Massacre & ratonnade

The French anti-colonialist press and writers invented a new word to describe attacks against Muslim population : "ratonnade". This is derived from the pejorative racist word "raton" used  against a Muslim person in French.

This word is nowadays commonly used in French. For instance, in 2002 an exposition in La Coupole, Paris, dedicated to pictures of Algeria war illustrated one photography with the following sentence here translated in French : "The vengeance of the population is immediate. 70 Muslims are killed during a "ratonnade" in the Kasbah of Algiers".

Strangely, similar actions against European population of Algeria was never qualified with such a dedicated word, the word "massacre" (similar in French and English) is used instead.

If speaking about "massacre" is not wrong, this doesn't report the racist aspect of those massacres, neither it gives a balancing equivalent for "ratonnade".

Why speaking about "pogrom"?

Rather than building a new word, "pogrom" is fairly well suited to describe massacres of Europeans that happened during Algeria war, because there are great similarities as described by Yvan Amar on RFi (Radio France International) :

• a popular movement
• target an ethnic or religious minority, actions are clearly racists hence.
• looting, often with violence against the population, killing most of the time and number of massacres are not uncommon..
• passivity of security forces. Here organizations like FLN do nothing to prevent those crimes, tolerate them and even are behind them in Algeria.

As two related event : in Algeria in 1934, Jews from Constantine were victims of a pogrom from Muslim population, and in 1954 Christians, the Greeks from Istanbul, were victims of what is nowadays called the "pogrom of Istanbul".