Fighting on all Fronts (9 page)

Muslim soldiers were to play an important role in the war against the Axis Powers both in Italy and in France, but were shown no gratitude in return. This was symbolised by their being kept away from liberating the French capital. Having got his way politically and having united all the French forces under his single command in the war against the Nazis, de Gaulle then made an agreement with Eisenhower providing for the participation of French soldiers in the battle for Paris. De Gaulle decided to
field the 2nd Tank Division instead of an infantry division. The reason was their composition. The infantry was made up largely of North African troops, whereas in the tank division ethnic French served. Arabs as liberators along the Champs-Élysées? This was simply not on.
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The Second World War completely changed France’s political landscape. It also changed colonial reality in Algeria, though in the course of a protracted, more complex and much bloodier process than the power struggle between Giraud and de Gaulle had been. The conflict between Algerian nationalists and France’s new rulers in the years 1943 to 1945 did away with the illusion that an Allied victory over the Axis Powers and the reinstatement of bourgeois parliamentary democracy in France would open up a peaceful avenue to end colonialism. It was a political laboratory in which the three main currents of Algerian nationalism transformed themselves and their relations to each other.

The moderate wing had as its representative the pharmacist Ferhat Abbas. Finding his inspiration in the Young Turks who founded the Turkish republic after the First World War, he published a collection of essays in 1931 which struck a chord among the thin layer of Muslim-Algerian intellectuals. According to Charles-André Julien, his was a “courteous but firm criticism of French policies”.
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1931 was marked by a giant colonial exhibition exalting France’s empire, which attracted hundreds of thousands of admiring visitors. Abbas felt this was an attack on his self-esteem. As an Arab he was not granted equality with French citizens, something he had a right to in his view. In the context of the 1930s this made Abbas a reformer, but not an Algerian nationalist. In an often quoted passage he wrote: “Had I discovered the Algerian nation, I would be a nationalist… However, I will not die for the Algerian nation because it does not exist.” At the same time he recognised that “without the emancipation of the indigenous population French Algeria will not last…”
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The second source of Algerian nationalism was the Association of Algerian Muslim Scholars, the Ulama, grouped around Abdelhamid Ben Badis. It was a current we today would label “political Islam”. Although the colonialists branded them “Wahhabi”, the Ulama in fact argued for a rapprochement between Sunni and other Islamic currents as well as between Arabs and Berbers, and to build a united bloc of Algerian Muslims against colonialism. Julien stressed: “It was the Ulama who awakened indigenous
opinion from its lethargy… For they possessed a religious doctrine capable of serving as a basis for national aspirations”.
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While Ferhat Abbas denied the existence of an Algerian nation, the Ulama declared that “the Muslim nation has formed itself and exists”.
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It coined the slogan: “Islam is my religion, Arabic my language, Algeria my country.”

The Ulama polemicised against the Marabouts and the brotherhoods, who practised a popular version of Islam. Fragmented in thousands of local towns and villages, these folksy clerics preached deference and submissiveness towards the colonial administration in return for a bit of flattery awards. They formed a part of those collaborators who were called by the derogatory name “Beni-Oui-Oui”—the “Yes-men”. The main publication of the Ulama declared in 1937: “The Marabouts are colonialism’s domestic beasts”.
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To fight the superstitions spread by the Marabouts and the general neglect of the hinterland by the French colonial state, the Ulama established over 200 schools which tried to combine teaching in Arabic with modern education.

The Ulama’s successes were met by systematic repression on the part of the colonial administration. It instituted Consultative Councils of Cult which, as from 1933, were authorised to control who preached in the mosques. The administration hardly differentiated between Islamists and Communists. In February 1933 the prefecture of Algiers ordered local government outposts to “monitor very closely communist agents and suspect Wahhabi Ulama who were attempting to do damage to the French cause”.
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The third current of Algerian nationalism emanated from Muslim emigrants to France and was a child of the workers’ movement. Hadj Ali Abdelkader, a leading figure in the French Communist Party (PCF), initiated the North African Star (ENA, “L’Etoile Nord-Africain”) in March 1926. Under Messali Hadj’s leadership the ENA rapidly gained influence. Practically exclusively concentrated in the factories in and around Paris, the organisation could claim a membership of 4,000 only three years after being launched.

With its unambiguous demand for Algerian independence and the whole of the Maghreb, the organisation was not only a political provocation in the general sense, but represented a concrete threat to army discipline long before the outbreak of the Second World War. Messali, like so many other Muslims of Algerian origin, had fought in the French Army during the First World War. In 1933 he was sentenced to prison for “instigating members of the military to disobedience and for incitement to murder for the purpose of anarchist propaganda”.
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The ENA placed great hopes in the People’s Front, a coalition government formed in 1936 and composed of the Socialist Party with bourgeois parties led by Socialist leader Léon Blum and supported by the Communist Party. At the time the ENA participated actively in the mass demonstrations of the French workers’ movement. Its membership reached 11,000 and it was able to implant itself in Algeria. On 2 August, in a speech to 10,000 Muslims in the Algiers’ municipal stadium, Messali demanded Algerian independence.

Under Stalin’s influence and out of regard for its coalition with the Socialists and bourgeois parties, the PCF changed course. In the 1920s it had supported the Berber uprising in the Moroccan Rif Mountains, but by 1936 it had adopted an increasingly patriotic stance. This included bashful support for French imperialism and opposing the right to self-determination for the Algerian nation, arguing that Algeria was, in the words of its leader Maurice Thorez, in reality only in the process of “becoming a nation”. Against demands for independence it limited its support to the very meagre proposals of the Blum government, which spoke of voting rights for a section of the Muslim population—a reform project which in any case was doomed to failure in view of the hysterical opposition of the colonial administrative machinery and the mighty settlers’ lobby.

This stance brought the Communist Party into open opposition to the North African Star. In the autumn of 1936 the hitherto close contacts between the two organisations were severed and the PCF adopted an openly aggressive attitude towards the ENA, claiming that it was a “party in league with the fascist settlers”. At the Communist Party Conference in January 1937 hundreds of Algerian Muslims were pushed out of the hall after they had sung an Algerian independence hymn. Two days later the Algerian governor-general appointed by Blum decreed the dissolution of the ENA on the grounds that its activities were “clearly directed against France”.
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The breach between the Communists and the Algerian nationalists was to have fatal consequences for the struggle in Algeria, where it brought in its wake a breach between Muslims and the “petits blancs”, the proletarian whites of European descent in Algeria’s cities. The PCF alienated itself permanently from the Algerian Muslims so that its local offshoot, the Algerian Communist Party (PCA), despite all efforts hardly benefited from the upswing of the Algerian movement in the period after 1943. The Muslim struggle for independence, on the other hand, lost its specific class orientation to become, between 1954 and
1962, basically a minority guerrilla organisation substituting for the large majority of the population in its struggle against the state institutions—at times even bombing civilian targets.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the colonial regime sat more firmly in the saddle than ever before. On 29 September 1939, long before the establishment of the Vichy regime, the Algerian People’s Party, the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA), follow-up to the North African Star, was banned along with the Communist Party. However, the ban affected the two parties very differently. The Communists were already paralysed because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, in whose wake the Kremlin declared Anglo-American capitalism was now the main enemy. This isolated the Moscow-faithful PCA not only from Anglophiles and BBC-listeners, but also disarmed them ideologically as they were faced with a regime that sought an alliance with Hitler just as Soviet Russia had done. The PCA was forced underground without putting up any significant resistance. Once there their lack of orientation persisted.

The PPA was initially equally badly hit by the repression. Several dozen party members were imprisoned, among them party leader Messali Hadj. In 1941 he was sentenced to 16 years’ hard labour. The PPA had been effectively beheaded. However, the effects were short lived. In contrast to the PCA the PPA hadn’t lost its bearings. On the contrary, repression strengthened the PPA’s radical standing within the nationalist camp. Their analysis that the colonial state could not be reformed was confirmed by the experience of repression.

An important factor contributing to the resurgence of the PPA was the overall economic misery brought about by the Second World War. Within three years the production of citrus fruits fell by a fifth, that of cereal crops by two thirds. Semolina and bread had to be rationed. As a consequence of malnutrition many people succumbed to the terrible typhus epidemic that swept the country in 1941-42.

Rising unemployment and squalor forced untold numbers to flee a countryside plagued by lawless gangs, and migrate to the outskirts of the cities. So even if Algeria was largely spared direct warfare until 1942, the economic consequences of the war created mounting bitterness among large sections of the Muslim population and increased hatred of all Europeans. While the cattle of the large estate holders had plenty of fodder, many day labourers went hungry.

Economic misery and the displacement of such large numbers of people were preparing the ground for a revolution against the colonial administration. Police accounts at the time attest to the growing restlessness. The number of reported fist fights between members of different communities as well as of arson attacks in the woods in 1941 was on the increase. One police commissar reported having been the object of kids throwing stones while walking through an Arab quarter in Aumale.
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Governor-General Weygand complained: “The Muslim population is proving to be undisciplined, impolite and at times downright insolent”.
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Interior migration brought a new generation of impoverished country people into contact with the ideas of modern proletarian anti-colonialism in the suburbs. “These mostly young migrants—between the ages of 17 and 21—fear nothing and don’t hesitate to defy the forces of repression.” Among these young rural migrants many ”read anything they can get hold of, they distribute leaflets, listen to the eldest and most eloquent political orators, for whom they constitute a choice audience”.
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This enabled the PPA to rebuild its forces. Repression itself created new opportunities for organising. In May 1941 the party launched a solidarity campaign for their leader Messali, bringing in many new members. And the PPA wasn’t alone. The Union of the Ulama also developed into an important wing of the resistance. After Ben Badis’s death Bachir el-Ibrahim became its leader. Returning from Damascus he brought with him pan-Arab beliefs that were being discussed there in urban intellectual circles.

Regaining strength from 1941 onwards, both Ulama and the PPA changed their make-up. A new generation took over, shaped under conditions of sharpened repression and economic misery. In 1942 the medical doctor Lamine Debaghine became general secretary of the PPA. He stood for a new layer of nationalists, among whom young radicals such as Mohamed Belouizdad, who built a Youth Committee in the Belcourt suburb of Algiers which soon developed into an alternative pole of leadership to the old Messalists in the old city centre.

The rapid process of displacement, impoverishment and urbanisation at the same time undermined the support those sections of Muslims who actively collaborated with the colonial state had hitherto enjoyed. In those localities where it had no direct presence, the French state had local Qada (“leaders”) in its pay. Corruption among these local leaders was generously tolerated by the colonial administration, so long as they could guarantee the maintenance of order.

The class stratification of Arab-Berber society was reproduced in the army. Muslims could attain the grade of captain, but all higher grades were reserved for Frenchmen from Algeria or the mother country. The limited opportunities for advancement did not impact on the loyalty of the Muslim minority which had managed to climb up to the middle ranks. A famous example of this phenomenon is Bachaga Boualam, who till this day is celebrated in nostalgic colonialist literature as proof of how successfully assimilation worked, and who himself contributed his own gushes of French patriotism to this literary genre.
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The son of a gendarme, Boualam was the archetype of the patriotic French officer who owed his privileged position to the ancient and well-to-do family of Qada he named his own.

This stratification model suffered from a lack of elasticity. The layer of educated and enlightened Muslims was simply too thin and the retaliation of the hangers-on of “French Algeria” at even the slightest hint of any reform to the benefit of the Muslim majority too aggressive for this model to achieve any lasting stability. So long as the Qada remained in control, the Muslim population appeared to be undemanding and accepting of their fate. Apologists for French Algeria interpreted, and to this day still interpret, this sullen indifference as proof of loyalty towards France. In fact this apparent indifference could spontaneously flip into its opposite, into uncontrollable rage, as soon as the pressure that had built up through decades of humiliation exploded.