France Whitewashes Colonial Shame: Expansion of ‘Harki’ Compensation Law Deepens the Insult to Algerian Memory

✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada

By equating traitors to victims, France doubles down on historical revisionism, seeking to cleanse its colonial conscience while rewarding collaborators and ignoring the pain of its true victims.

 

Algiers, Algeria | May 17th, 2025 — In a move steeped in historical hypocrisy and neocolonial arrogance, France’s Constitutional Council has expanded the controversial 2022 law on compensation for “Harkis”—those who betrayed Algeria during its liberation war—to include more repatriated individuals, regardless of their military status. This decision, lauded by the French establishment as “inclusive,” is in reality a shameful act of revisionism that seeks to equate collaborators with victims, all while reinforcing France’s refusal to confront its colonial crimes in Algeria.

Let us be clear: the Harkis were not victims. They were auxiliaries of the French colonial army—individuals who chose to stand against their own people in support of an occupying power. Their repatriation to France after independence was not exile; it was evacuation by their masters, a consequence of the choices they made when they picked the side of oppression.

Now, under the pretext of human dignity and “inhumane” post-repatriation conditions, France is retroactively turning these collaborators into symbols of suffering—deserving of state compensation and moral recognition. This moral inversion is not just insulting—it is dangerous.

The case that triggered this legal adjustment involved a family of a former soldier of North African origin who returned to France post-1962 and was housed in what were described as “degrading conditions.” The Constitutional Council, in a ruling cloaked in humanitarian language, decided that all those subjected to such conditions—Harkis or not—should be compensated. In doing so, France is blurring the lines between resistance and betrayal, between oppressors and the oppressed.

Attorneys Antoine Auri and Raphaël Bonillo-Brochier, who represented the family, welcomed the ruling, calling it “just.” But justice in France’s colonial context remains selective—offering reparations to the wrong side of history, while denying even symbolic recognition to the millions of Algerians who were killed, tortured, displaced, and raped under French rule.

Let us not forget: the original law of February 23, 2022, was born not out of justice, but out of Macron’s continued efforts to curry favor with France’s far-right and pied-noir lobbies. His hollow apology to the Harkis in 2021—where he shamefully declared that “France failed them”—is part of a wider campaign to rewrite history, where the colonizer is painted as flawed but benevolent, and the colonized reduced to footnotes or, worse, villains.

With more than €176 million already disbursed through the CNIH (National Independent Commission), and 6,000 more “beneficiaries” now added, the French state is spending millions not to repair the wounds of colonialism, but to rehabilitate its collaborators.

Meanwhile, Algerian families who endured napalm bombings, mass executions, internment camps, and forced disappearances receive no acknowledgment—let alone reparations. Their truth is silenced by the very Republic that continues to celebrate its “civilizing mission” while paying hush money to its accomplices.

France’s latest move is not justice—it is a grotesque betrayal of memory. It is a final insult to the martyrs of Algeria’s liberation, and a glaring reminder that the colonial mindset is alive and well in the corridors of Paris.

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