,
- From: arash7019@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 2 May 2007 03:35:42 -0700
The American Conservative
April 23, 2007
Algeria, the Model
Fifty years ago, another Western power fought "Islamofascism"-then
walked away.
By Scott McConnell
When contemplating Iraq, Americans look into a murky crystal ball.
History naturally presents itself as a tool to clarify the choices and
possibilities that lie before us. But what history? Before the
invasion, neoconservatives soaked the capital in the rhetoric of
Winston Churchill and the "lessons" of the 1930s.
Later, after Saddam was found to have no weapons of mass destruction,
they sought to rebrand the Iraq War as a part of the long struggle
against totalitarian "Islamofascism" and thus a successor to the Cold
War. For many Americans, the natural comparison is the Vietnam War,
which ended with evacuation choppers on the Saigon embassy's roof and
several more years of bloodshed in Indochina.
The French war in Algeria, never well known in the United Sates, has
its own claims to stake. Before the Iraq War commenced, some Pentagon
special operations officers attended a screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's
classic 1966 docudrama, "The Battle of Algiers".
More recently, reporters were told that George W. Bush was reading
Alistair Horne's exhaustive "A Savage War of Peace"-a book that, Horne
stated in the preface to the recent paperback edition, was Ariel
Sharon's favorite bedtime reading. (Israeli dove Amos Elon remarked
that Sharon must have completely misunderstood the work).
What lessons might Americans draw from the Algerian war? They are not
obvious. The brutal conflict, which gave rise to an extraordinary
memoir literature in French, impinged on France's national life far
more than Iraq has yet touched America. But some common features are
clear. The Algerian war was more or less part of our own historic era,
influenced by international air travel and mass communications. A
Western democracy was facing off against Arab Muslims; terrorism
against civilians-first employed by the Arab guerrillas and later by
the French far Right-was a central aspect of the war; and the use of
torture to root out the terror networks produced a moral upheaval in
France. Indeed, the war very nearly cost France its democracy.
In the end, it required the extraordinary political leadership of
Charles de Gaulle, who turned against some of his most devoted
supporters, to extricate France from the mess and move the country
forward. Losing the war proved far more painful for the Algerians who
had aligned themselves with France than for France itself. If one is
looking for an example of a comparatively rich and technologically
superior Christian country trying to dominate an Arab land against
substantial local and international opposition, Algeria surely fits
the template.
Still, different people will draw different conclusions about the
conflict: The Weekly Standard's Irwin Steltzer reports (with great
satisfaction) that the lesson George W. Bush has apparently imbibed
from Alistair Hornes's book is that France didn't stay long enough!
Of course the parallel doesn't fit perfectly. France was tied to
Algeria through the presence of one million European settlers, who saw
themselves as French, though they came from throughout the northern
tier of the Mediterranean. Prosperous landowners, small
industrialists, holders of lower middle-class city jobs, shopkeepers,
(a few) manual laborers, the "pied noirs" were united by attachment to
a privileged status French control over Algeria gave them.
http://www.answers.com/topic/pied-noir
They had a powerful lobby in Paris, through which they exercised great
influence on the appointed colonial government. A local legislature-
originally created as a liberalizing reform-was designed with separate
wings, one for Europeans and one for Muslims, so that any Algerian
democratic initiative would be stillborn. The pied noirs secured for
themselves the colony's best land and had access to the best jobs.
France devoted more resources to schooling the children of the one
million pied noirs than it did to those of nine million Muslims. The
two communities had little social contact and virtually no
intermarriage.
The accelerating disparity between the groups' birthrates reached into
every aspect of the colony's social system. At the time of the French
conquest in 1830, the Muslim population was less than two million; it
was nine or ten million at the outbreak of the insurrection-and
growing fast. Any program of real integration between the two
communities-one that gave every Algerian an equal right to a European
to vote for representatives in Paris-would have led to Muslims
becoming a powerful voting bloc in France proper. This was a fact few
partisans of French Algeria were willing to face.
In May 1945, the pied-noir conceit that Algerian Muslims were content
with second-class status was contradicted by a violent Muslim riot: a
V-E march in the town of Setif took on nationalist overtones, the
police fired shots, and the Muslim crowd turned on the Europeans. The
unrest spread quickly to neighboring towns: 103 Frenchmen were killed,
often brutally. In punitive retaliation, the French used dive bombers,
naval shelling, and Senegalese troops to destroy several villages,
producing a Muslim death toll in the thousands.
http://www.answers.com/topic/s-tif-massacre
The Setif riot (massacre) and its aftermath passed almost unnoticed in
France but set a pattern that would repeated as the rebellion gathered
steam: the Muslims would riot or stage an attack, and the French would
answer with massive and relatively indiscriminate reprisals. At the
end of each round, nationalist sentiment would grow.
http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?ArchiveId=11861
Months after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Algerian
rebels-the FLN (National Liberation Front)-then numbering fewer than a
thousand, launched their first organized attacks, setting off bombs,
striking isolated barracks. The ringleaders were young men of modest
education, with no real ideological program beyond getting the French
out. But they succeeded in igniting a war and capturing the
imagination of Algeria's youth, who in the tens of thousands proved
willing to kill, suffer, and die for Algerian independence.
http://www.answers.com/topic/battle-of-dien-bien-phu
http://www.answers.com/topic/national-liberation-front-algeria
France responded as a sophisticated liberal Western power might be
expected to. The Fourth Republic's leaders were humanist, temperate
democratic socialists, convinced that France's ideals of liberty,
combined with increases in economic and technological aid, could
surmount the acknowledged evils of colonialism and bind Algeria to
France.
http://www.answers.com/topic/french-fourth-republic
They sent Jacques Soustelle, an ethnographer first prominent as a left-
wing intellectual, later a key organizer of the Resistance and an
associate of de Gaulle, to govern the colony. Soustelle was determined
to make France's rule enlightened and not reactionary, to break the
social and economic monopolies of the pied noirs, to make "Algerie
Francaise" something progressive France could be proud of.
Meanwhile, the military set about to clean up the guerrillas in the
countryside, and France began to pour in troops. Within a year, most
of the initial FLN leadership was killed or captured. But still the
rebellion managed to survive. In 1955, a handful of guerrillas incited
the Muslims of Philippeville to set upon the town's European majority
with knives and axes. In an orgy of violence, the Muslims killed women
and children, slitting throats, disemboweling pregnant women. The
death toll was 123, including 53 Muslim "collaborators". The French
responded in kind, but more widely. The pied noirs went on a
countrywide rampage, shooting Muslims in the street. American
diplomats estimated the death toll of the French retaliation at
20,000.
http://www.answers.com/topic/algerian-war-of-independence
Philippeville brought a practical end to "integration" as a concept,
though it lingered on in French rhetoric. The massacre also brought a
quick end to Soustelle's liberalism; at the funeral of one slain
Frenchmen, he spoke of revenge and of the "totalitarian fanaticism" of
the rebels. He would end his career as a backer of the terrorist far
Right trying to hold on to French Algeria at all costs.
Military means could never definitively smother the rebellion, even
after France stationed half a million troops in the colony. As a
character in Jean Laterguy's war novel "The Centurions" put it, the
guerillas were "like the algae which always comes back in aquariums".
Their chief targets were the Muslims who co-operated with the French
and the most liberal representatives of the French effort, teachers
and engineers. Killing was not enough. The guerrillas preferred
mutilation, severing the noses, lips, and sexual organs of their
victims. The purpose was to make the middle ground untenable. "France
is at home here", Soustelle had announced to the Algerian Assembly
when he arrived at his post. Following Philippeville, this claim
sounded ridiculous.
After one battle in which a platoon of French reservists was ambushed
and wiped out, the rhetoric escalated as France sought more grandiose
justification for a conflict it couldn't face losing. French Resident
Minister Robert Lacoste described the war in Algeria as
"but one aspect of a gigantic global struggle, where a number of
Muslim countries, before collapsing into anarchy, are trying through
Hitlerian strategies to install an invasive dictatorship. ... The war we
are waging ... is that of the Western world, of civilization, against
anarchy, democracy against dictatorship".
By the third year of the war, language like this was commonplace among
diplomats and intellectual partisans of Algerie Francaise, who
increasingly depicted the conflict as "terror" against "liberty".
To justify the sacrifices of the war, much of the French political
class essentially talked itself into believing that defeating the
rebels in Algeria was a matter of national life and death, which of
course made a negotiated withdrawal that much more difficult to
contemplate.
The war reached the city of Algiers in the spring of 1956. The FLN
recognized that killing French civilians in the capital was worth
more, propaganda wise, than killing soldiers in the field. The
memorable scenes in Gilles Pontecorvo's 1966 docudrama (The Battle of
Algiers) tell the story well enough: attractive young Muslim women
getting dressed up in Western clothes, flirting with the French
soldiers, and placing bombs in the social hangouts of the gilded youth
of Algerie Francaise.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/09/1538221
http://www.slate.com/id/2087628/
After a few months, the city yearned for martial law. General Jacques
Massu and a division of paratroopers were put in charge. The paras
began torturing. Contrary to liberal conventional wisdom, the torture
did its job, and the secret organizations of bomb makers and placers
began to give up their secrets. Electrodes to the genitals-"la machine
qui fait parler"-was the most effective method.
http://www.ordredelaliberation.fr/images/compagnon/massu.jpg
http://www.answers.com/topic/jacques-massu
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/apr2001/alg-a09.shtml
The paras (French paratroopers/parachute regiment) won the Battle of
Algiers. By the fall of 1957, the city was free of violence and would
remain so for four years. And the legend of the paras in their
colorful regimental berets grew: many Frenchmen would come to see them
as their country's most legitimate political force.
But elite metropolitan France-or at least its liberal intellectuals-
was not willing to accept torture done in its name. Repugnance at the
paras' methods waxed during 1957, inciting an uproar in the Parisian
journals. Then it waned, the mood of indignation proving impossible to
sustain. By 1960, an American writer in Paris noted that among the
intelligentsia, torture had become a bore-perhaps the worst fate a
moral cause could suffer. Nevertheless, the debate lingered. France
officially disavowed the methods that seemed necessary to defeat the
guerrillas, and mainstream French political opinion began to shift
toward finding the costs of staying in Algeria heavier than defeat.
Much as France sought to depict the battle as a decisive conflict
between "Western civilization" and "Islamic fanaticism", few elsewhere
in the West shared the view. The Eisenhower administration remained
publicly understanding toward its ally. Forging NATO and a strong
Western Europe were central to its diplomacy. But when the war swelled
France's budget deficit, forcing it to seek emergency aid from
Washington, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles hinted that
withdrawing from Algeria would help matters. The young Senator John F.
Kennedy called openly for Algerian independence in 1957, and the chic
French weekly L'Express put him on the cover. Americans of both
parties feared that if the war dragged on, Communist infiltration of
the North African nationalist and independence movements would become
inevitable.
It was in this context that the Fourth Republic stumbled. In February
1958, a French air strike along the Tunisian frontier killed scores of
civilians, and British and American diplomats offered their "good
offices" to calm matters. This was widely seen as a prelude to dreaded
American interference, and the army and the colons sniffed a
"sellout". A mob in Algiers, eventually backed by several key
generals, seized the government buildings and put the city under the
rule of a Committee of Public Safety. Rumors flew around Paris that
the army would take power there too; it was not clear that in a crunch
any regiments would defend the Fourth Republic against a military
coup.
Charles de Gaulle was well informed of these plots through his own
network-perhaps encouraging them while holding himself aloof as an
arbiter between the elected government and a rebellious military. In
May 1958, he was asked to form a government by Fourth Republic
politicians who knew they might otherwise be swept away by a few
regiments of angry paratroopers.
He was 67, too old for the job by his own reckoning. Six feet, five
inches tall, his regal style was evident in both spoken and written
word. His call to national resistance after the 1940 armistice had
salvaged France's honor in World War II-he had won a place for France
among the war's victors by the force of his own personality more than
by France's military contribution to the victory-and his presence in
the first postwar liberation government was a critical brake on the
ambitions of France's largest organized political force, the
Communists. He resigned in 1946, perhaps expecting to be summoned
back. By the 1950s, his mystique still lingered, and he maintained a
powerful network of devoted followers among the French political
class. The first volumes of his memoirs were huge bestsellers; even
without his remarkable second act, de Gaulle would have been one of
the political giants of the 20th century.
But the key aspect of de Gaulle's return as the first president of the
Fifth Republic-about which most of the country was unaware-was that he
was prepared from the outset to flout the wishes of the very generals
and colonels who had eased his return to power. From 1946 onward, one
can see a clear line in de Gaulle's thinking: the era of colonies was
finished. It could end sooner or later, gracefully or abruptly. France
could retain cultural and economic ties to its ex-colonies or not. But
the end of colonial rule was inevitable. And yet de Gaulle allowed
many Gaullists who were fierce partisans of Algerie Francaise to
interpret his Delphic utterings as they wished.
Having ascended to power in the slipstream of a pied-noir riot, within
weeks of his investiture in Paris, he visited Algeria. Standing on an
Algiers balcony with his commanding general Salan and the hawkish
Soustelle, he addressed a crowd very much like the one that set the
coup in motion weeks before. Introduced amid oceanic cries "long live
Algerie Francaise", he replied, famously, "Je vous ai compris"-"I have
understood you".
Video
http://www.ina.fr/voir_revoir/algerie/video6.fr.html
He would later write that those words, "seemingly spontaneous but in
reality carefully calculated" would fire the crowd without committing
him to any further action. In the same speech, he spoke of "ten
million French citizens of Algeria" who would decide their own
destiny. Already he was using a formulation too liberal in its
implications for any French politician in power to have uttered
before. Then came a nearly heretical reference to the courage of the
FLN guerillas. Their struggle, he said, "I personally recognize is
courageous ... however cruel and fratricidal". Before the cheering
stopped, some in the crowd must have wondered what exactly they were
cheering for.
During his first year, de Gaulle set his generals to winning the war.
France had by then completed the Morice Line, a complex of electrified
fence and minefields that cut off the rebels from their sanctuaries in
Tunisia and Morocco. General Maurice Challe, the new commander of the
French forces, developed tactics to keep the guerrillas on the run,
and France had learned to induce more Algerians to fight alongside its
own forces, the so-called harkis. By every statistical measure-
insurgents killed, weapons captured, harkis recruited-the war was
being won. All that was remained was for the guerrillas to seek
surrender terms.
http://www.answers.com/topic/harki
The army was not only winning, it was highly conscious that its honor
was at stake. Jacques Soustelle explained it best, in a book published
after he had broken with de Gaulle: the French army had made an oath
to the Algerians and was bound by it. Every Algerian notable had asked
the commanding officer of every village post "Are you leaving or
staying?" If the notables refused to help the rebels, would the army
protect them from reprisals? The army had always answered, "France
remains and will remain", Soustelle wrote. He concluded, "So don't let
anyone say that in committing themselves the officers committed only
themselves. It was the whole army that made that oath, an oath that no
one had the right or power to untie". This powerfully emotive argument
was impossible for many French officers to ignore and explains how
perilous de Gaulle's process of disentanglement would prove to be.
He began the task the following year. His cabinet was roughly evenly
divided. His prime minister, longtime Gaullist Michel Debre, was an
Algerie Francaise hawk. Even his closest ministers could only guess at
de Gaulle's own thinking. In September 1959, he spoke of Algerian
"self-determination"-a process whereby the Algerian people would
choose, through universal suffrage ballot, between independence, which
he depicted as "cruel and impoverished", a formal linking to France,
or some less binding form of association. The FLN recognized that with
these words, de Gaulle had acknowledged the legitimacy of their aim.
Right. General Massu, the hero of the Battle of Algiers, denounced deFrom that point forward, de Gaulle's main adversary was the French
Gaulle as a "man of the Left" in January 1960, and in the next two
years de Gaulle faced down two coup attempts instigated by pied noirs
allied with high-ranking dissident officers. He could not have
squelched both without taking to the airwaves, appealing in a visceral
and heartfelt language to the French people on television and to the
army's enlisted men, who heard him on transistor radios. Their
loyalty, he intoned, was to France, not to their commanders. Both
coups were close-run things; both could have easily succeeded, giving
France a Franco-style military dictatorship and a slow bleed in
Algeria that might have endured for a decade or more.
De Gaulle fashioned a referendum to legitimize the path of
negotiations he had embarked upon, and by 1961, the French people
overwhelmingly backed "the bill concerning self-determination". He
remained utterly, coldly realist: he did not want the Algerians to
become part of France any more than the FLN wanted to. (In 1959, he
privately remarked that under the full integration with France
envisioned by some partisans of Algerie Francaise, his native village
of Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises would be turned into Colombey-Les-Deux-
Mosquees).
Rhetorically zigging and zagging, conscious always that he needed to
maintain a certain baseline of military support to survive in power,
de Gaulle moved toward negotiations with the FLN. After the collapse
of the second coup attempt in 1961, the army and settler diehards of
French Algeria formed their own terrorist organization, the
"Organisation Armee Secrete" (OAS), and set out to assassinate de
Gaulle while fomenting as much chaos as possible within Algeria to
render the colony ungovernable. To what end? The best they could
imagine was that some sort of apartheid solution could be created in
Algeria. Some styled themselves a sort of pied-noir Hagganah. The
broader strategy was never clear. But such was the rage against de
Gaulle, and the number of officers who felt betrayed by him, that the
OAS could carry out actions in both France and Algeria for over a
year. They barely missed de Gaulle several times, and their terrorist
"successes" in Algeria so poisoned the atmosphere that no settlers
could remain there after independence. They brought terror to France
as well.
http://www.answers.com/topic/haganah
http://www.answers.com/topic/organisation-de-l-arm-e-secr-te-1
Jean Paul Sartre (French philosopher and novelist) survived when a
bomb meant for his apartment was placed on the wrong floor. Andre
Malraux, the novelist who was de Gaulle's culture minister, was a
target as well, but a plastique intended for him maimed a four-year-
old girl instead. By the end, OAS activities only increased the
majority of Frenchmen who just wanted to be done with Algeria.
"Terrorism is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others"
-- Jean Paul Sartre, 1972
http://www.answers.com/topic/jean-paul-sartre
This Algeria fatigue was a sentiment de Gaulle nurtured, coaxing it
along with his rhetoric. Asked at a press conference in 1961 whether
the withdrawal of France from Algeria would open the colony to
exploitation by the Soviet Union and the United States, he replied,
with lofty formality, "I hope they both enjoy themselves there". Or
again, at a 1961 press conference, "Algeria costs us, it's the least
one can say, dearer than she brings in. ... In sum, decolonization is in
our interest, and consequently, our policy".
At the final cabinet meeting, signing off on a negotiated settlement
that essentially met all of the FLN demands (including the ceding of
the disputed oil and gas rich Sahara), Andre Malraux declared that the
end of the war marked a sort of liberation of France. Michel Debre,
overcome with emotion and still a fierce partisan of Algerie Francaise
concurred, "It's a victory over ourselves". De Gaulle concluded, "It
was vital to free France from a situation that had brought her so much
misfortune". No one in authority had any illusions that the agreements
would be airtight in their application or that the new Algeria would
be any better than a revolutionary totalitarian regime.
Freed of its colony, France quickly began to modernize its own economy
(which grew at an amazing 6.8% in 1962 after the armistice). Algeria
remained full of French teachers, doctors, and technicians. The French
constructed a flattering narrative for themselves: they had "given"
Algeria its independence because they wanted to, thus providing for
the world a model for decolonization and modernization.
To the surprise of few, a darkness descended on Algeria. The first
victims were the harkis, those who had served in the French army.
Perhaps as many as 100,000 were slaughtered, often with great sadism,
being made to swallow their French medals before execution. Then the
revolution turned on itself: Ben Bella, the country's first president,
spent most of the 1960s in an Algerian prison, as he had spent much of
the 1950s in a French one. But France was done with it.
So how could the Algerian war not speak to us? Its example has long
resonated in Israel, and many even hoped that Sharon-a successful
military man of the Right-could do what no liberal Israeli leader
could accomplish and withdraw Israel from the West Bank.
But now its lessons are dear to America as well as we search the
horizon for a leader who can explain to the country-especially to the
military and to the Republican Party-that its destiny doesn't lie in
the long-term occupation of Arab lands.
The rhetoric that justifies the Iraq War as part of colossal battle
against "Islamofascism" could be lifted almost directly from the
French colonial intellectual slogans of the 1950s-and is no less self-
deluding. To leave Vietnam, America needed a man of the Right, Richard
Nixon. Today, when we need our own de Gaulle to achieve a "victory
over ourselves", we don't even have a Nixon.
http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_04_23/article.html
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