N°18 novembre 2021 October 17, 1961 a day “reported missing”. They tried to erase it from memories, they failed but it remains to remove the layers of makeup that are piling up to hide the raw truth of French imperialism.
Since the 1830s and 1840s, the colonization of Algeria has consisted in massacres, atrocities, devastation of farms and harvests in the burning and ransacking of an entire country. The settlers dream of an Algeria without Algerians as a gateway to the entire African continent. Thus until 1962 130 years of colonization and violence, looting and humiliation take place. It is by restoring the manifestation of October 1961 in this history that the horror of repression appears in the continuum of a French imperialist policy whose traces will never be erased. Terror is a constant which makes “reconciliation” between the two states illusory. We cannot list all the massacres but those of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata in May 1945, the beheaded in southern Algeria, the " law and order policing operations ", the atrocities committed by the French army on civilians make credible the number of five million Algerian deaths in 130 years. Not to mention the colonial troops enlisted by the French army in the two world wars. Only the Algerian people are the guardians of this memory and they alone can judge the odious nature of Macron's declarations on the "memorial rent" that the power of Abdelmadjid Tebboune would use for domestic political purposes. Just as was odious in 2005 the passage of a Chiraquian law containing an article on the "positive role of the French presence in North Africa." An expression abrogated, of course, but omnipresent in the colonial doxa and which reappears regularly as soon as the interests of the former colonizer are at stake.
The lip service to October 17, 2021, is no exception. That this massacre of more than 200 Algerian demonstrators peacefully marching in Paris with women and children against a curfew which again discriminated against them should be reduced to a fault of one man: the prefect Papon, adds to the falsification of history for the benefit of the French power of de Gaulle and Debré, the real instigators of unrestricted repression. Moreover, the repression continued until the March 19 ceasefire. Prefect Papon is indeed an infamous individual and this was not an isolated act in his career as a collaborator. But it is General de Gaulle’s power that must be denounced. Power in the service of capital, the main contented beneficiary of colonization. And the few retaliatory measures implemented by the Algerian government will not threaten the business of multinationals in Algeria. First customer and second supplier- after China- France has never ceased its post-colonial trade. Danone, Sanofi, Yoplait, Schneider, Veolia, Thomson, Thalès, Saur, Total, Crédit agricole, BNP etc. continue their juicy trade on both sides of the Mediterranean regardless of the diplomatic tensions linked to Macron's utterly irresponsible and disrespectful remarks. Prime Minister Aïmene Benabderrahmane reminds us: "We do not accept such statements, Algeria is a people, a standing nation that has proven itself in history".
We were and will remain alongside the Algerians in their past and future struggles against exploiting, colonizing capitalism. Our two peoples have been able to prove their solidarity in the face of the imperialists’ ferocity. Our COMMUNIST Revolutionary Party renews its internationalist solidarity with the Algerian people in their struggle for national sovereignty.