4 Summary of Session 5

The repatriated settlers of European heritage and the Muslim Harkis, shared many similar experiences:

• the shock of colonial conflict
• unwilling exile from their lives in Algeria
• the struggle to begin a new life in a new country
• a sense that their sacrifice was unappreciated by the metropolitan French who wished to move on from an unpopular and costly colonial war.

Racism, however, added to the burdens of the Harkis in France, even more so during the economic recession of the early 1970s, when the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Algerian sentiment in France affected their daily lives. They expected to receive loyalty from the French state due to their military service: they did not receive it, because they were ethnically Algerian and adhered to the Muslim faith. Both of these things marked them as different and unequal in a France still rebuilding its sense of identity in the aftermath of the second world war and the loss of imperial territory. That identity did not include the Harkis.

Lobbying in the 1970s and 1980s by the second generation of Harkis for political and social recognition of their parents’ contributions to French Algeria highlighted the racial discrimination that their communities confronted, and continue to confront to the present day. In 2016, then President of France Francois Hollande accepted ‘the responsibilities of French governments in the abandonment of the Harkis’. In September 2021, his successor Emmanuel Macron held a ceremony at the Elysee Palace to apologise for the failure of the French state in its ‘duty towards the Harkis, their wives, their children’ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . But the continued social exclusion of the Harkis is an example of the pervasive legacy of racialised colonial thinking.