Algeria: The Sétif Massacre Warns Us

Eighty years ago, on May 8, 1945, French colonial rulers began a massacre in occupied Algeria as Algerian demonstrators demanded an end to colonialism and occupation. The Sétif massacre serves as a warning.

May 8, 1945, was not only the day of liberation, the day the fascist terror of Nazi rule was crushed. On the same day, a massacre took place in Sétif, a northern city in Algeria.

But it wasn’t the Nazis who perpetrated this massacre. It was the troops who had proclaimed “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” on their banner in Europe. It was the French colonial occupiers who had ruled Algeria for over a hundred years, since 1830.

During World War II, more than 100,000 Algerians, like other colonized people around the world, fought with France against the Nazi dictatorship. Many Algerian soldiers were killed or wounded in World War II. Even while fighting in the French army to liberate Europe from fascist Nazi rule, Algerian and other racialized soldiers from the French colonies were oppressed within the French ranks.

ALGERIA’S ANTI-COLONIAL OUTCRY

To celebrate the victory over the Nazi dictatorship and demand independence from the yoke of French colonialism, around 4,000 Algerians took to the streets in Sétif on May 8. They had lost fathers, uncles, and brothers in the war against fascism and now demanded their own liberation. When a young man named Bouzid Saâl waved the Algerian independence flag, the French police reacted brutally and shot him dead. On the same day, demonstrators in the Algerian city of Guelma were also attacked by French police. This sparked an anti-French uprising in which several French settlers were killed. The absolute violence of the oppressor, by definition, engenders the anti-colonial counter-violence of the oppressed.

These events were used as a pretext by the French colonial rulers, together with settler-colonial militias under orders from Paris, to launch a retaliatory strike shortly thereafter. Muslim Algerian civilians and activists were sought out, shot, and their villages bombed.

It is estimated that up to 45,000 Algerians were murdered by the French colonial rulers during this period. No Frenchman was ever held accountable. These events are considered a catalytic point for the subsequent Algerian War of Liberation (1954-1962), in which the French army killed more than one million Algerians.

COLONIAL CONTINUITIES

The brutality of the Sétif Massacre and the subsequent struggle against the Algerian Liberation War represented a continuity of French colonialism, which had been ongoing for over a century. Since the beginning of the French occupation of Algeria in the 19th century, French colonial rule was known for its series of murders. For example, decapitated skulls of Algerian anti-colonial freedom fighters were taken to France as trophies and displayed in museums. Hundreds of Algerian skulls are still in French museums today.

THE IMPERIALIST WORLDVIEW

The fact that the same French troops who fought against the Nazi dictatorship in Europe in the 20th century and boasted of liberal slogans of enlightenment, freedom, and equality simultaneously tortured and killed civilians and suppressed independence movements in Algeria and other French “colonial territories” is not a contradiction, the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon argued. Rather it must be understood as part of the racist worldview of France and other colonial regimes. They classified and continue to classify racialized people as inferior in order to justify their exploitation and oppression.

Thus, French—but also British, German, and Spanish—colonialism, and later imperialism, was stylized as a “civilizing mission.” Liberal ideals in Europe served as a pretext for colonial campaigns. For this purpose, colonial-racist language was used, according to which it was the “white man’s burden” to “educate” the rest of the world. Such racist justifications were used to conceal the underlying material interests of the imperialists. In plain language, this always meant domination, subjugation, and exploitation. To this day, similar language of “women’s rights,” “civilization,” or “fighting terrorism” is used to legitimize imperialist campaigns, be it the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq or the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The Sétif massacre, and beyond that, the brutal French occupation of Algeria, remind us that the fight against fascism and the fight against imperialism must be tackled together.

Photo: Algeria War Collage

First Published Here