Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam
158. The War of Algeria’s Independence – 4
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
One of the earliest Algerian nationalists who tried to from a political front was Messali Hadj Abdel Qader. A grandson of the legendary Algerian resistance fighter Shaikh Abdel Qader, Messali Hadj (1898-1974) grew up in the town of Tlemcen. Drafted into the French army, he fought in the waning years of World War I and experienced firsthand the discrimination faced by native troops in the French armed forces. Presence on French soil exposed him to new and exciting political ideas.
Returning to Algeria in 1921, he held a series of menial jobs under appalling conditions which reinforced in his young mind the wide disparities in the living standards of the French and the Algerians. He returned to France in 1923, settled in one of the North African shanty towns on the outskirts of Paris, married a French woman who was a member of the communist party, became a small businessman and set about giving a voice to Algerian aspirations.
Political opinion of the Algerian émigré population had split into two camps. One camp sought accommodation with France and ultimate integration with French society. These were the elite, the highly educated and successful businessmen. The other camp, consisting of small businessmen, workers and petty bureaucrats wanted autonomy. Messali Hadj worked with the latter group.
In 1926, with encouragement from the communist party of France, he founded the Etoile Nordafricaine (North African Star). He gave forceful expression to North African aspirations in a declaration read at the Socialiste Internationale Conference in Brussels, Belgium in 1927. It was here that he first put forth a demand for Algerian independence.
The French, apprehensive of the growing popularity of Messali Hadj’s views, dissolved the Etoile Nordafricaine in 1929. The party went underground and continued its activities. Hadj Messali founded a journal El Ouma which found wide readership among the Algerian émigré communities as well as Algeria itself. Hadj Messali tried to combine his socialist rhetoric with Islamic themes so as to broaden the appeal of his message to the working masses as well as the learned ulema in north Africa.
The continued political assertiveness of Hadj Messali was viewed with suspicion by the French establishment and he was sentenced to jail for six months in 1933 on charges of illegal political activities. It was a time of great economic dislocations in Europe. The Nazis had come to power in Germany, riding on a wave of mass unemployment and economic collapse. America was in the grip of the Great Depression. The French needed social peace on the home front. Accordingly, the government of France proposed minor reforms to allow a handful of Algerian Muslims to become French citizenships. These proposals were viewed with favor with the elites who favored integration with France. Hadj Messali travelled throughout Algeria and in speech after speech roused the people to oppose. The proposals were abandoned because of the determined opposition of the colons. Hadj Messali founded the Party of the Algerian People (PPA) in 1937 but it too was suppressed by the French and he was jailed until 1945.
The Second World War intervened. Hitler’s armies occupied Paris, the Vichy government set itself up in Southern France, and as part of the armistice agreement with the Germans continued to govern the north African colonies. Algeria witnessed the same repression against the Jews and the communists as did metropolitan France. The tide of the war turned in 1942 with the American entry into the war and in 1943 Algeria was firmly in Allied hands. General de Gaulle set up the headquarters of the Free French Forces in Algiers and there it remains until the liberation of Paris in August 1944. More than 200,000 North Africans saw action during the war as part of the Allied forces. Discriminated, ill-equipped and treated with racist contempt by French officers, these soldiers, often recruits from villages, fought with valor in the Italian and French campaigns, even while the vaunted French corps of the Fifth Republic collapsed and were taken prisoner by the Germans. The colonial order placed these brave men in a class of sub-humans, to be used to preserve and perpetuate the very colonial regimes that suppressed them.
The Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) was no less hostile to Algerian aspirations than its predecessors. Algerian resentment, contained by decades of repressive measures, was like pressurized steam in an air tight kettle. The lid came off immediately after the war.
On May 8, 1945, the day that Germany surrendered, the Muslim population of Setif took out a procession to celebrate the allied victory. Scuffles between the marchers and the Europeans broke out as the procession made its way through the French quarter. The situation got out of control, riots ensued, and in the mob violence that followed, more than a hundred colons were killed. In revenge, the French army went on a killing. Muslim quarters were raided by the army accompanied by vengeful colons. Mountain villages around Setif were strafed and bombed. Estimates vary, but the Algerian chroniclers estimate that over 40,000 civilians were massacred. This was a turning point in the struggle for independence of Algeria. The violence and its fury disillusioned moderate Algerians and political opinion began to shift in the direction of armed resistance.
Meanwhile, on the continent, Hadj Messali was released from prison and he founded a new political party, the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertes Democratiques (MTLD). Even though he remained the most conspicuous spokesman for Algerian independence after the war, the struggle was moving ahead of him. The Setif massacres had convinced many in the younger generation that France would not willingly relinquish control of its north African colonies. Disillusioned, they turned increasingly to armed resistance.
Ahmed Ben Bella, a rising star in the anti-colonial struggle, founded the secret Organisation Speciale in 1947 whose purpose was armed resistance to French rule. Ben Bella is considered the father of Algerian independence. Born into a poor, religious family in Tlemcen in 1916, Ben Bella joined the French army in 1936 as a way of advancing his career. After the fall of France in 1940, the French army was demobilized, Ben Bella volunteered to serve with a regiment of Moroccan infantry and fought in the Italian campaigns.
Returning home after the war he participated in the assembly elections of 1947. French interference in the elections convinced the young Ben Bella that peaceful emancipation from colonial rule was impossible. The Organisation Speciale carried out sabotage of French installations. Ben Bella was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison in 1951. He escaped from prison and found his way to Tunisia and from there to Cairo, Egypt.
In 1952, Hadj Messali was arrested once again, and the MTLD fell apart. It was obvious that France had no intention of withdrawing from Algeria and it was apparent that the older generation of Hadj Messali was becoming irrelevant. Frustrated, young Algerian men deserted the MTLD in droves. In October 1954 they formed the National Liberation Front (FLN) with a military wing Armee de Liberation Nationale. The War of Algerian Independence had begun.
On November 1, 1954 a group of FLN nationalists struck at French military and civilian installations. On the political front, the FLN established its headquarters in Cairo and with the support of Gamel Abdel Nasser obtained access to Radio Cairo and the Arab masses. As the uprising began, the FLN broadcast an appeal to all Algerian Muslims to rise up against French colonial rule and establish a sovereign, democratic and socialist state in accordance with the principles of Islam. The nationalist appeal was packaged in Islamic terms so as to have the broadest appeal to the peasants, the intellectuals and the ulema alike.
France was reeling from its defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the loss of its Indochina colonies. It was in no mood to entertain independence for Algeria, a province that it had long considered a part of itself. The reaction of the French government was to dig in and seek a military solution. This was a grave miscalculation. France’s repressive rule in Algeria for over a hundred years, characterization by discrimination, violence, neglect and exploitation had used up the patience of the native Muslim population. But even at this late date there was a substantial section of Algerian population that was willing to seek an accommodation with France, perhaps some form of association or even integration. A political solution might have worked. But the history of French rule in Algeria was long characterized by racism and blindness to the rights of the Algerians. It was astonishing how even well-meaning Frenchmen could claim Algeria as part of France while keeping the native population in a state of perpetual servitude, without political rights or education and employment opportunities. Over the years, even modest attempts at reform were torpedoed by the entrenched colon lobbies in Paris. The die was cast. The cup was full and events moved inexorably in the direction of armed conflict.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
