Sétif and Guelma massacre

The Sétif and Guelma massacre (also called the Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata massacres or the massacres of 8 May 1945) was a series of attacks by French colonial authorities and pied-noir settler militias on Algerian civilians in 1945 around the market town of Sétif, west of Constantine, in French Algeria. In response to French police firing on demonstrators at a protest on 8 May 1945, riots in the town were followed by attacks on French settlers (colons) in the surrounding countryside, resulting in 102 deaths. The French colonial authorities and European settlers retaliated by killing between 6,000 and 30,000 Muslims in the region. Both the outbreak and the indiscriminate nature of its retaliation marked a turning point in Franco-Algerian relations, leading to the Algerian War of 1954–1962. The anti-colonialist movement started to formalize and organize before World War II, under the leadership of Messali Hadj and Ferhat Abbas. However, the participation of Algeria in the war had a major impact on the rise of Algerian nationalism. Algiers served as the capital of Free France from 1943, which created hope for many Algerian nationalists. In 1943, Ferhat Abbas published a manifesto that claimed the right of Algerians to have a constitution and a state associated with France. The lack of French reaction led to the creation of the "Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté" (AML) and eventually resulted to rise of nationalism. Hundreds of thousands joined to protests in several cities to demand their rights. Contemporary factors other than those of the emergence of Arab nationalism included widespread drought and famine in the Constantine Province, where the European settlers were a minority: in the city of Guelma, there were 4,000 settlers and 16,500 Muslim Algerians. In April 1945, growing racial tensions led to a senior French official proposing the creation of an armed settler militia in Guelma. With the end of World War II in Europe, 4,000 protesters took to the streets of Sétif, a town in northern Algeria, to press new demands for independence on the French administration.