On the occasion of his 75th birthday on 1 February, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin gave a rare interview to the national network Channel One. Robust and fresh, Yeltsin said he is now physically and intellectually active, and enjoying his current family life.

Yeltsin said that he considers the dismantling of the totalitarian machinery of the Soviet regime to be the greatest achievement of his presidency. His biggest failure, he said, was the inability to make profound reforms in a very short time.

The former Russian leader also spoke about the role of then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in the coup-d'etat organized by some members of the Soviet government in August 1991.

Yeltsin said that Gorbachev was anything but an innocent victim of the plotters. "He [Gorbachev] knew about [the coup] from the very beginning. There is documentary proof. And during the putsch, he was informed [about the plans] and waited the whole time [to see] who will win, these or these. In any case, it was a win-win situation for him," Yeltsin said.

It is the first time that Yeltsin has directly accused Gorbachev of siding with the putschists. The official version of events has always been that Gorbachev was isolated in his Crimean residence of Foros after he refused to authorize the plotters' agenda.

In response, Gorbachev -- who since 1991 has maintained no personal relations with Yeltsin -- told the Italian daily "La Republica": "Yeltsin is trying to denigrate me and, by so doing, [trying] to relieve himself of the grave responsibility for the [signing of the] Belovezh Treaty and other actions [leading to] the disintegration of the USSR."

While Yeltsin and Gorbachev are long-time political opponents, it is the first time they have publicly exchange accusations of this type.

Meanwhile, Russian and Western historians continue to disagree about the role of the two men in these historical events. Most historians, however, agree that the answers lie in the Soviet KGB archives, as this institution was one of the prime movers of the August 1991 putsch.

THE woman who began life as François Mitterrand's secret daughter is considering a political career of her own, having adopted her father's name for the first time.

THE woman who began life as François Mitterrand's secret daughter is considering a political career of her own, having adopted her father's name for the first time.

Several former allies of the late socialist president are said to be pressing behind the scenes for Mazarine, 31, to make her first step towards entering the French parliament.

Their idea is that she would stand with a former minister, Laurent Cathala, as his "suppléante'', or understudy, in next year's parliamentary elections, with a view to taking over from him as MP, according to the daily newspaper Le Parisien.

The newspaper said Mr Cathala, 60, a Mitterrand loyalist who served him as secretary of state for the family and the elderly, would be favourable to the arrangement while Mazarine, who now calls herself Pingeot-Mitterrand, was "reflecting''.

Understudies take over the role of an MP who becomes a minister, accepts a long-term government function or dies.

Last year Miss Pingeot-Mitterrand published a best-selling book, Lips Sealed, about her upbringing as part of Mr Mitterrand's "second family''.

She was the product of his relationship with Anne Pingeot, an art historian, which began when he was a married MP with children but before he came to power.

The affair was an open secret among the Parisian elite but was kept from the public, with the aid of pressure, some of it illegal, from the Elysée, until November 1994, 14 months before Mr Mitterrand died.

Miss Pingeot-Mitterrand, a philosophy lecturer, literary critic and novelist, told in the book of her "hidden childhood''.

She was never allowed to call her father Papa in public and felt that she was the "shame of the republic'' when her father's secret was revealed by the magazine Paris Match.

She says she loathed the attention her origins brought her, but has fought hard to turn to her own advantage her "unwanted loss of anonymity''.

During the commemorations last month of the 10th anniversary of her father's death, she spoke glowingly about her father and his legacy and accused his detractors of "trying to kill him all over again'' with personal attacks and "disgusting rumours''.

"One thing that's certain is that France misses him,'' she said. "It's clear that we need a great man to lead France in the world and give us a strong and attractive image.''

Miss Pingeot-Mitterrand, has a baby son with her boyfriend, Mohamed Ulad-Mohand, who is a Moroccan film-maker.

She said that she had combined the names of her mother and father so that her child could make his own decision later in life.

Mr Mitterrand and his wife, Danielle, had two sons. Gilbert is the socialist mayor of the wine-growing Bordeaux town of Libourne.

Jean-Christophe, having been his father's chief African adviser, has had brushes with the law, and was recently given a suspended jail sentence for tax offences.

Students must navigate through changes in their student loans after the U.S. House passed a budget reconciliation bill Wednesday that cuts a record $11.9 billion in government-backed student loan programs.

The cut in student loans, the largest in the program's history, represents nearly a third of the almost $40 billion Congress backed to reduce the federal deficit during the next five years. The Senate approved the bill in December and it now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law.

The bill reduces federal subsidies to private lenders, sets a higher, fixed-interest rate for students and parents, and requires borrowers to pay a 1 percent fee to loan guarantors. It also increases the amount freshmen and sophomores can borrow and provides an additional $3.75 billion in Pell Grants to students who major in certain courses.

Yurie Kuroda, a business management major from Japan, said students should not have to pay the higher rate on their loans, even at a fixed rate.

"Many students have to take out loans and I don't agree with raising the cost," she said.

The bill also expands the criteria for low-income families to qualify for federal aid, according to Nancee Langley, the University of Nevada, Reno director of student financial aid services.

"As a result, more families should qualify for a Pell Grant (through) an application process that is shorter and simpler in terms of the information required," Langley noted in an overview she wrote about the bill.

Student financial aid officials at Truckee Meadows Community College could not be reached Wednesday for comment.

Langley's other observations of the bill's impact:

# Fixed interest rates

The bill, which takes effect July 1, will switch student loans to a higher, fixed 6.8 percent interest rate. Under the current federal formula, the interest rates vary with the market from year to year, but cannot exceed 8.25 percent. Students currently are paying 5.3 percent.

To avoid the higher fixed interest rate, Langley said anyone with student loans should consider a one-time refinancing option to consolidate their outstanding loans before July 1 at the current fixed rate of 5.75 percent.

About 4,000 UNR students borrowed money under the Stafford Loan program in 2004-05 and many of them face higher interest payments, Langley said. The average amount borrowed by undergraduates at UNR is about $15,000 compared to the national average of $20,000, she said.

# Annual borrowing limits

The law raised the loan limits for first-time freshmen from $2,625 to $3,500, and for the second year, the limit increases from $3,500 to $4,500.

"The existing limits are too low, forcing students into multiple and private loans at much higher interest rates," she said.

# New programs

In addition to expanding eligibility criteria for needs-based families to qualify for Pell Grants, the bill also provides supplemental Pell Grants that range from $750 to $4,000 a year to students who major in math, science and specified foreign languages.

# Administrative costs

The bill eliminates mandatory funding to offset the cost to universities and colleges for their federal student aid programs, which means the funds could be reduced or eliminated. That loss to UNR would be about $100,000 a year.

"If left unfunded, the office's ability to continue certain programs and services to students and remain technologically compliant with the U.S. Department of Education requirements for program administration would be in jeopardy," Langley said.

Conservative lawyers in the administration of President Ronald Reagan had an ambitious agenda. They wanted the courts to pay closer attention to the Constitution's text, to fashion a more limited role for the federal government, to allow religion to have a larger presence in public life, to use skepticism in reviewing race-based classifications in the law and to stop the expansion of protections for criminal defendants.

Many of those ideas, considered bold, and even extreme, at the time, have entered the legal mainstream and now routinely serve as the basis for decisions of the Supreme Court. That means that the Supreme Court's two newest members, both alumni of the Justice Department in the Reagan years, will, if they follow the agenda they helped create back then, largely be consolidating a victory rather than breaking new ground. ...

Charles Fried, who was United States solicitor general from 1985 to 1989 and now teaches law at Harvard, said that with just a few exceptions the court had in the last 20 years corrected what he called the excesses of the Warren court, which moved the law in a liberal direction in the 1950's and 60's in decisions concerning race, religion, criminal procedure and the role of the federal courts.

"I'm perfectly happy with things as they are now," Professor Fried said. "The sky is not falling. We just have to repair a few holes in the sky. What remains to be done is to return the law to the place where Justice O'Connor — and only in the past few years — suffered a change of heart."

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Alito's predecessor, took a relatively liberal position on affirmative action and executive power in some recent cases.

Many scholars trace the intellectual roots of the Reagan-era project from a speech that Attorney General Edwin Meese III gave to the American Bar Association in 1985, not long after he moved to the Justice Department after working for four years as one of Mr. Reagan's closest advisers in the White House. Mr. Meese criticized the Supreme Court for what he called incoherent decisions based on the policy preferences of the justices in the majority. The court's work, he said, "defies analysis by any strict standard" and reflects only an inclination "to roam at large in a veritable constitutional forest."

The solution, Mr. Meese said, was to focus on the text of the Constitution as it was understood by its framers.

"It has been and will continue to be the policy of this administration to press for a jurisprudence of original intention," Mr. Meese announced. "We will endeavor to resurrect the original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes as the only reliable guide for judgment."

That approach has taken hold, said Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and a chairman of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.

"The very battleground has changed," Professor Calabresi said. "Compared to 25 years ago, the text of the Constitution is treated as much more important. The court also pays more attention to the original history surrounding the Constitution." ...

Boycotts of academic institutions are antithetical to academic freedom and should not be used as a means of protest, according to a new policy being adopted by the American Association of University Professors.

The policy follows considerable controversy in the last year over a boycott declared by Britain’s main faculty union against two Israeli universities. The AAUP and many other faculty groups condemned the boycott, which was ultimately withdrawn. But tensions over the boycott remain high — and the AAUP is currently facing criticism for inviting eight prominent backers of the boycott to a small private gathering in Italy this month to discuss academic boycotts.

AAUP officials say that the invitations simply represent the group’s commitment to listening to all ideas. But critics say that the association is devaluing its statement by giving legitimacy to those who would seek to isolate Israeli scholars and academics.

"African American Lives," a two-night, four-part PBS series is scheduled for February 1 and 8. The host and executive co-producer is Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard. Gates has assembled eight notably successful African-Americans, among them the media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and the film star Whoopi Goldberg. Each participant, along with Gates, is the subject of some serious professional family-tree tracing.

There are surprises for each of them, and the series has undeniable human-interest appeal.

But there are other reasons why it is likely to be a staple for courses on history, family and kinship, and African-American studies for years to come. Who knew that before the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 250,000 free blacks lived below the Mason-Dixon line? We learn that the kinds of fears that preoccupied them in their daily lives were partially mitigated when they bonded in one place, permitting them to vouch for each other's long-term community standing if a white person came and tried to claim them as slaves.

The first three segments are very much driven by traditional genealogical research, the hard work of ferreting through archival materials, birth and death certificates, deeds, trusts, estates and wills, church records, and, inevitably, the sale of slaves. One of the patterns discernible at the outset is the speed of some tales of rags to riches and meteoric ascendancy from modest circumstance to extraordinary accomplishment. The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, who performed pioneering work in separating twins joined at the head, is the son of a domestic. Winfrey's story is fairly well known — as a child, she was sexually abused and shuttled between homes until finally becoming more settled as a late teenager.

Gates deserves special praise for the way in which he weaves biographies into the larger social and historical context. Reconstruction comes to life in the form of Winfrey's grandfather, Constantine Winfrey, who was illiterate as slavery ended. He taught himself how to read and write, then sponsored a new school, all the while raising a family and tilling the soil. The comedian Chris Tucker's great-grandfather was a beneficent church minister who purchased a large plot of land upon which the sanctuary was built. To keep his congregation together, he sold small plots to members. The Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's ancestors left New England to start a trade school in the South to help the newly freed slaves find employment.

None of the participants knew the rich details of these histories, and the "only in America" element is compelling.

At another level, however, the series performs a disturbing sleight of hand. Conventional wisdom has it that we can choose our friends, but that our families are a given. But with long-term genealogical work, there is a sense in which this can be inverted. We each have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. As Gates points out in the fourth segment, current technology permits us to link via DNA analysis to only two specific lines. On the Y chromosome, one's father's father's DNA, going back as far as we can locate the genetic material, can be determined with a high degree of certainty. (That is how Thomas Jefferson — or one of his brothers — was definitively linked to Sally Hemmings's offspring.) On the female side, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can link one's mother's mother's mother going back as far as we can garner the DNA. So, while we have 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents, the technology allows us to locate only two of those 64, if we're going back six generations, as our real legacy and genetic link to the past. But what of the other 62? Those links are equal contributors to our genetic makeup, and we ignore them only because we do not have access to them.

What an arbitrary "choice" of a branch on the family tree!

The Times has opened its archives to Ric Burns for his two-part, four-hour PBS documentary. Burns tells Gabriel Sherman he'll cover the history of the paper from its founding in 1851 to today.

"We’re going to cover the warts and all. For example, you don’t want to look too closely at the reporting the paper did during the Holocaust -- but we will."

Jack the Ripper, despite never having been identified, has been chosen in a poll as the "worst" Briton of the past 1,000 years.

The serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888 has lost none of his notoriety. Nearly 5,000 people voted for their least favourite figure from a shortlist representing each century over the past millennium in a poll for BBC History Magazine.

The Ripper received 24 per cent of the vote, more than twice that of his nearest rival. Thomas Becket, who divided England as Archbishop of Canterbury by quarrelling with Henry II over the rights of the church before being assassinated around 1170, came second with 11 per cent.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled yesterday that a French historian fined for calling the Catholic Church anti-Semitic and partly responsible for the Holocaust had been deprived of his right to free speech.

The court overturned a French court's 1998 ruling that Paul Giniewski had defamed the church by saying that it harboured a deep-rooted anti-Semitism that had "readied the ground where the idea and realisation of Auschwitz sprouted."

He was originally convicted of defamation after a group run by a former far-right-wing politician sued him for publishing what it said were "racially defamatory statements against the Christian community".

The court, the final appeals body in European rights cases, said Mr Giniewski himself admitted that his attack might shock or offend some people.

The court reiterated that such views did not in themselves preclude the enjoyment of freedom of expression.

Mr Giniewski made the comments in a newspaper article analysing The Splendour of Truth, a 1993 encyclical by the late Pope John Paul discussing the foundations of Christian morality.

He said many Christians thought a church doctrine that Christianity had replaced Judaism's covenant with God had led to anti-Semitism in church scriptures and, indirectly, to Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz.

History, it has been said, is what a country wants to remember and tries to forget - a definition that tends to undermine the notion of learning from past mistakes. Yet, as France is discovering, different versions of history have a way of reappearing uninvited. And then things can get complicated.

The violence this past autumn in some French immigrant banlieues, or suburbs, is a case in point. At one level, it was about alleged police brutality, discrimination, unemployment and poverty. At another, it was about French-born youths of immigrant extraction angry over being denied the normal privileges of being French.

At a less visible level, though, it was about memory: Everything that happened - on the streets, in the media, among politicians, in the government - was shaded by perceptions inherited from the past. And nothing disrupts official versions of history more than when past and present collide.

Under the shock of this unrest, then, France is beginning to look - nervously, reluctantly - at the history of its colonial rule of North and West Africa. Just this week, for instance, President Jacques Chirac decreed that the abolition of slavery would be remembered on May 10 each year. More immediately, even the idea that the recent riots were a kind of postscript to French colonialism is also gaining ground.

Now, joining the debate, is a new low-budget French movie set during what the French call the Algerian war and the Algerians call their war of independence. Its title, "La Trahison," or "Betrayal," says everything. It sums up the sentiments of all sides in that conflict. It also aptly describes the breakdown of trust between the French and a good part of France's immigrant population today.

Based on a memoir by Claude Sales, also called "Betrayal," the movie, directed by Philippe Faucon, recounts the experience of a young French Army officer in charge of a small garrison outside a small town in the desert of Algeria. The time is March 1960. By then, the war was six years old and still had two years to run.

The movie, which was warmly received by critics when it opened in France last week, has as its backdrop one of the most sensitive legacies of the Algerian war: the fact that, at one moment or other, some 300,000 Algerians fought on the French side. To the French, these men were loyal; to Algeria's National Liberation Front, they were traitors.

In the movie, four Algerian conscripts are among the soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Roque (Vincent Martinez), who treats them with respect and trusts them. The four Algerians, armed and dressed identically to the French soldiers, go on patrols and participate in clashes where Algerian rebels are killed.

One young Algerian in particular, Taïeb (Ahmed Berrhama), serves as Roque's translator when the officer executes the French anti-terrorist strategy of forcing peasants into army-controlled areas and burning their villages. It is through Taïeb, for instance, that Roque asks communities of women and children for the whereabouts of the men, who are presumed to have joined the guerrillas.

The discomfort of the four conscripts at seeing peasants rounded up is apparent. They also feel slighted when French soldiers refer to them by slang names for Arabs rather treating them as French. But even here, Roque takes their side, telling them to pay no attention to the insults of "ignorant" French grunts.

Roque's sympathy for them explains his initial disbelief when military intelligence informs him they are covert rebels. Further, Roque is told, during an imminent attack on the garrison, they have orders to cut his throat. When he discovers for himself that the information is true and they are arrested, he feels deeply betrayed. For the conscripts, though, any other behavior means betraying Algeria.

The Algerian war is perhaps the most dramatic example of what happened in almost every French colony: The rulers and the ruled viewed their place in history differently. Then, when millions of the colonized immigrated to the home country of the colonizer, they carried with them their memory of the past. And for their French-born children, it became an inherited memory, perhaps distorted by time and environment, but no less a memory.

"Forty years later, one might think that feelings have calmed," Faucon said of the Algerian conflict in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, "but that is not the case, as the crisis in the banlieues recently demonstrated. On each side, memory is still perpetuated in an antagonistic way, without leaving room for the position of the other."

Betrayal? It is easy to see how both sides could still feel betrayed: the French by those immigrants France has received, housed, educated, subsidized and employed; immigrants by the French who continue to look down on them as if they were still colonial subjects.

Evidently, there is no single memory.

Last February, the government majority in the National Assembly ordered French schools to teach the "positive role" of French colonialism. At the time, this bizarre legislation was protested only by a small group of youths of immigrant extraction who call themselves "The Natives of the Republic." After the banlieue riots, the article was put to a fresh vote - and again it passed. But this time, at least, it provoked angry exchanges in the Assembly and a furious debate in the media.

Since then, history is back in the headlines, with the government on the defensive.

"There is no official history of France," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said. Chirac chipped in: "The law's job is not to write history." And the man who hopes to succeed him, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered up a report on "the law, history and memory" from a high-profile lawyer called Arno Klarsfeld.

As it happens, Sarkozy's move was the cleverest because Klarsfeld's father, Serge, played a key role in reviving the memory of France's wartime deportation of Jews. For years, this memory - along with ample evidence - eroded the official portrayal of the German occupation as one of widespread French resistance. Finally, when Chirac took office in 1995, one of his first actions was to offer France's apologies to the Jews.

The parallel is obvious. France's official history may still laud the civilizing mission of its colonialism, but it is now coming under the siege of memory. Indeed, what the movie "Betrayal" underlines is that colonialism is a shared history of different memories. Recognition of this could be a first step towards peaceful coexistence between old white France and the new French of many colors.

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

Tomorrow: Jane Perlez on America's man in Sumatra.

PARIS History, it has been said, is what a country wants to remember and tries to forget - a definition that tends to undermine the notion of learning from past mistakes. Yet, as France is discovering, different versions of history have a way of reappearing uninvited. And then things can get complicated.

The violence this past autumn in some French immigrant banlieues, or suburbs, is a case in point. At one level, it was about alleged police brutality, discrimination, unemployment and poverty. At another, it was about French-born youths of immigrant extraction angry over being denied the normal privileges of being French.

At a less visible level, though, it was about memory: Everything that happened - on the streets, in the media, among politicians, in the government - was shaded by perceptions inherited from the past. And nothing disrupts official versions of history more than when past and present collide.

Under the shock of this unrest, then, France is beginning to look - nervously, reluctantly - at the history of its colonial rule of North and West Africa. Just this week, for instance, President Jacques Chirac decreed that the abolition of slavery would be remembered on May 10 each year. More immediately, even the idea that the recent riots were a kind of postscript to French colonialism is also gaining ground.

Now, joining the debate, is a new low-budget French movie set during what the French call the Algerian war and the Algerians call their war of independence. Its title, "La Trahison," or "Betrayal," says everything. It sums up the sentiments of all sides in that conflict. It also aptly describes the breakdown of trust between the French and a good part of France's immigrant population today.

Based on a memoir by Claude Sales, also called "Betrayal," the movie, directed by Philippe Faucon, recounts the experience of a young French Army officer in charge of a small garrison outside a small town in the desert of Algeria. The time is March 1960. By then, the war was six years old and still had two years to run.

The movie, which was warmly received by critics when it opened in France last week, has as its backdrop one of the most sensitive legacies of the Algerian war: the fact that, at one moment or other, some 300,000 Algerians fought on the French side. To the French, these men were loyal; to Algeria's National Liberation Front, they were traitors.

In the movie, four Algerian conscripts are among the soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Roque (Vincent Martinez), who treats them with respect and trusts them. The four Algerians, armed and dressed identically to the French soldiers, go on patrols and participate in clashes where Algerian rebels are killed.

One young Algerian in particular, Taïeb (Ahmed Berrhama), serves as Roque's translator when the officer executes the French anti-terrorist strategy of forcing peasants into army-controlled areas and burning their villages. It is through Taïeb, for instance, that Roque asks communities of women and children for the whereabouts of the men, who are presumed to have joined the guerrillas.

The discomfort of the four conscripts at seeing peasants rounded up is apparent. They also feel slighted when French soldiers refer to them by slang names for Arabs rather treating them as French. But even here, Roque takes their side, telling them to pay no attention to the insults of "ignorant" French grunts.

Roque's sympathy for them explains his initial disbelief when military intelligence informs him they are covert rebels. Further, Roque is told, during an imminent attack on the garrison, they have orders to cut his throat. When he discovers for himself that the information is true and they are arrested, he feels deeply betrayed. For the conscripts, though, any other behavior means betraying Algeria.

The Algerian war is perhaps the most dramatic example of what happened in almost every French colony: The rulers and the ruled viewed their place in history differently. Then, when millions of the colonized immigrated to the home country of the colonizer, they carried with them their memory of the past. And for their French-born children, it became an inherited memory, perhaps distorted by time and environment, but no less a memory.

"Forty years later, one might think that feelings have calmed," Faucon said of the Algerian conflict in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, "but that is not the case, as the crisis in the banlieues recently demonstrated. On each side, memory is still perpetuated in an antagonistic way, without leaving room for the position of the other."

Betrayal? It is easy to see how both sides could still feel betrayed: the French by those immigrants France has received, housed, educated, subsidized and employed; immigrants by the French who continue to look down on them as if they were still colonial subjects.

Evidently, there is no single memory.

Last February, the government majority in the National Assembly ordered French schools to teach the "positive role" of French colonialism. At the time, this bizarre legislation was protested only by a small group of youths of immigrant extraction who call themselves "The Natives of the Republic." After the banlieue riots, the article was put to a fresh vote - and again it passed. But this time, at least, it provoked angry exchanges in the Assembly and a furious debate in the media.

Since then, history is back in the headlines, with the government on the defensive.

"There is no official history of France," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said. Chirac chipped in: "The law's job is not to write history." And the man who hopes to succeed him, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered up a report on "the law, history and memory" from a high-profile lawyer called Arno Klarsfeld.

As it happens, Sarkozy's move was the cleverest because Klarsfeld's father, Serge, played a key role in reviving the memory of France's wartime deportation of Jews. For years, this memory - along with ample evidence - eroded the official portrayal of the German occupation as one of widespread French resistance. Finally, when Chirac took office in 1995, one of his first actions was to offer France's apologies to the Jews.

The parallel is obvious. France's official history may still laud the civilizing mission of its colonialism, but it is now coming under the siege of memory. Indeed, what the movie "Betrayal" underlines is that colonialism is a shared history of different memories. Recognition of this could be a first step towards peaceful coexistence between old white France and the new French of many colors.

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

Tomorrow: Jane Perlez on America's man in Sumatra.

PARIS History, it has been said, is what a country wants to remember and tries to forget - a definition that tends to undermine the notion of learning from past mistakes. Yet, as France is discovering, different versions of history have a way of reappearing uninvited. And then things can get complicated.

The violence this past autumn in some French immigrant banlieues, or suburbs, is a case in point. At one level, it was about alleged police brutality, discrimination, unemployment and poverty. At another, it was about French-born youths of immigrant extraction angry over being denied the normal privileges of being French.

At a less visible level, though, it was about memory: Everything that happened - on the streets, in the media, among politicians, in the government - was shaded by perceptions inherited from the past. And nothing disrupts official versions of history more than when past and present collide.

Under the shock of this unrest, then, France is beginning to look - nervously, reluctantly - at the history of its colonial rule of North and West Africa. Just this week, for instance, President Jacques Chirac decreed that the abolition of slavery would be remembered on May 10 each year. More immediately, even the idea that the recent riots were a kind of postscript to French colonialism is also gaining ground.

Now, joining the debate, is a new low-budget French movie set during what the French call the Algerian war and the Algerians call their war of independence. Its title, "La Trahison," or "Betrayal," says everything. It sums up the sentiments of all sides in that conflict. It also aptly describes the breakdown of trust between the French and a good part of France's immigrant population today.

Based on a memoir by Claude Sales, also called "Betrayal," the movie, directed by Philippe Faucon, recounts the experience of a young French Army officer in charge of a small garrison outside a small town in the desert of Algeria. The time is March 1960. By then, the war was six years old and still had two years to run.

The movie, which was warmly received by critics when it opened in France last week, has as its backdrop one of the most sensitive legacies of the Algerian war: the fact that, at one moment or other, some 300,000 Algerians fought on the French side. To the French, these men were loyal; to Algeria's National Liberation Front, they were traitors.

In the movie, four Algerian conscripts are among the soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Roque (Vincent Martinez), who treats them with respect and trusts them. The four Algerians, armed and dressed identically to the French soldiers, go on patrols and participate in clashes where Algerian rebels are killed.

One young Algerian in particular, Taïeb (Ahmed Berrhama), serves as Roque's translator when the officer executes the French anti-terrorist strategy of forcing peasants into army-controlled areas and burning their villages. It is through Taïeb, for instance, that Roque asks communities of women and children for the whereabouts of the men, who are presumed to have joined the guerrillas.

The discomfort of the four conscripts at seeing peasants rounded up is apparent. They also feel slighted when French soldiers refer to them by slang names for Arabs rather treating them as French. But even here, Roque takes their side, telling them to pay no attention to the insults of "ignorant" French grunts.

Roque's sympathy for them explains his initial disbelief when military intelligence informs him they are covert rebels. Further, Roque is told, during an imminent attack on the garrison, they have orders to cut his throat. When he discovers for himself that the information is true and they are arrested, he feels deeply betrayed. For the conscripts, though, any other behavior means betraying Algeria.

The Algerian war is perhaps the most dramatic example of what happened in almost every French colony: The rulers and the ruled viewed their place in history differently. Then, when millions of the colonized immigrated to the home country of the colonizer, they carried with them their memory of the past. And for their French-born children, it became an inherited memory, perhaps distorted by time and environment, but no less a memory.

"Forty years later, one might think that feelings have calmed," Faucon said of the Algerian conflict in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, "but that is not the case, as the crisis in the banlieues recently demonstrated. On each side, memory is still perpetuated in an antagonistic way, without leaving room for the position of the other."

Betrayal? It is easy to see how both sides could still feel betrayed: the French by those immigrants France has received, housed, educated, subsidized and employed; immigrants by the French who continue to look down on them as if they were still colonial subjects.

Evidently, there is no single memory.

Last February, the government majority in the National Assembly ordered French schools to teach the "positive role" of French colonialism. At the time, this bizarre legislation was protested only by a small group of youths of immigrant extraction who call themselves "The Natives of the Republic." After the banlieue riots, the article was put to a fresh vote - and again it passed. But this time, at least, it provoked angry exchanges in the Assembly and a furious debate in the media.

Since then, history is back in the headlines, with the government on the defensive.

"There is no official history of France," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said. Chirac chipped in: "The law's job is not to write history." And the man who hopes to succeed him, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered up a report on "the law, history and memory" from a high-profile lawyer called Arno Klarsfeld.

As it happens, Sarkozy's move was the cleverest because Klarsfeld's father, Serge, played a key role in reviving the memory of France's wartime deportation of Jews. For years, this memory - along with ample evidence - eroded the official portrayal of the German occupation as one of widespread French resistance. Finally, when Chirac took office in 1995, one of his first actions was to offer France's apologies to the Jews.

The parallel is obvious. France's official history may still laud the civilizing mission of its colonialism, but it is now coming under the siege of memory. Indeed, what the movie "Betrayal" underlines is that colonialism is a shared history of different memories. Recognition of this could be a first step towards peaceful coexistence between old white France and the new French of many colors.

The French government has asked Arno Klarsfeld, the son of famous Nazi-hunters, to help decide the fate of a contentious law that seeks to interpret the country's colonial history.

Arno Klarsfeld, 39, seems to attract attention in France with everything he does, including when he took Israeli citizenship and served two years in the border police during the recent intifada.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy asked Klarsfeld to issue what amounts to an official opinion on the rewriting of part of a 2005 law, known as the "Feb. 23 Law," which basically states that there were positive aspects to France's colonial empire.

Klarsfeld presented his recommendations to Sarkozy in late January, arguing that the law should stress both positive and negative aspects
of colonization.

The law has proved hugely controversial with French historians, most of whom are considered leftists. They say politicians should not make laws concerning the public's view of history, and that the last word on history should be left to historians only.

Klarsfeld -- the son of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who have detailed the deportation and deaths of 76,000 French Jews in World War II
-- first attracted attention when he represented plaintiffs from the French Jewish community during the 1994 trial of Paul Touvier,
a Lyon-area pro-Nazi militia leader. He also made headlines during the 1997-98 trial of Maurice Papon, the Bordeaux-area police chief
under France's World War II-era Vichy regime.

Klarsfeld says he agrees that there were positive aspects of colonization, such as French efforts to build infrastructure and roads, hospitals and schools, which are all mentioned in the Feb. 23 Law. However, the text neglects the well-known negative aspects such as slavery, racial injustice, economic exploitation.

"The bottom line is that the law is not clear, so it must be rewritten," Klarsfeld says.

"Either it must state that there were positive and negative aspects, or it must take a more neutral stand. And the main point is to distinguish between colonization and slavery, which the law currently does not do."

At base, the debate is about whether history -- referred to as "la memoire" in French -- should be codified by law. Klarsfeld does not share the historians' critique.

"Many historians, especially those on the left, want the writing of laws to have nothing to do with how we look at history," Klarsfeld
says. "I believe that the law should set a moral standard for how we interpret history."

Current school textbooks, written long before this law, discuss only the negative side of colonization -- the slavery, killings,
deprivation and economic theft -- but that should be changed to a more evenhanded approach, Klarsfeld says.

In a country like France, interpreting the past is up for grabs.

More than 1,000 historians, along with human rights groups and teachers associations, want the Feb. 23 law abolished, along with another
piece of legislation called the Taubira Law that labels slavery a crime against humanity, and other laws that make it a crime to deny
the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.

"The historians want to keep everything for themselves," Klarsfeld says. "But they're wrong. Before the Papon and Touvier trials, textbooks in France stated that the 76,000 Jews were arrested and deported by German soldiers. In fact, three-quarters of them were arrested and deported by French Vichy police, not the Germans. After the trials and after the very courageous declarations by President
Chirac in 1995 placing the blame squarely on Vichy, the textbooks were rewritten."

The French press has focused on the battle between historians and lawmakers more than on the law itself.

The hubbub has also highlighted the ongoing battle between Sarkozy and President Jacques Chirac. As Sarkozy was asking Klarsfeld to
take up the rewriting mission, Chirac was asking the speaker of the Parliament, Jean-Louis Debray, to do the same thing. Debray is to make his conclusions public in February.

"For me right now, it is important to recognize the truth of the historical context," Klarsfeld says.

"The European powers conquered lands that became colonies. History is war. We don't have to feel guilty about this now," he says. "For example, has anyone asked the Arabs to say they are sorry about conquering Spain and half of France? No. That is the historical context. So the law should be based on history."