WHEN I DISEMBARKED from an Air Algerie flight at Algiers’ Dar el
Beida airport long ago as a young newsmagazine correspondent,
Algeria was newly independent after 130 years as a French colony. I
expected that the recently formed Democratic and Popular Republic
of Algeria—“neither democratic, nor a republic, and certainly not
popular,” the foreign press snickered—would be an Arab country full
of fierce-eyed turbaned men, mysterious veiled ladies, soaring
minarets with chanting muezzins calling the faithful to prayer,
and, hopefully, exotic belly dancers undulating to throbbing drums
in the Casbah. I did find some of that, though the revolutionary
puritans trying to impose “Arab Socialism” frowned on belly
dancing.
But I soon learned that this part of the Maghreb had little
resemblance to Arabia. Major cities, with architecture that
resembled Dijon or Le Mans, had names like Philippeville, Oran, and
Constantine. Most urban men wore business suits, the young women
miniskirts. Cathedrals and churches outnumbered mosques, and
officious civil servants loved to niggle importantly over details—a
close parody of their French predecessors.
Besides the halting development of the new nation, the big story
was whether the Soviet Union would succeed in a communist takeover,
or at least convince the anti-Western Algerian government to let
them set up air and naval bases there. From the terrace of my
apartment overlooking the Bay of Algiers, I could see cargo ships
with hammers and Sickles on their smokestacks and names like
Yuri Gagarin arrive with cargos covered by tarpaulins on
their decks. Soviet Air Force MiG-15 jet fighters, intel sources
told me, wondering whether they would be piloted by Algerians or
Russians. Similar ships were putting into the big port at Mers-el-
Kébir, where the Sovs hoped to establish a strategic submarine base
in the Mediterranean.
Their negotiations with a smart, 30-year-old, blue-eyed Berber
named Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who Was enjoying a stint as foreign
minister, ultimately led nowhere, though he was able to obtain
certain goodies from them before sending them back to Moscow.Known
for cruising Avenue Pasteur in his government limousine looking for
attractive girls to invite aboard, Bouteflika would later be
convicted of siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars from
funds intended for Algerian embassies. Despite that, he hung on to
political power thanks to his FLN (National Liberation Front) and
army cronies who had fought the French. He had the perfect profile
to become the anti-Western poster child for the United Nations, and
at age 37 was duly elected president of the 29th General Assembly
in 1974.
Bouteflika became president of Algeria in 1999, and is now on
his third five-year term. It was in this role that he watched a
Chinese-designed fireworks display over the port of Sidi Fredj, 20
miles west of Algiers, on July 5—the 50th anniversary of the
country’s independence from France. That kicked off a year-long,
$2.4 billion series of commemorative spectacles, seminars,
conferences, and publications that will all celebrate liberation
from the French occupation of the largest country in Africa and the
Arab world.
Occupation began in 1830, when 30,000 soldiers landed on those
same beaches of Sidi Fredj. Their superior firepower easily
overwhelmed the Ottoman forces there, and in the process soldiers
captured, and subsequently barbecued, 60 camels. Pretext for the
invasion was slim, as the British historian Martin Evans relates in
his recent Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford
University Press). When the dey of Algiers, Khodja Hussein,
demanded repayment of loans made to France during the Napoleonic
Wars, the French consul refused. Thereupon the dey tapped him
symbolically with a ceremonial flywhisk, calling him a “wicked,
faithless, idol-worshipping rascal.” France’s retaliation
eventually became a full-fledged colonization that, Bouteflika has
said, “brought the genocide of our identity, of our history, of our
language, of our traditions.”
THE FRENCH TAKE a predictably different view.Having declared
Algeria in the 1880s officially an integral part of France on par
with Normandy or Burgundy, they created the lasting legacy of an
infrastructure of roads and railways, while building schools and
hospitals and setting up a modern public administration. They liked
to say the Mediterranean flowed through this Greater France like
the Seine flowed through Paris. As late as 1954, a French interior
minister and future president named François Mitterrand declared,
“Algeria is France. From Flanders to the Congo, there is one law,
one single nation, one sole Parliament.” And there were some 1
million French settlers there, convinced they were living in
France. This was the crown jewel of its colonial empire.
But France was trying to hold back the tide of history. The
collapse of Europe’s empires was one of the great trends of the
20th century, what Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
rightly called an irresistible “wind of change.” The Austro-
Hungarian, German, and Ottoman colonies were lost in WWI, and
Britain and France gave up their holds over a good part of the
world’s populace after WWII. But while the British handed over
power to new states in Africa and Asia relatively peacefully,
leaving solid governmental institutions in place, the French hung
on stubbornly until humiliating defeats forced them out of Vietnam
and Algeria. Of all the conflicts that accompanied the end of
European colonialism, the eight-year Algerian war that began in
1954 was the most brutal and tragic.
Partly that was because civil wars are the most hateful, and
this often resembled brother fighting brother, with longtime
household servants overnight slaughtering their masters and
children. But mainly it was because Paris considered Algeria, with
its size and vast oil and gas reserves, the symbol of its standing
as a world power. Then, too, France was on the defensive
psychologically. It had been humiliated by the Prussians in 1870,
occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, booted out of Vietnam after the
massacre at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. National gloire and the
pride of the French army dictated that it had to make a stand in
Algeria.
Muslim resentment of the French had been simmering ever since
the invasion, and rebels used whatever weapons were at hand: Axes,
knives, and sabers were wielded occasionally to cut off settlers’
hands, slash breasts, slit throats. French forces reacted with
bombs, summary executions, and public humiliation like making
rounded-up Muslims chant, “We are dogs.” But the rebellion
unexpectedly accelerated in 1942. Oddly enough, it was thanks to
the Allied landing in North Africa.
Algerians liked the cut of American uniforms, the zip of their
jeeps, the taste of their chewing gum.They saw how easily Gis
brushed aside the Vichy troops who briefly opposed them, making the
French look like losers. They noticed the easy, democratic
Relations between officers and men. And they read American leaflets
dropped over Algeria: “We come to your country to free you from the
grip of conquerors who seek to deprive you of your sovereign
rights, your religious freedom, and the right to lead your way of
life in peace.” (Just who those “conquerors” were wasn’t explicit,
but the Algerians had their own ideas about that.) Nor was the
French cause helped by the Atlantic Charter’s call for all peoples
to choose their own form of government. Franklin Roosevelt spelled
that out in a private meeting with the Moroccan sultan: “Anything
must be better than to live under French colonial rule,” he said.
“Should a land belong to France? By what logic and by what custom
and by what historical rule?”
The Algerian powder keg ignited on November 1, 1954, when the
FLN offensive began with bombs across the country that left
numerous dead. There followed eight years of savage, indiscriminate
terrorism unequaled even in our current Age of Terror.Besides
butchering French settlers—often leaving their mutilated bodies
unburied with eyes gouged out, severed genitals stuffed into
corpses’ mouths— the FLN sometimes gave innocent Muslim villagers a
taste of the same treatment to make them fear it, and back it, more
than the French. The French army responded with door-to-door
ratissages to round up insurgents, torturing many to get
information. The French approach to winning hearts and minds
included waterboarding, administering electric shocks, and forcing
both men and women to sit and impale themselves on an upturned wine
bottle.
The decisive turning point came in March 1957 with the Battle of
Algiers, made famous in Gillo Pontecorvo’s unforgettable 1966 film
of that name. Unlike urban guerrilla warfare with street-by-street
fighting, it was based on the hit-and-run tactics of terrorism— an
Algerian Dien Bien Phu designed to force France to negotiate
independence. Bombs, often carried by women and girls, exploded
unpredictably all over the city, especially in cafes, cinemas, and
theaters. As FLN leaders said, “A bomb killing 10 people and
wounding 50 others is the equivalent psychologically to the loss of
a French battalion.” France responded with more torture and public
executions, dumping bodies from helicopters into the bay. By May
1958 the French army, sensing their countrymen’s weakening
political resolve, was in revolt. A small coterie of die-hard
generals threatened to drop paratroopers on Paris to put Charles de
Gaulle in power, hoping he would back their demands to keep Algeria
French.
As it was, de Gaulle returned to power but was noncommittal,
flying to Algiers to address delirious crowds with the famous
phrase “Je vous ai compris” (I have understood you).
Deliberately ambiguous, it meant nothing. But it bought him time to
see whether the U.S. would support his use of force to keep the
colony. President Eisenhower made it clear during a state visit to
Paris in September 1959 that, faithful to America’s anti-colonial
tradition, he wasn’t buying it. De Gaulle knew then the game was
over. In March 1962 he signed a treaty with the FLN granting
Algeria its independence.The era of French empire was at an
end.
TODAY, FRANCE AND ALGERIA are still trying to bring closure to
the undeclared war that took the lives of some 30,000 French
soldiers and, Algeria claims, killed 1.5 million Algerians
(historians believe the figure is closer to 350,000). Attempts at a
friendship treaty have foundered on Algeria’s insistence that
France officially apologize and acknowledge its “crimes.” That’s
too much for the French, who for years in denial could only bring
themselves to refer to the conflict obliquely as “the events.”
So touchy is the subject still that a retired general lost his
Legion d’Honneur after openly describing as “useful and necessary”
the torturing and killing of prisoners, which has long been public
knowledge. A current commemorative exhibit at the French Army
Museum at Paris’ Invalides draws on film archives, photos, and
captured FLN documents to recount the army’s 132 years in Algeria.
A discreet handful of previously unpublished photos lifts one
corner of the veil over the truth: an Algerian, trussed up and
slung beneath a wooden bar, being beaten on the soles of his feet;
French officers seizing another by the throat.
The French will need yet more time to get their minds around the
horror of the war, the shame of the loss, and France’s tarnished
image as a beacon of human rights. As the conservative Le
Figaro mused at the beginning of this embarrassing anniversary
year, “What’s the message of this commemoration?Is there even one
for us? What can we say and how can we say it? How do we position
ourselves with respect to Algeria, a country with which our
relations are never simple?” To answer such questions could take
France another 50 years.
