PARIS — On a closely watched state visit to Algeria, President François Hollande on Thursday acknowledged the “profoundly unjust and brutal” nature of France’s former colonial rule, a statement seen in both countries as marking a change of tone in Paris’s official view of the painful colonial period.
But his address fell short of the full apology for which Algeria has long pressed.
“I recognize here the suffering that colonialism inflicted on the Algerian people,” Mr. Hollande said in a speech before Parliament in Algiers. His visit came as Algeria celebrates 50 years of independence from France.
Mr. Hollande arrived in Algiers on Wednesday with a delegation of about 200 people, including nine government ministers and executives from 40 French companies. He announced a deal for the French carmaker Renault to build an assembly plant near Oran and signed a joint statement with the Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, calling for revived economic, strategic and cultural relations between both countries.
Mr. Hollande also hopes to ensure Algerian support for a multinational African military intervention in northern Mali, where radical Islamists have seized control. Algeria has been opposed to such an intervention, fearing that any conflict within the borders of its southern neighbor may draw it into the fray. The Algerian position has softened somewhat as the threat posed by a terrorist haven in northern Mali has grown more patent.
In his address on Thursday, Mr. Hollande, known as a conciliatory figure in France and who lived for a time in Algeria as a young graduate, made clear his intent to steer French-Algerian relations away from the countries’ uneasy past.
He sought to strike a more nuanced and conciliatory tone than his predecessors, commentators and politicians said. The memory of killings committed by the French authorities “remains rooted in the minds of Algerians and the French,” he said. He made reference to the killings in Sétif, where scores of unarmed Algerian civilians were killed by French soldiers in May 1945.
Benjamin Stora, a French historian of Algeria, praised Mr. Hollande for his “new tone” with Algeria. “He made reference to the French role but also to Algeria’s history,” Mr. Stora said, calling this a first.
Some Algerian commentators denounced Mr. Hollande’s speech as opportunistic and economically motivated, however, at a time of economic difficulty in France. And on the French right, some called the speech too conciliatory. A number of conservative voices had spoken out before Mr. Hollande’s address to denounce any “repentance” he might seek to make.
He had signaled in advance, however, that while he had no such intention, he wanted to turn a new page in the often troubled relations between France and its former colony.
“I am not here to repent or apologize, I am here to tell the truth,” he told a news conference on Wednesday.
Algerians have longed for an apology from successive French presidents and while many countries have apologized for their historical transgressions, France has not for its actions in Algeria.
A poll this week by the CSA polling organization for BFM TV found that only 13 percent of French people support an apology. An additional 26 percent support an apology only if Algeria apologizes for its atrocities during the war and its aftermath.
The Algerian war, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Algerians and the expulsion of about one million French settlers, known as “pieds noirs.”
An estimated 578,000 Algerian immigrants live in France, according to an Interior Ministry study from 2010, and several million French citizens have Algerian ancestry. Many of Mr. Hollande’s supporters are from the French-Algerian minority.
In October, Mr. Hollande became the first French president to officially acknowledge that scores of Algerian independence protesters were killed by the French police at a rally in Paris in 1961.
Harvey Morris contributed reporting from London.
Hollande Uses Softer Tone on Delicate Visit to Algeria http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-89EKCgBk8MZdE.gif
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