'It is impossible to exaggerate how hard the French state has worked to underplay its 132 years of racist atrocities in Algeria.' Opinion | NabilaRamdani
Victory in Europe Day is a public holiday in France for all the right reasons. The country was pulverised during World War II, losing more than half a million citizens and experiencing the humiliation of invasion and conquest.
As crowds celebrated on the streets of European capitals, French forces slaughtered up to 45,000 men, women and children in and around the towns of Setif, Guelma and Kherrata, in northeastern Algeria. Some of the thousands of demonstrators in Setif, for example, carried banners with messages such as “Long live a free and independent Algeria” and sang nationalist anthems. One – a 26-year-old student called Bouzid Saal – held an Algerian flag aloft and was promptly shot dead. As the bodies piled up, panic intensified and fighting spread into the countryside.
As so often, French administrators deliberately underestimated the Algerian death toll by tens of thousands, while correctly putting the number killed on their own side at just over 100. It is estimated that there were one-and-a-half million Algerian casualties, as all the tools of modern combat – from napalm to electric torture – were used by the colonisers. Their dirty war saw police and military personnel operating covertly and calling themselves the Secret Army Organisation .
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