by Robert Fisk
The pieds noirs would later come to believe that their mission in Algeria was to “civilise” an otherwise barbarous land; hence the constant emphasis on administration, justice, education and modern technology. But contemporary evidence and the literature published in the early years of the French conquest tell a different story. For when the Comte de Bourmont, the lieutenant general commanding the French expeditionary force to Algeria, arrived off the North African coast with forty-two destroyers, frigates and corvettes and sixty other vessels in May 1830, he issued a proclamation of almost wearying familiarity:
Soldiers, civilised nations of both [new and old] worlds are watching you; their thoughts are with you; the cause of France is the cause of humanity; show that you are worthy of this noble mission. Let no excess tarnish the banner of your exploits; merciless in combat, you must be compassionate and magnanimous after victory; this is in your interest as much as it is your duty. So long oppressed by a rapacious and brutal soldiery, the Arab will see you as liberators; he will beg to be our ally . . .
Eighty-seven years before General Maude’s proclamation to the people of Baghdad, insisting that the British army had invaded Iraq as liberators rather than conquerors, and 173 years before President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair invaded the same country with the same excuses—and the firm belief that they would be welcomed by the local Arab population—the French poured ashore in the gentle, sheltered bay of Sidi Fredj with identical illusions to commence the long and sombre history of colonial Algeria. The French army would spend the next fifty years suppressing an insurgency; fifteen of them would be spent fighting the brilliant, tough young Algerian resistance leader Abdelkader. Both sides committed atrocities and even French society was shocked to learn that its troops had asphyxiated 500 Algerian men, women and children by lighting a fire at the mouth of the cave in which they had taken refuge—a horrible prelude to the same fate which was visited by the Turks upon thousands of Armenians during the 1915 genocide. Between 1831 and 1839, the French lost 1,412 soldiers in battle in Algeria; a nightmare portrait of the land came from a French diplomat in 1841:
The country is without commerce; the circulation of the caravans is suspended . . . the plough is forsaking the fields . . . the Arabs, bent on deeds of blood and decapitation, approach even the gates of Algiers.
Was it through self-delusion or false optimism that Léon Galibert, writing a history of Algeria only three years later, could describe with admiration the missionary works of the French Catholic Church—“because they strongly emphasise the consolidation of our authority in Algeria”—and its desire to conquer Islam:
On December 24th 1832, one of the most beautiful mosques of Algiers, situated in Divan Street, was consecrated to the Catholic faith. Religious services began with the heavenly solemnity of a midnight mass . . . Here a new era starts for the Church of Africa. Not only have the ceremonial pomp and magnificence of the Catholic church made the natives realise that their conqueror believes in God and has a religion; the church’s growing benevolent activities, from which they benefit, has made them understand that this religion is eminently merciful and the friend of man . . . Cardinal Pacca, in his journal dedicated to the Catholic world, makes a point of giving due praise to the efforts that France has made to spread Christianity throughout its possessions. “I saw on the coasts of Africa . . . the spirited French nation restoring the banner of the crucifix, reinstating the altars, converting infidel mosques in temples consecrated to the Almighty, and building new churches. Moreover, I saw on the coasts of Africa a holy priest followed by zealous followers, not only being welcomed by acclamations and shouts of glory on the part of the Catholics, but also respected and venerated by the infidels, Arabs and Bedouins . . . In Constantine, where we can already find 5,000 Catholics . . . a beautiful mosque was transformed into a Church, and renamed Our Lady of Sorrows . . . thanks to the French intervention, Christianity is reconquering in this part of Africa the power that it had acquired in the early age of the Church.”
The Church regarded this proselytism as a re-establishment of Christianity in a country where St. Vincent de Paul’s Catholic mission had first been established in 1646. Less Christian sentiments, however, applied to the territory which the French intended to settle. Typical was Saïd Bugeaud’s statement before the National Assembly in 1840: “Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate the colons , without concerning oneself to whom these lands belong.” France’s own progress as a democracy shaped and reshaped its policies in Algeria, its imperial status constantly challenged by its own liberalism. If Algerians did not have a vote in the parliament of the mother country, however, they were expected to bear an equal sacrifice in the face of France’s enemies; it was not only the pieds noirs who went to fight and die on the Western Front in the First World War. In the vast war cemeteries of northern France, Algerian tombstones bearing the half-moon of Islam can be found in their thousands, usually separated from the French dead but within the same cemetery enclosure. Their fate provoked widespread unrest in Algeria, although this went largely unreported at the time. Indeed, one has to search through French monographs of the postwar period to find any serious examination of this insurgency. “Despite the [1914] victory of the Marne, worries and prejudices magnified into terrible stories of the battle of Charleroi,” one author wrote on the centenary of the French invasion of Algeria in 1830.
In particular, it was said that we had sacrificed our Muslim troops; that we did not have any more soldiers in Algeria; that our capacity for troop reinforcements had vanished and that the conscripts would be sent under fire as soon as they were drafted. Incidents of resistance mushroomed in three areas, and at the beginning of October, in the mixed commune of Mascara, there occurred the rebellion of the Beni Chougrane [tribe] which occurred some days after demonstrations by the people of Sidi Daho . . . emphasising the region’s hostility to recruitment.
Algerians, it seemed, were worthy of dying for France, but not of participating in its democracy, a view expressed without much subtlety by one of France’s most experienced governor generals in 1926:
There’s no doubt that to give everyone the right to vote—for which few actually care—would not in itself resolve the native problem. It’s perfectly commendable for those who are already 20th-century men to claim this right, but we have to be aware that the rest, who choose to maintain respectable traditions, barely achieve the level of maturity [réalisent à peine] of the 13th century . . .
Cruelty and oppression marked the last years of French rule. Around the walls of the “Museum of the Martyrs” in Algiers today, beneath the massive concrete wings of the memorial to well over a million Algerians killed in the 1954–62 war of independence against the French, the visitor can see all he wants of this terrible struggle. The museum curator plays Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Brahms’s Violin Concerto in C over the audio system as if it is necessary to soften the evidence of barbarity. There are French military documents demanding the arrest of guerrilla leaders. There are shackles, whips and guns. Forty-three-year-old posters, printed in secret by the National Liberation Front—the FLN— inform the resistance movement that it is “the beacon of African socialism.” There are monochrome photographs of Algerian “martyrs” and tortured men, their faces shattered or running with blood at the hands of General Jacques Massu’s 10th Parachute Division. And there is a showcase filled with the paraphernalia of the French military police, of bullets and cartridges and a small metal object in the shape of a pineapple, labelled: “U.S. Mark 2 Defensive Fragmentation Grenade.”
Most historians agree that the massacre at Sétif in 1945—when European settlers and French gendarmerie and troops slaughtered around 6,000 Muslims in revenge for the Muslim murder of 103 Europeans—helped to provoke the original struggle for independence. They also agree that France’s subsequent attempts to introduce reforms came too late; not least because “democratic” elections were so flagrantly rigged by the
French authorities that Muslims could never achieve equality with French Algerians. Once the FLN declared war in 1954, “moderate” Muslim Algerians were silenced by their nationalist opponents, including a largely forgotten Islamic independence movement, the “Association of Ulemas,” which saw the struggle as religious rather than political. The first FLN attacks were puny. A French gendarme would be murdered in the outback, the bled—from balad, the Arabic for a village—or in the mountains of Kabylie. The FLN began a campaign of cutting down telegraph poles and setting off small bombs in post, airline and government offices. As the war intensified, up to 500,000 French troops were fighting in the cities and mountains, especially in Lakhdaria, east of Algiers, using air strikes and employing helicopters to hunt down guerrilla bands. Sometimes the guerrillas were successful—the wreckage of a French helicopter shot down in the bled is today on display in the “Museum of the Martyrs.”
Some Algerians claim that in fact a million and a half Algerians may have been killed in the eight-year war that ended in 1962, albeit that 500,000 of these may have been slaughtered by their own comrades in internecine fighting. The conflict was one of betrayal of Muslim Algerians by each other, of French Algerians by their own government, specifically—in the minds of so many pieds noirs—by de Gaulle. The guerrillas murdered, raped and mutilated captured French soldiers and civilians. The French army murdered prisoners and massacred the population of entire villages. They, too, raped.
The war of independence became the foundation of modern Algerian politics, a source of violent reference for both its supposedly socialist and corrupt pouvoir and those opposed to the government. The war was dirty but could always be called upon as a purifying factor in Algerian life. The revolutionary government of Algiers commissioned Gillo Pontecorvo to make a film of the initial 1954–57 uprising and The Battle of Algiers remains one of the classic movies of guerrilla struggle and sacrifice. There is a dramatic moment when Colonel Mathieu, a thin disguise for the real-life General Massu, leads the captured FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi into a press conference at which a journalist questions the morality of hiding bombs in women’s shopping baskets. “Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?” the reporter asks. Ben M’Hidi replies: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenceless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims . . . Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.” Mathieu is publicly unrepentant at using torture during interrogation. “Should we remain in Algeria?” he asks. “If you answer yes, then you must accept all the necessary consequences.” The film contains many lessons for the American and British occupiers of Iraq; nor was it surprising when in early 2004 the Pentagon organised a screening for military and civilian experts in Washington who were invited by a flier that read: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.”
If the war was a constantly revived theme for Algerians, however, it was for almost three decades wiped from the French collective memory. For years, The Battle of Algiers was banned in France, and when it was eventually shown, cinemas were fire-bombed. It took thirty years before a French film director interviewed the forgotten conscripts of the conflict in which 27,000 French soldiers died. Bertrand Tavernier’s La Guerre sans nom showed the veterans breaking down in tears as they expressed their sorrow at killing Algerians. In the same year, 1992, the Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine held its first exhibition on the war and published a 320-page guide that did not attempt to hide the war’s brutality. In 2000, President Jacques Chirac rejected calls for a formal apology for the use of torture by French soldiers during the war. When long-retired General Paul Aussaresses, who was coordinator of French intelligence in Algiers in 1957, published his memoirs in 2001 and boasted of the Algerians he had personally executed, Amnesty International demanded an investigation by the French government. Aussaresses claimed that François Mitterrand, who was Socialist minister of the interior at the time, was fully aware of the tortures and executions being carried out by French forces in Algeria. But the contemporary Algerian government maintained what an Algerian journalist called “a cowardly silence” over Aussaresses’s revelations, not least because its own security services had long practised the same tortures on their own people which Aussaresses and his henchmen had visited upon Algerians. Even in Paris, Algerians died by the hundreds when they protested in October 1961 against a night curfew imposed on them by the police. French cops ferociously assaulted the demonstrators and as many as 300 may have been murdered, their corpses washed up next day in the Seine. To this day, the authorities have not opened all their archives on this massacre, even though the prefect of police responsible for the repression was Maurice Papon, who was convicted in April 1998 for crimes against humanity during the German occupation.
Just as the original French claim to have invaded Algeria to “liberate” its people has a painfully contemporary ring, so too do the appeals for support advanced by the French government to the U.S. administration during the Algerian war of independence. France, the Americans were told, was fighting to defend the West against jihad, against “Middle Eastern Islamic fanaticism.” This, the French claimed, was a clash of civilisations. They were wrong, of course— the French were fighting a nationalist insurgency in Algeria, just as the Americans found themselves fighting a national insurgency in Iraq—but the Islamic content of the 1954–62 independence struggle has long been ignored, not least by the Algerian government that found itself fighting an Islamist enemy in the 1990s.
MOHAMED BOUYALI HELD OUT to me the snapshot of his dead brother. “It was taken when Mustafa was already on the run. The government never got a picture of him wearing his beard. This is a historic photograph.” Algeria was already collapsing into a terrifying new war as we spoke in July 1992, a conflict so fearful that the picture he handed me was never given back to him. When I returned to Algeria, Mohamed Bouyali’s home was in an area controlled by the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA—Islamic Armed Group) and even my Algerian driver refused to visit the house. So Mustafa Bouyali’s snapshot lies on my desk as I write these words. It is a grainy but powerful print, because he has a big face and a thick beard and his eyes are boring hard and suspiciously into the camera, the eyes of a wanted man. In 1992, his brother and I were sitting in his high, bright airy home in the Algerian village of Ashour from which Mustafa Bouyali had fled just over ten years earlier, never to return.
The picture is slightly out of focus, the paper on which it is printed creased and grubby. It must have been shown many times to trusted family friends, the image of an honoured “martyr” since that rain-drenched night of 3 January 1987 when the Algerian army ambushed Bouyali on the Larba road and a soldier shot him in the head. It is a poor snapshot, unframed, though it would be difficult to overestimate the effect this man has had on Algeria’s modern history.
His story has rarely been told in the West, let alone publicly discussed in Algeria. Yet he was the man who provided the inspiration for the armed groups that would assault Algeria’s government in the 1990s. He was the catalyst behind the Islamic guerrilla movement that was then assassinating police officers across Algeria, 120 in the previous six months alone. Here in the village of Ashour, in the breezy house with its hot, synthetic velvet sofa and vinyl-covered table and peach trees outside the back door, was the missing historical link between Algeria’s savage war of independence and the increasingly merciless civil war of the 1990s, a reference point for Algeria’s betrayal and the continuity of its tragedy. Because Bouyali was both a loyal guerrilla fighter for the FLN against France and an Islamic guerrilla fighter against the FLN government that replaced French rule, his activities call into question the meaning of Algerian history. How could a man imprisoned by the French, a maquisard in the FLN’s National Liberation Army, have chosen to lead another, Islamic maquis against his former comrades?
Mustafa Bouyali was bor
n in Ashour on 27 January 1940, and joined the FLN at the age of sixteen, collecting funds for the nationalist guerrilla movement in his own village, part of the 6th zone of the FLN’s Wilaya 4 district. In 1958 he was arrested by the French police at the little house in Ashour and imprisoned for two years. On his release, the French tried to force him into their army, but after three months he escaped from their barracks at Blida and was appointed an FLN officer in Algiers. His old wartime comrade Abdul-Hadi Sayah, who was arrested by the French at the same time, remembers Bouyali, even then, as an “Islamic militant.” According to Sayah, Bouyali found within the FLN “a way to make jihad against the French—he held this Islamic view even when he was in the FLN.”
His brother Mohamed agrees, although when he produces another, older photograph of his brother it shows Bouyali in FLN guerrilla uniform, dressed in a camouflage tunic, a poncho hat and army boots, posing melodramatically as if about to attack an enemy, holding an old breech-loading rifle in front of him. The picture has been painted in the manner of the time, the uniform a bright green, the sky a clear blue, the face an unhealthy yellow. The glass on the picture is cracked. There were other equally unknown FLN sympathisers at this time. One of them, who conspired to blow up a French government building, was called Abassi Madani. He spent most of the war in prison.
There was no doubting the bitterness that the war engendered. To their horror, the French discovered that hundreds of their own “loyal” Muslim troops were defecting to the FLN side, taking their weapons with them. French prisoners of the FLN were found with their eyes gouged out and their severed genitals stuffed in their mouths. The French responded with mass arrest operations, interning thousands of Algerian men in desert camps without trial. Death sentences were imposed on captured guerrillas; the condemned were usually guillotined, unless it became politically expedient to impose lighter sentences. After de Gaulle returned to office from his exile in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, he arrived in Algeria to give apparent support to the pieds noirs—Je vous ai compris, he told them—and then proceeded to negotiate with the FLN and to turn against the French army which had helped to bring him back to power. In 1960, de Gaulle negotiated, in person, with three leaders from the FLN’s Wilaya 4 district—Bouyali’s sector— and most of the subsequent assassination attempts against de Gaulle, a total of twenty-four in three years, were made by Frenchmen, some from within the security forces.
