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And even most of these forget that Algeria was once a French colonial territory where secularism, even after independence, was influential among the native intellectual elites. So influential indeed that no urban populations prostrated themselves in public for prayer and office workers kept ham sandwiches in their desks during Ramadan. But thirty years later Islamism had become powerful enough to precipitate a bloody civil war which caused 100,000 dead. This story which serves as a paradigm for what would come about in other Moslem countries shows that Algeria was in many ways the crucible for violent anti-colonialism, third worldism and, finally, jihad.
huge number of Algerian immigrants who have now been arriving steadily for over half a century. The terrible story is the subject of a recent book by Martin Evans and John Phillips (Algeria Anger of the Dispossessed, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007). Over a million pieds noirs, as Algerians of non-native provenance were called, were always an obstacle to a peaceful decolonization, not least because of Algeria’s proximity to Europe. In the final analysis they were France’s motive for regarding that country as an integral part of France and any challenge to this status as invasion.
FLN (Front de Libération National), while internecine conflict among the rebels themselves set a pattern for the future. Atrocities by both sides as well as notorious cases of torture by the French cemented a culture of violence which was to continue for decades both in North Africa and France itself. When independence did come in the early sixties it was resisted with bombs by the OAS (the secret terrorist army set up by French generals, opponents of De Gaulle). The latter’s terrorism, however, paled in comparison with what was to come later among the Algerians themselves.
their own military losses at 27,000 killed and civilian losses at 5,000 to 6,000. These also say that casualties among Algerians reached between 300,000 and 500,000, while Algerian sources claim as many as 1,500,000. Added to human losses there was substantial material destruction: scores of villages were razed, forests damaged and some 2,000,000 inhabitants relocated in what France claimed to be a campaign of pacification.
A second important feature (as in other Arab countries such as Iraq and Egypt) was the widespread influence of marxist and socialist ideas. Disaffected Algerian intellectuals followed French example in adopting marxist ideas despite the policy of the French Communist Party, never wholeheartedly in favour of independence for France’s colonies. But even where they did not embrace the French or Algerian Communist parties—the PCA was largely a settler creation—many Algerians on both sides of the Mediterranean gravitated at first towards the leadership of Messali Hadj and his peculiar mixture of Islam and Leftish populism, liberally peppered with socialist ideas. Ahmed Messali Hadj was, until the founding of the FLN in 1954, the Algerian leader most favoured by European leftists. However, these gradually turned to the FLN when the latter began to show it meant business by adopting armed struggle and the production of texts supporting socialism. Nevertheless, despite growing support for the FLN in international forums Messali’s ideas persisted and long remained an influence for egalitarianism and socialism. As for the French communists, it was only towards the end of the independence war, during which it had firmly opposed desertion from the armed forces by its militants, that the PCF itself began to support the FLN. Nevertheless this volte face, which was reinforced after independence, never reconciled many strata of Algerian society to communism. The ideological influences behind Algerian socialism, the role of communism and of what was to be virtually an alliance both with Castro’s Cuba, the USSR and Eastern Europe are not widely understood. Nor how what had once been perceived as a model finally lost its appeal for Algerians and other Arabs. And yet it was this factor that left the vacuum that Islamism came to fill both in Algeria and the Middle East. Evans and Phillips give due account of the role of the Berber minority, its territory of Kabylia, its nationalism (as much anti-Arab as anti-French) as well as the significance of French-speaking Algerian intellectuals whose importance continued long after independence. Each case was to provide an ample seed-bed for the consolidation of clans and provoke violent conflict between them. On more than one occasion after independence there was open fighting between francophone and arab-speaking students and staff at Algiers university. Determination to ignore Berber claims became clear when the department of Berber studies was closed down. As in other Moslem countries Algerian politics and economics found themselves the prisoners of their oil and gas resources. Sixth in the ranking of world suppliers, Algeria enjoyed such rich pickings as eventually to make its rulers independent of taxation and hence from any need to placate their voters. These, despite growing rates of abstention, nevertheless went regularly to the polls in national and local elections and referenda. But the rulers they elected showed no qualms over abandoning promises and continued to engage in flagrant corruption as well as ferocious repression against all critics. Dependence on oil of course also meant vulnerability to the vicissitudes of its market, as became all too evident in the mid-1980s when falls in oil prices, followed by drought, intensified economic problems. The Army against the Maquis The military coup that overthrew Algeria’s first president Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965 broke an uneasy peace between the clans. The causes of the coup lay in the different origins of the two men. Ben Bella, a former sergeant-major in the French Army decorated for his service to France in World War II, was one of the founders of the FLN, an active organizer of its guerrilla warfare and a participant in spectacular robberies. After a first arrest by the French in 1950 and his escape two years later, Ben Bella was again arrested in 1956 and imprisoned until 1962. He was a francophone and frequently recalled that it was in French prisons that he had finally learned Arabic. This long incarceration not only gave him the opportunity for reading but also insulated him from implication in the fierce and often bloody struggles inside the FLN thus allowing him to emerge after the war with his reputation virtually unscathed. Houari Boumediène, on the other hand, was an Arabic speaker and a fervent Moslem who had studied in Cairo. He had not taken part in the maquis and by 1962 was a colonel in the ALN (National Liberation Army) stationed on the Moroccan frontier. Independence did little to assuage the long-standing conflict between the armies of the frontiers on the one hand and the maquis of the interior on the other. These felt that the former had left them to bear the brunt of battle by failing to provide the arms and logistic support they needed. By independence it had become clear there were two distinct clans fighting for dominance: the leaders of the various maquis on one side and, on the other, the military with their Securité Militaire (SM). According to Evans and Phillips the SM, which eventually pervaded every area of society, was trained in dirty tricks by the STASI in East Germany and the KGB in the Soviet Union. The ordinary police on the other hand were trained by Franco Spain, a fact not mentioned by the authors. Building Socialism After Ben Bella’s overthrow and imprisonment in 1965, the only substantial change in foreign policy made by Boumedièn was to rid himself of the numerous foreign advisors who had flocked to Ben Bella’s side in 1962/1963. These had arranged influential positions for themselves in government offices and included trotskyists whose influence with some Algerians dated from the liberation war. A striking example of this was the Greek revolutionary Michel Raptis, a leading figure in the Trotskyist Fourth International. He irritated Algerian rivals by taking charge of two key positions: the distribution of the biens vacants, property abandoned by French colonists, and advising Ben Bella on the credentials of foreign anti-colonialist movements who hoped to make Algiers their headquarters. Like most of his Algerian colleagues and other foreigners, Raptis was concerned with creating a clientele for himself. In their account of the Ben Bella years Evans and Phillips say little of these foreign advisers. The matter was, however, one of the factors that provoked Boumedièn’s coup d’Etat in 1965. The cornerstone of Ben Bellas’ foreign policy was African revolution and loudly proclaimed solidarity with all who fought ‘imperialism’. His hubris was so great that he once declared ‘We shall even help the Papuans if they ask’. Press, radio, TV and public meetings constantly produced inflamatory declarations and helped to create an excitable anti-colonialism which diverted attention from growing social and economic problems at home. Ben Bella’s domestic policies were those of a speedy transition to socialism through the nationalization of industry and collectivizing of rural properties accompanied by a number of spectacular operations such as that of rescuing from the street the petits cireurs (litle bootblack boys) and the appeal to the population to donate its gold jewellery to the nation. Administrative confusion was put down to infighting among the many clans that disputed power with both the military and the former maquisards, not to mention alleged French sabotage. The flight of many Algerian professionals added to that of their French colleagues also caused disruption in all the social services, while the arrival of Egyptian ‘coopérants’ sent by Nasser was not wholly welcomed either by schoolchildren who, like most Arabs living west of Tripoli, could not understand the Egyptian version of Arabic, or by the civil servants they were supposed to help. The Boumedièn coup in 1965 was intended to put some order into an increasingly chaotic administration and discipline among the feuding groups and also to placate islamist criticism of westernizing social trends, which had continued and intensified after independence. At the time of his coup Boumedièn was denounced as Rightwing by the international Left.This soon turned out to be a hilarious misapprehension: in the years between 1965 and 1978 there was no change in most of the policies that had been pursued by Ben Bella. On the contrary, farm collectivization was continued and extended as was nationalization of industry. Economic and political relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were strengthened and arms imports mounted. Third Worldist posturing in the United Nations and other international forums were more frequent than ever and Boumedièn was as keen to prove himself as good an anti-imperialist as his predecessor. The net consequence was further ruin of Algeria’s economy, a growing scarcity of consumer goods, and mounting isolation internationally. Boumedièn intensified the dictatorship with arguments based on a sacralization of the role of the FLN and its leaders in the fight for independence. Arab supremacism was explicit. No attention was paid to Berber claims for official recognition of their language (Tamzight) or the importance of their region, Kabylia, and the role of its customs in the formation of Algerian identity. On the other hand there was no attempt to reduce the importance of French at university level, although this had been an important promise during the liberation struggle. Accordingly francophony continued to prevail among the elites, who sent their children to Europe for schooling. The inevitable result was that the children of less well-off families faced a serious handicap on the labour market, especially in technological sectors such as the oil industry. The highest birth-rate in the world (fervently encouraged by Boumedièn who is said to have predicted Islam’s victory over the West through ‘the wombs of our women’), increased the population from 12m. in 1962 to double that number at the end of the millenium. In consequence there were times when unemployment reached 25 per cent. Hence it is unsurprising that the appearance of Moslem fundamentalism found a ready-made audience. This doctrine, which had played little part in the struggle against the French, began to spread and for many it provided hope in a hopeless world. Evans and Phillips give a lively description of the street life of these unhappy young people, as it began to develop in the eighties, including some of their grisly jokes and the scoffing lyrics of their songs. They became known as hittistes, a word etymologically connected with the Arabic for wall, on account of their habit of lounging against the wall at street corners. Protest music, known as raï, resentful, febrile and bitter, became fashionable among wide swathes of youth and not only those from the shanty-towns. Particular hatred was directed at the chi-chis, children of the corrupt rich who lived far from the slums and flaunted their designer clothes, expensive cars and european-style girl-friends whenever they descended on the centre of the capital. Villa, Honda, Blonda , the hittistes shouted at the chi-chis as these passed showing off the booty bought by their fathers’ corruption. The time had not yet come for the throat-cutting, beheading, mutilations or gang-raping of the nineties. As the authors point out, there was a strong sexual undercurrent to the discontent of the young idlers. Poor and only half-literate, they had no prospect of finding a wife, for whom custom decreed the need to pay bride price, while the ressurgence of islamic puritanism ensured that girl-friends were out of bounds. A World of Smoke and Mirrors Evans and Phillips reiterate the widespread contention that much of the appalling blood-letting of Black October 1989 and the Civil War of the 90s was provoked or even organized by the authorities themselves in order to dislocate opposition forces and further terrorize the population. These chapters dealing with Boumedièn and his successors transmit a political atmosphere of ‘smoke and mirrors’, familiar to us from accounts of politics in other Arab countries, not least in present-day Iraq. The authors take us through the rule of Boumedièn, of the tentative reformist Chadli Bendjedid, of the chef historique Mohammed Boudiaf, who was assassinated in June 1992, and of his successors Ali Kafi and general Liamine Zeroual, up to 2007 and today’s relative calm. A new constitution, approved in February 1989, dropped all references to socialism, dismantled the one-party state and initiated political pluralism and a stuttering passage to a market economy, none of which put a stop to mounting islamism. They give due weight to two factors which favoured the rise of the islamic fundamentalism represented by the FIS and the GIA which fought against the army in the 90s Civil War. One of these was the influence of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the other was Algerian participation in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. Both provided examples of successful struggle against what came to be regarded as two forms of imperialism, American and Soviet. The latter put a final cap on the last vestiges of illusion about marxism. The results of successive elections since the end of the eighties can leave us in little doubt that Algeria may well have become an Islamic Republic had the Algerian army and its leaders not been ruthless enough to quash them and intensify the dictatorial system which was already in place. The ideological vacuum was, of course, to be filled by islamism. The ensuing bloodbath was to cause the slaughter of at least 100,000. Algeria’s President Abdelazis Bouteflika has now consolidated his position both at home and abroad. Evans and Phillips offer an unfavourable analysis of his character and career and evidently concur with the American view of him as ‘one of our own bastards’ in the fight against terrorism. Now that there is a self-confessed Al Qaeda presence in Algeria, American policy towards North Africa has every reason to coincide with that of Britain and the EU, dependent as are the latter on Algerian gas and oil. s< *First published in The Salisbury Review, Spring, 2008 |
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FRANCE AND GERMANY COMBINED BUT WITH A SMALLER POPULATION THAN EITHER., A THIRD OF THESE ARE UNEMPLOYED AND HALF ARE UNDER NINETEEN. |