French President Emmanuel Macron does not intend to “ask for forgiveness” over his country’s colonization of Algeria and its role in the war of independence, he said in an interview published Wednesday in French weekly Le Point.

“It’s not relevant, and the word [forgive] would break all bonds,” Macron told French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud during his state visit to Algeria back in August.

A former French colony, Algeria gained its independence in 1962, after an eight-year war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives — most of them on the Algerian side.

The brutality of the war, which included executions and acts of torture against Algerian nationalists, had a lasting impact on French politics and society {snip}

In 2017, then-presidential candidate Macron described French colonization as a “crime against humanity,” breaking with a tradition of carefully weighted wording on the topic from French politicians and leaders.

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