The Algerian War of Independence - Part 1 of 3

[cshchan]

The Algerian War of Independence - Part 1 of 3
By Keith G Emuang

War is always bitter but the ferocity that was displayed during the French-Algerian War of 1954 stunned the world. While the strategies employed were nothing new, their intensity underlined a phenomenon we are all too familiar with today - terrorism.

Even today, many question the validity of classifying the Algerian fight for independence against the French as a proliferation of terrorism. As we regularly hear these days, one man's fight for independence is another's terror. It was the widespread desire for independence that eventually won over the Algerian people to unite against the French. That is not to say that at the onset of the war, there were no segments in Algerian society that were comfortable with French rule.
The Rocky History
The French occupation of Algeria took root in 1830. Although it had a profound impact on the country and its prosperity, there was still widespread discontentment. The disdain for the French was ever growing and was attributed to several factors. Besides the fact that the French were a foreign, non-Muslim power, many Algerians were frequently stripped of their lands by the colonial government.
The French who lived in Algeria were self-serving and often discriminated against the locals. Powerful or prominent traditional leaders were also removed from any seat of power to prevent any influential figure from stirring up negative sentiments. By 1954, nearly a million Europeans, called pieds noirs, (named after the type of shoes they often wore) had worked and lived there for generations.

It was a time when various sectors of society fought to achieve different ideals; some fought for survival, some for equality and co-existence while others demanded the French to leave altogether. While it often fell on deaf colonial ears, what this collectively achieved was to gradually help form an Algerian identity. Although militias had stirred uprisings and riots, it would take 124 years before things were to reach boiling point.

The Struggle Begins
The Front de Liberation Nationale or FLN was an organisation of Algerian nationalists who strongly and vehemently opposed French rule. Their main rivals in Algeria were the National Algerian Movement (Mouvement National Algerien or MNA).

Although the FLN and MNA shared the same goal of wanting the French to leave Algeria and gain independence, their rivalry often led to bitter confrontations. In fact, members and supporters from both groups were known to have fought each other not just in Algeria but in France where they also enjoyed huge support.

Some 5,000 deaths were reported in merciless encounters that took place across France, from the busy streets of Paris to quiet countryside villages. These were subsequently called the Café Wars. All this took place for the whole duration of the war of independence where they were fighting the French back home in Algeria.

The FLN however, while brutal with those they suspected, were ready to embrace members from other groups who had to go underground due to the French discovery and subsequent dismantling of their groups. The MNA, with all their support from Algerian workers in France, did not enjoy as much support in Algeria as the FLN did. As such their influence back home was somewhat limited.
So the stage was set for the battle of independence between the Algerian Nationalists and the French. But it did not occur with a build up or facing off of opposing forces. The war began unexpectedly just after midnight on 1 November 1954 when deafening explosions lit up the quiet Algerian night skies. These were the same skies that would, for the next eight years, be privy to the bloody proceedings unfolding below.

Recommended Reading:
www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/webberm/algeria.htm#ch4
www.lewrockwell.com/wall/wall24.html

Coming up nextThe Bitter Conflict Begins

[Yosy]

Great topic. The Algerian conflict is specially interesting because the French didn't want to leave. And the FLN proved that terrorism-***-resistance works. Israel should look to this conflict.

[Secret Squirrel]

Great topic. The Algerian conflict is specially interesting because the French didn't want to leave. And the FLN proved that terrorism-***-resistance works. Israel should look to this conflict.

Best lesson to draw from this war is the pointlessness of using torture during a military conflict.

[fantassin]

The French didn't want to leave...? ever heard of Général de Gaulle and his self rule choice given to the Algerian?

A few hard core setllers did not want the end of colonial rule; the vast majority of French as well as the government from the time de Gaulle arrived in 1958 wanted the departure of France from there.

Militarily the FLN was a spent and broken force after 1959.

[Yosy]

The French didn't want to leave...? ever heard of Général de Gaulle and his self rule choice given to the Algerian?

A few hard core setllers did not want the end of colonial rule; the vast majority of French as well as the government from the time de Gaulle arrived in 1958 wanted the departure of France from there.

Militarily the FLN was a spent and broken force after 1959.

Ever heard of the OAS? And how many french actually suppported the OAS? Or Petit-Clamart (the failed assissanation attempt of De Gaulle)? Or the famous "Algerie Française"? Or the Foreign Legion "lost battalion" (a battalion that revolted and joined the OAS"?

[S'13]

Israel should look to this conflict.

Israel provided the French with intelligence at the time of this conflict. So it can be assumed that Israel can do more than just "look to it". :) ;)

[fantassin]

Yes, only three regiments (1er REP, 14°&18° RCP) and a& few isolated individuals who supported the settlers joined the general's mutiny while the army numbered 100s of Bn at the time.

The military had thought such an event could occur; they had distributed 1000s of short wave radios even to the most remote outpost so the soldiers could tune in to the news in case an uprising happened.

When it happened, de Gaulle made a radio speech calling for the arrest "by all means available" of those three rebel units and all the other units remained calm and did not join the coup attempt. It lasted all of about 72 hours....they were then disbanded and that was it.

There were several attempt on de Gaulle's life but that does not mean the country was not in favour of Algerian independance. There was a referendum organized by the French to ask the Algerian if they wanted independance. They wanted it, so France left.

De Gaulle was too much of a political genius not to see the burden Algeria would represent for France at the end of the XXth century with its huge demography and its untrained masses. Oil was just not enough of an excuse to stay and colonies were a thing of the past.

Militarily, there is no question the war was won. The French had a huge experience in COIN, they pioneered the use of combat helicopter there, they made extensive use of PsyOps, they did use torture too which helped bringing down the terrorist infrastructure in Algier in 1957 and ended a string of terrorist attacks in the city.

So saying terrorism made the French leave the country is pure bollocks since the FLN was practically unable to operate efficiently in Algeria from 1959 on. They had moved to Tunisia where every time they tried to cross into Algeria through the Morice Line they got a pasting.

[Zarathustra]

I don't give a **** of algeria, look what this country was during the french "occupation" and what it is since 40 years ago ( their independance ): can you see the difference? Now it's a poor country with a fews terrorist who cut off the heads of childs and womens the day in the street: 150 000 deads in 10 years with the GIA during the 90's ! It's a complete ****e hole, if they hate france or any sort of democraty, let them in there...

[mack pl]

I don't give a f*** of algeria, look what this country was during the french "occupation" and what it is since 40 years ago ( their independance ): can you see the difference? Now it's a poor country with a fews terrorist who cut off the heads of childs and womens the day in the street: 150 000 deads in 10 years with the GIA during the 90's ! It's a complete ****e hole, if they hate france or any sort of democraty, let them in there...
huh, like all fukin Africa man. So, what? Recolonization or what? They wanted independence, so they have it, and its only theirs business what happens there now.

regards

[Secret Squirrel]

Militarily, there is no question the war was won. The French had a huge experience in COIN, they pioneered the use of combat helicopter there, they made extensive use of PsyOps, they did use torture too which helped bringing down the terrorist infrastructure in Algier in 1957 and ended a string of terrorist attacks in the city.

"We all had the same reaction. We tried not to see it. We were shocked, but powerless. At first, revolted; by the end, indifferent. It has to be said, it's shameful." These are the words of a French soldier, Raymond Dumas, who witnessed torture during France's war in Algeria in the 1950s. They could, however, be the words of torturers everywhere and in every era.

The French case provides eerie parallels to today, when we are faced every day with new allegations about the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. A democracy like the United States, France has long affirmed support for human rights. Like the United States, it resorted to extreme forms of coercion as part of a war against what it called "terrorists."

France won key battles by torturing suspects for intelligence. But the bigger lesson is that it lost the war. The fact that French military leaders resorted to the extensive use of torture shows that they had lost the support of the populace at large. It is a lesson that seems to have been ignored by American leaders as they prosecute a war in Iraq.

The French use of torture in Algeria didn't happen overnight. It was a reaction to a deepening crisis in which the French military, originally looking for suspect Algerians, came to see all Algerians as suspects. A signatory to the Geneva Conventions on war, the French government nonetheless insisted that these conventions weren't applicable to the Algerian situation. Its rejection of Geneva protections, and the consequent acceptance of harsher methods of interrogation of prisoners, proved to be fertile breeding ground for torturers.

Since late 2001, because the attacks against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has, like the French in Algeria, displayed a clear ambivalence toward the Geneva Conventions. At times it has professed adherence; at others, it has scoffed. Even the reasoning for rejecting these conventions is identical to earlier French arguments: like the United States today, the French military argued that countering terror required harsh methods.

In Algeria, concerned about countering a "revolutionary war," French generals increasingly seized authority from civilian leaders. They ran roughshod over legal protections for the population. The main opposition to French rule, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), seized the initiative. But the FLN was not simply the virtuous revolutionary force beloved of the left; like many weak revolutionary forces (for example, the Vietnamese Viet Minh at the beginning of its war against the French), it too resorted to terror to achieve its aims.

In Iraq, frustrated with the rising use of terror attacks, the U.S. military has, understandably, pushed aggressively for more and better intelligence. In the process, it has ignored its own regulations against extreme forms of coercion. The French experience in Algeria should have driven home, however, the danger in linking intelligence and torture.

In Algeria, faced with the threat of the FLN, French officers pushed for better intelligence. At the end of 1956, they set up the Detachments Operationnels de Protection, autonomous military intelligence units whose primary function was to dismantle the FLN networks. These French units exploited the unclear lines of their own command authority to act somewhat independently of the rest of the military. This ambiguous command authority also allowed them to set up a vast network of detention camps in which torture was widely practiced.

When we look at Iraq today, many parallels to Algeria jump out at us: the ambivalence toward the Geneva conventions on war, the diminished civilian judicial authority over the conduct of war, the problem of ambiguously defined command authority and the creation of "extra legal" spaces in which clandestine use of coercion can thrive.

The French failure in Algeria also suggests some questions that must be asked about Iraq. The vast majority of American attention has been focused on one place: Abu Ghraib prison. But other detention centers exist. In Algeria, much of the torture took place in "temporary" or transitional detention camps, some of them clandestine. For suspects, the time between being rounded up as a suspect and officially documented as a prisoner was particularly dangerous. Suspects were often tortured; if they tried to escape, French soldiers were allowed to shoot to kill.

It is imperative that U.S. military clarify whether or not it engages in similar practices toward "suspects." In the short term, intelligence operatives can use torture to extract information that will save lives. But in the long term, the widespread use of torture destroys a population's acceptance of occupation. As Gen. Jacques Massu, commander of the army corps in Algiers, who played a leading role in the Algerian war, admitted in 2001, "Torture is not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well."

Torture helped the French army win the Battle of Algiers; it also helped the country lose the Algerian War. That defeat, and the role that torture played in it, is one that the United States should heed today as it confronts the crisis in Iraq.

Dr. Shawn McHale

[fantassin]

Hence the French opposition to the war in Iraq since this country's been there before, especially Jacques Chirac who spent over two years there, saw combat and was decorated for his part in relieving a surrounded unit.

[LordHalbert]

I hate it when people say "torture is useless". The French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam have proven that torture can be effective (if applied properly) in gaining intelligence. Now whether this will win a war or not is different matter.

[Secret Squirrel]

I hate it when people say "torture is useless". The French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam have proven that torture can be effective (if applied properly) in gaining intelligence. Now whether this will win a war or not is different matter.

Effective for what? pyrrhic victories?

[LordHalbert]

torture (if applied properly) can be useful in gaining meaningful intelligence.

That is what I'm claiming. As a previous post mentioned, the French had good success using torture to loosen tongues.

[Secret Squirrel]

torture (if applied properly) can be useful in gaining meaningful intelligence.

That is what I'm claiming. As a previous post mentioned, the French had good success using torture to loosen tongues.

and what were the ultimate consequences of using torture? it was a pyrrhic victory.

[Yosy]

I hate it when people say "torture is useless". The French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam have proven that torture can be effective (if applied properly) in gaining intelligence. Now whether this will win a war or not is different matter.

True, but the use of torture in Iraq made the US loose all the moral high ground that it had. Torture is useless in the long-run. Word will get out, public opinion will be against you and you'll be unable to win the war.

The colonial wars, like Algeria, were a no-win scenario for the european nations. They just coulnd't maintain colonies anymore

[David Lehmann]

Go to this thread to see several photos from this conflict :
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=50804

Regards,

David