The Unexamined Life

Bugger STEM, if you don't know and own your (colonial) history, you don't know yourself:

"Algeria experienced an 'Arab Fall' in 1988, which led to a war between armed Islamic groups and the Algerian army and state. Many journalists, intellectuals, artists were among about 200,000 Algerians who died under the blades and bullets of these fanatic murderers. Almost overnight, the face of Algerian society changed and entered one of the darkest times of its history. During the paroxysm of the war in the mid-90s, my parents decided that it was safer to temporarily move to France, as my mother had received death threats. It was a return 'home' for her as she was born and raised in France by immigrant Algerian parents. I remember feeling grateful that I could finally walk down the street without being scared. But yet, I often felt out of place. I encountered racism for the first time and discovered what it was like to be an outsider. I was surprised to discover that Algerians were not exactly well received and welcome. I did not know then, considering my age, the complicated intricacies inherited from colonial times." (America accepted me - an Algerian Muslim - in a way France never did, Melyssa Haffaf, The Guardian, 30/8/16)

Thereby Hangs a Tale...

Guardian Australia is featuring a "video explainer" called Why is France targeted so often by terrorists (16/7). Its only reference to that nation's bloody colonial history is as follows:

"France has intervened militarily and economically to defend its interests in Africa and the Middle East."

To expand the old Shakespearean line: thereby hangs a largely overlooked, not to say forgotten, tale - at least by the mainstream media.

Although the warp and woof of this tale has many a tangled strand, I present here just one, involving the intersection between France's (along with Britain's and Israel's) failed stab at regime change in 1956 Egypt and its arrogant refusal to read the writing on the wall in 1960s French occupied/settled Algeria:

"When [British PM Anthony] Eden and [Foreign Secretary Selwyn] Lloyd left Paris [French PM Guy] Mollet was able to reassure his Israeli partner, David Ben-Gurion, that he could depend absolutely on British co-operation in the plan for invading [Egypt's] Sinai and capturing the [Suez] Canal. So confident, in fact, was the mood in Paris after the meeting of October 16 [1956] that Mollet and his Ministers now decided to toughen their Algerian policy. Until this moment they had not been certain enough of ultimate victory over the [Algerian] nationalists to go all out in their efforts to crush the rebellion. But now that [the Egyptian president] Nasser was to be destroyed, the order was given to pull no punches and a plan was promptly hatched to capture the leader of the Algerian rebels, Ahmed Ben Bella, by a singular act of treachery.

"Ben Bella was currently visiting Rabat at the invitation of the Sultan of Morocco, who, with Premier Bourguiba of Tunisia, was seeking to persuade the National Liberation Front of Algeria to agree to peace talks with the French. These efforts at mediation had earlier received active encouragement from Mollet himself, in token of which the French authorities had earlier given a safe-conduct across Algeria for the aeroplane which was to transport Ben Bella from Rabat to Tunis for the talks with Bourguiba. But Mollet was now no longer interested in discussing peace in Algeria. And when the aeroplane reached Algerian air space it was immediately intercepted by French fighters and forced to land at Algiers Airport. Ben Bella and four of his nationalist associates were then arrested and taken off to prison in France, where they were to remain until Algeria finally won her independence six years later.

"By this act of treacherous folly, France not only forfeited the last vestiges of Arab respect in North Africa, but, when her Suez plan failed to destroy Nasser, she served to prolong her own agony in Algeria by isolating the principal spokesman of the nationalists in a Paris prison and thereby denying to the only interlocutor valable the opportunity to negotiate a settlement. From then on it was war to the death in Algeria - and many Frenchmen as well as Algerians were to die in the six bloody years that followed. Egypt increased her assistance to the rebels, and the Moroccans and Tunisians, rebuffed in their efforts to bring about a truce, joined in giving the National Liberation Front all possible aid and protection." (No End of a Lesson: The Story of Suez, Anthony Nutting, 1967, pp 100-01)

Remember the Algerian War?

Consider the following Australian ms press snippets arising from recent reportage on the Charlie Hebdo massacre:

"Cherif [Kouachi], 32, and Said [Kouachi], 34, were born in the northern 10th arrondissement of Paris, a downbeat district of railway terminals and multi-ethnic neighbourhoods... The boys' Algerian immigrant parents died when the children were small." (Journey from 'delinquent' rapper to killer, Dominic Kennedy/Sean O'Neill, The Australian, 10/1/15)

"Their parents are thought to have been among the waves of immigration in the decades after Algeria's independence in 1962." (Civilisation under siege, Matthew Campbell, The Australian, 12/1/15)

 "'We are engaged in a new kind of war,' said Alain Juppe, a former French prime minister. 'It spreads from the chaos in the Middle East... Unspoken by Mr Juppe, but understood by all, was the conclusion that the beneficiary in cold political terms from the outrage is Marine Le Pen. The leader of the National Front has turned the party into France's most popular, thanks in part to her anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant discourse." (Jihad born in neglected ghettos on city edges, Charles Bremner, The Australian, 9/1/15)

"... the thousands of demonstrators who gathered at the Place de la Republique on Wednesday night chanted: 'Je suis Charlie' - I am Charlie. We are Charlie. At the centre of the Place de la Republique are three statues entitled [sic] Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The massacre at the Bastille, where Charlie Hebdo had its offices, is redolent with symbolism, as the Bastille was the flashpoint for the revolution whose rallying cry became liberty, equality and fraternity. This attack... was an attack on liberty, equality and fraternity." (Editorial: Better to die standing than live on our knees, Sydney Morning Herald, 9/1/15)

The connection is never made clear, but each of the above, in its own way, references an earlier episode in French history: the French occupation and colonisation of Algeria (1848-1962) and the bloody war of independence (1954-62) which ended it. In the plethora of reports on the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the Australian press, however, not one - in the spirit of Faulkner's "The past is never dead. It's not even past"  - bothered to join the dots.

While the slogan of the French Revolution (1787-1799), Liberty, Equality & Fraternity, would have come easily to the Herald's editor, I doubt the fact of its non-application to the peoples of France's colonial empire would ever have entered his Eurocentric mind.

For example, when the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) issued its November 1954 call for French recognition of Algerian nationhood, with "equal rights and duties" for all French colons choosing Algerian citizenship, and ties between France and Algeria "defined by agreement between the two powers on the basis of equality and mutual respect," far from living up to its revolutionary motto, France opted instead to repress the Algerian independence movement, triggering a brutal struggle "bringing death to an estimated one million Muslim Algerians and the expulsion from their homes of approximately the same number of European settlers."*

As for Algerian Muslim immigration to France, I found myself wondering whether or not the long-deceased parents of the Kouachi brothers may have been among the ranks of the Algerian Muslim harki forces, who had fought with the French against their nationalist countrymen, and fled to France after the Algerian War:

"According to Ait Ahmed, these convulsions of the summer of 1962 cost the lives of a further 15,000 Algerians. But the worst fratricidal horrors were reserved for those Muslims who, like the harkis, had continued to fight for France. De Gaulle had never shown much sympathy for them; to a Muslim deputy, ten of whose family had already been killed by the FLN and who had protested that on 'self determination' 'we shall suffer', de Gaulle had replied coldly, 'Eh bien! vous suffrirez.' As General de Gaulle had feared... the peace agreements contained no guarantee sufficient to save these Algerians now from the wrath of their countrymen, in whose eyes they were nothing but traitors. Out of the quarter of a million who had worked for the French less than 15,000 had managed to escape from Algeria... In France they were, for the most part, to live lives of poverty, unappreciated and unassimilated. Of the fate of those that remained, however, harrowing stories came out of Algeria. Hundreds died when put to work clearing the minefields along the Morice Line, or were shot out of hand. Others were tortured atrociously; army veterans were made to dig their own tombs, then swallow their decorations before being killed; they were burned alive, or castrated, or dragged behind trucks, or cut to pieces and their flesh fed to dogs. Many were put to death with their entire families, including young children. Compelled by the terms of the Evian Agreements to stand by and witness this massacre of their former allies, the agony of the French army was extreme. In some cases, acting under orders, units had been forced to disarm the wretched harkis on the promise of replacing them with better weapons - then sneaked away in the middle of the night, abandoning them to their fate."

As for the reference to the Islamophobic far-right National Front of Marine Le Pen, would it surprise you to know that its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a French intelligence officer during the Algerian War?

[*A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Alistair Horne, 1977, p 14;** 537-38]