On November 1st, Emmanuel Macron acknowledged France’s responsibility in the assassination of Larbi Ben M’hidi, one of the founders of the National Liberation Front (FLN). This “gesture,” which “Tout sur l’Algérie” considers to be “an instrumentalization of memory for the needs of adjusting France’s foreign policy,” comes amid a warming of relations between France and Morocco.
The acknowledgment by French President Emmanuel Macron that Algerian national hero Larbi Ben M’hidi [a militant for Algerian independence and co-founder of the National Liberation Front, murdered by the French army during the Battle of Algiers in 1957] was “assassinated by French military” has not generated the enthusiasm anticipated by its initiator.
In Algeria, the “gesture,” announced on the day of the commemoration of the start of the National Liberation War [November 1, 1954], was met with official silence. However, many voices rose to signify that the French state, as such, has still recognized nothing, denouncing an instrumentalization of memory for the purposes of adjusting France’s foreign policy.
Limited Responsibility
Abdelaziz Rahabi, a diplomat and former minister, remarked that the French president “has evidently sought to spoil our grand celebration on November 1st by acknowledging a crime out of a million.”
“The memory rent is rather on the side of the French right, nostalgic for French Algeria,” wrote the former Algerian ambassador to Spain on X.
French historian Fabrice Riceputi highlights what he calls “the typically Macronian tropism,” which “carefully avoids the question of the political responsibility for this extrajudicial execution.”
This is not the first time that the French president has limited the responsibility for a crime committed during Algeria’s colonization to a certain level in the chain of responsibility, without reaching a formal acknowledgment that the act is attributable to the French state.
This time, it is General Paul Aussaresses who is explicitly named. For the massacres of October 17, 1961 [the deadly repression by the French police, under the orders of Prefect Papon, of a peaceful demonstration of Algerians in Paris], it was police prefect Maurice Papon that Emmanuel Macron had criticized in 2021, three years after attributing the death of Maurice Audin under torture to a “system instituted in Algeria by France” [a French mathematician, a member of the Communist Party and a militant for Algerian independence, who disappeared and was assassinated on an unknown date following his arrest on June 11, 1957].
“Has there ever been any doubt regarding France’s responsibility? And what is the use of acknowledgment if it is not accompanied by reparations?” wondered Algerian historian Hosni Kitouni.
Evacuating True Responsibility
“No, Emmanuel Macron did not acknowledge France’s responsibility in this assassination,” responds categorically Noureddine Amara, an Algerian historian residing in Switzerland.
In the Élysée communiqué, it is stated that Larbi Ben M’hidi “was assassinated by French military under the command of General Aussaresses.”
The historian interprets it as follows: “It is said that, like with Maurice Audin and Ali Boumendjel [an Algerian lawyer and political activist who disappeared during the Battle of Algiers], the fault does not truly lie with anyone, as it is explained by this system outside the society of human and citizen rights, made possible by the vote of special powers.”
According to Noureddine Amara, the French president is closing the door on any possibility of rendering justice by proceeding this way. “We still do not know how to make the dead or the systems speak. Therefore, there can be no possible justice through legal means,” he regrets.
For him, there is a “deliberate intent” to evacuate the question of “the state’s responsibility from a legal point of view,” and thus, “the reconciliation of memories is a trap that seeks to evade an imperative of justice” that neither the mixed commission nor the policy of small steps subscribe to.
The Significance of Timing
Noureddine Amara also questions the timing of Emmanuel Macron’s gesture, asserting that “there is no coincidence in the calendar.”
“The announcement aims first to minimize the cost of French policy regarding Western Sahara,” he analyzes, concluding that this action is “neither free nor genuinely honorable.”
This interpretation is shared by Hosni Kitouni, who sees it as yet another “sleight of hand” by Macron intended this time to “mitigate the political, diplomatic, and symbolic impact of his visit to Morocco and the disgraceful arrangements he has just conceded at the expense of the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination.”
During his state visit to Morocco (October 28 to 30), President Macron formalized France’s recognition of the “Moroccan sovereignty” over the occupied Western Sahara.
Before the Moroccan Parliament, he reiterated what he wrote at the end of July in a letter to King Mohammed VI, announcing France’s change of position regarding this conflict.
