Will France's abandonment of the harkis be recognized in a law or will its recognition remain in the form of discourse?

Emmanuel Macron chairs, Monday, September 20, a reception dedicated to these former combatants alongside the French army during the Algerian War, to "take a new step" towards the recognition of the responsibility of the State for the suffering of these men and their families.

Some 300 people were invited to the Élysée: harkis, now very old, sixty years after the end of the conflict, but also their descendants, heads of associations and personalities.

This reception is held five days before the national day of homage to the harkis, which has been celebrated every September 25 since 2003, especially in the south of France where they are very present.

The highlight on Monday will be, at 10:30 am, Emmanuel Macron's speech in which he announces "to open the repair site", going further than his predecessor François Hollande who, in 2016, had recognized "the responsibilities of French governments in abandoning the harkis ".

"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.

A law demanded to recognize "the abandonment of the harkis"

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.

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 harkis associations, who demand, in an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, that a "law of recognition of the abandonment of the harkis" be voted by "the end of the year".

"We have seen you have the courage to recognize dark pages of our history, on the Algerian war, Rwanda or the nuclear tests in Polynesia. We hope that you will be the one who will end sixty years of a certain hypocrisy consisting in recognizing the abandonment of the harkis in the speeches but to refuse it in a law ", writes Ajir, Association Justice Information Reparation for the Harkis.

>> Webdocumentary: Women of harkis and weavers of the Republic

The associations, which claim to represent a community of around 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.

Distribution of Legions of Honor

Emmanuel Macron had announced that he would address the harkis by receiving, in January, the report of the historian Benjamin Stora aiming to promote "the appeasement of memories" around the war in Algeria, which remains "an open wound. "between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

During the reception, the president is to decorate Salah Abdelkrim, a harki representative wounded in combat, a French officer, General François Meyer, who organized the repatriation "of several hundred harkis by disobeying orders", and a daughter of harki, Bornia Tarall, "Equal Opportunities and Diversity Activist". 

After having taken various initiatives (on Maurice Audin, the opening of the archives or the assassination of lawyer Ali Boumendjel ...), Emmanuel Macron still intends to participate in two memorial days by the end of the five-year term: repression by the French police of a demonstration of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961, and the signing of the Evian Accords on March 18, 1962 which consecrated the French defeat in Algeria.

So many politically sensitive meetings in the run-up to the presidential election in April 2022 when the harkis represent an electorate traditionally courted by the National Rally and the right.

With AFP

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