Emmanuel Macron will make a memorial gesture this Wednesday towards the returnees from Algeria which will relate to the shooting of the rue d’Isly in Algiers. On March 26, 1962, soldiers of the French army opened fire on “pieds-noirs” demonstrators, killing some 80 people and injuring 200.
Qualified as “a riot (which) can only be dispersed by the murderous fire of the troops” in General de Gaulle’s “Memoirs of Hope”, the shooting in the rue d’Isly was legitimized in the name of the fight against the ‘OAS. Yet there was no intention among the protesters to overthrow a political regime.
March 26, 1962. We are a week after the ceasefire of the Evian agreements which mark the end of the Algerian war. That day, French, unarmed civilians, favorable to French Algeria, demonstrate peacefully and are determined to break through the roadblocks of the police who are blockading the European district of Bab El-Oued. The latter is in a state of siege, in retaliation for the commando actions of the OAS which have caused the death of seven conscripts from the contingent and the intervention of the security forces has already caused the death of many civilians, including children.
The record is appalling
The correspondents of the foreign press (Daily Telegraph, New York Times) tell without censorship what was this appalling strafing of the crowd of demonstrators, for about fifteen minutes.
At first, many demonstrators were able to cross the scattered cordons of soldiers before finding themselves trapped further away facing armored vehicles, in front of the Grande Poste on rue d’Isly (whose name commemorates the battle of the same name, today rue Larbi Ben M’Hidi). The correspondents of the foreign press (Daily Telegraph, New York Times) will recount without censorship this appalling strafing of the crowd of demonstrators, for about fifteen minutes, by Algerian riflemen of the French army. The appalling toll is 80 dead and 200 wounded, often hit in the back or at point-blank range for those who were hiding or getting up. We will collect nearly two thousand casings…
The official investigation, which claims self-defense against hypothetical OAS snipers on the terraces, has never been able to provide conclusive evidence. In reality, there were no such deaths on the military side, no arrests of shooters, no weapons found.
The families were never allowed to recover the bodies of the victims, many having been clandestinely buried in the Saint-Eugène cemetery. In 2010, the names of those killed in the shooting were added to one of the illuminated columns of the National Memorial to the War in Algeria and the Fights in Morocco and Tunisia, in Paris. Until now, the French State has not recognized its responsibility in these events, unlike those of the massacre of October 17, 1961, and to date, there has been no official commission of inquiry created to clarify the facts and the responsibilities in this massacre.
