Re: French in Algeria: Inhumanity exposed

[gdunkel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I was looking thru the Algerian press -- at least the part of it that is online
-- while the debate on  Gen. Aussaresses' book was spreading thru the
French press.

The amin topic I was following was the mass, spontaneous revolt of the
Berbers -- a non-Arab but Muslim minority -- who make up about 1/3 of
Algeria's population. It was mainly youth who went into the street,
demanding jobs, decent housing, respect (an end to police corruption,
harassment and brutality), education, but they had wide support. 150,000
people following the banners of the Front for Socialist Forces (FFS)
proclaimed "No to a police state, no to an islamic republic."

The Algerian reaction I saw, outside of the official condemnation of
Aussaresses, was that his revelations were no big deal.  He had even
had an interview in Le Monde about 6 months before his book came out.
Algerians know that the French army and police behaved like fascists
during the Battle of Algiers and after.  the Algerian War of Independence
is not known as the war of 1 million martyrs for nothing.

You can look at the political and organizational mistakes of the National
Liberation Front, but I think they should be balanced and compared to
the great political mistake of the French Communist Party in Algeria.
(While we are at it, we should think about the political mistakes of the
French Socialist Party, one of whose rising stars at the time -- Francois
Mitterrand -- was interior minister and Gen. Aussaresses' boss.

Some of its members like Maurice Audin, whose wife Josette Audin
admitted they were both in the Communist Party in 1957 on Canal II (the
French news show seen in NY) this week, paid with their lives to resist
French fascism.  But their party, while it opposed the brutality of the
French army and the colonialist in Agleria, still supported the
"resestablishment of order" in the "Algerian departments." The PCF
never, to my knowledge, unequivocally supported Algerian independence.

And of course the Socialist, like Mittereand, took an significant part in
the oppression.

I think one testiment to the strength and depth of the Algerian revolution
is that an organization like the FFS, led by one of the origianl leaders of
the NLF, could take on both the government and the Islamic
fundamentalists.

The FFS is not a particularly left organization, but it appears to be
opposed to the privitization of Algeria's oild industry and rolling back
other gains of the revolution.