Former president Nicolas Sarkozy while admitting French wrongdoing during the Algerian war of independence refused to apologize. More was expected of his successor François Hollande on his visit to Algeria this week. However, he too, while accepting the brutality with which France had sought to crush the independence movement refused to apologize. During the latter part of their 132-year rule, the French sought to make their Algerian colony an integral part of metropolitan France, as a way of solidifying white minority rule over an Arab and Berber majority. But Algerians wanted their own country back and managed it after seven years of bitter civil war. In the course of that conflict, the French military, forced into a fight against guerrillas for which it had little training, resorted to brutality and terror. Reprisals for the killings of white French settlers were savage and indiscriminate. However, as the German Nazi forces discovered when they occupied France, no amount of violence could break the spirit of a proud and determined people. Yet ironically, the French seemed to forget their own resistance experience when they encountered its mirror in the Algerians. The viciousness of the crackdown on every manifestation of independence, even among peaceful activists who rejected rebel violence, was quickly counterproductive. The forced removal of two million Arabs from their mountain homes and resettlement on the coastal plains may have isolated FLN groups from local support, but it also made France two million more enemies. The French always protested that it was the massacre by the main FLN rebel fighters of 123 colonists, including old women and babies, at Philippeville in 1955, that triggered their own tougher response. Until that attack, the FLN had assaulted only military and government targets. Yet however reprehensible the rebel crime, France was the civil power in Algeria. It thus had a responsibility to support law and order and protect the rights and security of all its citizens, Arab, Berber or white. This it failed to do. Had a new French government under General Charles de Gaulle not thrown in the towel in 1962 and given the Algerians back their freedom, it was very likely that France would have been hauled before the court of world opinion to answer for its rising catalog of crimes. Now is surely the time not simply to admit wrongdoing and failings, but also to offer an apology to the Algerian people for the horrors that were inflicted on them. It cannot be that apologizing for their behavior will in any way unleash a tidal wave of compensation claims from those who suffered and are still alive. Admitting their wrongdoings was an act that gave quite sufficient grounds for legal action. But confessing to something terrible is an act of truth only. It carries with it no contrition, no regret, no indication that the person confessing wishes that the crime had never happened in the first place. The French either cannot see the subtlety in this or deep down, still do not feel that they did anything for which they should be truly sorry. That is why the successive failure of two French presidents to say the simple word “sorry” is causing such offense among many in Algeria. Perhaps the Algerian government could demonstrate the way to behave by itself apologizing for the Philippeville massacre and other horrors that were perpetrated against white colonists and Algerians who supported them.
