In , he announced that France would open up its archives on the thousands of civilians and soldiers who went missing during the war, both French and Algerian. But with many of the files classified state secrets historians complain that access is still heavily restricted.
The content you requested does not exist or is not available anymore. ON TV. On social media. Who are we? Fight the Fake. French colonization begins in Algeria As the second-biggest imperialist state, France added Algeria to its list of colonized countries.
For Algeria, days full of fear and pain seemed to never end. A great number of Europeans, referred to as "pied noirs," were sent to Algeria. French soldiers usurped land from Algerian farmers and was mostly given to European colonists for free.
However, this was the beginning of a transformation in a society that, like the Ottoman Empire, was late to develop science, technology, education and military technology. An independence movement began with a religious and military leader, Emir Abdelkader El Djezairi, between and until he was captured by France. The Soviet Union support ed the Algerian War of Independence by providing military assistance, which explains the movement's connection with socialism.
Their support continued after Algeria's independence. The occupation of Algeria also influenced French politics. French President Charles de Gaulle understood that the French people wanted a solution and that Algerians wanted independence.
In , the Evian Agreement was signed by the two sides. More than 1 million Algerians and 26, French died in 65 months, starting Nov. ALGIERS, Algeria History has a lot to say about the atrocious crimes committed by French colonial authorities in Algeria when it colonized the country for years between and It took France about 70 years to fully control Algeria since occupying it on July 5, Seizing of Islamic endowments Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Issa Ben Akoun, a professor of Algerian history at the University of Algiers, said Islamic endowments were among the Algerian heritage looted by French colonial authorities following a decision they issued on March 23, to confiscate Islamic endowments throughout Algeria.
Please contact us for subscription options. Related topics Algeria colonialism France looting. Priest convicted in France 'believed' to have sexually abused dozens in Lebanon. The Arab corpses that lay strewn in the streets and along the coastline were no more than incidental colour to the Parisian spectator watching the slaughter through opera glasses from the deck of his cruise ship.
The trauma deepened as, within a few short decades, Algeria was not given the status of a colony but annexed into France. This meant that the country had no claim to any independent identity whatsoever, but was as subservient to Parisian government as Burgundy or Alsace-Lorraine. This had a deeply damaging effect on the Algerian psyche. The settlers who came to work in Algeria from the European mainland were known as pieds-noirs — black feet — because, unlike the Muslim population, they wore shoes.
The pieds noirs cultivated a different identity from that of mainland Frenchmen. Meanwhile, Muslim villages were destroyed and whole populations forced to move to accommodate European farms and industry. As the pieds-noirs grew in number and status, the native Algerians, who had no nationality under French law, did not officially exist. Albert Camus captures this non-identity beautifully in his great novel L'Etranger The Outsider : when the hero Meursault shoots dead the anonymous Arab on an Algiers beach, we are only concerned with Meursault's fate.
The dead Arab lies literally outside history. Like most Europeans or Americans of my generation, I had first come across Algiers and Algeria in Camus's writings, not just in L'Etranger but also his memoirs and essays. And like most readers who approach Algeria through the prism of Camus, I was puzzled by this place, which, as he described it, was so French that it might have been in France but was also so foreign and out of reach.
Part of this difficulty arises from the fact that the Algeria Camus describes is only partly a Muslim country. Instead, Camus sees Algeria as an idealised pan-Mediterranean civilisation.
In his autobiographical writings on Algiers and on the Roman ruins at Tipasa, he describes a pagan place where classical values were still alive and visible in the harsh but beautiful, sun-drenched landscape. This, indeed, is the key to Camus's philosophy of the absurd. In his Algeria, God does not exist and life is an endless series of moral choices that must be decided by individuals on their own, with no metaphysical comfort or advice, and with little or no possibility of knowing they ever made the absolutely correct choice.
It is easy to see here how Camus's philosophy appealed to the generation of French leftist intellectuals that fought in the second world war, a period when occupied France was shrouded in moral ambiguity as well as in the military grip of the Germans. It was less effective, however, in the postwar period, as Algerian nationalism began to assert itself against France, modelling itself on the values of the French Resistance.
Camus was sympathetic to the cause of Muslim rights. Most importantly, throughout the s, as violence between the French authorities and Algerian nationalists intensified, Camus found himself endlessly compromised.
His intentions were always noble but by the time of his death in a car crash in he had acknowledged that he no longer recognised the country of his birth. During the 90s, it became all but impossible to visit Algeria. Reading Camus as a way in to this Algeria was simply a waste of time. This was a country dominated by terror as the hardline government fought a shadowy civil war against Islamist insurgents who sought to turn Algeria into "Iran on the Mediterranean".
Algerian Muslims were regularly massacred by Islamist and other unknown forces. Foreigners were declared enemies by the Islamists, targeted for execution. The government could not be trusted either. The only non-Algerians who braved the country were hardened war reporters such as Robert Fisk, who described disguising his European face with a newspaper when travelling by car in Algiers and staying no more than four minutes in a street or a shop — the minimum time, he decided, for kidnappers to spot a European.
In Algiers in the mids, in this formerly most cosmopolitan of cities, an hour or so's flight from the French mainland, for Algerians and Europeans kidnap and murder were only ever a matter of minutes away. When I finally arrived in Algiers for the first time in , the city I found was not like this.
The ceasefire and amnesty had been in place for several years, although as recently as there had been a wave of deadly bombings and assassinations. But although you no longer had to hide your status as a European, the city was still tense. On the drive from the airport, I passed no fewer than six police or military checkpoints, all manned by heavily armed men.
0コメント