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'France must still apologise'
18/05/2006 20:05 - (SA)
Algiers - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika says France must officially apologise to Algerians for its "barbarian massacres" if Paris wants to improve ties with its former colony.
Bouteflika's remarks were the latest in a war of words that broke out last month, when the Algerian leader said France's 132-year colonial-rule amounted to a "genocide of Algerian identity".
France is trying to retain influence in Africa's second largest country, where the United States is bolstering oil and trade ties.
In a speech read out on his behalf by minister for veteran affairs Mohamed Cherif Abbas on Thursday, Bouteflika said: "It is, today, our duty towards the Algerian people and the martyrs to demand official apology from a nation whose motto of revolution was freedom, equality, fraternity."
Bouteflika has urged Paris to acknowledge its role in the massacre of 45 000 Algerians, who took to the streets to demand independence from France as Europe celebrated victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.
'They were a savagery'
According to the Algerian government, the later 1954-1962 Algerian war of independence cost the lives of 1.5 million Algerians. Many French also died.
Bouteflika said: "The massacres of May 8, 1945, were of a barbarity and a cruelty never equalled in both old and modern Algerian history. They were a savagery that no one could not disavow."
The speech in the western town of Mostaganem was to mark the country's National Student Day and pay tribute to students who left school and took up arms in the war of independence.
French minister for Europe, Catherine Colonna, called for an end to an "unhelpful" war of words between the two nations on April 27. She said relations should be built on trust.
The two countries bickered over the protocol of a mid-April health check Bouteflika had in the French capital last month.
Chirac repealed controversial law
French right-wingers said France should not have permitted Bouteflika to visit Paris. Just days earlier, he had said French colonialism amounted to a "genocide" of Algerian identity.
The comments came a few days after a visit to Algiers by French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, to negotiate a friendship treaty aimed at improving ties.
The two countries were to sign the accord, similar to the 1963 Franco-German reconciliation treaty, at the end of last year.
But France's National Assembly approved a law referring to the "positive role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa" in February 2005, a move seen by Algiers as a hurdle on the way to normalisation.
French President Jacques Chirac repealed the law but that step did not defuse the row.
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