To end atrocities like Nice we must first accept what drives them

In an update to her weekly column, Victoria White, argues that we can never come to the beginning of the end of atrocities such as Nice if we don't understand that Bastille Day doesn't mean the same thing to many Arabs as it does to the French.

Algerians don't remember too much "egalite, liberte and fraternite" from their horrific war of independence with France between 1954 and 1962 which France attempted to suppress with appalling ferocity. French estimates of the death toll run to about 450,000 while the Alergian estimate is 1.5 million people.

The 50th anniversary of the peace agreement was marked with official queasiness but it was then-President Sarkozy who came out in the city of Nice with the line, "There were atrocities on both sides... but France cannot repent having conducted this war."