Paris - President Jacques Chirac yesterday became the first French leader to publicly acknowledge France's failure to stop barbaric reprisals against Algerians who fought on its side during the 1954-62 war of independence.
When a defeated France pulled out of its north African colony after the war, victorious Algerian revolutionaries massacred thousands of the French loyalists, so-called harkis, their wives and children.
"France, as it left Algerian soil, failed to stop them, it's true. We failed to save our own people," he told leaders of France's large Algerian community at his ElysΘe Palace on the first national day of remembrance for the harkis.
