France is getting closer to recognizing its responsibility for the suffering of the Harkis.

For this, Emmanuel Macron is chairing a reception on Monday dedicated to these former combatants alongside the French army during the Algerian War.

This takes place five days before the national day of homage to the Harkis, which has been celebrated every September 25 since 2003.

Some 300 people were invited to the Elysee Palace: Harkis, who are now very old, sixty years after the end of the conflict, but also their descendants, heads of associations and personalities.

The highlight will be, at 10:30, the speech of the president in which he will "open the repair site", going further than his predecessor François Hollande who, in 2016, had recognized "the responsibilities of the French governments in the abandonment of the Harkis ”.

The "failure of the French Republic to its own values"

"The president considers that the work accomplished for sixty years is important but that it is necessary to take a new step in the recognition of the failure which was made to the Harkis but also to the failure of the French Republic to its own values", explains the Elysium.

The Harkis are these former combatants - up to 200,000 men - recruited as auxiliaries to the French army during the conflict which between 1954 and 1962 opposed Algerian nationalists to France.

At the end of this war, some of them, abandoned by Paris, were victims of reprisals in Algeria.

Several tens of thousands of others, often accompanied by women and children, were transferred to France, where they were placed in “transit and reclassification camps” with undignified and lasting traumatic living conditions.

Request for an adjustment of compensation

Since then, "the Republic has taken steps: there have been various compensation procedures installed over time," recalls an adviser to the presidency.

So many gestures deemed insufficient by the associations, which demand, in an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, that a "law recognizing the abandonment of the Harkis" be voted by "the end of the year".

The associations, which say they represent a community of about 400,000 people (Harkis and descendants), are also calling for an increase in existing compensation.

In September 2018, Secretary of State for the Armed Forces Geneviève Darrieussecq presented a "Harkis plan" including the release of 40 million euros over four years to revalue the pensions of veterans and help those of their children who are living. in precariousness.

World

France has spread illiteracy in Algeria, presidential adviser says

Society

Emmanuel Macron facilitates access to classified defense-secret archives, including the Algerian war

  • Harkis

  • Emmanuel Macron

  • Society

  • Algeria