Algeria: One Million WitnessesAlgeria · 1954–1962“France said Algeria was France. Eight years of war answered: then why are we not French in our own land?”A hundred and thirty years of settlement had made Algeria, on paper, three départements of France itself — and made Algerians foreigners in their own country: barred, taxed, governed, and in 1945 at Sétif, massacred for marching.The lesson the elders kept: Wars of independence leave painful memory on both shores — and the refusal to grant dignity peacefully is itself the cause of the war's cruelty.