A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 Read Online Free Page A

were known as the “Afghans,” highly trained volunteers who had served their apprenticeship in that country. The economy was targeted, and so at one point were foreigners, businessmen and journalists, promiscuously massacred with the clear intent of driving out foreign capital. Whole villages—including women and children—would be slaughtered by unknown guerrillas, for unknown motives.
    The techniques of murder equally had echoes from the grisly égorgements , the throat-slittings, from days of the Savage War, the “Kablyie Smile” as French servicemen dubbed it with unpleasant humour, frequently accompanied by castration. Beheading victims became common, their heads stuck on road signs as a kind of gruesome sport. Algerians themselves spoke of the “blind war,” but in its prolonged, random senselessness it came almost more to resemble Europe’s Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. Power now came to reside essentially in the hands of the military, and its role in the coming civil war remains a murky if not repugnant one. There were even ugly rumours that somehow the Army itself was involved in some of the uglier massacres. Reports seeped out via eyewitnesses and defectors suggesting that the security services and the regime, or at least elements within them, had a hand in some of the extreme violence initially attributed to Islamists. The main motivation for this was never quite clear, but there appeared to be a desire to demonise the Islamists and win over the bulk of the population—which seemed to be bewildered as to exactly who was killing whom.
    All the time the economy suffered, leading to ever worse unemployment—one-third of the labour force, in a population well over three times that of 1954, produced by one of the world’s highest birthrates, and concentrated (in Algiers) in some of the world’s worst slums. All more incentives for bringing recruits to the revolt. By the end of 2001 at a rough estimate 100,000 Algerians had died—and 120 foreigners—with a cost to the economy running into billions of dollars. With strong US support, the Bouteflika regime has to some extent been successful in suppressing the Islamicist revolt, winning over the pious middle classes, and providing the Pentagon with a staunch ally in the war on terror—but at a questionable price in human rights.
    In 1962, a popular slogan heard among exhausted Algerians was “ Seba’a snin, barakat! ” (“Seven years, that’s enough!”) Yet, five decades after independence, a savage war still continued in Algeria. It was a country exhausted by seven years of senseless violence, of not knowing who were the “good guys” and who the “bad.” As much as any other factor, it was this exhaustion that helped bring the civil war to an end.
    Though the parallels may be only partially exact, dark comparisons also offer themselves between the two former French colonies both “liberated” in the 1950s and 1960s: Vietnam, infinitely more devastated than Algeria over twenty years of war, and lacking its natural wealth of oil and gas, but now rapidly emerging as the new Taiwan of Southeast Asia; Algeria wracked by internecine fundamentalism, and economically impoverished. Students of contemporary Islam and its incompetence in the world of material progress might wish to draw their own conclusions.
    Shadows in France, Too
    As for France, if at every hand in Algeria one could detect the roots, and pattern, of the war of 1954–62, so too in a similar fashion did the civil war between Algerians of the 1990s soon overflow across the Mediterranean. In 1995 and 1996 feuding between rival clans of the GIA brought terrorism to the Paris Metro, killing and wounding over eighty persons. Supposedly aimed at dissuading the French from backing the repression of the Algiers government, in what could have been a hideous preview of 9/11, an Air France plane hijacked, pointedly, on Christmas Eve, 1994, was evidently programmed to be flown