January 29, 2002	Tuesday	Ziqa’ad 14, 1422

PARIS: Although it had the votes to pass the measure, the French Government of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has withdrawn its projected law which would have made a national holiday - and day of memory - out of March 19, the day in 1962 when France ended its long colonial war with Algeria.

On the previous day, March 18, 1962, France, through its Foreign Minister Louis Joxe, and Algeria, through its own foreign minister Krim Belkacem, had signed the Evian accords which officially put an end to a war that between 1954 and 1962 had seen France lose some 27,500 men on the battlefield, with Algeria suffering even greater losses with at least 140,000 combatants killed, a figure that would be magnified by Algeria which to this day officially lists the loss of 1.5 million men whom it characterizes as martyrs.

It was on March 19, at noontime, that a ceasefire was called, although from that day the OAS (Organization Armee Secrete), a clandestine paramilitary organization made up in large part of officers like General Raoul Salan decided to continue the war on their own, and very violently so, indeed to the point where they attempted to assassinate France’s then head of state, General Charles de Gaulle, considered as a traitor to their cause. One of the attempts is recounted in Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 film “Day of the Jackal”.

The war continued unofficially for many years, indeed made its way onto French soil where the officers who had felt betrayed by General de Gaulle, and the French political class as a whole, made a point of letting it be known that they did not accept what for them was nothing less than an embarrassing defeat.

One of De Gaulle’s closest political allies, Culture Minister Andre Malraux, saw a little girl who lived in his building in Boulogne killed outright by an OAS bomb that had been intended for him, a bomb that had been left by mistake on a neighbour’s windowsill. For another quarter-century it was not unusual in Paris to hear French drivers honk their horns to the tune of Al-ge-rie-fran-caise, the slogan of those who for many years refused to accept France’s abandonment of a colony that it had settled in the 1830s. The honking became so loud and vociferous that French authorities passed a measure which meted out stiff fines to those who dared continue the practice. Still it became a commonplace of French traffic jams for years to come.

The French political figures who hoped to turn March 19 into not only a national holiday, but also a day of memory, had not seemingly reckoned with the fact that the resistance to the signing of the Evian Accords continues to this day. One of the deputies who voted against the measure, Jean-Pierre Meylan, a man who had taken part in the war, clamoured that for his part, “I don’t understand this desire to commemorate what is effectively a kick-in-the-backside for France. We shouldn’t fall into the Algerian camp. It’s all a big joke (une grande plaisanterie).”

What is strange about Jospin’s decision to withdraw the projected law is that he had the votes to pass the measure, indeed the National Assembly last week had adopted the projected holiday by a comfortable margin.

But, as announced by the Socialist Party’s principal spokesman Francois Hollande, “we chose not to send the measure over to the Senate, because we thought it was best to end the procedure on a strong positive note in the National Assembly rather than on a negative vote in the Senate.” For a measure like the proposed holiday to become law, it must be voted by both of France’s legislative organs, the National Assembly and the Senate.