New film honours France's "the other D-Day"'s heros

Film honours France's African saviours

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Tuesday September 26, 2006
The Guardian


At his home in the small Alsace village of Wittenheim, Yoube Lalleg expressed no regrets about leaving his village in Algeria aged 21 to liberate France from the "tyranny" of Nazi occupation.
He just wished more people knew his story. So, dressed in a suit and bow tie, the 87-year-old war veteran appeared on the red carpet at this year's Cannes film festival in support of a controversial new action film about the forgotten north African heroes of the second world war.

The film, Indigènes, opens in Paris tomorrow amid a furious row over France's racist treatment of colonial troops and a political battle over pensions worth millions of euros that surviving veterans are still owed.
What began as a small independent movie that battled for years to raise its budget - the sympathetic king of Morocco even stepped in to provide his army logistics corps free of charge - has taken on epic proportions on France's political scene. Indigènes won Cannes's best actor award for its male leads including Samy Naceri, Jamel Debbouze and Roschdy Zem, and gained the blessing of Jacques Chirac. But the cast and crew are still circulating a petition for the government to issue African soldiers with back payments of army pensions frozen in the 1960s after the colonies gained their independence.

On August 15 1944, more than 100,000 African soldiers landed on the beaches of Provence before liberating Marseille and Toulon and fighting their way up to the bloody standoff with the Nazis in Alsace. Despite being overshadowed by the D-day landings in Normandy, the African assault was crucial in freeing occupied France. More than 23 nationalities from the French empire fought to free the motherland, but were referred to disparagingly as indigènes, or "natives". They suffered racism and humiliation, were denied the same rations as French soldiers and, after the war, received pensions sometimes 10 times lower than the French.

Mr Lalleg, who inspired one of the characters in the film, came from an educated Algerian family. He told the Guardian: "My father said to me, 'You're grown up now, you must do your bit.' I volunteered because I wanted to defend a cause, to free France from the Nazis. To me, France was the motherland."

But the discrimination in Europe was far from the liberty, fraternity and equality that many of his north African comrades were fighting for. After gruelling campaigns in Tunisia and Italy, Mr Lalleg landed in Provence and was injured twice in Alsace, before falling in love with a local factory worker whom he later returned to marry.

"We helped win the war, but afterwards no one appreciated us. Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians didn't have the same pension rights as French soldiers. It is unjust and should have been rectified long ago," he said.

The film's director, Rachid Bouchareb, who grew up in an Algerian family in Paris's run-down immigrant suburbs, said he wanted to rescue an important part of his ancestors' history from "national amnesia", and make the interior minister and presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy, reconsider his draconian views on immigrants.

A backlash against the film has already begun. France, which once ruled more than a third of Africa, has for the past year been plunged into soul-searching over its colonial past. Last year Mr Chirac was forced to repeal a new law urging teachers to stress the positive role of the "French presence overseas".