Algeria’s parliament unanimously approved on Wednesday a law declaring France’s colonisation of the country a crime, demanding an apology and reparations in a move Paris condemned as “hostile”.
Standing in the chamber, lawmakers wearing scarves in the colours of the national flag chanted “long live Algeria” as they applauded the passage of the bill, which states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused”.
The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis, and while the move is largely symbolic, it is still politically significant, an analyst said.
Parliament speaker Brahim Boughali told the APS state news agency before the vote that it would send “a clear message, both internally and externally, that Algeria’s national memory is neither erasable nor negotiable”.
The legislation lists the “crimes of French colonisation”, including nuclear tests, extrajudicial killings, “physical and psychological torture”, and the “systematic plundering of resources”.
It states that “full and fair compensation for all material and moral damages caused by French colonisation is an inalienable right of the Algerian state and people”.
A French foreign ministry spokesperson condemned the law’s passing as counterproductive to “the desire to resume Franco-Algerian dialogue and to calm discussions on historical issues”.
The official said Paris was “not in the business of commenting on Algerian domestic politics”, but pointed to “the work undertaken” by French President Emmanuel Macron to establish a commission of historians to study the period of colonial rule.
– ‘Not binding’ –
France’s rule over Algeria from 1830 until 1962 remains a sore spot in relations between the two countries.
The period was marked by mass killings and large-scale deportations, all the way up to the bloody war of independence from 1954-1962.
Algeria says the war killed 1.5 million people, while French historians put the death toll lower at 500,000 in total, 400,000 of them Algerian.
Macron has previously acknowledged the colonisation of Algeria as a “crime against humanity”, but has stopped short of offering an apology.
Asked last week about the vote, French foreign ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux said he would not comment on “political debates taking place in foreign countries”.
Hosni Kitouni, a researcher in colonial history at the University of Exeter in the UK, said that “legally, this law has no international scope and therefore is not binding for France”.
But “its political and symbolic significance is important: it marks a rupture in the relationship with France in terms of memory”, he added.
The move comes at a time of diplomatic friction between Paris and Algiers that began last year when France officially backed Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, where Algeria supports the pro-independence Polisario Front.
Several events have since exacerbated tensions, such as the conviction and imprisonment of the French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who was ultimately pardoned following German intervention.
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