Voland

A new french movie, dedicated to those from Frances former colonies in Africa, mostly Algeria , who were fighting for the motherland in WW II and also contributed to Frances liberation from the Nazis without beeing rewarded for it recieves a lot of attention....

http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-Fi...genes_4012.jsp

freedomfighter

That sounds like a cool movie.

Voland

Also interesting, like in the british colonies, many independence fighters were WW II veterans.....



The facts are these. In 1944, the French army had 550,000 soldiers, more than half coming from the "empire": 134,000 Algerians, 73,000 Moroccans, 26,000 Tunisians, and 92,000 sub-Saharan Africans. Around 60,000 of them (including French nationals living in the colonies) paid with their lives for the liberation of a country they didn't know, which oppressed them and never really recognised their sacrifices. They represented a quarter of all French casualties during the second world war, adding to the 70,000 who fell in Verdun in 1916.

They were also too often used as cannon-fodder, second-class soldiers: fed more poorly, clothed more shabbily, paid less, rewarded rarely, promoted hardly, humiliated routinely. Indigènes reminds us of all this. It explains why some, such as former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, were among the first to take arms in 1954 to lead the Algerian war until independence was won in 1962.