French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday condemned as “inexcusable” a deadly crackdown by Paris police on a 1961 protest by Algerians whose scale was covered up for decades, disappointing activists who hoped for an even stronger recognition of responsibility.
Macron told relatives of victims on the 60th anniversary of the bloodshed that “crimes” were committed on the night of October 17, 1961 under the command of the notorious Paris police chief Maurice Papon.
He acknowledged that several dozen protesters had been killed, “their bodies thrown into the River Seine” and paid tribute to their memory.
The precise number of victims has never been made clear and some activists fear several hundred could have been killed.
Macron “recognised the facts: that the crimes committed that night under Maurice Papon are inexcusable for the Republic”, the Elysee said.
“This tragedy was long hushed-up, denied or concealed,” it added in a statement.
The rally was called in the final year of France’s increasingly violent attempt to retain Algeria as a north African colony, and in the middle of a bombing campaign targeting mainland France by pro-independence militants.
Papon was in the 1980s revealed to have been a collaborator with the occupying Nazis in World War II. He was convicted of crimes against humanity but later released.
Macron, the first French president to attend a memorial ceremony for those killed, observed a minute of silence in their memory at the Bezons bridge over the Seine on the outskirts of Paris where the protest started.
His comments that crimes were committed went further than predecessor Francois Hollande, who acknowledged in 2012 that the protesting Algerians had been “killed during a bloody repression”.
However he did not issue a formal apology. He also did not give a public speech, with the Elysee issuing only the written statement.
The president, France’s first leader born after the colonial era, has made a priority of historical reconciliation and forging a modern relationship with former colonies.
But Macron, who is expected to seek re-election next year, is wary about provoking a backlash from political opponents.
His far-right electoral opponents, nationalists Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, are outspoken critics of efforts to acknowledge or show repentance for past crimes.
Historian Emmanuel Blanchard told AFP that Macron’s comments represented “progress” and had gone “much further” than those made by Hollande in 2012.
But he took issue with the decision to pin responsibility on Papon alone, saying that then prime minister Michel Debre and president Charles de Gaulle had not been held to account over the ensuing cover-up or the fact Papon would remain Paris police chief until 1967.
The statement by Macron “is progress but not complete. We hoped for more,” Mimouna Hadjam of the Africa93 anti-racism association told AFP.
“Papon did not act alone. People were tortured, massacred in the heart of Paris and those high up knew,” Hadjam added, calling for recognition of a “state crime”.
Domonique Sopo, the head of SOS Racism, said while the comments were welcome, Macron was showing a tendency of taking “small steps” on such issues by reducing responsibility to Papon alone.
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