By Kamel Daoud In the Financial Times, February 24 2021
The writer is an Algerian author and journalist.
When Benjamin Stora, a respected French historian of Algerian origin, submitted his long-awaited report on “the memory of French colonisation and the war in Algeria” in January, reactions in both countries were extreme. The powerful Algerian organisation Veterans of the War of Liberation (ONM) dismissed it as a symbolic effort that covered up colonial crimes, and said Stora “showed his limits”, while in France, groups representing Harkis, Algerians who supported the French, accused the historian of avoiding difficult questions.