Paris massacre: 60 years on, France must face its colonial past
Al Jazeera
On the anniversary of the Paris massacre, we do not need ceremonies or a plan for reparations for French Algerians. We need a major anti-fascist movement.
“The most violent contemporary state repression ever applied to a street protest in Western Europe.” This is how British historians Jim House and Neil MacMaster described the massacre of Algerians protesting peacefully in Paris on October 17, 1961, during the period now known as the Algerian war.
The protesters – 30,000 pro-independence Algerians – were demonstrating against a curfew that had been imposed on “Algerian Muslim workers”, “French Muslims” and “French Muslims of Algeria”. According to historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, the authorities intended not only to stop the demonstration but to kill the protesters; police officers even threw some of the demonstrators alive into the River Seine.
For years, the official death toll of the 1961 massacre was only three. Nowadays, historians agree that at least 48 people were killed by French police on that night, although many believe the death toll was well over 100.
