A painful date. France commemorates on Saturday March 19 the 60th anniversary of the Evian agreements and the ceasefire in Algeria. During a ceremony organized at the Elysée where some 200 witnesses of the war were invited (conscripts, independence fighters, harkis and repatriates), Emmanuel Macron declared that this date “was neither the beginning of peace nor the end of war”. The re-election candidate added: “This date can neither be the only one, nor be denied, pushed around, forgotten.”
Because since the law of December 6, 2012, March 19 is the “national day of remembrance and meditation in memory of the civilian and military victims of the war in Algeria and the fighting in Tunisia and Morocco”. But this date continues to be rejected among the harkis and returnees and within a part of the right and the extreme right. Explanations.
On March 18, 1962, after eight years of war, France and the representatives of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) signed the Evian Accords in which Paris recognized the independence of Algeria, the integrity of its territory and its people. France undertakes to gradually evacuate its troops from Algeria and to establish a ceasefire the next day at noon.
Pieds-noirs, harkis, veterans believe, however, that these agreements do not mark the end of the war since the violence continued until the independence of Algeria on July 5, 1962. On March 26, 1962, for example , during the shooting of the rue d’Isly, in Algiers, French soldiers opened fire on dozens of demonstrators opposed to the independence of Algeria. The exact toll of this killing remains unknown to this day. On July 5, 1962, while the inhabitants were celebrating the independence of their country, at least 700 Pieds-noirs and Algerians who had chosen France were massacred in a few hours in Oran, under the passive gaze of the French army. For its part, the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which refuses the cease-fire, redoubles its violence, causing dozens of deaths and injuries in targeted attacks and assassinations.
Numerous kidnappings and the painful exodus of thousands of repatriated Muslims and auxiliaries who had fought alongside France also took place after March 19. Between 55,000 and 75,000 harkis, in particular, are not authorized to join France and are victims of massacres and reprisals in Algeria, recalls France Culture.
“For us, this date does not mark the end of the war, but the beginning of the Harki genocide with thousands of massacres”deplores Hacène Arfi, president of the Coordination Harka association, with 20 minutes. “The Algerian war claimed a triple number of victims after its ‘official’ end than before!”, denounces in Le Figaro General Hervé Longuet, president of the National Union of Combatants (UNC).
Within the right and the extreme right, the controversy swells from 2012. In a column published in Le Figaro in 2016, former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy estimated that “choosing the date of March 19 (…) is to consider that there is now a good and a bad side of history and that France was on the bad side.” The mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi (then LR), refuses to commemorate March 19 in his city, a date he describes as “unspeakable provocation against returnees and harkis”. In 2014, the mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard (extreme right), decided to rename the street of March 19, 1962 to give it the name of a partisan officer of French Algeria.
Ten years later, the criticisms have not ceased. The presidential candidate LR, Valérie Pécresse, is committed if she was elected to find “another date” only on March 19 to commemorate the end of the Algerian war, because “80% of civilian victims fell after the Evian agreements”she said on Thursday.
“Obviously, March 19 does not mark the end of the Algerian conflict. Eighty percent of civilian casualties fell after the Evian Accords.”
Valerie Pécresseduring a trip to Nîmes
Marine Le Pen, candidate for the National Rally, also recalled on France Inter that she contested “since a long time” this date because “there were tens of thousands of harkis who were brutally murdered” after March 19, 1962.
For the historian Gilles Manceron, these criticisms illustrate a “awakening of the colonial project”. “It is a fact that there were still victims after March 19 in Algeria and France. But if they existed, it was because of the refusal of the OAS to recognize independence and the application of the Evian agreements”, he explained to France 24 in 2016. “There were still many French people killed in the Pacific after May 8, 1945, especially in Japanese camps. This does not prevent us from saying that May 8 marks the end of the Second World War”, he recalls.
“It’s a very Franco-French confrontation (…) we can’t stay in community memories”points out for his part the historian Benjamin Stora with The Independent. “We can’t live on each other’s accusations forever.” In his report on the memoirs of the Algerian war given to Emmanuel Macron, he recommends commemorating different symbolic dates. Among them, on March 19, but also September 25 (tribute to the harkis) or October 17, 1961 (repression of the demonstration of Algerian workers in France).