The Algerian government also appealed for international help in removing millions of land mines left by the French military during its 1954-62 war against the Algerian independence movement.

While the Allied imperialist governments, headed by Washington, celebrated “V-E Day,” events across Algeria marked the 60th anniversary of the 1945 massacre. “The Algerian people have always been waiting for France to admit the acts perpetrated during the colonization period and the liberation war,” said Bouteflika in his May 7 speech.

While admitting that thousands of Algerians were killed in 1945, Paris has disputed the numbers, placing the toll at “only” 15,000 to 20,000 killed by French forces. The French government also continues to try to portray its occupation of Algeria as something other than colonization. “Each of the two sides has its view of these events,” said French foreign ministry secretary Renaud Muselier, according to AP. “For Algerians, it was a war of colonization and for the French it was a war.”

In February, the French ambassador to Algeria called the massacre that occurred in the city of Sétif an “inexcusable tragedy,” reported Al-Jazeera. And Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said the two countries must “look together at the past, in order to overcome the chapter most painful for our two peoples.” Barnier’s remarks appeared in the Algerian daily El Watan on May 8, the day that thousands across the country commemorated the 1945 massacre.

Barnier has suggested that Paris’s role in that massacre would be part of discussions aimed at signing a French-Algerian friendship treaty this year. Paris has seen its influence in Algeria weaken as Washington continues to make gains in the region, including growing investments in the country’s oil industry.

Starting in 1942, the North African Allied headquarters was located in Algeria and Algerians served with Allied forces. During the French-organized celebration of the end of the war on May 8, 1945, thousands of Algerians took advantage of the opportunity to demonstrate for independence. In the town of Sétif demonstrators unfurled Algerian flags—banned by the French government.  
 
Algerian villages bombed
The protesters fought back when French cops attempted to confiscate the flags. The pro-independence demonstrations spread rapidly, involving at least 50,000 Algerians, even by the conservative estimates of French government officials at the time. Among those who sided with Paris and were attacked by the rebels were members of the Algerian Communist Party, which opposed independence.

“An uprising of the Algerian people against French rule had brought about the military action,” said a news item in the June 9, 1945, Militant. “In the early stages of the revolt, 97 Europeans, mostly French colonial administrators and wealthy residents of the Constantine area, were reported killed.” Among the sources the Militant used for that report was the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes.

“Among the first victims, according to other sources, were Stalinists,” the Militant continued. “One local Communist Party secretary was killed and beaten. The anger of the Algerian masses arose from the support to French imperialism offered by the Algerian Communist Party. Last spring this party suddenly stopped declaiming against imperialism and instead took a stand against the Algerians,” who were demanding independence, it said.

“The bloody repression was the answer of French imperialism to demands of starving colonials for food,” the Militant reported. “French bombers smashed entire native villages in the mountain area near Constantine, Algeria. The airmen flew as many as 300 sorties a day. The medium and heavy bombers they used were made in the United States.

“‘Entire communities of thatched and dirt homes were leveled,’ said Stars and Stripes. ‘French fighters in British-made aircraft followed up the bombers to strafe the fleeing population or dive-bomb Arab strongholds in the mountains.’”

The 1945 revolt and its brutal suppression were part of the prelude to the Algerian independence war. The Algerian revolution rose with the wave of anticolonial struggles that swept Africa and Asia after World War II. The first action of the Algerian National Liberation Front was a guerrilla attack on Nov. 1, 1954. Paris threw the full weight of its army, supplied with the latest weapons from NATO, against the Algerian independence movement. During the seven-and-a-half-year war more than 400,000 French troops were engaged, including two-thirds of Paris’s air force and half its navy. More than 8,000 Algerian villages were destroyed under the scorched earth policy of the French military, and more than 1 million Algerians were killed.

The French colonialists used land mines and electrified barriers to seal Algeria’s borders with Tunisia and Morocco. The Algerian government said it has removed some 8 million of these mines. Algiers estimates there are 3 million more mines left to clear, according to an Al-Jazeera report.
 
 
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