A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (83 page)

Hesitantly, because fearful of offending the “chauvinist” sensibilities of the Muslim male, French administrators made groping moves towards emancipation; at the referendum of September 1958 a major success was registered when something like eighty per cent of Muslim women turned up at the polls. On the other hand, the women left behind by their menfolk in “rebel”
douars
all too often had the French “pacifiers” to reproach for their excessive suffering. Mouloud Feraoun writes angrily of the women of his native Kabylia carrying the cross of villages emptied of men: dying at the hands of the rebels if they betrayed them to the French, or arrested and perhaps tortured by the French for helping the rebels. Rape, if one is to believe Algerian sources, assumed appalling proportions and left permanent psychological scars among the female population. All in all, the F.L.N. seemed to have far more to offer Muslim womanhood by way of an escape from thraldom than the French.

Fanon speaks of the “intense drama” of the sudden coming to maturity of the Algerian woman when drafted into the revolt. They were carefully vetted: first, married women whose husbands were militants; then widows and divorcees; single girls were rejected initially, because of the difficulty they encountered in leaving the home, but they too eventually became involved. “For months on end”, writes Fanon, “parents would be without news of a young girl of eighteen who was sleeping in the forest or in caves, roaming the
djebel
dressed as a man, a gun in her hands.” Here, for the first time, she met and coexisted with unmarried men on equal terms, and with equal rights. She adapted herself to guerrilla activities with remarkable speed and effectiveness. It was a heady experience: “The woman ceased to be a mere complement for the man. Indeed it might be said that she had pulled up her roots through her own exertions,” says Fanon. The female recruits for the A.L.N. were not just limited to the
évoluées
, young intellectuals used by Yacef to place bombs during the Battle of Algiers, but they came from many walks of life. On occasions the role of the female in the egalitarianism of the maquis was viewed with mistrust by the more traditionalist
moudjahiddine
. “The Angel and the Man work for unity; Satan and the Woman for division,” an Algerian proverb declares contemptuously. Sometimes she would be allotted little more than a propaganda function; nevertheless, on the whole the F.L.N. woman was treated with a respect never experienced before — either from her own menfolk or from even the most liberal French emancipators. Discipline was strict; as in many guerrilla movements, illicit sexual relations were ruthlessly punishable by death. For the women, perhaps even more than for the F.L.N. men, revolution and the pursuit of independence — with the promise of personal liberation at the end of the road — became an irrecusable way of life. (Alas, the promissory notes issued then in the heat of battle have yet to be fully honoured.)

Revolutionary schooling

The capture of the minds of the young, and indeed the very young, has to be one of the primary objectives of any revolution. As Mouloud Feraoun illustrates in his moving novel,
Le Fils du Pauvre
, the Algerian schools were always of capital importance in the breeding of national consciousness. The burning of new schoolhouses, proudly built by the French as part of their “cultural offensive” against the F.L.N., the terrorising of “loyal” schoolteachers — these were seldom random acts of savagery. Gloomily Soustelle records a conversation during his tenure of office between an F.L.N. leader and a teacher: “We shall not cease, even after we have thrown all the French into the sea. We shall destroy all the schools because they represent the French culture, which we want nothing of.” Somehow, as with their “hospitals” in the maquis, the F.L.N. managed to establish and maintain their own schools, fighting illiteracy, providing “evening courses” for adults, and keeping up the pressure of indoctrination on Muslim children. Whole new interpretations of history were introduced, sometimes going to excess in their zeal to revise the French version of the colonial past. For example, in 1830, “the Mitidja was not a barren pestiferous swamp, but a cultivated region”; “literacy was higher in Algeria [because of the many religious schools] than in France of the same period [!]”, and so on. To what extent the F.L.N. was winning the battle for young minds was graphically revealed in essays shown the author by Germaine Tillion, written by ten-year-old Algerian children in answer to the question: “What would you do if you were invisible?” — a topic brightly suggested to the 22-year-old French teacher on a recent “psychological education course”. Composed (with illustrations) spontaneously in the classroom, and not as homework under parental influence, the pupils wrote:

“I’d rob a French bank….”

“I’d kill French soldiers; even the Zouaves….”

“I’d steal my mother’s sugar to make a bomb….”

And so on.[
1
]

This was in 1957. Four years later Richard and Joan Brace, two Americans invited by the F.L.N. to inspect refugee camps in Tunisia, noted in the boys’ dormitories:

faded and cherished newspaper clippings tacked to his wall telling the fate of one or another Algerian hero…the closed, tough little face of Krim, looking like a gangster from a George Raft movie, more often than not it was the prisoners of Aulnoy — Ben Bella, Boudiaf, Ait Ahmed, Khider, and Rabah Bitat — dressed in casual clothes and holding hunting guns, snapped during some happier time.

Many of the children were orphans; one ten-year-old, Mustapha from Tébessa, had seen his parents shot down in front of him, one after the other, by French soldiers when he was seven. He claimed that they had then tortured him, burning his arm on a stove, and added fiercely:

I will burn them as they burned me. I will not burn a child, however, because the children haven’t done anything wrong. Those who burned me, however, I will make suffer, and I will kill them. And I will not ever forget those who burned me; even if they come and ask my pardon, I won’t pardon them.

Since 1954, alleges Frantz Fanon, common crime among Algerians had almost disappeared, for “the national conflict seems to have canalised all anger”. Certainly, after six years of war, hatred and violence and their habit had become etched deep into souls, deeper than could be excoriated by any amount of purely military successes.

F.L.N. ideology: Marxist or home-grown?

“I will not die for the Algerian nation, because it does not exist.” So an anguished young Ferhat Abbas had cried in the 1930s on being unable to discover an Algerian fatherland. In place of a nation a whole ethos had had to be created from 1954 onwards. When furnishing itself with a provisional constitution at the Third C.N.R.A. of January 1960, the G.P.R.A. had declared: “At the same time that it is conducting the war of liberation, the F.L.N. is also directing a revolution….” Thereby “revolution” had been made statutory. But what now were its ideological well-springs? Was it Marxist—Communist, as the French colonels of the Cinquième Bureau so often proclaimed in their endeavours to frighten successive regimes in Paris with the bogey of “the Soviet Navy at Mers-el-Kébir”?

It will be recalled that the F.L.N. had sent its first team to Peking and Moscow in December 1958, gained a warm reception from the Chinese and promises of two milliard francs’ worth of arms, but coolness and no firm promises from the Russians. The initiative had been proposed by Ben Khedda, who led both the first delegation and its successor in September 1959. Ben Khedda, the convert from Messali’s M.N.A., was generally regarded to be ideologically the most Marxist-orientated of the F.L.N. leaders, but he never belonged to their inner circle. China was among the first countries to recognise the G.P.R.A. in September 1958, while a somewhat grudging recognition was not forthcoming from Moscow until more than two years later. A more powerful delegation to Peking and Moscow had been led by Krim (in his new capacity of Foreign Minister), Boussouf and Ahmed Francis at the end of April 1960, which had included side-trips to North Vietnam and North Korea. Again, a rapturous welcome from tens of thousands of cheering Chinese (plus offers to supply more arms than all the Arab world put together) contrasted with a coolly, diplomatically correct reception in Moscow. Five months later Ferhat Abbas was being received officially, as president of the G.P.R.A., in both Communist capitals; in Peking his visit happened to coincide with the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, and Abbas was placed ostentatiously as guest-of-honour at Mao’s right; in Moscow he managed to extract
de facto
recognition but little else — except for a promise to supply arms once the G.P.R.A. was in control of a piece of “liberated” Algerian territory — a highly unlikely prospect in the prevailing military state of the war.

On his return from the Communist bloc, and following the deadlock at Melun, Krim warned the West — with considerable diplomatic skill — that Algeria was appealing for military assistance from the East, “including rockets”, and after his visits in the autumn of 1960 Abbas was telling the
New York Times
how he expected Chinese and Soviet arms deliveries to be substantially increased. Privately, in all their dealings the Algerian delegates had insisted that there should be no political strings attached, and it was clear that — even more than the actual arms supplies themselves (which never lived up to promises made) — the F.L.N. primarily valued their relationship with Peking and Moscow for the pressure it applied upon France, both directly and through the medium of her nervous Western allies.

The coolness of the U.S.S.R. towards the Algerian revolution had several motives. In the first place they were committed to support the French Communist Party and its sister in Algeria, the P.C.A., both of whom had ambivalent attitudes in that they in turn were committed to support the
petit pied noir
workers, as well as the largely anti-Algerian workers of metropolitan France. Secondly, the advent of de Gaulle and his threats to break up the Atlantic Alliance persuaded the Kremlin that its longer-term interests lay better in doing nothing that might seriously upset de Gaulle. Thirdly, in its espousal of the new Khrushchev doctrine of “peaceful coexistence”, the Kremlin was compelled to pay lip-service to condemning violent revolution as “infantile disorders”; and, fourthly, it was increasingly clear that the F.L.N. was throughout a nationalist and not a Marxist liberation movement, and showed few signs of becoming one. In turn, the coolness of the Soviets was to freeze any inclination the F.L.N. might otherwise have nurtured for Soviet Communism, leaving it with a mistrust and an aversion that would linger significantly into the post-war Algerian world.

Quoting Fidel Castro, Régis Debray says: “that there is no revolution without a vanguard; that this vanguard is not necessarily the Marxist—Leninist party”. This was certainly true of the Algerian revolution; but it was not even to succumb to Marxism—Leninism in the aftermath of war — in contrast to Cuba, and despite Boumedienne’s close friendship and admiration for Castro. Perhaps because of the language and proximity, the F.L.N. was always strongly influenced by the French Resistance, but if there was one Communist country — apart from Maoist China — with whose revolutionary struggle they felt a particularly warm identity, it was Tito’s Yugoslavia. From the earliest days, the Yugoslavs had given the F.L.N. staunch support both in arms and on international platforms; they were of the approved “third world”, not representing the massive, monolithic menace of the Soviet system; they did not thrust their ideology at the F.L.N.; and their brand of decentralised Socialism was not unappealing to the Algerians. In the style of the war of liberation there was also some kinship with the partisans’ experiences of 1941–5; the F.L.N. had been waging simultaneously a “war within a war” against the M.N.A., just as Tito had had his parallel struggle against the Četniks of Mihailović but, above all, both sets of revolutionaries were to emerge proclaiming in victory that they had won through their own courage and largely on their own resources, without “foreign” intervention. The mere fact of the Algerians’ proud insistence that their war of liberation was an act of pure nationalism, borrowed from no one else’s, is of itself a further point of comparison (though where it ends, of course, is that the F.L.N. never had — and as a matter of principle refused to have — a Tito).

The fact is that, despite contemporary French claims to the contrary, Communism exerted but little influence on the F.L.N. war effort. As Abbas told a French Marxist towards the end of the war, “these Communists give people bread to eat, and that’s good; but man does not live by bread alone. We’re Muslims, you see, we believe in God, we want to elevate their minds; the mind must be nourished too.” Marxist materialism was at least as alien to the F.L.N. ethos as were other external Arab ideologies such as Moroccan monarchism, Tunisian Bourguibism, or Egyptian Nasserism. The F.L.N. had always been quite unyielding in never accepting Communists into their ranks as a “block membership”; if they came, they came as individuals, forswearing all former allegiances. The Communist world was, if anything, more exploited than exploiting; as Edgar O’Ballance aptly remarks: “The F.L.N. outsmarted the Communists all along the line by taking all it could from them, and then playing them off at their own game.”

Although, because of the all-smothering blanket of secretiveness, it is hard to be categoric, the impression one has is that in general the wartime debates and dissents within the F.L.N. were far more a matter of personalities than of ideologies. Most of the leaders were men of simple learning. There was a paucity of well-read intelligentsia; few, like Boumedienne, had university educations, and they tended to be indoctrinated in Islamic rather than Marxist thought. Essentially inward-looking, the F.L.N. leaders as a whole do not impress one as having been well-read on revolutionary practice and theory; if they had absorbed the techniques of the Viet-Minh, it was through the direct experiences some had had as members of the ill-fated French forces in Indo-China. In reading
El Moudjahid
, once one has scraped away the thick gravy layers of propaganda, one finds little serious discussion of social aims of the future Algerian society, and this was especially so from the death of the super-political Abane onwards. The frustration of Abane’s hopes for a “dynamic” revolution on the Viet-Minh pattern was also exacerbated by the ever-increasing isolation of the “interior” from “exterior”. Communication between the two, constantly preoccupied with matters of sheer military survival, gave but little time for ideological speculation. But as the years rolled by the revolution did develop pragmatically it own social face. It was an austere one, materialistically and religiously, and borrowed more from the theological teachings of the interwar Ulema than from Karl Marx. Characteristically, the F.L.N. never offered prosperity, liberty or the pursuit of happiness as planks in its programme. Its leaders profoundly disapproved of Bourguibism, not just on account of its “cult of the personality” but also for its emphasis on the merits of bourgeois free enterprise. When one declared to the Braces, “We are not Communists, but we are
not
fighting and dying for a bourgeois capitalist state which will only benefit a few people,” he could hardly have taken a more representative line.