until 1962 resulted in the deaths of up to a million people or more though, again, that count is estimated differently depending on the point of view of the source. But it is clear that the French Army, French police, and the Foreign Legion and intelligence services killed hundreds of thousands in a very brutal military campaign. Torture became a routine method of terrorising the Algerian resistance forces of the FLN, the Front de Liberation National, and the murder of civilians to terrorise the population. The French Army was determined to hold on to Algeria at all costs and when Charles De Gaul became president, they had hoped the war would continue, since De Gaul had stated that Algeria must remain a part of France.
But, once in office as President, and the war seeming to be endless, he changed his position and called for a limited independence of Algeria, The French Army considered this a betrayal of France and plotted to assassinate him. Those plots continued even after the war was ended in 1962 and Algeria gained independence, Several French generals fled France to Spain and other countries and organised a secret army, the OAS, the Organisation Armee Secrete, to kill De Gaul and renew the war. They planted bombs in both France and Algeria but their attempts failed and they finally gave up the attempt.
The French invasion and occupation of Algeria was the beginning of their Second Empire. The first was composed of French colonies in North America and the Caribbean. In fact, France controlled all of what is now Canada and much of the current United States from the late 1500s until the Seven Years War with the British, which ended in 1763, in which France lost its possessions in Canada and the Caribbean to the British, followed by the sale of the vast territories in the USA by Napoleon in 1803, known as the Louisiana Purchase.
These losses were a huge blow to French prestige and economic power. The need to choose other places to gain colonies became apparent to the French capitalists and so began the scramble for Africa, as it is known, the competition between European powers for colonies in Africa. In the same period, France expanded its power to Southeast Asia and the Pacific with Vietnam being the jewel in the French possessions in the region.
With the end of World War II and the declarations of peace and goodwill of sovereignty of nations and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the UN Charter and the consequence struggle for decolonisation, strong political movements for independence in the European colonies began to make themselves felt.
Displaying their hypocrisy, the Europeans resisted. The Dutch fought to maintain their control of Indonesia. The British fought to maintain their control of India, Malaya and Kenya. The French fought to maintain their control of Indo-China, now Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The wars were bloody and long and all ended in the defeat of the Europeans. The German also had colonies in Africa for a short period before World War I in East Africa and Namibia but they lost them to the British at the end of that war.
The Germans attempted to compensate that loss by their invasion of the USSR in 1941 by which they intended to break Russia and its other constituent republics into pieces, eliminate the Slavic peoples and turn the lands into German colonies. The Belgians tried to maintain control of Congo as well as Rwanda and Burundi. But finally had to withdraw though not without consequences for the peoples of those nations and bitter memories. And European finance capital still has dreams of re-establishing its colonial rule in one form or another along with the Americans today, which accounts for the stubborn obsession of both regarding the proxy-war in Ukraine.
In the case of France, the acceptance of the nominal independence of their West African colonies such as Ivory Coast, Mali, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, masked French economic domination using the CFA or French franc of the African colonies, a version of the French franc, totally controlled by France and the French Treasury which was imposed on the colonies in 1945. With no alternative national currencies available to conduct trade, the former colonies were forced to use it in the same way many countries had to use the American dollar. The result was that African countries channel more money to France than they receive in aid and have no sovereignty over their monetary policies. In January 2019, Italian ministers accused France of impoverishing Africa through the CFA franc, and criticism continued from various African organizations.
On 21 December 2019, President Alassane Ouattara of the Ivory Coast and President Emmanuel Macron of France announced an initiative to replace the West African CFA Franc with the Eco a new proposed regional currency but it was still to be tied to the French franc. Subsequently, a reform of the West African CFA franc was initiated. In May 2020, the French National Assembly agreed to end the French engagement in the West African CFA franc and the countries using the currency will no longer have to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury, a requirement which was nothing less than outright theft of African resources.
As an aside, the reader has to be reminded that the French Army, placed President Ouattara in power in 2011, when French forces overthrew the elected President, Laurent Gbagbo. Several thousand people were killed by French forces and Ouattara’s thugs in the coup. President Gbagbo was immediately handed over by the French to the International Criminal Court, and there is evidence in leaked emails between the French and then prosecutor Mr. Ocampo that Ocampo agreed to arrange charges against Gbagbo if the French could overthrow him and arrest him. The charges they filed were all fabricated. No evidence was ever presented of any crimes, yet the ICC kept Gbagbo and his wife as well as his Minister of Youth, Charles Ble Goude detained for years until they were finally released in 2021. They were not compensated for their false arrests and decade of detention. The reason for their arrest? They opposed French control of Ivory Coast. This episode illustrates how the ICC itself has served as an instrument of colonialism.
The process of decolonisation was supported by both the USSR and China throughout the 1950’s 60s, 70’s and 80’s. The long struggles in each of the African nations that went through them and the wars that have taken place in the years since then are important for an understanding of the present situation of the African nations and deserve to be treated in separate essays. Though I am tempted to enter into that history it would make this essay too long and too complex.
Suffice it to say that President Putin acknowledged the important role of many of the leaders of those struggles at the African Summit on July 28 when he stated, in part,
“For decades, we invariably provided support during the African countries’ difficult fight against colonialism. Unfortunately, some manifestations of colonialism have not been eradicated to this day, and former colonial powers still practice them, including in the economic, information and humanitarian spheres.
Russia remembers and cherishes the memory of Africa’s outstanding sons. I will name them, friends. We must remember them, and we must never forget them. I will name Patrice Lumumba, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Ben Bella, Omar al-Mukhtar, Kwame Nkrumah, Samora Machel, Leopold Senghor, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere. We also remember other African freedom fighters and national leaders of African countries. While relying on the principles of justice and equality, they staunchly promoted independent development for their nations, often sacrificing their lives. “
I would like to note that the African continent is emerging as a new centre of power right before our eyes. It has been demonstrating exponential growth in terms of its political and also economic roles. Everyone will have to reckon with this objective reality.”
Nevertheless, France still tries to maintain its own hegemony in its former colonies and refuses to recognise its crimes. This writer once met about the year 2010, in Tanzania, a group of French peace activists travelling the continent. We met be chance in a café. They invited me to dinner. There were five of them, including a woman, travelling in one of those VW Vans with peace signs all over it. But when the wine flowed, they soon admitted to me that they all worked for French Army Intelligence and were based at the French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti and were disguised as peace activists, long hair, torn jeans and all, in order to gather intelligence on the situation around Africa. I remember them very well and they gave me on parting company, a bottle of Ricard as a gift. Nothing is ever as it seems.
And what about the demand for compensation demanded by Algeria for the occupation and the barbarities of the war of independence? France refuses any but has agreed to compensate the harkis, that is the local Algerians who fought for the French, some 200,000 of them. About 100,000 fled to France after the war there but were treated badly in France and have demanded compensation. On May 16, 2023, France announced it would offer the compensation to those ex-soldiers who fought for France but Algerians will get nothing.
So the visit of Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune to Moscow on June 15, as a guest at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and his Prime Minister Aymen Benabderrahmane, is doubly significant, as they reconfirm the long friendship between the USSR and now Russia and Algeria and also confirms strategic alliance and further develops the growing economic, military, scientific and cultural ties between the two nations.
France, can only view this with dismay since it has also maintained economic and cultural relations with Algeria and has a large population of Algerians living in France. The young man who was shot by French police recently, sparking weeks of chaos was from an Algerian family.
There has been a strong drive in Algeria to rid itself of its colonial past, reducing the use of French in discourse, education and the media and this in turn has generate more anti-French feeling the country. France could damp down some of the anti-French feeling by acknowledging its past in Algeria and agreeing to negotiate some form of compensation. But it refuses to do so, and though strong ties will certainly remain, it is clear that Algeria, like many other African countries is shifting its focus away from Western Europe and North America towards Russia and China, a shift that will only accelerate as American and European colonial hegemony cover the world continues to crumble into dust.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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