Les harkis de France rattrapés par le racisme anti-arabe et l’islamophobie

The harkis of France caught up in anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia

Divorce

The bitter honeymoon between France and its harkis seems to be coming to an end. The divorce is practically complete. From the start, the union between these two warlike entities was unnatural. Because it was built on the fields of genocidal war waged against the Algerian people. Colonial France was the mastermind of this war of extermination of Algerian independence fighters, and the auxiliaries harkis its indigenous armed arms.

Both were driven by the same murderous hostility of the Algerian revolutionary and the same bloody determination to crush in blood the desire for national emancipation manifested by the viscerally anti-colonialist Algerian people.
In France, harkis have always been considered Arabs to be kept away from society. The proof: upon their repatriation, they were herded like animals into camps, far from the gaze of native French people. In the eyes of the French, they have always remained natives, “French” Muslim second-class citizens.
France will thus have raised, like subhumans, the children of harkis in reclassification camps to better ensure and succeed in their downgrading. This is where “grateful” France will have thrown the children of harkis: into reclassification camps, vectors of their downgrading, into psychiatric hospital centers to treat their relegation, into social services to beg for their survival, demanded moreover in approximate French, with a poor lexicon due to lack of having received decent schooling.
Today, France, racist and Islamophobic, comes to remind its harkis that it considers them to be Muslims, and therefore, according to the current extreme-right political terminology, Islamists.
Thus, the harkis are returned to their Arabness and assigned to their Islam, at a time when these two cultural and religious notions are furiously stigmatized and criminalized in France.
On Thursday, September 25, National Day of Tribute to the Harkis, the municipality of Pertuis called on its residents not to participate in the minute of silence organized by the French Muslim Rapatriés de Pertuis association. The city accuses the association of “Islamist activism.” “We have never seen this, a minute of silence in homage to the harkis banned by the town hall of Pertuis,” says a member of the association.
Thus, on September 25, although a national day of homage to the harkis, members and supporters of the association Français Musulmans Rapatriés de Pertuis were prohibited from group access to the stele to commemorate “the Muslim soldiers of the French army during the Algerian war”. Probably because of the qualifier “Muslims” attached to the name “soldiers”.
In the era of uninhibited French racism and warlike militarism, the French state certainly requires sacred union around tricolor values, but free from any reference to Arab culture or Muslim worship.
Ironically, the sons and grandsons of the Harki soldiers, these soldiers who donned the uniform of the French colonial army to fight their brothers by blood and religion, had to face, this Thursday, September 25, municipal police officers and gendarmes dispatched to the site to keep in check these Muslims accused of belonging to the Islamist movement. An accusation systematically leveled against any Muslim whose practices are considered too rigorous. And, now, against the children of harkis.
The city of Pertuis accuses the French Musulmans Repatriés association of “mixing, in its positions, Islamist activism with memorial themes, which constitutes an unacceptable exploitation of History”. An accusation refuted by the association which plans to file a complaint for “defamation”. For the association, the affair seems above all “political”. It illustrates the climate of “ambient Islamophobia” which currently reigns in France.
Proof of this stigmatization and excommunication of the harkis, symbolized by the repudiation by the city of Pertuis of the members of the French Muslim Repatriated association, the municipality decided in 2023 to return to the initial lease by proposing a 12-year agreement, revocable at any time and without possibility of appeal. However, until then, the association had benefited for more than 50 years from municipal premises made available to it free of charge and for a long period. Unsurprisingly, in February 2024, the town hall expelled the association from its premises.
In the end, this Thursday, September 25, the town of Pertuis did pay tribute to the harkis, but at the town hall, “among ourselves Gallic”, in the presence of French officials, in particular the sub-prefect, the deputy of the constituency and many local elected officials. Without the participation of harkis members of the French Muslim association.
Ironically, the harkis, who proclaimed themselves more French than the French, discovered, reluctantly, that they were not spared from anti-Arab racism and ambient Islamophobia.
Probably, as they wrote, in January 2023, a letter to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to ask him to protect them from Algeriepatriotique and the author of these lines
will they write, this time, to President Tebboune to implore him to protect them from the racism and Islamophobia currently rampant in France. Even to repatriate their families and children to Algeria to escape the deleterious ambient climate, the rise of fascism, and potential pogromist attacks targeting Arabs and Muslims.