the Parliament definitively adopts the bill of “reparation” in favor of the harkis

Sixty years after the end of the Algerian war, Parliament definitively adopted Tuesday, February 15, by a final vote of the Senate, a bill to ask “pardon” to the harkis. The text recognizes “conditions unworthy of reception” reserved for the 90,000 harkis and their families, who fled Algeria after independence.

Almost half of them have been relegated to camps and “forest hamlets”. “These places were places of banishment, which bruised, traumatized and sometimes killed”according to the Minister in charge of Memory and Veterans Affairs Geneviève Darrieussecq.

For these, the bill provides for a “repair” with the key to a lump sum of 2,000 to 15,000 euros. The number of potential beneficiaries is estimated by the government at 50,000, for an overall cost of 302 million euros over approximately six years.

If the level of compensation was deemed “weak”even “ridiculous” by some, disappointment crystallized on the approximately 40,000 returnees excluded from reparation because they stayed in “urban cities”where they were not deprived of freedom of movement, even if they experienced precarious living conditions.

This text materializes a commitment made by President Emmanuel Macron, who, on September 20, asked “sorry” to those Algerians who fought alongside the French army, but who were abandoned by France after the signing of the Evian agreements on March 18, 1962. Up to 200,000 harkis had been recruited as auxiliaries to the French army during the conflict between 1954 and 1962.