Painful memory: War crimes and colonial repression in Algeria

A disturbing colonial past.

French colonial history in Algeria is marked by systematic violence and war crimes, which some politicians and public figures still try to minimize or even deny. Recently, a journalist came under political attack for comparing the massacres committed in Algeria to that of Oradour-sur-Glane, a French village destroyed by the Waffen-SS in 1944. Yet this comparison, far from being an exaggeration, highlights the scale of the atrocities committed by the French army during colonization and the Algerian War of Independence.