Tunisia's Bold Move to Demand Apology from French Colonisers Rejected

Tunisia's parliament has recently rejected a motion put forward by the Al-Karama coalition which demanded an apology from France for the "murder and torture, the brutality of French colonialism". Seifeddine Makhlouf, the leader of the coalition which currently occupies 19 of the 217 seats in parliament, had insisted that the apology would be a move towards "[healing] the wounds of the past". According to Aljazeera, the motion fell short by 109 votes needed for it to pass.

READ: Belgium Has Apologized to its Former African Colonies for Kidnapping their Mixed-Race Children

The details of the motion included the European country taking responsibility for the "crimes, assassinations, torture, rape, forced deportation and looting of natural resources" before Tunisia eventually obtained its independence in 1956.

However, resistance to the motion was voiced out by leader of the Qalb Tounes opposition party, Osama Khelifi, who said that, "We are not going to feed Tunisians with such motions." Ultimately, the significance of France as a trade partner in light of Tunisia's longstanding economic crisis swung the vote and moved for the motion to be dismissed.

Given the current climate, the motion was a bold move by Tunisian opposition leaders in their attempts to have the injustices of colonialism acknowledged. With the continued Black Lives Matterprotests in America, and now several other countries in the world, colonialism and its various symbols have been cast into the spotlight as racist systems of oppression are being interrogated.

More recently, Belgian authorities removed the statue of King Leopold II from Antwerp square, amid the mass protests in the country. The monarch was responsible for the murder of an estimated 10 million Congolese people in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.