The French Are Looking For Excuses To Whitewash Their Somber Past In Algeria

The French continued to dig into the history of their dark pages in Algeria, and this time the turn came to one of the categories of the victims of the French occupation, namely the “Harkis” who were blackmailed by colonial France, before abandoning them in a scene that lacks the worst moral considerations.

“The Wound… The Tragedy of Harkis” is the title of a documentary film about what the French call “the Algerian war” and the liberation war in Algerian literature, broadcast from Sunday night to Monday on the French public channel France 5 (France5). It deals with the fate of the “harkis” category, and they are the Algerians who decided to take up arms on the side of France against their brothers and sons during the revolution.

The documentary was produced by Isabel Clark and Daniel Coastal, and it attempted to research the reasons that prompted this category of Algerians, which according to French accounts were estimated at about 200,000 recruits, to take up arms against the liberation revolution between 1954 and 1962.

The pictures included in this documentary are considered live scenes leaked from the French archive that dates back to the stage of the liberation revolution, which has not been previously seen. However, the commentary carried many fallacies and misinformation regarding the struggles of the Algerians and their insistence on victory over the most powerful colonial powers at that time. Doing justice to this category who served France and failed their country when it was needed them most.

Among the fallacies that this documentary film tried to generalize, is a blatant lie repeated by many French and a few deceived people in Algeria, which states that France has defeated Algeria militarily, but the Liberation Front and the Liberation Army, and behind them the interim government of the Algerian Republic, turned this “military defeat”, on their claim led to a political victory thanks to the complicity of General Charles de Gaulle, which eventually culminated in the achievement of independence.

Such a fallacy does not find its way to the conviction of any sane person, because the whole world realizes that the Algerians were able to bravely break the military power of France despite the ugliness of crimes and the war of extermination it committed against the Algerians, after it granted independence to several countries, including the Kingdom of Morocco and Tunisia, in addition to countries from Black Africa in 1956, in order to gather its forces and concentrate in Algeria, to eliminate the revolution, yet it dismally failed.

The second point that this documentary tried to highlight, which has a humanitarian and moral dimension, is the fate of thousands of Algerians who cooperated with the French army, after the ceasefire of March 19, 1962, which extended until after the declaration of independence on July 5th from the same year, it was remarkable how the Algerians dealt with the “harkis”, which the French side tried to exploit to strike a balance in the moral field between what the occupation army did against the Algerians, and what the Harkis were exposed to.

This equation contradicts the French themselves, according to the opinion of many scholars of history, because the practices that they say they were exposed to before, during and after independence, were carried out by the French against Marshal Petain and his followers in what was known as the “Vichy government” that dealt with Nazi Germany in World War II .

The issue of the movement remains a purely French issue in the opinion of the Algerian side, because the occupation authorities are the ones who have armed them, entangled them, and put them against their brothers through their destructive project based on the policy of divide and rule. Putting them in “ghettos” does not amount to being a shelter for humans.