A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (114 page)

In the years that intervened, however, much changed. Algeria went to every country in the world, regardless of political hue, for aid and technical knowhow; American oil and gas men, Russian steel men, Japanese chemical engineers, Chinese military advisers, Spaniards, Britons and Romanians, West Germans and East Germans swarm about the country. Economic relations with France stabilised, if not harmonised, with the seal set upon them by President Giscard’s state visit of April 1975. French technicians returned, so that the French colony in Algeria now already numbered some 65,000, including 7,000 teachers sent under the “cultural co-operation” clauses of Evian (one of the few provisions to survive). Algeria’s efforts to pull herself up by her own bootstraps were truly remarkable. Largely based on her natural gas reserves, reckoned to be among the biggest in the world, her heavy industry showed an astonishing growth rate. Boumedienne’s Algeria did not think in terms of four-year plans but in terms of a generation ahead. Everywhere one found evidence corroborating his tenth anniversary claim; vast housing complexes under construction; new industrial plants set in huge compounds that show extraordinarily ambitious forward thinking. The errors, when they occurred, were on the same grandiose scale as the achievements. But certainly no developing country (and few developed countries) visited by the author revealed a more impressive effort in material self-improvement. As far as the Arab world is concerned, in terms of economic efficiency and accomplishment, Boumedienne made Algeria its undisputed leader.

Pace-setter of the Third World

Post-war Algeria had its failings, and its critics. Sartre and the other left-wing French supporters of the wartime F.L.N. deplored that it had not gone further towards Marxism, that it failed to “export the revolution” to France. (An extreme revolutionary like Frantz Fanon would have found himself a prophet without honour in Boumedienne’s Algeria.) The emancipation of women lagged behind the promises of the war years, with the equality they had come to enjoy then forgotten in peace: “The woman is treated according to the racist principle of apartheid; she is still ‘colonised’,” complained Fadela M’Rabet in
La Femme Algérienne
. Efforts to control the bursting birth-rate were inadequate. Agriculture was a black spot; some of the farms taken from the
pieds noirs
were maintained at least as immaculately as by their past owners, but others were choked with weeds and incompetently managed; agrarian reform (as in so many emerging countries) remained an elusive chimera. To the West, Algeria’s belligerent noises towards Israel, on the demands of the Third World, on commodity prices, seldom offered comfort.

Yet no one could deny the distinctive place that Boumedienne’s Algeria, an under-developed nation fifteen million strong, had carved for itself in the world. Politically it stood — and still stands — apart; Socialist but not Marxist, it was as wary in its relations with Soviet Russia as with the U.S.A. Externally it zealously preserved its image as a revolutionary state, friendly to almost all other revolutionary movements; yet internally its own society, where Islam remains very much the binding cement, was highly conservative. If there is one country to which Boumedienne’s Algeria might most profitably be compared, it was perhaps Tito’s Yugoslavia, just as the F.L.N. at war bore a certain affinity with the Yugoslav partisans of the Second World War. Apart from Algeria’s proud independence of East and West, it was in her role of eminence in the Third World where the parallel is most relevant. More even than Tito at his zenith, Boumedienne was himself leader of the Third World. It was his taciturn authority that has welded it together, that set its tone. It was in Algiers that the mammoth Non-Aligned Conference took place in September 1973, probably the most significant congress of the Third World since the Bandung Conference of 1955 which gave the F.L.N. its first recognition in the outer world. It was also in Algiers in September of 1973 that, under Boumedienne’s guiding influence, the diplomatic and political dispositions against Israel, as well as the oil weapon, were co-ordinated, providing the essential prelude to the “Ramadan War” of the following month. Following the triumph of Arab unity which ensued, and the undreamed-of power which the accompanying “oil war” revealed, Boumedienne’s stature emerged hugely enhanced. When he spoke of the demands for equal shares for the world’s poorer nations — “We are ready to fight to get it, just as, not long ago, most of us had to fight for our political independence … we have come to understand that it is only by a show of strength on our part that they (the rich countries) will understand that we mean business” — his reputation, both as an uncompromising fighter in war and leader in peace, ensured that his (and Algeria’s) voice were taken seriously.

From Boumedienne to Bendjedid

When Chadli Bendjedid succeeded Boumedienne, from the beginning of 1979 onwards subtle changes slowly took place, almost surreptitiously. Photographs of the two men seemed symbolic; the gaunt, austere and unsmiling features of the wartime leader contrasted with the comfortable bourgeois face that you might almost expect to meet in an English golf club, perhaps a retired colonel. Algeria tended to slip from the world headlines. Under Bendjedid, Algeria ceased adopting extreme postures in the outside world (and particularly in Middle East politics) in favour of concentrating on domestic matters. The grandiose (and sometimes disastrous) industrial projects launched under Boumedienne gave way to consumer goods. In 1984, Algiers itself throbbed with vast and apparently insoluble traffic jams, that Western index of prosperity. The young were well clothed, and there were no signs of the terrible malnutrition rampant south of the Sahara. But, in a nation with bursting population explosion where the average age was 19, economic problems remained menacing. High price structures made it difficult to sell Algerian natural gas on glutted world markets; as in so many emerging countries, a rich agriculture had been nearly ruined by early collectivisation and was only gradually being rectified by opening to private enterprise. But, whether Algeria continues along the road of moderation charted by Bendjedid — so it seemed at the time — or regresses to a Boumedienne-style of authoritarianism, must to an important extent depend on its success in mastering its economic problems.

Algeria’s new mood of benevolent moderation was exposed to the world when — to mark the 1984 celebrations — Bendjedid granted some fifty post-humous amnesties. The men thus rehabilitated included not only leaders who had been liquidated during the war, but also fallen angels who had revolted against either Ben Bella or Boumedienne during the post-war years. Among the wartime leaders forgiven were Si Salah, and the two tracked down and murdered abroad: Krim and Khider. Explicitly absent were the
harkis
who had served France. So, too, was Ramdane Abane; for obvious reasons, so long as any of those implicated in his death remained alive, the legend of the hero “killed in action” had to be allowed to persist. But, in Chadli Bendjedid’s Algeria of 1984, veterans were much less inhibited in discussing what really happened to men like Abane and Si Salah, in a manner that would have been inconceivable under the shadow of Boumedienne ten years previously.

Algiers itself seemed a much more open society, more smiling and less dour, as the war years receded further in human memory. With many young Algerians trained in France or the U.S., the country looked increasingly northward and westward and away from the East. The successful role of Algerian diplomacy over the Teheran hostages in 1980 brought her into closer proximity with the United States — which she welcomed. In the saga of the hijacked airliner in 1985, Algeria was reckoned by Washington to have acted as honourably as circumstances permitted. Though Algeria continued to back Polisario against America’s ally, King Hassan of Morocco, their support was limited by balanced fears that the fall of Hassan might lead to a Khomeini-style revolution and Islamic fundamentalist anarchy on Algeria’s western flank. Only to a lesser degree was Algeria concerned about the succession to the ageing Bourguiba on her Tunisian flank.

“Don’t look on us as an
Arab
people,” remarked Bendjedid’s Foreign Minister, Taleb Ibrahim, to a foreign diplomat; “We are Mediterranean people in an Arab context.” It revealed just how complex is the Algerian identity. Yet, even though Algeria
is
an Arab nation, the legacy of the past is such that no amount of calculated “arabisation” will erase completely the 130 years of links with France. As of 1978, a large proportion of Algerians still remained francophone; to many it was still a
lingua franca
, often used with pride as a sign of education. As the correspondent of
The Times
wrote after President Giscard’s simple but moving welcome by Boumedienne in 1975, the first time the
Marseillaise
had been played at an official Algerian ceremony in thirteen years: “France and Algeria are like an old couple who have been married many years, had a tremendous bust up, divorce, and then decide to make up. Emotion will never be altogether absent from their relationship; it will never be completely straightforward.”

The fading ghosts

From that mortified relationship of the past the ghosts, though fading, have lingered most pervasively in Algeria. As I wandered around the
bled
in 1973, for the first time, I recorded for the last pages of my account how the tokens of destruction of those seven terrible years had not even then been effaced.

Along the main roads, like rows of neatly felled trees, the power pylons lie where they were blasted by the F.L.N., and frequently you have to bounce your way across rocky fords where destroyed bridges have not yet been replaced. High up on Kabylia’s Col de Tametz cows saunter in and out of the gutted remains of what was once a luxury hotel for Algeria’s wealthier
colons
. Everywhere there are the empty shells of farmhouses, barns and homesteads, sometimes whole villages. Memories have blurred as to who was responsible for each separate tragedy: was it an isolated
pied noir
farm destroyed by the
fellagha
, or a Muslim
douar
razed by the French army in reprisals? On their broken walls, superimposed upon each other like the strata of archaeological diggings, the rival war slogans remain clearly legible:

ALGÉRIE FRANCAISE!

DE GAULLE — VOTEZ OUI

O.A.S. — SALAN

And finally, more emphatic than all the rest:

F.L.N.

Every few kilometres along the railway that runs through the savage Aurès mountains, the cradle of the revolt in 1954, stand the gaunt skeletons of French watch-towers. But their purpose seems hardly less remote than the marvellously preserved arches and columns of the nearby Roman garrison of Timgad. Here — in the same breath — Chaouia women try to sell you a Roman oil lamp, a Second Empire cock (minus its works), or a fifty-year-old French flat-iron. All seem to belong to an equally vanished past. In the French villages of the Mitidja the parish churches are boarded up and gently dying. Overlooking Oran stands a vast votive sanctuary, built in thanksgiving after a past plague, surmounted by a Virgin with hands outstretched as if imploring for the compassion that
Algérie française
so tragically lacked. In its deserted cloisters visitors may find a half-starved cur eating a dead pigeon, the chapel altars defaced by Arabic graffiti. Above Algiers, Notre Dame d’Afrique has an air of even greater abandonment. The shutters of the small boutique which once sold candles and religious bric-à-brac are rusted firmly shut, the eucalyptus trees dying unwatered. In comparison, the Catholic Cathedral in Algiers seems to have had a happier fate, by reverting once more to being a mosque, busy and alive. Along the lovely beaches around Algiers, what were once the weekend villas of the
pieds noirs
stand abandoned, stucco flaking, curtainless windows staring blankly out across the Mediterranean. Half a generation ago they would have comprised a cheerful, thriving and typically French bourgeois resort such as one might find in Brittany or Arcachon; now, though a few prosperous Algerians are refurbishing the deserted homes, the remainder seem haunted by resentful ghosts. These seaside hamlets are deader and colder places than ancient Roman Tipasa, whose glowing ruins nearby seem somehow younger than the similar relics of French bricks and mortar scattered all over contemporary Algeria, testifying glumly to the perishability of Western civilisation.