captive

The film Hidden made an apparent analogy of the Franco-Algarian relationship.  Thank you Suetyi (& Chung indirectly) for reminding me of that.  Here I’ll try to write here what I know about, please check the accuracy of the history if you wanna be sure. 

Algaria had been a French colony until gaining its independence in 1962, after 10 years of struggling against the French.  It had been a prolonged bloody struggling, with a lot of Algarians tortured and killed during the period. 

Algaria is still said to be essentially controlled by the French government through its puppet head of the State in the 1980s.  After WWII, France badly needed rebuilding and so offered a great number of working opportunities for the Algarians.  Those were mainly construction and manufacturing sweating work which required low-skill labour.  France also offered immigration permits to its ex-colony.  Therefore a great number of Algarians immigrated to France.  However, the oil crisis in the 1980s which created the Great Depression ceased to provide more jobs to the Algarians.  Not hard to imagine at all is that there were a lot of social problems.  Seeing that the Algarians could not integrate well into France plus unemployment, the immigration policy changed not to offer immigration for them anymore.  Racial problem plus unemployment, you can imagine the rest of it. 

For the immigrated population in France, the Africans make up the greatest proportion.  Among them are Algarians, Morrocans and Tsunians which are all former colonies of France.  Remember a few months back the Paris riots?  It is again the formula of raical disintegration, unemployment, poverty, high crime rate and the rest of it.  One cannot say that it’s the Algarians who staged those riots but statistically they are more numerous.

I guess if I rashly make the analogy to Hong Kong Tin Shui Wai we can have an immediate picture of such social phenomenon. 

Welcome any discussion of colonization, post-colonization, racism etc.  (But I don’t think anyone will respond to me or read to this far… thank you if you do)

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