Sarkozy scandalizes in Algeria
With the publication of his latest book "Time of Storms", former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has once again set social networks on fire, fuelling the eternal controversy between France and its former colonies. Civil society in the countries that suffered the colonization of the homeland of Robespierre and Napoleon has reacted indignantly to the attempt to trivialize the atrocities committed in the colonization process. In particular in Algeria, where the wounds left by 130 years of French colonization, including 7 years of an extremely bloody popular insurrection that culminated in the independence of the North African country in 1962, still remain open.
Nicolas Sarkozy wished to respond directly to the initiative launched by the current French President Emmanuel Macron who, in agreement with his Algerian counterpart Abdelmayid Tebboun, has decided to set up a bilateral commission to examine the causes, methods, forms and effects of colonisation. The Algerian side, led by the director of the National Centre of Archives, Abdelmayid Chikhi, is however pessimistic since, according to him, "the colonial phenomenon has given rise to two opposing nationalisms, the imperial and the liberating"; two incompatible nationalisms.
While Macron has admitted that during colonization atrocities were carried out, described by all human rights organizations as "crimes against humanity", Sarkozy disqualifies them as such. The former French president justifies himself by alleging that "there were women and men who taught, cured and loved Africa", but he forgets to remember the massive executions, the annihilation of entire peoples, the widespread and official practice of physical torture, and the administrative contempt for the racist segregation of the Indigenous Code and the laws of land spoliation.
Based on official statistics and demographic graphs, Dr. Menouba Benmati Hamani, author of several academic works on "The impact of colonial laws on the territory", answers the former French commander straightforwardly: "How do you explain that the Algerian population went from 4 million inhabitants in 1830 to 2.1 million in 1847, a decrease of 50%? Only 70 years later, in 1906, the Algerian population was 4 million again. I call that genocide, Mr. Sarkozy. Loud and clear.
On the official side, the Algerian State, through the voice of President Abdelmayid Tebboun, has been explicit: "France has cruelly violated the Algerian people, crimes against humanity. These odious crimes show the falsity of the civilizing mission of colonization". The presidential response has been forceful, but this time it has not been accompanied, as in the recent past, by a real official media campaign against the former metropolis demanding apologies and reparations.
Voices as authoritative as that of the recently deceased lawyer Gisele Halimi, who stood out for her defence of Algerian political prisoners and members of the anti-colonial guerrillas tried by French courts, abound in condemnation of colonial barbarism. For Halimi "Justice - one of the three fundamental pillars of the rule of law inaugurated by the French Revolution - became an instrument of colonial domination and, in my opinion, was the paroxysmal means of colonial repression. Thus the so-called "civilizing mission" is crumbling.
For many years it was thought that the reciprocal visions of colonisation seen from Paris and the capitals of the former colonies, Algiers, Rabat, Tunis or Bamako, would bring about a generational change; however, the legacy is so profound that it is inevitable to address it jointly without leaving out any of the collateral fringes: the Algerian harkis who took the French side during the war of independence, the million European pieds-noirs who lived in Algeria and the vast majority of whom had to leave the country, Algerian emigration to France, the residues of expropriations and of colonial movable and immovable Fridays in Algeria, and the innumerable treaties and conventions, many of them still secret today, which linked France to the former colony after independence in 1962. Sarkozy's words, far from opening the way to understanding, risk provoking virulent reactions that escape the control of the authorities of both countries.