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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136106 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Series: | Global History of the Present |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 435 KB |
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Algeria since 1989: Between Terror and Democracy
By James D. Le Sueur
Fernwood Publishing and Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2010 James D. Le SueurAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-725-1
CHAPTER 1
Building a postcolonial state
On July 5, 1962, Algeria celebrated its independence from France, bringing to an end a violent eight-year war of national liberation. Algerian authorities chose July 5 for its symbolism. It was on that day in 1830 that France commenced its assault on the Ottoman Empire, the rulers who had remained in control of the territory since the 1500s. It would be on that day that Algerians would rejoice at the fact that they had finally rid themselves of the French. The war of independence had begun on November 1, 1954, and the ceasefire agreed to in Evian, France, between Algerian revolutionaries and President Charles de Gaulle's government had been in effect since March 19, 1962. Together the ceasefire and ensuing independence celebrations marked the death of "French Algeria" and the birth of a nation.
The evidence of the slow, painful death and birth in the zero-sum game of decolonization came during the spring and summer of 1962, when roughly one million French settlers fled from Algeria to France in what has remained one of the largest mass exoduses of colonial settlers in world history. Ironically, South Africa's apartheid government, whose image had been severely damaged by the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960, schemed to convince de Gaulle to divert the movement of some of these ex-colonial refugees to the Republic of South Africa. As the South African ambassador to France R. J. Jordaan put it in a confidential briefing: "Algeria may, therefore, offer South Africa a richer field of potential immigrants, in this next year, than our history will ever again afford. The white settlers of Algeria not only include some of the best and most enterprising stock of France; they also know the realities of Africa and have no illusions about the problems of European survival on the African Continent." Insisting that the "opportunity" to divert as many as 20,000 of these settlers with "high technical skills" and "considerable personal wealth" should not be lost, Ambassador Jordaan advised the creation of "[i]mmigrant selection teams" that would scout out the best and the brightest settlers willing to move to South Africa. Though this proposal came to naught, the ambassador certainly hoped to increase the European count and thus counteract the inevitable wind of change that would topple one colonial government after another across the continent for several decades.
Indeed, what distinguished the Algerian case within the European colonial world and what rendered it especially agonizing among the hard-won anticolonial struggles was the long history of settler colonialism. Indeed, Algeria was unlike any other French possession. It also differed substantially from other forms of European imperialism, such as the English case in India, and more closely resembled the violence of the British experience in Kenya and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (which, like Algeria, had a governor general). But Algeria had a much larger European population. By 1954, when the Algerian revolution began on November 1, the European population in Algeria had grown to roughly one million, a far greater number than any of the British cases. These settlers in Algeria lived among eight million locals (nearly all of whom were Muslim, and roughly divided into 80 percent Arabs and 20 percent Berbers, with a small minority of Jews). Each successive French monarch and republic (all four after the French Revolution) made a firm commitment to incorporate and defend overseas Algeria, and by default its European settlers, as integral parts of France and its broader civilizing mission.
The process of "civilizing" Algeria began in 1830 with the military invasion of Ottoman lands and accelerated after Algeria's rival to French authority, the emir Abd el-Kader, finally laid down his sword in 1847, after over a decade of leading the jihad against the French forces. During this conquest phase, French commanders applied such violent scorched-earth and total-war tactics against Algerians that even Alexis de Tocqueville (no friend of Islam), sent to Algeria to investigate French excesses, decried shocking human rights abuses on the floor of the French parliament in 1847. Thereafter, backed by the complete instruments of state and a large military contingent with a reputation for brutality, France experimented with the nuances of settler colonialism, and by mid-century, the Algerian territory was formally divided into three French provinces. This simple fact distinguished it from every other French overseas possession. "Algeria is France," became the oft-repeated saying, which was restated incessantly by French authorities until the ceasefire was signed in March 1962.
Being France and not just French brought to the fore special contradictions in "French Algeria." Most notable was the denial of the basic rights of citizenship to indigenous Algerians. Short on rights but long on special obligations, taxes, restrictions, and duties, Algerians were forced to endure brutal hardships most often at the hands of French settlers, who were in turn protected by the French administration, designed to ensure the de jure subordination of the Muslim population. Hence, by the end of the nineteenth century, France had generated a vibrant and growing settler population by encouraging French peasants and entrepreneurs to migrate there in search of a better life. Naturally, that better life was often built on the backs of Algerians, whose land was systematically confiscated, whose labor was required to build the riches of this new Mediterranean paradise, and whose religion (Islam) was considered a threat to those cherished French "universal" values that spun from the European Enlightenment: progress, reason, and by the end of the nineteenth century, secularism. The European settlers, comprised mostly of French nationals but who included migrant Italians, Spanish, Maltese, and others, came be known collectively as pieds-noirs (or black-feet, denoting their peasant status). Industrious and fierce, the powerbrokers of the pied-noir community worked in tandem with the pro-settler lobby in metropolitan France during the first half of the twentieth century to ensure that Algerian Muslims would be perpetual second-class citizens, disqualified from the republican ideals that made France "French" in the minds of officialdom and its unofficial propagandists. Unable to accept the one-man, one-vote ideology that republican France had itself come to embrace over time (with French women securing the right to vote in 1945), the European system effectively segregated and discriminated against Algerian "Muslims" until 1962. This pattern of abuse corresponded with similar suppositions of European superiority and native inferiority throughout the continent, from Kenya, to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, to South Africa. In short, French oppression in Algeria, like other nations' racist colonial violence, became a way of life, part physical, part ideological, until the quasi-colonial system imploded after sustained armed resistance took definitive shape on November 1, 1954, with the FLN's first attacks on French targets in Algeria.
The FLN, the aftermath, and the state
At Algeria's birth, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and its military wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), looked to rebuild a nation whose very existence served as matter of fierce pride and as a beacon to other third-world national liberation movements (including Nelson Mandela's banned African National Congress) which were still in the thick of their own anticolonial wars. But at independence Algerians faced a daunting if not overwhelming task. Because of the ire with which its former settler population greeted Algeria's liberation, Algerians would pay an immediate price with long-term effects. The most trenchant of the French occupiers would not be ushered off the stage without a fight; resorting to sheer paramilitary terror, violent settler groups and break-away French military personnel disillusioned with de Gaulle's "retreatist" approach organized and murdered Algerians and Europeans alike throughout 1961 and 1962, in an orgy of fascistic rage. The most notorious gang of killers, the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), murdered thousands of innocents and failed in several assassination attempts against de Gaulle, the man whom it blamed for engineering the end of French rule.
Meanwhile, during the frantic summer of 1962, boats ferried ex-colonials at a rate of some twenty to thirty thousand settlers a day back to a beleaguered and angry mainland France. Totaling near one million, the unwelcome pieds-noirs made their way to a largely imaginary homeland, encountering closed and hostile villages and cities. The metropolitan population generally viewed these new arrivals as troublemaking refugees, responsible for defeat in a terrible colonial war and for the deaths of their sons sent to fight in the Algerian graveyard. As soon as Frantz Fanon's "wretched" Algerians finally inherited this blood-soaked but honorable Mediterranean earth, Europeans began to set it ablaze in the spring and summer of 1962, blowing up buildings, destroying the vast communications and transportation networks, torching libraries and incinerating any assets – including grapevines that made fine French wine – that could not be carried.
In addition to physically rebuilding what the settlers had destroyed on their way out, FLN leaders faced a plethora of internal and regional political challenges. Of particular concern were the perceived differences between the Arab and Berber populations (accentuated by the decision to immediately arabize the nation after independence) and a nascent conflict with Morocco over the shared Southern Saharan border. Both the Berber question and the dispute with Morocco presented important challenges for Algerian leaders, and both would fester for decades.
Many of the Berbers, largely from Kabylia, rejected the Algerian state's immediate decision to adopt an "Arab" political platform and to use Arabic as a prime tool of national unification (a decision that incidentally mirrors the debate over the use of French to unify the nation during the French Revolution). The move to arabize the populations (both Arab and Berber) was spectacular in many ways, but suggested a political agenda that did not completely map onto the linguistic and cultural realities of Algeria: both because Algerian dialectical Arabic did not exist in a standardized written form, and because there was a sizable Berber population that did not share the notion of a homogenized Arab identity of the people. Linguistically, there were in fact several variations of Arabic, a fact that spawned controversies among Arabic specialists over which dialect (if any) would be better to pursue. More simply, no common Arabic dictionary existed prior to independence. All Arabic textbooks, and the language itself, would have to be developed and standardized. Hence, like the nation itself, Algerian Arabic had to be created and tooled for specific purposes, but its most immediate purpose was to replace French as the language of instruction in primary and secondary schools.
This preference for an invented language that connected to a broader pan-Arab ideology incensed the Berbers, who made up an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the population. Berber cultural activists argued that this group had as good a claim as any to being the indigenous population, for after all the Berber people predated, and indeed resisted, the Arab conquest of the seventh century. Reacting against the claims of Algerian postcolonial leaders (many of whom were in fact Kabyle) that national unification required subsuming regional and linguistic diversity into an overarching Algerian identity, which became de facto Arab, pro-Berber politicians rejected the totalizing vision of the nation presented by the FLN, as well as its one-party ideology. As a result, Berber political leaders immediately challenged the emerging postcolonial belief that a single state required forging a single people and a single party. For their part, FLN leaders in 1962 viewed the Berbers' ethnic activists as subversive forces capable of fracturing a fragile postcolonial nation-state, both politically and culturally. As a result, the FLN repressed ethnic activists and arrested Berber leaders. The most noted case was that of Hocine Alt Ahmed, arrested and sentenced to death in 1963 for founding a rival Kabylia-based opposition party known as the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS), that challenged Ben Bella and the FLN's right to speak of and for all Algerians. In short, arguing that national unification trumped ethnic politics, the FLN persevered with its efforts to forge an authentic Algeria that was part real, part wishful thinking.
Another immediate challenge for the Algerian state came in the form of a border dispute with Morocco often referred to as the "Sands War." The antagonism had its origins in the nineteenth century. However, during and after decolonization (Morocco received independence from France in 1956), the ruling Istiqlal Party and the monarchy of Mohammed V insisted that Morocco's claims on the southern and western part of the Sahara predated the French occupation in 1830, and therefore this territory was rightly part of Greater Morocco. Naturally, the FLN rejected this claim, and in October 1963 Ahmed Ben Bella decided to go to war against Morocco. After brief but bloody fighting, which was followed by the combined efforts of the Arab League and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to resolve the conflict, a ceasefire came into effect in February 1964. This agreement called for the creation of a demilitarized zone, which did little to abate the intensity of a conflict that would fester for years and which would eventually lead to other disputes between the two countries, most notably the conflict over the Spanish Sahara after Morocco claimed it in 1975.
Confronting postcolonial unknowns
Beside the ongoing politics of the Berber and Moroccan questions, the FLN moved forward aware that although they had defeated the most powerful of European NATO powers (earning them heroic cultural capital for years to come), they still faced many unknowns. For example, exactly what kind of post-revolutionary state would Algeria become? Democratic, secularist, socialist, Arab, or all of the above? How could the fledgling state provide for a population of approximately eight million, of which over two million had been forcibly moved into concentration camps by the French military during decolonization? What kind of political, defense, social, educational, and economic institutions could emerge in such conditions? And what kind of leadership would be required to safely guide this young state through the many difficult choices?
In answering these questions, it is important to recall that Algerian leaders were genuinely inspired by the idea of independence, and wished to make the most of its promises. They also had other models for what the modern postcolonial state apparatus might look like – ranging from Jawaharlal Nehru's India (1947), to Fidel Castro's Cuba (1959), Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt (1954), Sukarno's Indonesia (1954), and Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana (1957). Algerians often compared themselves to these other newly emerged nations, but they mostly looked inward and attempted to distill their new sense of identity from their long-fought war against the French and from the colonial and pre-colonial past. Above all, FLN leaders claimed that their party was obliged to remain in firm control in order to prevent independence from being sabotaged by a host of competing internal and external threats. To enforce such control, the FLN used the military might of the ALN (founded by Colonel Houari Boumediene) to grasp the reins of power and tilt the future into its hands. Yet it would be misleading to claim that Algeria immediately after independence evidenced the character of a military state, along the lines established in Egypt by Gamal Abdel Nasser or the many other dictatorships that sprang up in African countries after independence. This is because although the Algerian military was indeed vital to the FLN's political authority, the army's real power lay in its ability to exercise control obliquely. At the same time, the FLN sought to foster a unified national identity and to suppress ethnic (especially Berber) and religious challengers that could undermine this goal.
Despite innumerable physical, political, and cultural hardships, Algerians began to make steady progress and set out on an ambitious political course.
In 1962 Algeria became a member of the United Nations, and Ben Bella flew to New York City to attend the induction ceremonies in October of that year. True to Algeria's ideological convictions that had sustained it throughout decolonization and which brought it to the Bandung Conference in 1955 (when the term "Third World" was coined by nationalists in a collective effort to redefine and unify those states emerging from colonial rule), Algeria announced that it would continue its affiliation with the Non-Aligned Movement, which in turn reaffirmed Algeria's commitment to what Robert Malley and others have called "Third Worldism."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Algeria since 1989: Between Terror and Democracy by James D. Le Sueur. Copyright © 2010 James D. Le Sueur. Excerpted by permission of Fernwood Publishing and Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- The principals
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- Map
- Introduction: democratic reform, terrorism and reconciliation
- 1. Building a postcolonial state
- 2. The road to reform
- 3. The kingmakers: generals and presidents in a time of terror
- 4. The Bouteflika era: civil society, peace, and sidelining generals
- 5. Energy and the economy of terror
- 6. A genealogy of terror: local and global jihadis
- 7. The future of radical Islam: from the GSPC to AQMI
- 8. Killing the messengers: Algeria's Rushdie syndrome
- Conclusion: a historian's reflections on amnesty in Algeria
- Notes
- Index