Atrocities Of Brutal French Colonialism Accompanied By Testimonies To Strike A Balance

An unprecedented movement in France at the level of memory, initiated by the French Channel 2 (France 2) with the broadcasting of the first episode on Monday night to Tuesday of a documentary film entitled “It was the war of Algeria”, a documentary made by historian Benjamin Stora with the journalist and director Georges Marc Benhamou. Both are Algerian Jews.

The documentary, which was specially prepared on the occasion of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the “Algerian War”, consists of five episodes, each one hour long, covering 132 years of French colonization in Algeria and seven years of war that ended, as is known, with the defeat of the occupation army and its departure from Algeria defeated. The documentary included testimonies of those who made or lived through these tragic events, which were marked by injustice, misery, desolation and humiliation…

Among the Algerians who testified were the late mudjahid Yacef Saadi, the mujahida Zahra Zarif Bitat, in addition to people who lived in the camps and were children at the time during the glorious Algerian revolution, and some of their testimonies served the viewpoint of the French party or those who worked alongside it, through slander in some practices attributed to the Mujahideen, and the documentary did not hesitate to describe the “kinetic” of the friends of the French state, which did not pay attention to them until six decades later.

The first part of the documentary devoted 124 years to the long years preceding the outbreak of the liberation revolution on November 1, 1954. Georges Marc Benhamou, one of the producers of this series, says: “You cannot understand colonialism in Algeria if you do not present the story from the beginning: the bloody occupation, the expropriation of land The Muslim population, and the law of the people… The documentary was basically launched, relying on visual archives, written narration, and historical pedagogy”.

The producers of this documentary were hosted on a program by Radio France International, and through this portal, Benjamin Stora said that many of the war images broadcast by the source of the “Institution for Communications and Audiovisual Production for Defense” of the French Ministry of Defense, however, these documents “were rarely presented for censorship reasons, but also because the French wanted to forget this war,” he said.

As for Georges Marc Benhamou, he quotes words from Pierre Joux, who was called to work in Algeria and is the son of a minister to General de Gaulle and the official of the French team that led the Evian negotiations versus the provisional Algerian government, stating: “The first war in Algeria dates back to 1830. Was the war really over? We do not officially recognize in France the term war in Algeria until 1999!” It is an attempt at denial whose claims have collapsed with the passage of time.

Among the rare photos shown by the documentary, are scenes of the father of the national movement in Algeria, Messali El Hajj, in the Great Municipal Stadium of the Annassers (formerly Ruisseau) in the capital, in August 1936, on the occasion of the first Islamic conference, organized in particular by Farhat Abbas and the Association of Ulemas or Scholars. In this stadium, Messali bends down to pick up a handful of dirt and waves it, shouting: “This land is not for sale”.

This incident marked a difference in the rift between colonial France and the Algerians who believed in its lies or at least matched them, such as the representatives, led by Farhat Abbas and Ben Jelloul, who were demanding integration in exchange for granting Algerians all the privileges that Europeans enjoy in Algeria.

Georges Mark Benhamou says it is the big lie of colonialism. When MP Bloom Violet of the “Popular Front” tried to propose the granting of French citizenship to about 24,000 Algerians who served France (warriors, leaders and dignitaries…) and they are a small minority out of nine million people, the most influential colonial lobby strongly resisted this proposal, and the project initiated by Bloom Violet derailed.