France’s Horrific Colonial Crimes Haunt Her Wherever She Goes

The call by Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev for France to apologize to the countries that were victims of its heinous colonial crimes, such as Algeria, under the auspices of a transcontinental body, is a severe blow to the reputation of a country that claims to defend the values of freedom, brotherhood and equality, which would weaken the French state’s grip on the colonies that are still under its influence and control.
The significance of these shocking words lies in the fact that they were uttered during the ministerial meeting of the Coordination Office of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, in the presence of representatives of African, Asian and Latin American countries that have suffered for centuries at the hands of European colonialism, particularly that of France, which is considered to be the worst.
The colonial mentality still dominates the decision-makers in France, as many African countries are still hostage to suspicious relations between their ruling elites and Paris, even if the latter has tried to crystallize a neo-colonial project aimed at erasing the black past of traditional colonialism, after Africans revolted against the French presence in some of them. Countries are subject to the CFA Franc currency, such as Mali, the Central African Republic, and, more recently, Burkina Faso.
The words of the Azerbaijani president come in a particular context of relations between Algeria and France, which are at the heart of any discourse on colonial crimes in international forums, given the debate that has characterized this issue for decades and which has often poisoned relations between Algeria and Paris because of the latter’s refusal to look in the mirror. Its history is stained with the blood of its victims and the horrendous crimes of its army.
When President Ilham Aliyev talks about France’s horrific crimes in the world, he is talking about the pain his country has suffered because of France’s policy of supporting colonialism wherever it existed, and the positions are not far apart. Only two years ago, France was present in one way or another in Azerbaijan’s war of liberation against expansionist Armenia.
And everyone remembers how Paris tried to thwart Azerbaijan’s efforts to recover its lands in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which had been usurped by the Armenians. Having failed to stop Turkish support for the Azerbaijanis in the face of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s strong insistence on providing all the financial and moral support Baku needs, Paris has resorted to mobilizing Western countries to support the continuation of the Armenian occupation in the Azerbaijani regions.
This is the reason why Ilham Aliyev targeted brutal French colonialism in his speech to the representatives of the member states of the Non-Aligned Organization, which was founded and flourished in the midst of the growing awareness of liberation from colonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
And if the efforts for liberation from French colonialism were mostly successful, the current struggle is against colonialism in its new form, which is represented by dependence and the plundering of the wealth of the peoples, especially on the African continent, where the legacy of French colonialism, which still sucks the blood of the people of the brown continent,.
What was issued by the Azerbaijani President is another cry in the face of colonial France, and a call from a country that seems far away, but whose leaders are interested in seeing the executioner apologize to the victim, but it seems that France is incapable of facing its guilt and admitting its responsibility for the atrocious pain it has caused tens of millions of peoples in the world, and the Algerian people in particular, as they sacrificed more than seven million martyrs over the course of 132 years of despicable settler colonialism.
The strange thing about French politicians is that they forced Germany to apologize to them because Nazi Germany occupied their country for only a few years in the Second World War, but they refuse to acknowledge their heinous crimes and apologize to Algeria for more than a century, which witnessed the most heinous crimes of occupation, including genocide, impoverishment, expulsion and dispossession, in a position that even some French people could not understand.