Algeria celebrates this Tuesday in a lavish way, including, for example, a military parade of an unprecedented dimension, the 60th anniversary of its independence after 132 years of French colonization, a period that still casts a shadow over relations between the two countries.
After almost eight years of war between the Algerian insurgents and the French army, peace came on March 18, 1962 with the historic Evián Agreements, which paved the way for the proclamation of Algerian independence on July 5 of that year. , approved a few days earlier by 99.72% of the votes in a self-determination referendum.
After laying a wreath at the Shrine of the Martyrs in Algiers, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, standing aboard a convertible car, accompanied by the Chief of the Army General Staff, Said Chanegriha, reviewed units from various security services before to start the military parade.
At the same time, sixty cannon salvos were fired.
Several foreign guests, including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abas, Tunisian President Kais Saied and Nigerian President Mohamed Bazoum, were attending the ceremony.
Since Friday night, authorities have closed a 16-kilometre section of Algiers’ main avenue to traffic for the army to rehearse before the parade, the first in 33 years.
The closure of this avenue, the main access to the center of the capital, caused huge traffic jams on the routes leading to Algiers and its eastern suburb.
Guilty
Algeria’s independence was achieved at the end of a war that left hundreds of thousands dead, and made that country the only French colony in Africa that had to resort to arms to free itself in the 1960s.
But 60 years after the end of colonization, the wounds are still alive in Algeria, while France dismisses any “repentance” or “apology”, despite the fact that French President Emmanuel Macron has made efforts since his election to improve relations with a series of of symbolic gestures.
“Human genocide, cultural genocide and identity genocide of which France remains guilty cannot be forgotten or erased in any way,” said Salah Goudjil, president of the Council of the Nation, the upper house of Parliament, and a veteran of the war of independence, in an interview on Monday with the newspaper l’Expression.
In March, Abdelmadjid Tebboune declared that the issue of memory must be addressed in a “fair” manner, adding that the “crimes” of French colonization would not be prescribed.
Bilateral relations hit bottom in October, when Macron stated that Algeria had been built after its independence on a “memory rent” fed by “the political-military system”.
These statements provoked anger in the Algerian authorities.
But since then, the situation has been improving and Macron and Tebboune expressed their willingness to “deepen” relations, in an interview in mid-June.
On Monday night, the French presidency announced that Macron had sent a letter to his Algerian counterpart on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of independence in which he called for the “strengthening of already strong ties” between the two countries.
