On the 60th anniversary of the brutal police crackdown on an Algerian protest in the French capital during the final year of their country’s independence war with its colonial authority, a commemoration march was held in Paris on Sunday.
The remembrance comes after French President Emmanuel Macron said that “crimes” perpetrated on Oct. 17, 1961 — which officials have been attempting to cover up for decades — were “inexcusable for the Republic.”
On that day, protesters responded to a request for a peaceful demonstration by the French section of the National Liberation Front, which was fighting for Algerian independence, against a discriminatory midnight curfew imposed on Algerians in the Paris area.
Under the orders of Paris police commander Maurice Papon, “the repression was severe, violent, and bloody,” Macron stated in a statement released Saturday. Approximately 12,000 Algerians were detained, with many of them slaughtered and their bodies were thrown into the Seine River, according to the statement.
According to Macron’s office, at least 120 protestors perished, some shot and some drowned. Because the archives are still partially closed, the actual number has never been determined.
For his part in deporting Jews during World War II, Papon became the highest-ranking Frenchman to be convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity.
On Sunday afternoon, human rights and anti-racism organizations, as well as Algerian organizations in France, held a tribute march in Paris. They urged authorities to fully acknowledge the French state’s role in the “tragedies and horrors” of Algeria’s independence war, as well as to open up archives.
“It’s a late colonial massacre, we’re a few months away from Algerian independence, but (it’s) also a starting point in the history of the Republic’s treatment of immigrants,” Fabrice Riceputi, a historian who recently published a book about the event called “Here, we drowned the Algerians,” told reporters.
He claimed the slaughter “speaks of a time when there was obviously state racism, of colonialism.”
Riceputi described the bloodshed as “the climax of police harassment and violence against Algerians in the Parisian region” that began a month prior, with police raids in slum areas where Algerians lived on the outskirts of Paris, with some homes being destroyed and corpses found in the Seine even before the protest day. “It’s the end of a terrifying period,” he remarked.
Activists want the massacre to be acknowledged as a “state crime” committed by police, as well as the establishment of a memorial place and restitution.
Macron’s message did not include “any word about the backdrop of the Algerian conflict, any word on colonialism, nothing about archives… even less about reparation,” according to the Movement Against Racism and Friendship Between People, or MRAP.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo had attended a commemoration ceremony at the Saint-Michel Bridge in the capital’s city center earlier in the day.
On Saturday, Macron paid respect to the dead at the Bezons Bridge, which spans the Seine River in the northwest of Paris. He was the first president to attend the massacre’s memorial.
He indicated earlier this year that he will accelerate the declassification of secret records linked to Algeria’s struggle for independence from France from 1954 to 1962. Macron’s office stated that the new method was implemented in August.
Macron made the announcement as part of a series of moves aimed at addressing France’s terrible history with Algeria, which was ruled by France for 132 years until its independence in 1962.
Macron explicitly acknowledged the French state’s guilt in the 1957 death of an Algerian dissident, Maurice Audin, in 2018, recognizing for the first time the French military’s use of systemic torture during the conflict.
