PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Algeria on Thursday for a three-day visit aimed at addressing two major challenges: boosting future economic relations and healing colonial-era wounds.
The visit comes less than a year after a monthlong diplomatic crisis between the two countries stirred up tensions 60 years after the North African country won its independence from France. The war in Ukraine has reinforced Algeria’s status as a key partner in providing gas to the European continent.
In recent years, Macron has made unprecedented steps to acknowledge torture and killings by French troops during Algeria’s 1954-62 war of independence, in a bid to improve the two countries’ still rancorous relations. Yet the series of symbolic gestures has fallen short of an apology from France for its actions during the war — a longstanding demand from Algeria.
“We have a common past, we have a painful past, (...) but we want to build a future together,” Macron said in a joint statement with Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune in the capital, Algiers.
The two leaders agreed to form a joint commission of historians who will examine the past from the beginning of the French colonization in 1830 to Algeria’s liberation in 1962.
“We will not take the easy way,” Macron said and vowed that France will open up archives in the “quest for truth.” He added: “We did not choose and plan the past. We inherited it and we have to face it with humility.”
Earlier on Thursday, the two leaders attended a ceremony at the Martyrs’ Memorial, which pays tribute to those who died during Algeria’s struggle for independence, before heading to the presidential El Mouradia palace for a meeting and dinner.
This is the second time Macron has been to Algeria as president. During a brief stop in December 2017, he called for a “partnership between equals.” Months before that, during a trip to Algiers as a presidential candidate, he called colonization a “crime against humanity.”
Macron, the first French president born after the end of Algeria’s brutal seven-year war of independence in 1962, has promised a reckoning of colonial-era wrongs. The country was occupied by France for 132 years.
In 2018, Macron recognized the responsibility of the French state in the 1957 death of a dissident in Algeria, Maurice Audin, admitting for the first time the military’s use of systematic torture during the war. He later made a key decision to speed up the declassification of secret documents related to the war, amid other gestures.