For Algeria remains
the most painful wound within the
body politic of the Republic – save,
perhaps, for its continuing
self-examination of Nazi occupation
– and provides a fearful context for
every act of Arab violence against
France. The six-year Algerian war
for independence, in which perhaps a
million and a half Arab Muslims and
many thousands of French men and
women died, remains an unending and
unresolved agony for both peoples.
Just over half a century ago, it
almost started a French civil war.
Maybe all newspaper
and television reports should carry
a “history corner”, a little
reminder that nothing – absolutely
zilch – happens without a past.
Massacres, bloodletting, fury,
sorrow, police hunts (“widening” or
“narrowing” as sub-editors wish)
take the headlines. Always it’s the
“who” and the “how” – but rarely the
“why”. Take the crime against
humanity in Paris this week – the
words “atrocity” and “barbarity”
somehow diminish the savagery of
this act – and its immediate
aftermath.
We know the
victims: journalists, cartoonists,
cops. And how they were killed.
Masked gunmen, Kalashnikov automatic
rifles, ruthless, almost
professional nonchalance. And the
answer to “why” was helpfully
supplied by the murderers. They
wanted to avenge “the Prophet” for
Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent and (for
Muslims) highly offensive cartoons.
And of course, we must all repeat
the rubric: nothing – nothing ever –
could justify these cruel acts of
mass murder. And no, the killers
cannot call on history to justify
their crimes.
But there’s an
important context that somehow got
left out of the story this week, the
“history corner” that many Frenchmen
as well as Algerians prefer to
ignore: the bloody 1954-62 struggle
of an entire people for freedom
against a brutal imperial regime, a
prolonged war which remains the
foundational quarrel of Arabs and
French to this day.
The desperate and
permanent crisis in Algerian-French
relations, like the refusal of a
divorced couple to accept an agreed
narrative of their sorrow, poisons
the cohabitation of these two
peoples in France. However Cherif
and Said Kouachi excused their
actions, they were born at a time
when Algeria had been invisibly
mutilated by 132 years of
occupation. Perhaps five million of
France’s six and a half million
Muslims are Algerian. Most are poor,
many regard themselves as
second-class citizens in the land of
equality.
Like all
tragedies, Algeria’s eludes the
one-paragraph explanation of news
agency dispatches, even the shorter
histories written by both sides
after the French abandoned Algeria
in 1962.
For unlike other
important French dependencies or
colonies, Algeria was regarded as an
integral part of metropolitan
France, sending representatives to
the French parliament in Paris, even
providing Charles de Gaulle and the
Allies with a French “capital” from
which to invade Nazi-occupied north
Africa and Sicily.
More than 100
years earlier, France had invaded
Algeria itself, subjugating its
native Muslim population, building
small French towns and chateaux
across the countryside, even – in an
early 19th-century Catholic
renaissance which was supposed to
“re-Christianise” northern Africa –
converting mosques into churches.
The Algerian
response to what today appears to be
a monstrous historical anachronism
varied over the decades between
lassitude, collaboration and
insurrection. A demonstration for
independence in the Muslim-majority
and nationalist town of Sétif on VE
Day – when the Allies had liberated
the captive countries of Europe –
resulted in the killing of 103
European civilians. French
government revenge was ruthless; up
to 700 Muslim civilians – perhaps
far more – were killed by infuriated
French “colons” and in bombardment
of surrounding villages by French
aircraft and a naval cruiser. The
world paid little attention.
But when a
full-scale insurrection broke out in
1954 – at first, of course, ambushes
with few French lives lost and then
attacks on the French army – the
sombre war of Algerian liberation
was almost preordained. Beaten in
that classic post-war anti-colonial
battle at Dien Bien Phu, the French
army, after its debacle in 1940,
seemed vulnerable to the more
romantic Algerian nationalists who
noted France’s further humiliation
at Suez in 1956.
French military police drive through
Algiers during the insurrection
(Keystone/Getty Images)
What the historian
Alistair Horne rightly described in
his magnificent history of the
Algerian struggle as “a savage war
of peace” took the lives of hundreds
of thousands. Bombs, booby traps,
massacres by government forces and
National Liberation Front guerrillas
in the “bled” – the countryside
south of the Mediterranean – led to
the brutal suppression of Muslim
sectors of Algiers, the
assassination, torture and execution
of guerrilla leaders by French
paratroopers, soldiers, Foreign
Legion operatives – including German
ex-Nazis – and paramilitary police.
Even white French sympathisers of
the Algerians were “disappeared”.
Albert Camus spoke out against
torture and French civil servants
were sickened by the brutality
employed to keep Algeria French.
De Gaulle appeared
to support the white population and
said as much in Algiers – “Je vous
ai compris,” he told them – and then
proceeded to negotiate with FLN
representatives in France. Algerians
had long provided the majority of
France’s Muslim population and in
October 1961 up to 30,000 of them
staged a banned independence rally
in Paris – in fact, scarcely a mile
from the scene of last week’s
slaughter – which was attacked by
French police units who murdered, it
is now acknowledged, up to 600 of
the protesters.
A
crowd of Algerian demonstrators
outside Government House, carrying
Charles de Gaulle posters during the
Algerian war of independence in 1985
(Getty Images)
Algerians were beaten
to death in police barracks or
thrown into the Seine. The police
chief who supervised security
operations and who apparently
directed the 1961 massacre was none
other than Maurice Papon – who was,
almost 40 years later, convicted for
crimes against humanity under
Petain’s Vichy regime during the
Nazi occupation.
The Algerian
conflict finished in a bloodbath.
White “pied noir” French colonists
refused to accept France’s
withdrawal, supported the secret OAS
in attacking Algerian Muslims and
encouraged French military units to
mutiny. At one point, De Gaulle
feared that French paratroopers
would try to take over Paris.
When the end came,
despite FLN promises to protect
French citizens who chose to stay in
Algeria, there were mass killings in
Oran. Up to a million and a half
white French men, women and children
– faced with a choice of “the coffin
or the suitcase” – left for France,
along with thousands of loyal
Algerian “harki” fighters who fought
with the army but were then largely
abandoned to their terrible fate by
De Gaulle. Some were forced to
swallow their own French military
medals and thrown into mass graves.
Algerian rebels
training to use weapons in 1958
(Getty Images)
But the former French colonists, who
still regarded Algeria as French –
along with an exhausted FLN
dictatorship which took over the
independent country – instituted a
cold peace in which Algeria’s
residual anger, in France as well as
in the homeland, settled into
long-standing resentment. In
Algeria, the new nationalist elite
embarked on a hopeless Soviet-style
industrialisation of their country.
Former French citizens demanded
massive reparations; indeed, for
decades, the French kept all the
drainage maps of major Algerian
cities so that the new owners of
Algeria had to dig up square miles
of city streets every time a water
main burst.
And when the
Algerian civil war of the 1980s
commenced – after the Algerian army
cancelled a second round of
elections which Islamists were sure
to win – the corrupt FLN “pouvoir”
and the Muslim rebels embarked on a
conflict every bit as gruesome as
the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s
and 1960s. Torture, disappearances,
village massacres all resumed.
France discreetly supported a
dictatorship whose military leaders
salted away millions of dollars in
Swiss banks.
Algerian Muslims
returning from the anti-Soviet war
in Afghanistan joined the Islamists
in the mountains, killing some of
the few remaining French citizens in
Algeria. And many subsequently left
to fight in the Islamist wars, in
Iraq and later Syria.
Enter here the
Kouachi brothers, especially Chérif,
who was imprisoned for taking
Frenchmen to fight against the
Americans in Iraq. And the United
States, with French support, now
backs the FLN regime in its
continuing battle against Islamists
in Algeria’s deserts and mountain
forests, arming a military which
tortured and murdered thousands of
men in the 1990s.
As an American
diplomat said just before the 2003
invasion of Iraq, the United States
“has much to learn” from the
Algerian authorities. You can see
why some Algerians went to fight for
the Iraqi resistance. And found a
new cause…
