16

An Experimental Nation

The new government of Algeria flew into the city of Algiers on 3 July 1962. They arrived in a Tunis Air Caravelle, making the short trip from the Tunisian capital in a few hours and landing at Algiers airport mid-morning. When the FLN had started the war, they could not have hoped that victory would be so swift and overwhelming. More to the point, having prepared for conflict for so long, they had really no idea how to manage peace or – most crucially – how to make a nation out of the wreckage of war.

The cortège of limousines bringing the FLN home was received in delirious triumph as it drove slowly from the airport to the centre of the city. The streets were lined with children wearing military uniforms and carrying wooden rifles, imitating the Mujahideen, the legendary warriors who had brought them freedom. Older Algerians waved the green and white flag and chanted ‘Yaya Djezair!’ (Long live Algeria!).

When the new president of Free Algeria appeared on the balcony of the Town Hall, however, it came as a shock to many in the crowd. They had been expecting either Mohammed Khider or Ahmed Ben Bella, both of whom were legends to this generation of Algerians: ‘historic chiefs’ who had dreamed of and fought for liberty. Instead, the crowd was confronted by Ben Youssef Ben Khedda, a strategist rather than a soldier, who was unknown to many Algerians. They feared that their heroes had been usurped and that the revolution was being hijacked in front of their eyes. They were not reassured by Ben Khedda’s dour speech, railing against ‘the military dictatorship some of whom are dreaming of personal power, the ambitious, the adventurers, fascists of all stripes’. Many in the crowd were confused at this stern warning on what was to be supposed to be a joyful day of national liberation.

There was also a threat of yet more war in Ben Khedda’s speech, as he invoked the potential danger of Houari Boumédienne, a daring FLN commander, with his ‘army of the border’, a division of hardened fighters who preferred to watch events from their base on the Tunisian border. Boumédienne had his eyes on power. As Ben Khedda greeted the crowds in Algiers, he knew that the possibility of civil war was very near.

As the celebrations continued over three days, the situation appeared to be sliding into civil unrest, and on 5 July Ben Khedda ordered everyone on the street back to work on pain of arrest. The reality, which all the FLN chiefs had now grasped, was that the new nation was about to be born in a mixture of hope and bloody confusion.

‘The New Havana’

In the first instance, the hope was that Algeria would become a beacon of freedom in the post-colonial world, especially in Africa. For this reason, several thousand French Algerians with left-wing beliefs opted to stay on in independent Algeria, with the dream of building a new Socialist republic, free of the baggage of European history and ideology. The optimism radiated across the Mediterranean and over the next few years other Europeans, mainly French left-wingers – teachers, journalists, doctors – flocked to the new Socialist paradise. These utopian dreamers were nicknamed ‘pieds rouges’ (red feet) in an ironic homage to their French background. They took the revolution in Cuba as their model and called Algiers the ‘new Havana’ – a city halfway between a revolutionary playground and a laboratory for new ideas about freedom.

However, nothing could have been further from the reality of Algeria in the course of the 1960s. The early part of the decade was defined by a power struggle between Ben Bella and Boumédienne. Ben Bella was voted into power in September 1962, but only after a month of anarchy and vicious in-fighting between FLN factions. Ben Khedda had by now withdrawn from the conflict. Ben Bella’s hold on power, however, was always fragile and in June 1965 he was arrested by Boumédienne, who replaced him as president, bringing with him the hard men of the military. When Boumédienne’s tanks took key strategic points in the city to enforce the coup d’état, the citizens of Algiers assumed that this was just another set piece for the Gillo Pontecorvo film, The Battle of Algiers, which was then being filmed. They only realized later that the course of their history had yet again been determined by arms.

Boumédienne was tough and paranoid and had more in common with a South American right-wing dictator than with a leader of a liberation struggle. The pieds rouges were soon obvious objects of suspicion and many of them found themselves in prison and were tortured as ‘spies’, ‘infiltrators’ and ‘subversives’.

Traitors and Collaborators

The defining moment in Algeria’s first decade as a free nation, however, was a series of events as disgusting and bloody as any massacre during the war.1 This was the mass killing of the pro-French Muslims who, in the summer of 1962, had been abandoned by the French as the exodus of the pieds noirs became a stampede.

The pro-French Muslims were known by the Arabic term harki, a word derived from haraka, meaning ‘movement’, which, in Arabic military parlance, was commonly used to conceal small groups of guerrillas from external enemies. During the war, the term harki was applied to the groups of auxiliary troops formed by the French army to provide police and military cover at a local level, defending towns, villages and tribes against the FLN. By 1962 they numbered some 26,000 men who played a variety of roles, from local policemen to conscript troops in the field. The harkis were mainly peasants themselves and were often motivated by a determination to defend land and family against the FLN; they had no real interest in politics and certainly not the politics of national liberation.

In the summer of 1962, the harkis became the focus for anger and revenge for the victorious Nationalists and those fellow-travellers who now wanted to show their commitment to the new Algeria in blood. Terrible stories began to come out of Algeria of crucifixions, eyes gouged out and castrations. ‘Tahar’ from Palestro, who worked for the French security services, described watching two comrades being hung from the nose in a village square. The FLN charged the villagers 500 francs for the pleasure of whipping the men with canes. The whipping lasted for four or five hours, continuing even after the victims had died. Apparently the village women took a particular delight in the task. ‘Tahar’ managed to sneak out of the village and was rescued by a passing French army patrol.2

However, the first betrayal of the harkis was committed by the French. As the peace deal was being settled, leaders of various harki factions grew increasingly nervous and began to lobby the French government for reassurances that their safety could be ensured, either by military protection or by ‘repatriation’. The French government did not want either of these. On 16 May Louis Joxe, the French Minister of State, issued an order which secretly prohibited the transportation of harkis back to France. The French wanted to observe the principles of the peace agreement and, perhaps more obliquely, to avoid the OAS and the harkis joining forces to cause trouble on French soil.

When the policy became known, it sent the signal that France did not care about those who had fought for its honour. The point was that they were not French. De Gaulle was clear on this matter: the harkis were ‘toys of history’ rather than integral elements of the French army. When a Muslim deputy, whose family had been killed by the FLN, put it to the general that his community would suffer in independent Algeria, de Gaulle responded icily: ‘Yes. You will suffer.’

And suffer they did. A mere 15,000 harkis made it to France, where they were treated as pariahs, herded together and left to rot in camps outside the big French cities. These were wretched places, sometimes out beyond the suburbs, in the countryside or in forest clearings. The idea was that they would be protected from possible FLN reprisals, but in fact the French authorities were happy to hide them away and forget that they were there. Their lives in these camps were worse than they had been at home – assimilation and even the most menial work was out of their reach.

The fate of those left behind in Algeria was, however, truly terrible. Acting under the terms of the peace agreement, the French soldiers were often obliged to disarm their former comrades. They were then abandoned in a climate of frenzied bloodlust, which echoed the ‘épuration sauvage’ (wild purification) of 1945 in newly liberated France, when most suspected collaborators were lynched, murdered and mutilated in revenge for their treachery. In Algeria, the harkis were systematically rounded up and sent to work in labour camps or on pointless projects in the desert. In both instances they died of starvation and disease. Even more horrible were the individual acts of retribution which merged into a wave of violence that swept across newly independent Algeria. Whole families were massacred. Former soldiers were ordered to dig their own graves and swallow their decorations before being shot. Torture, being dragged behind trucks, and castration were all commonplace. One frequent act of sadism was to burn the victim alive, feeding the cooked flesh to dogs.

The fate of the harkis is still very much an issue in Algeria and France. In the 1970s the harkis were out in the camps, forgotten by their former masters. There were occasional riots in protest at the miserable conditions, but there was no official recognition of their status or their difficulties. The policy was to keep them separate from the ‘good Algerians’ who were arriving in massive numbers to work in France. It was only in 2001 that Jacques Chirac began the healing process when he declared 25 September a day of official homage to the harkis; a plaque was placed in the Cour des Invalides – the tomb of Napoleon and seat of all French military triumph – honouring the ‘harkis and other supplementary formations of the French army’. Since then the French government has sought to make reparations, in response to fierce campaigning by harki families. In 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy met an official delegation at the Elysée, although he still refused officially to acknowledge the ‘responsibility of France in the abandonment and massacre of the harkis’. Finally, in April 2012, Sarkozy acknowledged French responsibility for the ‘abandonment’ of the harkis, opening a memorial in the now derelict camp of Rivesaltes near Perpignan.

However, in Algeria harkis are still denied access to higher education and exiled harkis cannot be buried on Algerian soil. On an official visit to France in 2000, the Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika said on French television that the harkis were ‘as bad as Nazis and their collaborators’.3 And in the Algerian community in France, the word harki remains loaded with poison. During the infamous France–Algeria football match at the Stade de France in September 2001, the Algerian supporters taunted the French superstar Zinédine Zidane, who is of Algerian origin, with cries of ‘Zidane-harki’. As riots broke up the match, Zidane left the pitch in tears. When I interviewed him a few years later in Madrid, he described the match as the worst moment in his footballing career. The rumour persists in the banlieues of Marseilles and Paris that Zidane’s father was a harki. When I put this to him, he flinched visibly before denying that it was true.4

Arabization

The twin pillars of Boumédienne’s Algeria were the military and Islam, with financial backing from the USSR and China, who both saw Algeria as a strategic ally against the West. The key posts in his government were held by military men, either former commanders in the FLN or the so-called Déserteurs de l’Armée Française. These were officers who had been trained and promoted by the French and come late to the War of Independence, spending most of the war outside Algeria. Under Boumédienne they promoted themselves to posts they would never have achieved in France and began to construct the new Algeria as a rigid hierarchy, strictly enforced by the security services, the much feared Sécurité Militaire (SM), which were famous for high-profile assassinations of renegade FLN figures and others thought to have misunderstood the revolution. Boumédienne’s government was also populist – he won great prestige in the streets by sending Algerian military units to Palestine during the Six Day War and made much of breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States in the name of pan-Arab unity. The average Algerian admired Boumédienne’s ‘redjla’ – a term which roughly translates as ‘toughness’ – in defying the West.5

The most significant development under Boumédienne’s régime was his encouragement of a resurgence of Islamic values. He called this ‘a return to the sources’ of Algerian culture, positioning Islam against French or European values as a new step forward in the liberation struggle. This resurgence went hand-in-hand with the aggressive promulgation of Arabic as the first language of Algeria, displacing French. This was a complex issue. Algerian Arabic is a dialect which is spoken with massive regional differences. For this reason, even the most hard-line revolutionaries found French the most effective lingua franca of the country. What is more, Egyptian Arabic, which arrived with a wave of Islamic teachers from Egypt, was incomprehensible to many Algerian Arabic speakers, while classical Arabic was as remote or distant as Latin.

The Egyptian teachers brought with them a new ideology which was not then known as ‘Islamism’ or ‘political Islam’, but which was already at work as a subversive force against the kind of pan-Arab nationalism that had inspired the FLN until now. The most militant Islamist group in Algeria during this period was a religious association called al-Qiyam (Values), established by a group of clerics in 1953 in imitation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan el-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood believed that Islam had to reclaim the political dimension which had been lost with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They opposed Arab Nationalism with the slogan: ‘The Koran is our constitution!’ Islam was a complete and total system and there was no need to look to Europe for any other model – Marxist, Socialist or Nationalist. During the 1930s this had become a mass movement in Egypt, attracting the lower middle classes, who had only recently become literate and who defended their faith as ‘Islamic modernity’.

In Algeria in the 1960s, the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood had a clear appeal for Muslims who sought a way of opposing colonial structures and were suspicious of Western ideas being imported into Islamic territory. The most influential figure during this period was Sayyid Qutb, who emerged as the intellectual leader of the Muslim Brothers, who were brutally suppressed in Egypt under the régime of General Nasser. Qutb’s key argument against Arab Nationalists – including the FLN – was that they were leading the Islamic nations back to Jahiliya – a state of ignorance and barbarity which predated Islam. The ultimate sanction against those who are kufr (impious) is takfir, which means the unbeliever is left outside the law and therefore condemned to death: according to the holy formula, ‘his blood is his forfeit’. Although Qutb died in one of Nasser’s prisons in 1966 before he could fully define these terms, this ideology is what justifies most contemporary Islamist terrorism.

It was also the logic that defined the core beliefs of al-Qiyam, setting it against the FLN government in Algeria, which it regularly attacked as irreligious and anti-Muslim. In one famous example, Djamila Bouhired, one of the FLN’s heroines of the Battle of Algiers and a symbol of the new Algeria, was reported to have got off a plane without a veil during an official visit to Kuwait. This was held up by al-Qiyam as a clear example of the FLN’s scorn for true Muslim values. When Qutb died in prison in Egypt, al-Qiyam protested vehemently to Boumédienne’s government that no Algerian could tolerate this. In 1967, the government banned gambling and the sale of alcohol to Muslims. It was an initial concession, and the first step towards a wider Islamist radicalization of society.

Radical Chic

Algeria’s first decade as a free nation ended with a massive political statement by Boumédienne, who wanted to situate the new Algeria as the leader of an African renaissance, and make Algiers the global capital of Third World-ism. In 1969 Algiers hosted the first ever Pan-African Cultural Festival, set up by the Organization of African Unity, a loosely Marxist anti-colonial coalition. He invited delegates from all parts of the world that were at war, literally or metaphorically, with the West. These included representatives from North Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, Mexico and Palestine. One of Boumédienne’s most notorious guests was the American Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, then on the run from the police but filmed wandering nonchalantly through the Casbah by the photographer William Klein, who made a documentary about the festival.

Prior to his arrival in Algeria, Cleaver had been arrested in Oakland for attempted murder, having led a group of Black Panthers in a shoot-out with local police. He jumped bail, made his way to Cuba and then to Algiers, where the Algerian government welcomed him with open arms. Cleaver was a provocative symbol, a way of tweaking the nose of the Americans as well as announcing Algeria’s radical anti-Western credentials to the world. Cleaver was paid a stipend by the North Vietnamese and housed in a villa, said to be a haven for American black ‘revolutionaries’ returning to Africa as well as a safe house for deserters from the US military. Among those who visited Cleaver in Algiers was Timothy Leary, the guru of the psychedelic revolution, who had also been busted out of jail and smuggled over from America.

Despite his venerated status in exile, it was not long before Cleaver returned to his criminal past. Most of the ‘revolutionaries’ who made it to Algeria turned out to be accomplished gangsters. Cleaver was soon running rackets himself and left the country pursued by Algerian secret police, who suspected him of killing his wife’s lover. But in 1969 the images of Cleaver in Algiers – which made it on to the cover of Life magazine – proclaimed Algeria as the cool capital of the Afro-American revolution.

Other visitors to the Pan-African festival included Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and anti-apartheid militant. One the highlights was the free jazz sax player Archie Shepp jamming with Tuareg musicians and, in a virtuoso performance, breaking down the harmonic structures of Western music and rediscovering the atonal source of jazz in the music of Mother Africa. In his opening speech, Boumédienne had made it clear that the festival was not just a ‘distraction’ but the ‘revolution taking place in everyday life’. The art and music of Shepp and Makeba, and the presence of the Panthers, captured the excitement of this historical moment, as well as heralding a new dawn where art and politics dissolved into each other. For many of those who attended the festival, it was as if the promise of freedom in the revolts of May ’68 was now being made real in Algeria.6

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At the same time as Western fantasies of freedom were being played out in Algeria, Islam was on the rise. Until independence, Islam in Algeria was reasonably relaxed and multi-denominational. The Sunni school of Maliki Islam, which had been the religion of Islamic Spain, existed alongside the schools of Hanifi and Ibadite Islam. These schools all take the Holy Koran as their primary source but adapt it and co-exist with local customs, which meant that the cult of local saints and regional variants were all tolerated. Boumédienne wanted to make this the official state version of Islam; it was what he really meant by ‘a return to the source’.

To the fledgling Islamist movements, this was a betrayal of the Algerian revolution. Boumédienne’s sympathy for Socialism on the Cuban model and Third World politics in general was also detested by the various underground Islamist groups growing in popularity and strength in the early 1970s. Although al-Qiyam was banned in 1970, Abdellatif Soltani, one of its most charismatic figures, became a kind of folk hero in Algeria, as he persistently escaped capture by the police (usually by slipping over the border into Morocco) and went on to preach and publish texts which described Boumédienne’s government as anti-Islamic and therefore anti-Algerian.7

The first manifesto of the Algerian Islamist movement was published by Soltani in exile in Morocco in 1974 under the title Al-Mazdaqiya Hiya Asl Al-Ishtiraqiya (Mazdaquism is the Source of Socialism). This was a full-frontal assault on the FLN’s attempt to marry Islam and Socialism. For Soltani, this was nothing short of atheism – only the word of God could determine the values and laws of Muslims. The title is a reference to the Mazdaq Persians, a sect from the pre-Islamic age who practised an early form of Communism. The FLN were like the Mazdaqs, atheists who sought to infect the purity of Islam with foreign ideas, just as earlier Muslim scholars had misguidedly tried to introduce Greek philosophy into the Muslims’ religion. For Hachem Tidjani, who picked up Soltani’s mantle as the fiercest critic of the Algerian state, the FLN was no more nor less than ‘the party of Satan’.