France’s New Law: A Brazen Attempt to Whitewash the Crimes of Harkis ‘Colonial Collaborators’ in Algeria
✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada
Algiers – October 2025 – Once again, France unveils the true face of its colonial nostalgia, using the dark pages of its imperial past not as a moral reckoning, but as a political instrument to appease its right-wing electorate and conceal its deep domestic fractures. The latest move—a proposed law to establish a so-called “National Institution for the Memory of the (Harkis)”—reveals a deliberate effort to rewrite history and rebrand betrayal as heroism.
The initiative, led by right-wing deputy Michel Martinez and supported by dozens of conservative MPs, was submitted to the French National Assembly under bill number 1910, under the pretext of “recognition and respect.” Yet behind this polished rhetoric lies a darker agenda: to sanitize France’s colonial crimes in Algeria and present the (Harkis)—collaborators who turned their weapons against their own people—as victims rather than perpetrators.
Far from being a moral gesture, the project reflects an orchestrated campaign of historical engineering. France seeks to elevate the status of the (Harkis)—those who aided the colonial army during Algeria’s War of Liberation—through state funding, academic programs, and public commemorations. The intent is clear: to transform France’s guilt into glorification, and to replace the memory of resistance with a narrative of remorse for traitors.
The proposed law builds upon the February 23, 2022 legislation, which recognized France’s “responsibility for the conditions of reception” of the (Harkis) after 1962. But the new text goes far beyond financial compensation. It aims to institutionalize an alternative historical narrative, one that recasts France as a benevolent protector and Algeria as the source of post-war “revenge and violence.” Such distortion is not innocent—it is a calculated effort to invert the moral compass of colonial memory, erasing the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized, between the executioner and the victim.
By framing the (Harkis) as “martyrs of misunderstanding,” France attempts to absolve itself from its atrocities—massacres, torture, displacement, and starvation—perpetrated against millions of Algerians during 132 years of occupation. This shameless act of memory laundering seeks to replace accountability with amnesia, and justice with justification.
The so-called “National Institution for the Memory of the (Harkis),” envisioned as a cultural and academic foundation, would be funded by public money and private endowments, tasked with gathering archives, producing research, and organizing commemorative events under the banner of “dignity and remembrance.” But beneath its humanitarian façade lies the same colonial machinery that once justified “the civilizing mission”—now repackaged as moral rehabilitation for collaborators.
It is a grotesque irony: while Algeria still searches for the remains of its martyrs buried in unmarked graves by French forces, Paris chooses to honor those who betrayed them. The move reveals the enduring moral bankruptcy of the French political class, which prefers to canonize treachery rather than confront its own crimes.
This legislative maneuver is also a race against time. French deputies themselves admit that “witnesses of that era are disappearing quickly,” a statement that betrays their true intent—to close the colonial file before the full truth emerges. France’s refusal to apologize, its selective opening of military archives, and its persecution of researchers who expose its atrocities, all point to a state still haunted by its past and desperate to reshape it.
Each time Algeria strengthens its sovereignty and reclaims its historical narrative, France reaches for the same colonial relic—the (Harki) file—to reassert its lost grandeur. Yet history cannot be legislated. It is etched in the blood of martyrs, carried by the memory of a people who refuse to sell their dignity or silence their truth.
No law, however eloquent or deceitful, can erase the collective memory of resistance that defines Algeria’s identity. France may attempt to polish the image of its collaborators, but the world remembers who the colonizer was, and who fought for freedom. The truth of history remains unbending: nations are built by patriots, not by those who betrayed them.
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