Paris (AFP)
Emmanuel Macron on Monday "asked forgiveness" on behalf of France from the harkis, Muslim auxiliaries who fought alongside the French army during the Algerian War, and promised a "reparation" law.
The government "will bring before the end of the year a project aimed at inscribing in the stone of our laws the recognition and the reparation with regard to the harkis", announced the president during a ceremony of homage to the Elysium.
"You carry in your flesh the memory of the harkis. The honor of the harkis must be engraved in the national memory", explained the Head of State while calling for "to heal the wounds" which must be "closed by words of truth, gestures of memory and acts of justice ".
The President of the Republic "asked forgiveness" on behalf of France from the harkis, believing that the country had "failed in its duties" towards them.
"To the fighters, I want to say our gratitude; we will not forget. I beg your pardon, we will not forget," he said.
France "has failed in its duties towards the harkis, their wives, their children", judged the head of state.
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.
The harkis and their descendants today form a community of several hundred thousand people in France.
They experienced a difficult integration in France, both assimilated to immigrants and rejected by immigrants.
In 2000, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika qualified them as "collaborators" and, while criticizing their housing conditions in France, ruled out their return to Algeria, which he said was "not their country".
© 2021 AFP