France admits Algeria war ‘system’ led to torture

PARIS: France admitted Thursday that it instigated a “system” that led to torture during Algeria’s independence war, a conflict that remains hugely sensitive six decades on.President Emmanuel Macron is set to acknowledge that mathematician Maurice Audin, a Communist pro-independence activist who disappeared in 1957, “died under torture stemming from the system instigated while Algeria was part of France”, his office said.

Macron, who was due to visit Audin’s widow later Thursday, will also announce “the opening of archives on the subject of disappeared civilians and soldiers, both French and Algerian”. During the 1954-62 war, which claimed some 1.5 million Algerian lives, French forces brutally cracked down on independence fighters in the colony ruled by Paris for 130 years. Hundreds of thousands of young French men were conscripted to fight in a conflict that left deep scars in France’s national psyche as it wound down from being a colonial power after World War II. The French state has never previously admitted that its military forces routinely used torture during the war. Macron, the first president born after the conflict, sparked controversy on the campaign trail last year by declaring that France’s colonisation of Algeria was a “crime against humanity”. He later walked back the comments, calling for “neither denial nor repentance” over France’s colonial history and adding: “We cannot remain trapped in the past”.

On Thursday he will visit the widow of Audin, whose disappearance has long been a source of fascination in France.