Limitaciones del estudio

The state employs official carriers of memory, including legislation, court cases, monuments, ceremonies, and other forms of commemoration, to impose a hegemonic

interpretation of events of national significance. The purpose of official memory is to reinforce the unity of the national community through a shared orientation to past events1 and this function is particularly essential in the aftermath of defeat.2 In the case of the Algerian War, and the colonial period more generally, however, the French state has been unable to forge a national consensus. Harkis, members of the FLN, drafted soldiers, Pieds-Noirs, former colonial subjects, and their descendants have expressed differing perspectives on this period.3 Commemorative activity has become further politicized as parties on the left and right have aligned with various groups and their memorial causes.To some scholars and politicians, especially those who privilege a single shared national narrative, this lack of agreement on how to interpret the past has indicated a troubling new degree of social polarization in France.4 It has also prompted them

1 _{Allan Megill, Steven Shepard, and Phillip Honenberger, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary} Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 30.

2 _{Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);} John Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Jenny Macleod, Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat Since 1815, (Basingstoke England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

3 _{Jo McCormack, Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War (1954-1962) (Lexington Books, 2010), 5.} 4 _{Johann Michel, Gouverner Les Mémoires: Les Politiques Mémorielles En France (Presses Universitaires de} France, 2010), 157; Nicolas Bancel, “France, 2005: A Postcolonial Turning Point,” French Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2013): 208–18: 209, 215.

to employ the “memory wars” paradigm to interpret competing commemorative acts.5 Yet, as John Gillis has observed, even when commemorative activities seem consensual, “they are in fact the product of processes of intense contest, struggle, and, in some instances, annihilation.”6

I am the first to study how Harkis and their descendants have responded to official commemorations of the Algerian War and to analyze what this reveals about their evolving relationship to the national community.7 Their reactions are more apparent on Harki websites than in other sources.8 Indeed, they employ cyber carriers precisely in order to express their lack of ideological consensus. It is through these sites that we can observe the extent of their

resistance and examine how they have used the Internet to publically contest official memory practices. The Harkis and their descendants constitute a dispersed community and have restricted access to financial and political resources as well as limited visibility in France. The Internet has served as an indispensible communication medium for them. They have used the web to organize and promote collective action. Cyber carriers have enabled Harkis and their children to

participate more actively in the process of negotiating a collective memory of the Algerian War.

5 _{Eric Savarese, Algérie : La guerre des mémoires, (Editions Non Lieu, 2007) ; Benjamin Stora and Thierry Leclère,} La Guerre des Mémoires: La France face à son passé colonial (Paris : Editions de l'Aube, 2008) ; Pascal Blanchard, Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, and Collectif, Les Guerres de Mémoires: La France et Son Histoire, Enjeux Politiques, Controverses Historiques, Stratégies Médiatiques (Editions La Découverte, 2010).

6 _{Gillis, Commemorations, 5.}

7 _{On official commemorations of the Algerian War, see: William B. Cohen, “The Algerian War and French} Memory,” Contemporary European History 9, no. 03 (2000): 489–500; Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Colonial Memories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Michel, Gouverner.

8 _{My main sources for this chapter are the works of second generation activists and associations- their memoirs,} scholarly texts, and websites. In particular I analyze the reactions of the following key players in the Harki memory community: Boussad Azni, who led the coalition to bring the crimes against humanity case against France and wrote a text explaining the case; Hacène Arfi, who was a leader of the 1991 protest and an active opponent of March 19th as a commemorative date; Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, who has written a memoir and published collections of Harki stories, organized a number of scholarly conferences on the Harkis, and has served as president of the association Harkis et Droits de L’Homme, which has a website; Abderahmen Moumen, who is a second-generation Harki scholar; and Khader Moulfi, who founded the Coalition Nationale des Harkis and ran its website.

I also examine how and why Harki children have borrowed from French Jewish memory narratives and practices when articulating their collective memories. Other scholars, including William Cohen and Régis Pierret, have identified some of the parallels that Harkis and their descendants have drawn between their own experiences and those of Jews during the Holocaust.9 I argue that these multidirectional invocations have proved most productive for Harkis and their children in understanding and constructing their relationship to the French state. Their actions fit within a larger pattern of cross-referencing in the histories of Holocaust and colonial memories that Michael Rothberg has observed.10 The case of the Harkis seems to confirm “the rhetorical and cultural intimacy of [these] seemingly opposed traditions of remembrance.”11

This chapter explores state commemorations and Harki reactions to them in a chronological fashion. In the first section, I analyze the state’s attempts during the 1990s to celebrate the Harkis’ military service to France. This interpretation of the Harkis’ place in French history corresponded with the French republican memorial model, in which citizens were

honored for their sacrifices to the nation.12 This designation, however, did not accurately reflect the Harkis’ status during the war or their motivations for supporting the French, and did not meet

9 _{Regis Pierret, Les Filles et Fils de Harkis: Entre Double Rejet et Triple Appartenance (L’Harmattan, 2001);} William B. Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria & France, 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M. E. Lorcin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 164–80.

10 _{Parallels between these two histories began during the war itself, when supporters of Algerian independence who} were tortured by the French compared themselves to French resistors in WWII. Rothberg has argued that “The practice of torture and the use of detention camps by France in its war against the Algerian independence movement provide triggers that stimulated remembrance of the Nazi occupation and genocide and inspired new forms of testimony and witnessing.” He has likewise made the case that “the emergence of Holocaust memory has contributed to the articulation of other histories,” including that of the Algerian War in France. Rothberg,

Multidirectional Memory, 6, 228. In addition, French Jews in Algeria spurred Jews in France to be more vocal about their particular experience during the Holocaust and to enter into Holocaust memory culture.

11 _{Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford,} Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 7.

the needs of their community. Second-generation Harkis have instead positioned themselves and their fathers within a competing memory model in France, a “victim-memorial regime,” in which groups are memorialized as the nation’s victims.13 This commemorative framework emerged during the 1970s to 1990s as French Jews prompted the state to engage with its complicity in the Holocaust. The historian Serge Barcellini has described a commemorative shift from honoring “those who died for France” to “those who died because of France.”14 The status of French Jews as victims of the state provided them with political and social capital that they could leverage for material and symbolic concessions. This model has appealed to the Harkis and their children, who have felt that they have been isolated, rejected, and “forgotten” by the rest of the French. Instances of Harki multidirectional memory began in the 1975 protests, during which activists used the platform of Holocaust memory to articulate their experiences of suffering. In particular, they drew comparisons between the camps Harkis had been relegated to by the French and the Nazi concentration camps.

The second section details a crimes against humanity case that a group of second- generation Harkis filed in 2001 against France for its role in the post-independence reprisal violence against the Harkis and their families. This case occurred in the context of France bringing perpetrators to justice for WWII crimes. It demonstrates how second-generation Harki activists have positioned the Harkis within the republic. I argue that, paradoxically, their charges against France, as opposed to against the Algerians who did the killing, indicate their attachment to French society. At the same time, focusing on the responsibility of the French provided a potential basis for reconciling with Algerian immigrants, who have also experienced

13 _Ibid.

14 _{Serge Barcellini, “L’Etat Républicain, Acteur de Mémoire: Des Morts Pour La France Aux Morts À Cause de La} France,” in Les Guerres de Mémoires, ed. Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson, (Editions La Découverte, 2010), pp. 209- 219.

discrimination and injustice from the French state. In addition, the crimes against humanity case points to an evolution in how Harki children have framed their memory practices. After this point, second-generation Harkis focused their activism on the post-independence violence against the Harkis and on France’s neglected responsibilities that led to this tragedy. The case constituted the first time that they had presented the violence as a collective, shared event. It broadened the Harki identity to include not just the men who supported France during the Algerian War, but all who were threatened in the aftermath. This shift has carved out a larger place for Harki wives and daughters in their collective memory narratives and commemorative practices. Some second-generation Harkis also began to employ the term “genocide” during the case. Framing the violence as such solidified their victim status and buffered against accusations that Harkis were “traitors.” In sum, this case was designed to afford the community a dignified place in French society.

In the third section I analyze the French state’s attempts to establish a hegemonic national narrative of French Algeria and the Algerian War in the first decade of the 21st century. Their efforts to create annual commemorations for the Harkis and veterans of the Algerian War as well as the infamous 2005 law designed to impose a normative, positive interpretation of colonialism have met with considerable resistance in France. The polemics that these projects, and this last endeavor in particular, have sparked have prompted some scholars to employ the “memory wars” paradigm. Yet this paradigm cannot explain the Harkis’ reactions. It is more useful instead to think in terms of shifting memorial affiliations. With respect to commemorating March 19th as the end of the war, Harkis and their descendants have been united with Pieds-Noirs, the right, and far-right in opposition to this date. Scholars have positioned them the same way for the 2005 law, yet they have been among the most outspoken against the law, which has created a

foundation for solidarity with colonial subjects and the left.15 These incidents reveal how the Harkis and their families do not fit neatly into political struggles over commemoration.

The final section explores how Harki children have responded to what they see as the continued failure of the French state to officially acknowledge the Harki massacres and to apologize for France’s role in this violence. While French presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande each promised to do just this during their respective campaigns, second- generation Harkis have spoken out in newspapers and on websites and have organized boycotts of the annual commemoration for Harkis to express their frustration that these promises have not been satisfactorily fulfilled. They have also organized their own counter-commemoration on May 12th, the day in 1962 on which Pierre Messmer, then Secretary of the Army, sent an order to prevent French officers from helping the Harkis escape to France. This commemoration

conflates France’s original betrayal in abandoning the Harkis with the continuing lack of apology for this treachery and has evolved from an intimate, solemn event in 2010 to a mass protest in central Paris in 2013. The Harkis’ quest for recognition and official apology from France serves as the main unifying cause for their community. Ultimately, Harki resistance to official

commemoration has been designed to ensure their understanding of their place in France is reflected in this commemoration.

Official Memories of the Holocaust and the Harkis, 1970s-1990s

During the 1970s to 90s, Jewish memory of WWII in France underwent an “awakening,” as Henry Rousso has described it.16 While the French state had emphasized a collective narrative

15 _{In Chapter 4 I will show that second-generation Harkis are divided over the subject of the 2005 law—how to} interpret the colonial past.

16 _{Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 À Nos Jours, 2e éd. (Seuil, 1990), 132. Translation by Cohen, “The} Harkis,” 176.

of resistance to Nazi Occupation in the immediate postwar period, French Jews sought to hold the state accountable for its role in the Holocaust. They also challenged the republican model of a single shared national memory by proclaiming their right to express their own particular collective memory, which they called their devoir de mémoire, and to form their own memory community. In a sense, this move fractured the national narrative and changed the relationship between citizen and nation, but it also ensured their memory was not annihilated. Since they focused on France’s responsibility, their memory work ultimately affirmed their attachment to France.

The efforts of French Jews produced a number of commemorative measures in their favor. In addition to constructing monuments and plaques around France, the state enacted the Gayssot Law in 1990, which prohibited Holocaust denial and protected against anti-Semitic or

xenophobic attacks. This legislation enabled French Jews to bring suit against anyone who disparaged their community. Then, in 1995, President Jacques Chirac officially apologized for the state’s compliance in the deportation of French Jews during the Occupation.17 In his speech at the Vel d’Hiv, the site of a massive round up of Jews in 1942, he acknowledged a “collective fault,” saying that France had betrayed its own “values, principles and ideals.”18 He declared, “It is no longer only a government (Vichy) who is judged responsible for the Deportation of French Jews, but through it a whole state apparatus (local and national police, magistrate, civil

service…) is incriminated.” Chirac thus shattered the idea that the majority of French were resistors and only a handful of Vichy politicians were actually responsible for the deportations.

17 _{Michel, Gouverner, 94-97.} 18 _{Ibid, 95.}

These symbolic gestures were important because they established French Jews as victims of state violence. Moreover, these commemorative developments significantly altered the politics of memory in France.19 Johann Michel has argued that within the current memorial context, “The construction of a victim position allows us to recognize past events as traumatic and to translate these traumas into political demands for the given group. These demands for recognition not only concern material claims (indemnities, restitution of lost goods…) but also touch upon the symbolic construction of individual and collective identities, with the aim of restoring self- esteem.”20 Official victim status was appealing for the Harkis who had both financial concerns as well as an ambiguous place in French society.

From early on, then, the Harkis, their supporters, and their descendants have used the framework of Holocaust memory to formulate their demands for recognition and retribution from France. During the 1975 and 1991 protests, second-generation activists compared the treatment of the Harkis to that of Jews during WWII, referring to the camps as both ghettos21 and

concentration camps.22 This parallel seemed particularly fitting, given that some of the Harki camps had previously held French Jews during WWII. This analogy had a long history as well. French use of “regroupment” camps to resettle the Algerian population during the Algerian War had prompted remembrance of Nazi use of camps. Harkis in turn invoked the memory of Nazi camps to articulate their own experiences and expresses the gravity of the situation and their

19 _{This shift was part of a larger global process. As Barbara Misztal has observed, “Today, due to the proliferation of} the language of human rights and the new strength of the politics of identity, we see an increase in demands for governments to address historical injustices committed in their name.” Barbara Misztal, “Memory Experience: The Forms and Functions of Memory,” in Museums and Their Communities, ed. Sheila Watson (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 379–96: 389.

20 _{Michel, Gouverner, 72-73.}

21 _{Stéphanie Abrial, Les Enfants de Harkis: de la révolte à l’intégration, Histoire et perspectives méditerranéennes;} Variation: Collection Histoire et perspectives méditerranéennes. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 18.

demands. It proved to be an effective strategy, as they drew national attention to the Harki cause and forced the state to close the camps. It is important to note, however, that their rhetoric

“grossly overstated the number of harkis who resided in [the camps]. Focusing the protests on these spaces, which housed only 16,000 of the 180,000 harkis in 1974 (not the “vast majority” as the leader of demonstrations in summer 1975 claimed), and making parallels with Jews during the Second World War resulted in essentializing the plight of all harkis.”23 Over half of the Harkis and their children never lived in the camps and the experiences of those who did varied significantly.24 They thus constitute a problematic focal point for Harki collective memory. Yet these comparisons, and the vivid images they evoke, continue to be employed today. As one Harki son remarked when he returned to Bias in 2006, “the images that march through the mind are truly atrocious ... humiliation, oppression ... a concentration camp.”25

After decades of relative public silence, the French state’s first symbolic gesture towards the Harkis came in 1989, when it issued a commemorative postal stamp that read, “Homage to the harkis, soldiers of France.” Eleven and a half million of these stamps were sold.26 The French state had recognized the Harkis’ status as veterans in 1974, despite their rather loose attachment to the army, as many had not participated in direct combat. French soldiers who fought in Algeria also received official veteran status this year, even though the Algerian War was still formally considered an “operation to maintain order,” and would not be classified as a war until 1999. The move to officialize the Harkis’ status had been taken to help distinguish them from

23 _{Miller, “A Camp for Foreigners and ‘Aliens’, 37-38.}

24 _{Fatima Besnaci-Lancou and Abderahmen Moumen, Les Harkis, Idées Reçues (Editions Le Cavalier Bleu, 2008),} 60.

25 _{Claire Eldridge, “‘We’ve Never Had a Voice’: Memory Construction and the Children of the Harkis (1962–}