The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (81 page)

ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

Death toll:
525,000

Rank:
69

Type:
colonial revolt

Broad dividing line:
French vs. Arabs

Time frame:
1954–62

Location:
Algeria

Major state participant:
France

Major non-state participants:
National Liberation Front (FLN), Secret Army Organization (OAS)

Who usually gets the most blame:
France

Setting

In time, most European colonies overseas fell into one of two categories. Either the natives were conveniently wiped out and replaced by Europeans (Australia and New Zealand), or else European settlement never really took root (Nigeria and Burma). When the time came, the first type of colony was easy to set free because those people were just like the folks back home and they could be trusted with self-government. The second type was also easy to set free because those people were totally different, so no one cared what happened to them.

Algeria was in an awkward third category. Enough Europeans had settled there to create the desire for continued French rule, but not enough to make it very likely. There were 1 million Westerners with full civil rights in a population of 9 million Arabs and Berbers who had none. By every measure, the European settlers, the
pied noir
, had the good life. Their wealth averaged ten times that of the natives, and they were taxed at only half the rate of their compatriots back in France. Labor was cheap, and their cities on the Mediterranean coast were every bit as civilized and cultured as the rest of France.

Uprising

In December 1954, Algerian rebels of the National Liberation Front (FLN) attacked military and police targets all over the colony. The uprising intensified and turned cruel very quickly. In August 1955, the FLN inaugurated a new policy of killing French settlers and turncoat Muslims instead of soldiers, hacking apart 123 French civilians at the village of Philippeville. Angry French soldiers immediately retaliated by indiscriminately shooting any Arabs they found in the vicinity.

During the back-and-forth atrocities that erupted, the rebels routinely tortured and mutilated any French soldiers or settlers they captured, often leaving their bodies to be found with their severed genitalia stuffed in their mouths. The FLN especially targeted policemen and their families, which undermined the ability of the French to keep order. In response, the French recruited 150,000
harkis
, irregular local forces who fought back with as much brutality as the FLN.

After a few years of terrorizing the countryside, the FLN moved into the cities. In 1957, Algerians unleashed terrorist attacks all over the city of Algiers. The French reacted by dropping all restraint and due process, instituting curfews and checkpoints, and imprisoning any suspicious characters. After beating confessions out of them, they summarily executed the most expendable. As many as 3,000 Arabs disappeared while in French custody during the Battle of Algiers.
¹

Between 1957 and 1960, the French government resettled 2 million rural Algerians into fortified camps in order to separate the rebels from their popular support. The French laid mines and built barrier fences along the borders with Tunisia and Morocco to disrupt the supplies and sanctuary that the rebels were getting from the outside world.

Originally most of the soldiers fighting on the French side were members of tough, professional units such as the Foreign Legion or the paratroopers who didn’t shrink from a little torture and murder if it got results, got revenge, or at least let them blow off some steam. However, as troop levels rose to 400,000, demands on manpower increased and Paris started sending ordinary conscripts to Algeria. This meant that the general public now began to learn firsthand how savage the war had become, and the French people quickly turned against the conflict.

The bloody stalemate sparked the most dangerous political crisis to hit France since World War II. It was the closest any of the traditional democracies of Western Europe would come to dictatorship in the postwar era. In May 1958, as political support for the war eroded in Paris, hard-liners in the French army attempted a military coup in Algiers. It failed but threw the national government into chaos, and only Charles de Gaulle, retired hero of the Second World War, commanded enough respect to restore order. In June 1958, he was given the power to rule by decree until the crisis passed. Eventually, the French constitution was rewritten to transfer power from the divided and quarrelsome parliament to a strengthened presidency—the Fifth Republic.
²

While addressing the United Nations in September 1959, de Gaulle uttered the forbidden phrase “self-determination” in reference to Algeria. This outraged the hard-line hawks who insisted that Algeria was, and always would be, an integral part of the French motherland. With de Gaulle openly discussing the possibility of independence, the Secret Army Organization (OAS)—bitter-enders inside the French military—began planning a coup or at least an assassination. Although not one to back away from a fight, de Gaulle grew understandably annoyed at the frequent attempts on his life, and he turned against the war hawks. He realized that France would remain in turmoil as long as the war continued. Since victory was impossible, he cut Algeria lose in July 1962.

Nine hundred thousand French citizens fled Algeria within a few months of independence. Then, after the French were gone, mobs of native Algerians hunted down and slaughtered tens of thousands of their own people who had supported French rule but had been left behind by the defeated French.

Death Toll

The French military lost 17,456 soldiers dead, about 7,000 of whom were colonials or Foreign Legionnaires, not French. According to official French estimates, the FLN lost 141,000 who were killed in action, plus another 12,000 killed in internal purges. A total of 2,788 French civilians were killed.

Officially, the Algerian government claims that more than 1 million Algerians died during the war, but most scholars doubt it. Historians commonly suggest a civilian death toll somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 Algerians. I split the difference and added it to the 173,000 above. Somewhere in those numbers are the thousands of Algerians (estimated as either 30,000 or 150,000) who were lynched after the war in revenge for helping the French.
³

WAR IN THE SUDAN

Death toll:
2.6 million (500,000 in the first war,
¹
1.9 million in the second,
²
200,000 in Darfur
³
)

Rank:
35

Type:
ethnic civil wars

Broad dividing line:
Muslim Arabs of the north vs. pagan and Christian blacks of the south

Time frame:
1955–72, 1983–2005, 2003–present

Location and major state participant:
Sudan

Major non-state participant:
Sudanese People’s Liberation Army

Who usually gets the most blame:
Arabs

Another damn:
African civil war

A
FTER BRITISH TROOPS CONQUERED THE MAHDIST STATE (SEE “MAHDI REVOLT”)
they set up colonial Sudan with clean borders and a joint Anglo-Egyptian administration. The British Sudan included not only the Arab core along the middle stretch of the Nile River, but also a native black region in the upriver swamps of the Sahel in the south, which had nothing in common with the rest of Sudan except for a history of the Sudanese Arabs raiding it to harvest slaves. Since slavery was now illegal and the British were in charge, it shouldn’t matter that these two regions hated each other. The British were around to keep them apart.

The British treated the south like a cultural reserve, and the people here—the Nuba, the Dinka, and so on—had not been overrun by missionaries. Traditional African lifestyles stayed strong here, although a Christian minority gave the region a westward slant. While Muslims grudgingly tolerated Christians, they had no similar regard for half-naked pagans.

First Sudanese Civil War (1955–72)

Fast-forward to 1955 when the Sudan was being prepared for independence. These two regions were going to end up in the same country, and it began to look like the new federal government was going to be run mostly by the Arabs, who were Britain’s favorite colonials. Protests in the south turned into riots. Shots were fired. A southern military unit was called in to put down the uprising, but it mutinied instead. By the time the British handed the keys to an elected government in 1956, a civil war was already raging.

Why didn’t the north just let the south go? Unfortunately, northern Sudan (where most of the people live) is just a precarious strip of farmland along the Nile River in the middle of a vast, uninhabitable desert. The south, on the other hand, has a maze of rivers that feed into the Nile, gold, more farmland, pasture, timber, and water, so naturally the north was reluctant to let the south secede and take all that wealth with it. It got even worse in 1979 when oil reserves were discovered in the south. In addition, the kidnapping and selling of slaves from the south was still a lucrative business—nominally illegal but often unenforced.

The elected government put in place by the departing British was overthrown by Sudan’s first military coup in 1958. Democracy of a sort returned to Sudan with a popular uprising in October 1964, and various political parties regrouped and returned to parliament.

The war continued, and by 1969 there were 12,000 government troops in the south fighting 5,000 to 10,000 rebels. Then a 1969 coup put General Jaafar Nimeiri in power, and for the next decade, he ruled about as benignly as any dictator you will find in this part of the world. He shared power and brought opposing factions into the government. The war slowed down, and both sides started negotiating. Finally, the Addis Ababa Agreement stopped the fighting in March 1972 by granting autonomy to the south.

Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005)

Sudan had been a Soviet client state for many years, but in 1976, Nimeiri switched to the American side of the Cold War. In 1977, he allowed his political rivals—mostly Muslim fundamentalists—to participate openly in politics. It looked like peace and freedom were just around the corner, but the situation went downhill after that. Nimeiri changed course and became more dictatorial.
⁴

In 1983, President Nimeiri declared Sudan a Muslim state under strict Islamic Sharia law, and shortly afterward, he proclaimed a state of emergency and suspended constitutional rights. The south lost much of its autonomy, and Islamic law would now apply to anyone living in the north, regardless of religion. Strikes, riots, and guerrilla activity disrupted the south.

It was hoped that the crisis would defuse in 1985 when a popular coup overthrew Nimeiri. Sharia was rolled back, and civilian rule was restored after reasonably free elections were held in 1986; however, the leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), Colonel John Garang, an American-educated Dinka, dismissed the new regime as “the hyena with new clothes” and continued the fight. By 1986, Sudan had 20,000 armed rebels of the SPLA and three quarters of a million refugees to deal with. Even so, a certain level of calm returned to the Sudan for a few years, with multiple political parties and more freedom to bicker than any other African country had.
⁵

Then in May 1989 another coup put General Omar al-Bashir into power. He was the frontman for the National Islamic Front, a band of hard-core fanatics under the ideological guidance of Hassan al-Turabi. They blamed the insurgency on Americans and Zionists and refused to negotiate.

Turabi created a frighteningly efficient police state in a country that until then had been no worse than a chaotic kleptocracy. Through all the previous ups and downs, the Sudanese people had been willing and able to express contrary opinions, but now, independent press and trade unions were banned. Dissident voices were cleared out of the military, universities, and judiciary.
⁶

In 1991, harsh Sharia punishments like stoning for adultery, flogging for possession of alcohol, and amputation for theft were introduced nationwide, in both north and south. In 1993, the federal government replaced all of the judges in the south with proper Muslims, and moved all of the non-Muslim judges to the north where they would be easier to control. New laws forced southerners to dress like proper Muslims even if they weren’t. Converting from Islam to another religion was now a capital crime. In 2000 the government of Khartoum tried to ban women working in public places.

As the fighting intensified, the economy of the south fizzled out. Soon there were no banks, no employment, and no cash. Goods and services circulated only by barter or theft. Life support depended on charity shipments by international agencies.
⁷
After rebel warlords skimmed off the top, the rest might trickle down to the needy.

In 1999, Bashir (the general) and Turabi (the ideologue) butted heads over who was really in charge of the Sudan. When the dust settled, Turabi ended up in jail on charges of treason while Bashir was reelected president the next year in a rigged election, so that settled that.
⁸

After years of stalemate, the warring parties signed a peace treaty in Nairobi in January 2005. Although the south got most of what it wanted on paper, for a few years it looked like the north would renege on the deal. After a cooling-off period, however, the south was allowed to vote itself independent in 2011. The subsequent partition of Sudan represents the first time that a new African nation was not delineated along old colonial boundaries.

Darfur (since 2003)

Just about the time Sudan was wrapping up the civil war in the south, a new war erupted in the west. It began as a small uprising against Arab rule in the province of Darfur, but it expanded into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis when Bashir ordered the army to crush the rebels and bring back no prisoners. The army didn’t bother to differentiate between combatants and civilians as they systematically eradicated the local African tribes—the Fur people mostly, along with the less numerous Masalit and Zaghawa. Like the rebellious tribes of the south, the targeted groups are black, but, like the government, the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa are Muslim.

To avoid blame for the escalating genocide in Darfur, the government withdrew most of its troops and turned the extermination over to local Arab militias called the Janjaweed, whom Khartoum has not-so-secretly kept supplied and funded. The Janjaweed have methodically wiped out African villages, killed the men and children, raped the women, and destroyed or looted all property. Within a couple of years, 200,000 people were dead and two and a half million Africans—almost the entire non-Arab population of Darfur—had been uprooted and driven into refugee camps.
⁹