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It is an anniversary that takes place in relative discretion, in the middle of the campaign three weeks before the first round of the presidential election. France commemorates this Saturday the 60th anniversary of the Evian Accords and the ceasefire in Algeria. During a ceremony at the Elysée, Emmanuel Macron estimated: “This date does not mark neither the beginning of peace nor the end of war, nor the end of this history of which we are all the heirs. But it was a milestone. This date can neither be the only one nor be denied”.
“Today is a stage, it is also a very imperfect journey, but it is a journey of recognition which consisted in putting an end to denials, to silences (…)”, continued the president, affirming that all his predecessors were confronted before him with the same reproach: “You are weak because opposite, there is no respondent”. « I take responsibility for my actions. I accept this outstretched hand. The day will come when Algeria will take this path. It is undoubtedly more difficult for the people and the Algerian leaders”, explained the Head of State.
“This path of recognition that we are going to pursue, because it is now unstoppable, is simply the condition for all of us not to forget anything, to deny nothing of the irreducible nature of the sufferings, the pains of what has been experienced, but to assume that they are all French, because the Algerian war, its unspoken, had become the matrix of resentment. »
Emmanuel Macron also referred to the current Russian invasion, saying “What is happening today in Ukraine, what Russia has decided to do is based on a methodical ideological work of deconstruction and falsification of the story “.
Sixty years after March 19, 1962, the day of the entry into force of the ceasefire signed the day before between the French army and the Algerian separatists, this date continues to be controversial.
It was consecrated by law in 2012 as the “National Day of Remembrance and Meditation in memory of the civilian and military victims of the Algerian war and the fighting in Tunisia and Morocco”.
But the returnees believe that the Evian Accords do not mark the end of the Algerian war which began in 1954, because of the violence which continued until the independence of Algeria on July 5, 1962 and ended by the exodus of hundreds of thousands of them to France.
This position is supported by several candidates from the right and the extreme right. Valérie Pécresse (LR) has thus undertaken to find “another date” than March 19 to commemorate the end of the Algerian war. Because “80% of civilian victims fell after the Evian agreements”, she said on Friday, recalling the shooting in Rue d’Isly in Algiers on March 26, 1962, or the Oran massacre of 5 July 1962.
Marine Le Pen (RN) also stressed that she had been contesting this date “for a long time” because “there were tens of thousands of harkis who were brutally murdered” after March 19, 1962.