France's war in Algeria: telling the story

[jmm99]

Thank you.

Cheers

Mike

[SWJ Blog]

Book Review: Identity in Algerian Politics: The Legacy of Colonial Rule

Entry Excerpt:

Book Review: Identity in Algerian Politics: The Legacy of Colonial Rule
by J.N.C. Hill.
Published by Lynne Reinner Publishers, London, United Kingdom and Boulder, Colorado. 2009, 209 pages.
Reviewed by Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, MSC, USN

With recent and rapid changes gripping the Middle East, it is vital to go beyond the headlines and read a few books to understand nuance and context. Jonathan. N. C. Hill is a lecturer in the Defense Studies Department at King’s College in London. His most recent book is an in-depth look into the complex political history of Algeria with a focus on the impact of colonialism on this nation that has seen more than its share of political violence. Algeria is home to al-Qaida in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and therefore is of special interest in America’s global counter-terrorism effort. The introduction offers an excellent essay on the betrayal of the French reason for colonizing Algeria in 1832, that the French has a civilizing mission. Yet no aspect of French liberty ever make to the Arab Algerian populace. What evolved, according to the book, are a series of laws and privileges that gave increasing civil liberties and outright power to the pied-nior (French settlers in Algeria). One ubiquitous law passed by the French, was the consideration of granting French citizenship to Muslim Algerians, only if they renounce their faith. The book does a marvelous job in laying out the imbalance of rights between the French settlers and the native Algerians. A zero-sum game developed in which any granting of rights to Algerians was perceived by French settlers of Algeria as an erosion of their privileges.



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[SWJ Blog]

Algeria: The Undeclared War - A Review

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[davidbfpo]

From the BBC 'France's war in Algeria explored in Paris exhibition' and the opening paragraphs:

On the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence, it might seem an odd choice to mount an exhibition marking 130 years of French colonial rule over the country. But at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris, that is exactly what they have done. Algeria 1830-1962 is a look back over France's long military presence there.

An important passage IMO, citing the museum's director Gen Christian Baptiste:

There is no one truth about the Algeria war...There are many truths, and we have done our best to reflect all of them. The difficulty is that even after 50 years the suffering is still very raw. In many cases, the pain has been handed down from one generation to the next.

A historian adds:

They say that memory divides. Only history heals. That is why it is the task of historians and politicians to tell the full story - from all sides.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18343039

Amongst the three linked BBC stories is one on the film Battle of Algiers and it is almost as SWJ / SWC readers had been to see:

Yacef Saadi, the Algerian guerrilla leader whose memoirs of the independence war formed the basis of the film, La Bataille d'Algers (The Battle of Algiers), which remains one of the most compelling studies of insurrection and counter-insurgency ever recorded.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13728540

As SWC readers will know that film has a special place in America's desire to learn and IIRC features in several threads.

[davidbfpo]

Moderator's Note

I have re-titled this thread and merged a small number of threads to this one, after adding the post above on the current French exhibition. More merging done, four threads moved in.

These are linked threads which are not suitable for merging:

French & US COIN and Galula (merged thread):http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...read.php?t=858

Restrepo and The Battle of Algiers: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=11004

Ambush, IEDs and COIN: The French Experience:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=5585

Obviously simply searching for Algeria will bring back nearly 200 threads and not all refer to the historical contest.

[davidbfpo]

A short article in the e-journal Perspectives on Terrorism:

explores a less well-known episode in the history of terrorism: The Red Hand (La Main Rouge). During the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) it emerged as an obscure counter-terrorist organisation on the French side. Between 1956 and 1961, the Red Hand targeted the network of arms suppliers for the Algerian Front de Libration Nationale (FLN) and executed hits against rebel emissaries both in Western Europe and in North Africa. Today, there is consensus among scholars that the Red Hand had been set up by the French foreign intelligence service in order to strike at the subversive enemy. This makes the Red Hand a telling example of state terrorism and its capacity for unrestricted violence in emergency situations. Since the Red Hands counter-terrorist acts ultimately proved to be futile and due to the repercussions caused in France as well, the case study also highlights the limits of this type of counter-terrorism.

Link:http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/.../view/229/html

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to Bill Moore for sending a link to a US e-journal CTX; within is a review of this book 'The Harkis: The Wound that Never Heals' by Vincent Crapanzano.

Using locally recruited troops in contemporary COIN is a frequent subject on SWC, the story of the Harkis remains relevant today, obviously in Afghanistan and other places where an exit is likely.

Based on a combination of archival research and face-to-face interviews, Crapazano’s results are riveting.

During the French-Algerian War, the Muslim community was faced with a choice: join either the FLN insurgency, or the French Army as an auxiliary. As all students of insurgencies know, the only neutrals are dead ones. Indeed, Muslims often joined the French Army only after being forced to witness the slaughter of their family members en masse. All told, approximately 260,000
Algerians of Arab or Berber descent served in various capacities in the French Army as Harkis.

Crapanzano has chronicled the story of the Harkis with a well-researched and heartfelt, deeply disturbing personal journey. He illuminates not only the immediate costs of the Algerian rearguard action, but the less known collateral damage visited upon those forced to make choices that meant only preserving one’s life for the moment. Insightfully written, this work skillfully shifts our focus in one of the great geopolitical conflicts of the twentieth century to the most elemental level, that of the individual.

Link: to the e-journal November 2012 issue:https://globalecco.org/ctx-vol.-2-no...26C364DB59786C the review is on pgs.74-76 'The Written Word' https://globalecco.org/the-written-word

Amazon.com link, no reviews alas:http://www.amazon.com/Harkis-Wound-T...ent+Crapanzano

[Laeke]

I see torture was discussed already. The Algerian war has some good other topics, although I'm unsure if there is good english documentation on the subject:

- The "Bleuite" as it is now remembered, a quite successful intoxication campaign by French intelligence, which fed the ALN groups with false info about double agents in its ranks, leading to sometime heavy purges. It was used as a prelude to major operations. However such a manipulation was maybe only made possible in the context of a quasi-civil war where the potential allegiance to the French was very common.

- Apparently some Indochina vets, who had the misfortunes of having been taken prisoners by the Good Uncle Ho, were so impressed by the political "brainwashing" they were subjected to that they tried to implement equivalent methods in French camps within the broader "Psy-ops" experiment. With little success. For this I have a link to an article from an historian working for the Armée de l'Air, but french only (obviously)... http://www.cairn.info/revue-guerres-...-4-page-45.htm

[davidbfpo]

The controversial film 'Battle of Algiers' appears in may threads on SWC, but the linked article is about the actor who portrayed Colonel Mathieu and is worth reading. Some of the pithy comments will resonate on the dilemmas of fighting an internal war, as France saw Algeria and other 'small wars'.

Maybe the Colonel was a man for his times, not today?

Mathieu is the key to the central scene of the film: the moment when he is cross-examined by international journalists about torture. Accused by journalists of being evasive about the methods of victory, he rounds on them. He reminds them of the consequences of blind terrorism:

"Is it legal to set off bombs in public places?... No, gentlemen, believe me. It is a vicious circle. We could talk for hours to no avail because that is not the problem. The problem is this: the FLN want to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay".

He underlines that there was a political consensus, from right to left, in support of destroying the FLN rebellion.

"We are here for that reason alone. We are neither madmen nor sadists. Those who call us fascists forget the role many of us played in the Resistance. Those who call us Nazis don’t know that some of us survived Dachau and Buchenwald. We are soldiers. Our duty is to win".

At which point Mathieu throws the question back at the journalists:

"Therefore to be precise, it is my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences".

Link:http://www.opendemocracy.net/martin-...mbodied-france

[SWJ Blog]

French Failure in Algeria: A Public Relations Disaster

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[davidbfpo]

A coup by WoTR to republish part of Alistair Horne's book 'A Savage War of Peace', to contribute to the current public debate over torture:http://warontherocks.com/2014/12/tor.../?singlepage=1

The WoTR Editor's introduction explains:

Editor’s Note: Nearly 40 years ago, Alistair Horne wrote a magnificent book, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. It tells the story of the French-Algerian War, which ended with the victory of the National Liberation Front (FLN) and an independent Algeria, a land that France had considered an integral part of metropolitan France itself. This book has often been revisited in the decades since its publication, most recently during the Iraq War, when – in 2007 – President George W. Bush invited Horne to speak with him at the White House.


One of the most powerful lessons from the book is on the issue of torture. Torture was used, arguably to great tactical effect, by the French during the war, particularly during the Battle of Algiers. Once the extent of the use of torture became public knowledge, however, it changed the debate about the war, in both France and the rest of the world. Given the ongoing debate about torture in America’s war against jihadists, reignited by the recent report on the CIA’s interrogation practices by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, we could do much worse than to revisit what Horne wrote about the use and impact of torture during this savage war of peace. We are proud to re-print a portion of this book with the permission of New York Review Books. We hope that this elegant and haunting passage will illuminate America’s national debate on an issue that is inextricably linked to both America’s counterterrorism strategy and its core values. Our choice to re-print this passage is not an attempt to claim or even comment on any moral equivalence between France’s torture scandal and our own, but to draw attention to the common shape and form that these debates tend to take, within military and intelligence organizations and in society as a whole. This passage, from Chapter 9, begins with the death of Larbi Ben M’hidi, one of the six original leaders of the FLN. – RE

Reading Alistair Horne in the knowledge that the US military included the film 'Battle for Algiers' in its training syllabus, makes it rather poignant. It is not an easy read even today.

Citing the French prefect of Algiers, himself a torture victim in Dachau:

All right, Massu won the Battle of Algiers; but that meant losing the war

[davidbfpo]

A short blog article on Strife, a Kings War Studies blog, 'Lessons from Algeria: counter-insurgency, commitment and cruelty'. It opens with:

In the Algerian War of 1954-62, the belligerents tore apart a society that had coexisted for a century. The wounds they left were too deep to heal. But the continuation of theviolence after the war and the spiraling civilian-targeted terror campaigns conducted by both French colonists and Algerian independence fighters was not inevitable. Avoiding this type of outcome is the point of counter-insurgency operations today. More than sixty years later, we can see that no counter-insurgency campaign can succeed with aggressive ‘search and destroy’ tactics against embedded insurgentsif the ultimate aim is peaceful coexistence in a divided society. The United States failed to take this lesson to Iraq and as a result had to adapt during its operations.
Any country considering a counter-insurgency operation in the future must weigh up the extra costs of attempting it without this tool. France’s experience in Algeria shows that restraint and long-term commitment are vital if conflicts are to be resolved without the kind of fallout seen in Algeria in the 1960s and Iraq since 2011.

Link:http://strifeblog.org/2015/02/20/les...t-and-cruelty/

For reference this incident is seen by Algerians as the "beginning of the end" in 1945:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A...uelma_massacre

Incredibly there is contemporary newsreel of the French response, IIRC with unarmed men being shot down.

[davidbfpo]

Strife blog has a new article 'Imagining War in Film: The Algerian War in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Winds of the Aures'.

It looks at two films, both post-independence, one French, the other Algerian and concludes - in academic words:

The analysis of these two movies reveals that the memory of trauma and conflict can be shaped by nationalist narratives. This constitution and disciplining of memory is primarily exercised by state-controlled or state-censored cinema serving specific narratives regarding the nature, subjects, and motives of the Algerian war. In the end, we observe how both representations of the conflict divert attention from the realities of post-war nation-building. This helps recognise the (re)productive power of visual media in framing and constituting meaning and identity. The struggle for narrative eminence between Algerian and French filmmakers is a testament to the fact that artistic expression is yet another site for political struggles over power and identity.

[davidbfpo]

Thanks to WoTR, once more, for a review of 'Inside the Battle of Algiers' by Zohra Drif, which was published in French in 2016 and in September 2017 in English.

Her importance to many here will be from the film 'Battle for Algiers':

Late on a September afternoon in 1956 a young woman entered the Milk Bar, an Algiers cafe popular with European youth. She looked like an average well-to-do French-Algerian, who had stopped off after a day at the beach. In reality, however, she was an Algerian Muslim, her appearance altered to blend in with café’s clientele. After eating ice cream, she departed. No one noticed that she had left behind a beach bag at the foot of the stool she had occupied. Minutes later, a bomb in the bag exploded.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2018/03/ro...female-bomber/

From Amazon:

This gripping insider's account chronicles how and why a young woman in 1950s Algiers joined the armed wing of Algeria's national liberation movement to combat her country's French occupiers. When the movement's leaders turned to Drif and her female colleagues to conduct attacks in retaliation for French aggression against the local population, they leapt at the chance. Their actions were later portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo's famed film The Battle of Algiers. When first published in French in 2013, this intimate memoir was met with great acclaim and no small amount of controversy. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century and their relevance today, but also the specific challenges that women often confronted (and overcame) in those movements.

Link to Amazon.com with five * reviews:https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Battle.../dp/1682570754 and Amazon UK:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Battle-Algiers-Zohra-Drif/dp/1682570754/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520537043&sr=1-1&keywords=zohra+drif

[davidbfpo]

The actual title for this article is: France may have apologised for atrocities in Algeria, but the war still casts a long shadow.

It starts with:

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, wrestled with the demons of his country's colonial past this week by acknowledging that the country carried out systematic torture during the Algerian war of independence. After six decades of secrecy and denials, it was a historic first for a country that long refused to even admit that the brutal conflict - in which Algeria says 1.5 million died - was indeed a “war”.

Link:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...r-still-casts/ and yesterday on the BBC (slightly different e.g. Harki's mentioned):https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45513842

Professor Andrew Hussey, a UK historian resident in Paris, adds his commentary:https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...onial-history?

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to an excellent War on The Rocks article, which fits here well and has a wider application to fighting 'small wars'. Notably over working with local allies and whether a conflict can be won. I'd never heard of this soldier.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/07/th...odern-warfare/

[davidbfpo]

Back to the past and distant past, an interesting commentary on the film 'the Battle of Algiers': https://newlinesmag.com/review/a-mov...oss-the-globe/

[davidbfpo]

A summary of the film by a British commentator after a group watched the film:

Pontecorvo's famous, harrowing, and still horribly relevant, "Battle of Algiers" (1966). The speaker contextualised the moral dilemmas and human damage in a major mechanism of modern history: successful and unsuccessful insurgencies , repeatedly unleashed since the mid 20th century. Protracted strategies of provocative escalation have all too clearly succeeded, in a list extending from Palestine, Indochina, Algeria… to, last year, Afghanistan. They certainly do not always win, but confronting them is invariably painful and demanding of resources, patience and organisational restraint. Long lasting ethnic traumas and religious hatreds are quite consciously detonated or exacerbated. Insurgencies learn from each other and so do counter insurgents. Conclusions are not often gentle. There is no reassuring end in sight to these often very deliberately agonising human crises. But moral as well as operational lessons can be learned about how to avoid and mitigate them. The intellectually and emotionally intense discussion, linked to some participants' personal experiences of real life choices in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, made the previously viewing of the film even more instructively memorable in a way that no other medium could have achieved.