Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  By the end of the war Nasser was a captain in his late twenties, happily married to a woman with a considerable private income of £800 a year. He and Sadat quietly organized cells of so-called Free Officers within the army of the late 1940s, a clandestine group numbering in the low hundreds with a larger group of civilian sympathizers. Meanwhile, successive Egyptian governments sought to renegotiate the 1936 Treaty with Britain, seeking to force it to relinquish control of the Sudan and to withdraw its troops from the Suez Canal Zone. The British were able to resist these efforts, but were not strong enough to reassert their control over Egypt as a whole.

  In 1948 Egypt was one of seven Arab nations to send troops to Palestine, ostensibly to crush the new nation of Israel in support of the Palestinian Arabs, but in reality to prevent King Abdullah’s Jordan absorbing the areas the UN had ceded to the Arabs under the partition arrangements. Nasser was one of the officers involved in a shambolic campaign where he had to buy food for his men, who were equipped with Spanish grenades that blew up in their hands. He suffered a superficial wound and, although his troops may have acquitted themselves with honour, the political and military deficiencies of the Arabs were laid bare. Returning to his duties as a Staff College instructor, Nasser blamed the West’s royal Arab puppets for military humiliation at the hands of the Israelis, who at that time enjoyed the support of both the USA and the Soviet Union. Defeat also brought the Free Officers an important recruit in the form of the influential General Mohammed Naguib. In 1951 Faruq’s government unilaterally abrogated both the 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty and the 1899 convention on the Sudan but then, unwisely, authorized a guerrilla campaign against British forces in the Canal Zone, which was run by the Free Officers. Heavy-handed British reprisals triggered mass protests in Cairo and Alexandria that Naguib and the Free Officers exploited to topple the monarchy.

  Asking for Trouble in Algeria

  In Arabic the Maghreb signifies the western tip of an Arab world whose heart is in the Gulf. France had two protectorates in the Maghreb – Morocco and Tunisia – while the three departments of Algeria were legally and constitutionally as much a part of metropolitan France as Normandy. Algeria was France’s oldest and most integrated colonial possession. Hard, sun-baked colons faced hard, dour native Muslims, for, as the nationalist leader Ahmed Ben Bella himself acknowledged, the peoples of Algeria are not known for their winning charm.19

  Algeria was a classic settler colony, with some 800,000 Europeans – many of them Corsicans, Italians, Maltese and Spanish rather than français de souche (of the stump), as native French are known. Collectively these settlers were known as pieds noirs, after the shiny black shoes they wore amid the bare feet and sandals. The European settlers were French citizens – the indigenous Muslim population were unenfranchised subjects, to whom the repressive 1881 Native Code applied. One of Algeria’s nationalist leaders acknowledged that there was no Algerian nation: ‘such a fatherland does not exist. I questioned the living and the dead. I searched through the cemeteries: nobody could speak to me of it. You cannot build on air.’20

  The introduction of private property law based on written contract gave Europeans key advantages over an indigenous population based on oral lore and tribal ownership. Muslim prohibitions on usury also gave Europeans an advantage in buying land on credit. By 1936, a century after the initial French conquest, European colons owned 40 per cent of the land once owned by Arabs and Berbers, the indigenous people who predated the Arab conquests.21 Agricultural mechanization diminished the importance of physical labour.22 The Muslims migrated into shantytowns or the pullulating courts of the cities’ various kasbahs, the Arab word for tight warrens of streets, steps and alleyways. As long as they were docile, these migrants would not be regarded as a threat by the Europeans who lived in the tonier quarters of towns.

  The French divided Algeria into three departments – Oran, Algiers and Constantine – whose colon voters sent deputies and senators to the national legislature in Paris. The franchise was extended only to a very select group of Muslims who were deemed capable of being educated up towards full citizenship, as suggested by the paternalist Darwinian term évolués for such men. Since only 10,000 of three and a half million Muslims attended primary schools in 1890, evolution was a glacial process. Sharia law, governing marriage, the family and inheritance, was a convenient obstacle to granting Muslims full civic rights, a role played by polygamy in black Africa.

  Although many nationalist leaders were secular French-speakers married to French women – and spoke Arabic haltingly – they regarded Islam (in its typically Algerian animist Sufi form) as a non-negotiable part of their cultural identity. Fanatical Islam was something they associated with medieval Almoravid conquerors. Football was as important as religion in forging a sense of national identity. In the 1920s Muslim Algerians formed separate football teams such as the Mouloudia Club in Algiers, whose red and green strip celebrated Mahloud, the festival of the Prophet’s birthday. Nervous of allowing Muslims to occupy any public space unsupervised, the authorities insisted that each Muslim team must include three colon players, regardless of their lack of skill.

  There were three outstanding figures in the first wave of Algerian nationalists. Their precise ideological identities should be taken with a pinch of salt since in their part of the world these were often fluid. They were the Islamist cleric Sheikh Abd al-Hamid ben Badis, a student politician called Ferhat Abbas, who stemmed from the Francophone Muslim bourgeoisie, and finally the First World War veteran and factory worker Messali Hadj, who spent long periods in French prisons in between nondescript jobs in Paris’s Red Belt. The guru of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, influenced ben Badis, whose Association of the Algerian Ulema rejected French influences and sought to align Algeria within the wider Muslim umma, the global community of believers. Ferhat Abbas was a chemistry graduate married into an Alsatian settler family. He reluctantly moved from advocacy of citizenship through total integration to demanding an Algerian state based on parity of rights ‘within the fold of the French community’ and based on the principles of 1789. Messali Hadj was a shoemaker’s son who married the daughter of a French anarchist miner. He became the leading light of the Etoile Nord-Africaine (North African Star), an organization which flourished chiefly among the half-million Algerian workers living in metropolitan France. Politically, he moved from adherence to the French Communist Party to something more nationalist and Islamic, but the link with Communism would always play against him.23

  The Second World War crystallized Algerian nationalist demands, not for integration but for complete independence. The army had always been an exit route from the grim economic conditions Muslim Algerians experienced, although a few managed to become soccer stars in France. The future nationalist leader Ahmed Ben Bella joined the army in 1936, while playing midfield too for Olympique de Marseilles.24 Ben Bella was a natural soldier, who loved the army mainly because he experienced no discrimination in it. He won the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire fighting as a warrant officer at such epic battles as Monte Cassino. His elder brother had died of wounds sustained during the First World War. Other soldiers included such former non-commissioned officers as Omar Ouamrane and Belkacem Krim. ‘I never had a chance to know adolescence,’ said Krim. ‘My brother returned from Europe with medals and frost-bitten feet. There, everyone was equal. Why not here?’ It was a very good question, which could just as easily have been asked by any non-white soldier returning to a racially stratified colony, or by Afro-American GIs who returned to the segregated South, where they could not even enter a bar.25

  After 1940 the monolithic face of French authority was compromised, with Vichy being especially popular among the colons. Then a much more powerful ‘Anglo-Saxon’ actor arrived on the North African stage in the wake of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion in late 1942. Abbas was politely received by Roosevelt’s personal envoy Robert Murphy – mainly, it should be said,
to solicit Muslim support for the war. In 1943 most of the Algerian nationalist factions combined into an Association des Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty), which became the first mass political movement in Algerian history.

  In March 1944 de Gaulle in principle opened all government posts to Muslims and Frenchmen alike, and included 65,000 deserving Muslims on the French electoral roll. All Muslim males over twenty-one were declared eligible to vote for local assemblies, which had to include 40 per cent Muslims in their membership. This was too little, too late in an atmosphere rendered febrile by the end of a war that had pushed so many Muslims to the wall. By mid-1945 parts of Algeria seethed with discontent, with nationalists organizing boycotts of collaborating businesses and the intimidation of Muslims who drank alcohol or worked for the French. The eastern department of Constantine, next to Tunisia, became a flashpoint, with some of its nondescript towns harbouring concentrations of nationalists. One of these was Sétif, where Ferhat Abbas had worked as a pharmacist. On 8 May a noisy Muslim procession, led by the Muslim Boy Scouts, wound its way through Sétif to celebrate Victory in Europe Day and calling for the release of Messali Hadj from house arrest. Hadj was instead transferred to detention in the desert before being flown to Brazzaville in the French Congo – where, ironically enough, de Gaulle had made a declaration during the war embracing broad colonial reform, albeit without independence, to placate the Americans.

  In Sétif twenty gendarmes faced around 8,000 demonstrators, boldly intervening to confiscate the green and white banners emblazoned with calls for a ‘free and independent Algeria’. In the increasingly ill-tempered encounters between demonstrators and policemen, shots were fired, which led to wholesale Muslim attacks on any passing Europeans. A priest had his heart ripped out and hung round his neck, while the hands of the Secretary of the Communist Party were chopped off. Word passed quickly to the surrounding countryside that ‘jihad’ had been declared, to cries of ‘Holy War in the name of Allah!’ Although control was restored by nightfall in Sétif itself, out in the countryside armed groups of Muslims bushwhacked isolated settlers, killing 103 of them with clubs, guns and knives. There were instances of women being raped.

  One hundred and ten miles east of Sétif lay the small town of Guelma, with around 4,500 Italian, Maltese and Jewish European inhabitants amid 16,500 Muslims. The Association of the Friends of the Manifesto was well represented among them. Again there was an initially peaceful VE Day demonstration which turned ugly, after the local police commissioner, André Achiary, fired warning shots in the air, shortly followed by his men opening fire on the foremost demonstrators. After imposing a curfew, Achiary restored a semblance of order in the town, before launching a series of arrests of nationalist leaders, some of whom were summarily killed by the police and their colon vigilante helpers, who in an echo of Vichy’s paramilitary police dubbed themselves the milice. By the time the bloodshed stopped, around 1,500 Muslims were dead.26

  The French government’s response was swift and hard. On arriving in Algiers to congratulate the French Governor-General on victory in Europe, the liberal Ferhat Abbas was arrested despite having denounced the uprising in Sétif. French troops, including Foreign Legionnaires and Senegalese, neither trained in counter-insurgency warfare, saturated Muslim villages, aggressively ‘raking them over’ to identify Muslim militants. Remote villages were attacked with US-supplied Douglas dive-bombers, armed with anti-personnel bombs supplied by the RAF. A cruiser shelled a coastal road used by Muslim militants. Muslims suspected of political activism were arrested and shot, their bodies disposed of in kilns, wells and ravines.27

  Quite how many Muslims were killed remains contentious. After gaining independence the Algerian nationalist government claimed that 50,000 or 80,000 people had been killed (the number rose over time), but a more realistic estimate seems to be between 6,000 and 8,000. What is not in doubt is that the French authorities were determined to overawe the Muslims. After a hotelier and his daughter had been killed by Muslims in Falaise, the army commander in Constantine ordered 15,000 Muslims to assemble on a beach at Melbou, marshalled behind their headmen or caids. French navy ships manoeuvred offshore; aircraft swooped past at alarmingly low levels; artillery salvoes boomed. A mufti praised the steps taken by the French and invoked Allah before leading a collective prayer. The terrified crowd were given slices of ‘peace cakes’, which they received with applause and ululations.28

  By way of concession to Muslim opinion, and in the teeth of settler opposition, the French National Assembly agreed to a revised electoral statute for Algeria. A new Algerian Assembly would have 120 seats, half chosen by a European electoral college of 460,000 French citizens plus 58,000 assimilated Muslims, and the other half elected by 1,400,000 unassimilated Muslims. Even these slanted arrangements had to be comprehensively rigged on polling day in April 1948, to secure European dominance. Right-wing parties won fifty-four of the sixty European seats, but only nineteen of the sixty Muslim seats went to socialists and nationalists. Forty-one went to government stooges, known as béni-oui-ouis (Uncle Toms) to the locals.29 All of this was the handiwork of a ‘Third Force’, socialist-dominated French government, whose Governor-General in Algiers, Marcel Naegelen, was an Alsatian anti-Communist leftist fanatically opposed to ‘separatism’. Thus the range of non-violent options open to Algerian nationalists was diminished while the incentives for armed resistance increased.

  Not So Holy Land

  A year before the Second World War erupted, the newly appointed British Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, calculated that, although he was responsible for fifty colonies around the world, the Palestine Mandate alone occupied half of his time. Churchill would describe the war between Arab and Jew in Palestine as the ‘war of mice’, for it continued – as it still does more than sixty years later – even as the world’s bull elephants clashed. In essence, the conflict between the mice was about the semantic ambiguity of the phrase ‘national home’ as promised to the Jews in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, avoiding the commitment embodied by the word ‘state’.

  There has never been an historic Palestine, except as a Roman province, though there certainly were two ancient Jewish kingdoms long before that. Palestine had no separate identity during the centuries of Ottoman rule either, in the latter part of which, from the 1880s onwards, the 25,000 Orthodox Jews who lived in Jerusalem were augmented by two major waves of East European immigrants who farmed on the plains. The Balfour Declaration had served two circumstantial purposes. One was to defuse Bolshevism, whose internationalism was widely attributed to the influence of the perennially homeless Jews. The other was as a wartime expedient to win the support of US Jews, much as the Russians were promised Constantinople, and probably no more sincerely meant.

  Following a three-year Arab revolt, which the British crushed ruthlessly, in 1939 MacDonald published a White Paper that drastically restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, limiting it to some 75,000 persons over five years, even though he recognized that it was largely the employment opportunities created by these industrious immigrants that had led to an increase in the local Arab population. In Zionist eyes the White Paper was a cold-blooded betrayal of a desperate people, for it coincided with the intensified persecution of European Jews in Nazi Germany and in Poland. The rest of the world (with the notable exception of dictator Leonidas Trujillo’s Dominican Republic) had responded by agreeing at the 1938 Evian Conference that there was no more room in their respective inns. The British issued the White Paper to ensure that the wider Arab world, from which Britain derived 60 per cent of its oil, did not switch to the Axis side during the imminent war. As MacDonald explained, ‘We could not let emotion rule our policy. We must accept the facts of the extremely dangerous prospect with absolute, unsentimental and, some people would say, even cynical realism. The Jews would be on our side in any case in the struggle against Hitler. Would the independent Arab nations adopt the same
attitude?’30

  While this local example of appeasement did not lead to a recrudescence of the Anglo-Arab alliance of the First World War, it did mean that no major trouble jeopardized trans-Jordanian oil pipelines or threatened British bases in Egypt, even when the British heavy-handedly deposed the Egyptian Prime Minister. Nor, given the Nazis’ pathological hatred of the Jews, did the British have cause to worry where the latter’s sympathies might lie. The Zionist-Fascists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky were a tiny if noisy minority, although one of Jabotinsky’s most devoted disciples was Menachem Begin, later leader of the Irgun terrorist organization. The majority Zionist response to a war that was existential for the Jewish people was encapsulated by David Ben Gurion’s formula that ‘we shall fight with Great Britain in this war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war’.

  When the Zionists offered to raise a Jewish army to fight the Axis, the British prevaricated, eventually conceding a joint Arab and Jewish battalion attached to the East Kent Buffs in which the Jewish contingent fought and the Arabs deserted. Ten thousand or so Palestinian Jews (and 7,000 Palestinian Arabs) served as individuals in the British armed forces. In late 1944 the British at last sanctioned a Jewish Brigade, which fought with distinction. British equivocation, however justifiable in terms of keeping the Arabs on side, was to give the Zionists a potent propaganda weapon to use against them once the mass murder of European Jews was revealed to an uncomprehending world. As evidence built up of Nazi murder of Europe’s Jews, so Zionist insistence on a secure Jewish state of Israel intensified. If all else failed, the world’s Jews could repair there. This meant that the Jews were never going to accept the preferred British fix of Arab and Jewish enclaves with a bi-national Palestine.