In Algeria, we commemorate not March 18 but March 19, which marks the ceasefire of the war of independence, but above all in the official Algerian calendar, we celebrate two dates: July 5, independence day of the country in 1962 and on November 1, the start of the Algerian uprising in 1954.
For this sixtieth anniversary of the Evian Accords, President Abdelmajid Tebboune affirmed in a message to the nation that “the crimes of colonization cannot be time-barred.”
Seen from the Algerian population, the concerns of the moment are not linked to history, but first and foremost to the difficulties of daily life, with prices soaring a few weeks before the start of the holy month of Ramadan or even the war in Ukraine which raises fears of disruptions in the supply of wheat and flour, even if the government wants to be reassuring.
And then on the political level, the Algerian power maintains its iron grip on the militants of Hirak, a popular protest movement born in 2019, but today under the suffocation because of the Covid-19 epidemic and the repression.
The French president wanted to make Franco-Algerian reconciliation a marker of his mandate, but he was not paid in return. He ran into a wall of silence on the other side of the Mediterranean. And it is not for lack of having accomplished a whole series of symbolic gestures: recognition of the assassination by the French army of the mathematician Maurice Audin and the lawyer of the FLN Me Ali Boumendjel, restitution of skulls of Algerian combatants of the 19th century, Stora report on memorial issues, or opening of previously classified archives.
But to reconcile, it takes two. Both countries have to be willing, as we saw in the case of Rwanda. However, with Algeria, it is a completely different story. The power in Algiers considers that the “colonized” and the “colonizer” cannot be put on the same level, there is no question, for example, of recognizing the massacres of the FLN against the Europeans or the Harkis.
Suffice to say that despite calls from the foot of the Elysée, the dialogue of the deaf with Algeria will not stop. As if to perpetrate a form of “hostility in the intimacy” between the two countries, according to the expression of a French diplomat.