Mohamed Boudiaf

Mohamed Boudiaf, (born June 23, 1919, M’Sila, Alg.—died June 29, 1992, Annaba).

Algerian political leader, one of the founders of the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN) that led the Algerian war of independence (1954–62), and, after a 27-year exile, he returned to become the president of Algeria (1992).

Boudiaf fought in the French army in World War II, but by 1950 he was a central figure in the nationalist movement against France, and in 1954 he joined Ahmed Ben Bella on the FLN leadership council.

After being captured and imprisoned by the French (1956–62), Boudiaf and Ben Bella were released to form a provisional government in newly independent Algeria, with Boudiaf as deputy premier. He opposed President Ben Bella’s autocratic rule, however, and after being interned for several months, he went into exile in Morocco (1964), where he managed a brick factory and denounced what he saw as an increasingly corrupt FLN.

In January 1992, with the Islamic party FIS on the verge of winning parliamentary elections, he was invited to return as the head of a military-backed council of state. Although he appeared to have gained public support for his announced reforms, he was shot and killed while giving a speech; one of his bodyguards was suspected of the shooting.

Houari Boumediene

Houari Boumediene, original name Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharrouba, (born Aug. 23, 1927, Clauzel, near Guelma, Algeria - died Dec. 27, 1978, Algiers), army officer who became president of Algeria in June 1965 following the overthrow of Ahmed Ben Bella.

Bomediene’s service to Algeria began in the 1950s, during his country’s struggle for independence from France, when, after studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo, he joined the revolution and adopted the name Houari Boumediene. The  National Liberation Front divided the country into six military districts, and Boumediene commanded the fifth, the one around Oran. In 1960 he became chief of staff of the National Liberation Army, and he centred his efforts on raising an Algerian army on the Moroccan and Tunisian borders, out of reach of the French.

After a peace treaty was signed with France in March 1962, tension among the Algerian leaders increased, and that September, Boumediene occupied Algiers in support of Ahmed Ben Bella. Ben Bella became president later in that year, and Boumediene was named minister of defense and vice-president. 

Conflicts developed between the two leaders, and on the 19 June 1965 Boumediene carried out a coup against Ben Bella and installed himself as president. Boumediene lacked widespread popular support, and he governed at first through a 26-member revolutionary council. As a result his leadership was weak and indecisive, but after an attempt by military officers to overthrow his regime failed in December 1967, he asserted his direct and undisputed leadership of Algeria.

In 1971 he imposed state control on the oil industry, at the cost of ending Algeria’s special relationship with France. In 1976 his government issued a National Charter and then a new constitution, both adopted by referendum. Negotiating important industrial contracts with Western countries and at the same time maintaining close but independent relations with the Soviet bloc, Boumediene became a leading figure in the nonaligned movement.

Ahmed Ben Bella

Ahmed Ben Bella, (born December 25, 1916, Maghnia [Marnia], Algeria—died April 11, 2012, Algiers), principal leader of the Algerian War of Independence against France, the first prime minister (1962–63) and first elected president (1963–65) of the Algerian republic, who steered his country toward a socialist economy.

Ben Bella was the son of a farmer and small businessman in Maghnia in the département of Oran. There he successfully completed his early studies at the French school and continued his education in the neighbouring city of Tlemcen, where he first became aware of racial discrimination and also mingled with the fringes of the nationalist movement.

He was conscripted into the French army in 1937, served in World War II, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre (1940) and the Médaille Militaire (1944). On his return to Maghnia, Ben Bella resumed his nationalist activities, refusing to be intimidated by the French authorities’confiscation of his farm. He left Maghnia, joined Messali Hadj’s underground movement, and soon became one of the “Young Turks” who, after the rigged election of Gov. Marcel-Edmond Naegelen (1948), considered illusory any hope of achieving independence democratically. With associates in Messali Hadj’s party, Ben Bella founded the Organisation Spéciale (OS), a paramilitary organisation whose aim was to take up arms as quickly as possible.

After robbing the post office at Oran (1950) to obtain funds for the nationalist movement, Ben Bella was sentenced to prison, but he managed to escape after serving only two years of his term. He went underground again and moved to Egypt, where he was promised help by the revolutionary supporters of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In November 1954 Ben Bella and the Algerian émigré leaders resident in Egypt, who had met secretly in Switzerland with those leaders who were still living in Algeria, came to two major decisions: to create the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FLN) and to order an armed insurrection against the French colonists.

Ben Bella played an important political role in the leadership of the FLN, simultaneously organizing the shipment of foreign arms to Algeria. In 1956 he escaped two attempts on his life, one at Cairo and the other at Tripoli, Libya. In the same year, he was arrested in Algiers by the French military authorities while in the process of negotiating peace terms with the French premier, Guy Mollet.

His imprisonment (1956–62) kept him dissociated from those errors of military conduct committed by the FLN, and, when he was freed after the Évian agreements with France were signed in 1962, his reputation was intact.

The situation in independent Algeria was chaotic. The leaders of the FLN had formed a conservative provisional government (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), while the party’s congress at Tripoli had elected a socialist-oriented government at the end of the war. It was this latter “Bureau Politique” that Ben Bella ran.

The intervention on his behalf by Col. Houari Boumediene, chief of the Army of National Liberation (Armée de Libération Nationale, ALN), assured both the success of the Bureau Politique and of Ben Bella, who was elected unopposed and with an immense majority to the presidency of the Algerian republic in 1963.

Ben Bella reestablished order in a country disorganised both by the massive departure of French colonists and by the clashes of armed groups. He created a state out of nothing and set aside one-quarter of the budget for national education. Above all else, he inaugurated, under the title autogestion, a series of major agrarian reforms, including the nationalisation—but not the direct state control—of the former colonists’ huge farms.

Ben Bella allied himself with the anti-Zionist Arab states and developed cultural and economic relations with France. He also extricated the country from an important border dispute with Morocco.

Ben Bella’s method of government pleased the Algerian people, but the effects of his policies were not always as beneficial as his generous intentions. Through lack of either time, political lucidity, or planning, Ben Bella governed from day to day in a series of improvised acts, some of which—like his appeal to Algerian women to donate their jewelry to the state—were more spectacular than useful. Ben Bella was unable to restore the FLN, nor was he able to win for it that popular support that would have helped to keep Boumediene in check.

On June 19, 1965, Ben Bella was deposed in a coup led by Boumediene, who installed himself as president; Ben Bella was detained and had little contact with the outside world for 14 years. Following the death of Boumediene in 1978, restrictions on Ben Bella were eased in July 1979, though he remained under house arrest. On October 30, 1980, he was freed. He spent 10 years in exile, returning to Algeria in 1990.

Ben Bella re-entered the political arena soon after his return. He led the Movement for Democracy in Algeria (Mouvement pour la Démocratie en Algérie), a moderate Islamist opposition party he had founded in 1984 while in exile, in the first round of the country’s abortive 1991 parliamentary elections.

Messali Hadj

Ahmed Messali Hadj, (born May 16, 1898, Tlemcen, Algeria - died June 3, 1974, Gouvieux, France), revolutionary Algerian nationalist leader.

Messali emerged in 1926 as the head of an Algerian workers’ association in Paris and spent most of the rest of his life forming pro-independence organisations, militating both in France and Algeria, suffering imprisonment, and taking part in underground activities. 

Messali’s first party, the Étoile Nord-Africaine (North African Star), was dissolved by the French in 1929 after he called for revolt against their colonial rule. In March 1937 he founded the Parti Populaire Algérien (PPA; Algerian Popular Party), which was suppressed only to reemerge in October 1946 as the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD; Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties). 

His influence, however, declined dramatically in the postwar period. In 1954 he formed the Mouvement National Algérien (Algerian National Movement), but this organisation was unable to compete with the Front de Liberation Nationale (National Liberation Front, FLN), a rival party, which came to lead the Algerian struggle for independence. He became politically isolated and spent his final years in France.

Benyoucef Ben Khedda

Benyoucef Ben Khedda, Algerian independence leader (born Feb. 23, 1920, Berrouaghia, Alg.—died Feb. 4, 2003, Algiers, Alg.), negotiated Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, but he was forced from power shortly thereafter.

In 1943, after he protested against French attempts to recruit Algerians in World War II, Ben Khedda was imprisoned for eight months. After the war he became general secretary of the pro-independence organisation headed by Messali Hadj, but he later broke with the party and started his own organisation.

After the radical National Liberation Front (FLN) launched a revolt against French rule in 1954 and France responded with mass arrests, Ben Khedda wrote in a partisan newspaper decrying the French policy. Again he was imprisoned, and on his release he joined the FLN.  He joined the provisional government that the FLN set up in Tunisia, and in 1961 he replaced Ferhat Abbas as head of the provisional government.

A settlement was reached whereby a referendum was held in July 1962, followed by the departure of the French and the triumphant arrival in Algiers of the provisional government. Within weeks, however, Houari Boumediene and Ahmed Ben Bella challenged Ben Khedda for the leadership of the government, and he stepped down.

Ferhat Abbas

Ferhat Abbas, in full Ferhat Mekki Abbas, (born Aug. 24, 1899, Taher, near Jijel, Alg.—died Dec. 24, 1985, Algiers), politician and leader of the national independence movement who served as the first president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic.

Son of a Muslim official in the Algerian civil service, Abbas received an entirely French education at Philippeville (now Skikda) and Constantine and at the University of Algiers. After two years’ service with the French Army, he became a pharmacist at Sétif and was elected first to the municipal council of Sétif and then to the general council in Constantine. Early in his political career, he advocated collaboration with the French, the assimilation of the “native element in French society,” and the abolition of colonialism to bring about the emancipation of the Algerian Muslims as French citizens. Disillusioned by the French in 1938, he organized the Union Populaire Algérienne, which proposed equal rights for French and Algerians while preserving the Algerian culture and language. Nevertheless, at the outbreak of World War II, Abbas enlisted in the medical corps of the French Army.

On Feb. 10, 1943, the “Manifesto of the Algerian People,” prepared by Abbas, was proclaimed. It was subsequently presented to the French and the Allied authorities in North Africa. The manifesto, which reflected a fundamental change in its author’s political position, not only condemned French colonial rule but also called for the application of the principle of self-determination and demanded an Algerian constitution granting equality to all inhabitants of Algeria. In May, Abbas, along with a number of his colleagues, wrote an addendum to the manifesto, which envisioned a sovereign Algerian nation. It was presented to the French on June 26. On its rejection by the French governor general, Ferhat Abbas and an Algerian working-class leader, Messali Hadj, formed the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (AML; Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty), which envisioned an Algerian autonomous republic federated to a renewed, anti-colonial France. After the suppression of the AML and a year’s imprisonment, in 1946 he founded the Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien (UDMA; Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto), which advocated cooperation with France in the formation of the Algerian state. Abbas’ moderate and conciliatory attempts failed to evoke a sympathetic response from the French colonial officials, however, and in 1956 he escaped to Cairo to join the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), an Algerian organization committed to revolutionary struggle for independence from France.

On Sept. 18, 1958, the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic was formed with Ferhat Abbas as president. He resigned in 1961 but was elected president of the Algerian Constituent Assembly in 1962, when Algeria gained independence. Despite his political alliance with the revolutionary and Socialist FLN, he remained an exponent of parliamentary institutions and constitutionalism. To protest the drafting of the Algerian constitution by the FLN outside the Constituent Assembly, he resigned his post as the assembly’s president in August 1963 and was expelled from the FLN. An opponent of the then-president, Ahmed Ben Bella, he was placed under house arrest in 1964 but was released the following year.

Ferhat Abbas described the Algerian War of Independence in La Nuit coloniale (1962; “The Colonial Night”). He is also the author of Le Jeune Algérien: de la colonie vers la province (1931; “The Young Algerian: From Colony to Province”) and Autopsie d’une guerre (1980; “Autopsy of a War”).

Pleistocene Fauna in Algeria

Land of the Homo Mauritanicus

The site of Tighennif (also called Ternifine ) in Northern Algeria, well known for its Homo mauritanicus remains, and probably dating to the late Calabrian, yielded a large assemblage of terrestrial carnivores. Some are identical or probably identical with extant species: Crocuta crocuta and Hyaena hyaena (Hyaenidae), Felis silvestris(Felidae), Mellivora capensis and Poecilictis cf. libyca (Mustelidae), and Vulpes cf. rueppelli (Canidae). 

Saber-toothed Cat and Other Carnivores 

In addition, among felids there is an unidentified leopard-like form; a smaller, more common species assigned to Lynx sp. (a genus quite rare in Africa) but which is certainly different from modern forms, an Homotherium that seems to be the last occurrence of the machairodonts in Africa, and a Panthera aff. leo, which is unfortunately too poorly known to be named. Rare bears do not display all derived features of later North African U.bibersoni. Among canids, the Nyctereutes-like jackal Lupulella mohibiis an endemic North African form known until the late middle Pleistocene, and the hunting dog Lycaon magnusis also clearly distinct from the modern species. A single new species is described, Enhydrictis hoffstetteri, a large, otter-like member of the Mustelidae, of a genus that was previously unknown from Africa, and certainly testifies to North-South dispersal across the Mediterranean at some time during the early Pleistocene.

The Mammals

Besides the carnivores, the updated faunal list of mammals found includes: Homo cf. rhodesiensis, Theropithecusoswaldi, Loxodonta atlantica, Ceratotherium mauritanicum, Equus mauritanicus, Hippopotamus sirensis, Metridiochoerus compactus, Camelus thomasi, Giraffidae indet. cf. Mitilanotherium sp., Tragelaphus algericus, “Bos” bubaloides, Kobussp., Oryx cf. gazella, Hippotragus cf. gigas, Connochaetes taurinusprognu, Parmularius ambiguus, Gazella dracula, Gazella cf. atlantica, Gazella sp., Lepus sp., Ellobius africanus, Paraethomys tighenifae, Arvicanthis arambourgi, Praomys eghrisae, Gerbillus major, Gerbillus cingulatus, Mascaramys medius, and Meriones maximus, Caprini indet.

Evolution

The site of Tighennif , was discovered in 1872. Pomel (1878) gave the first report on fossil finds; he also briefly described as Hyaena spelaeathe first fossil carnivore from this site, and reported a zorilla (striped polecat) skull, while correctly noting that it was probably not fossil. Many more fossils were discovered during the last part of the 19th century. The great antiquity of the site was definitely established by the discovery by Pallary in 1928 of a canine of the saber-tooth cat Homotherium. Arambourg led new excavations in 1931, but the largest ones were conducted by C. Arambourg and R. Hoffstetter from 1954 to1956. Thousands of fossils were collected, together with numerous Acheulean artefacts and several human remains. 

Although these authors reported about their excavations and described the hominin remains, they left aside the other mammalian remains.

Two short field campaigns were conducted by a team led by J.-J.Jaeger et J.-J.Hublinin 1982-83; they resulted in an updated faunal list and a refinement of the stratigraphy and sedimentary context. The bulk of the sediments consists of loose eolian sands, often rubefied, which overlie grey and varicoloured clays. All of these are fossiliferous; Arambourg did not record the origin of the fossils, but it can sometimes be deduced from their facies.

Tighennif is thought to be older than the middle Pleistocene.

The Surviving Wild Cheetahs and Leopards of Algeria

A 2005 expedition to the Ahaggar region of the Algerian Sahara collected over 40 putative carnivore scat samples and proved the existence of cheetahs and leopards in this remote region of Algeria.

Among other carnivores, eight cheetahs and a leopard were found. This is the first time leopards have been recorded in this part of Algeria and the first direct physical evidence of wild leopards in Algeria for almost 50 years. The last one goes back to 1960 in northern Algeria (El-Kala) where the last leopard is said to have been killed.

Overall, the samples collected allowed to identify 8 cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), 1 wildcat (Felis sp), 1 leopard (Panthera pardus), 5 genets (Genetta spp.), 1 banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) and 14 dogs (Canis spp.)

The status of cheetahs in North Africa is poorly known, although they predominantly inhabit the more mountainous regions of the Sahara where water and gazelles are more easily found in this intensely arid region.

Rare Cheetah sightings have also been reported in the Tassili N’Ajjer plateau to the north-east, and also in the Tefedest area, north of the Ahaggar.

Conservative Trends of the Algerian Nationalist Movement

The growing public awareness of events in the Arab world, such as the failed Syrian Revolt against French colonialism in 1925 and the deteriorating situation in “British” Palestine led to a large-scale Arab revolt there in 1936. 

Numerous Algerians travelled to the eastern Arab countries, the Mashriq, for the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca or to be educated in the great centres of Islamic learning. Regional conversations about pan-Islamism or pan-Arabism also reached North Africa via radio and by a transnational newspaper network that linked Algiers, Cairo, Tunis, and even Zanzibar, allowing local organisations with common interests to exchange information and opinions. Thus the notable deterioration in relations between Algeria’s Muslims and its small but centuries-old Jewish community was due not only to the fact that the French had elevated the latter by granting them full citizenship but also to popular outrage at the Zionist project in Palestine. 

The Ulema Association 

A movement of reformist Ulema, or religious scholars, was one of the most important vectors for this Arabist current. The two most prominent figures among the Ulema, Sheikh ‘Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis and Bashir Ibrahimi, typified the movement’s origins in that they both came from established patrician families but received traditional Koranic educations and spent long periods of time in centres of Islamic scholarship outside Algeria. The Ulema were reformist in the sense of being greatly influenced by the Islamic modernist thinkers of the late nineteenth century and by the Salafi movement, which advocated a return to “original” or “orthodox” Islam. Their primary mission was therefore educational and cultural: they founded schools for Arabic instruction and criticised the Maghrib’s indigenous “unorthodox” Islamic institutions such as marabout preachers, Sufi brotherhoods, and the frequent worship of local saints. But in the colonial context, such concerns had inherent political ramifications. Many in the existing religious establishment, for example, were technically French civil servants since the colonial authorities sought to monitor and control what transpired in mosques and Koranic schools. 

The Ulema also taught a nationalist history that directly contradicted the French curriculum’s argument that no Algerian nation had ever existed; Ahmad Tewfik al Madani, who later became an important FLN diplomatic operative, published the first nationalist history book in 1932, Kitab al Jaza’ir (The book of Algeria). Accordingly, Ben Badis publicly responded to Ferhat Abbas’s antinationalist article in 1936 by asserting categorically that “this Muslim population is not part of France, cannot be part of France, and does not want to be part of France.” 

It should be noted that the Ulema did found schools with official sanction, such as the Progress Club in downtown Algiers, which served as a venue for discussion and debate among the Muslim elite, Europeans, representatives of the Jewish community, and so on. 

Bashir Ibrahimi also strove to build a Muslim cultural organisation that would straddle both sides of the Mediterranean, suggesting that political separation of Algeria and France was not his paramount concern. 

But on the whole, one progressively minded French education official was justified in his mournful observation that “the reformist Ulema will end up being the only masters of Arabic in Algeria, alas they will teach Arabic as the language of liberation and resistance!” Notably, Tewfik al Madani and Ben Badis each maintained an active correspondence with the prominent Syrian Arab nationalist thinker the emir Shakib Arslan and with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Amin al-Husayni, a Palestinian nationalist and religious leader who fled the British Mandate after the failure of the Arab revolt there in 1936– 1939. 

In the 1930s a teenage Mostefa Lacheraf, later the FLN’s leading intellectuals, attended both a French lycée in the morning and an Ulema school afterward. In his memoirs, he described the latter as a rich site of political imagination and exchange, or “a kind of sociological cell in full cultural bloom and [where] the contrasting currents of nationalism in the Algeria of those days awoke together.”

Algeria, Genesis of Political Nationalism

NORTH AFRICAN STAR (Etoile Nord Africaine, ENA)

While the political foment in Algeria gathered pace, the movement that was the most direct predecessor of the FLN (French acronyms for National Liberation Front) had been gaining strength across the Mediterranean, in France, since the early 1920s. 

Acquiring the Skills: Communist Tutelage

Founded among the metropole’s working-class Arab immigrant community, the Etoile Nord Africaine (North African Star, ENA) party was a precursor to the FLN in a philosophical and organisational sense for which it owed a great debt to communist tutelage.

For many, Wilson’s refusal to support anticolonial causes in 1919 left a bitter taste— the influential Egyptian journalist Mohamed Haykal judged it “the ugliest of treacheries ... the most profound repudiation of principles!”— and this disillusionment helped propel some nationalists toward the Soviet Union in their search for guidance and support. 

Indeed Messali Hadj, who quickly became the ENA’s recognised leader after helping to found the party in Paris in 1926, later credited the efforts of pied-noir communists for his initial political awakening, and the PCF (French Communist Party) closely assisted the party’s development. At that time he was a shop boy and his cofounders were factory workers, and like many other such anticolonial groups, the ENA was intimately enmeshed in the French left- wing milieu.

Messali actually married a PCF militant, and a 1929 Paris police report claimed sixteen of the twenty-eight members of the ENA’s central committee were also members of the communist party. Moreover, communist mentorship undoubtedly influenced the ENA’s doctrine. Not only was the ENA the first Algerian group to advocate consistently for outright independence, but its official party program for 1933 also called for “the complete transfer to the Algerian State of the banks, mines, railroads, ports and public services monopolised by the conquerors; the confiscation of the large estates monopolised by the feudal allies of the conquerors, the colonisers and the financial firms; and the transfer of this seized land to the peasants.” 

Messali and his comrades had internalised Lenin’s argument that imperialism was the product of European capitalism.

The ENA also participated in anticolonial transnational forums such as the 1927 Anti- imperialism Congress in Belgium, where future national leaders like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal formed the League against Imperialism, a short- lived Comintern-sponsored initiative that nevertheless created many durable relations between far-flung activists. 

Other intercolonial exchanges happened outside the communist umbrella, though usually with some connection to the diverse left wing of French politics. For example, the ENA cooperated with the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (Negro Race Defense League), a black African movement founded by Senghor and the French Sudanese (Mali today) activist Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, to protest the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935– 1936. The January 1935 issue of the party’s newspaper El Ouma (Nation, or Community) urged that “Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Annamese [i.e., Vietnamese], Malagasy, Senegalese, etc., get together, find common ground ... and work together closely, shoulder to shoulder with the French intellectual and manual proletariat for their economic, political and social independence. Oppressed people from the colonies, unite to protect your interests.”

The Great Rift

By the mid- 1930s, however, there were clear divergences between the communist and anticolonial agendas, and Messali’s movement experienced a particularly angry parting of the ways with former comrades in the Marxist mainstream. The immediate cause was geopolitical: obeying Stalin’s orders, the PCF and its new Algerian offshoot, the PCA, deprecated the anticolonial cause to focus on forging an anti-Fascist coalition in Europe, and to keep Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in power in Paris. 

Thus the ENA condemned the Blum-Viollette reform bill of 1936, which would have further expanded the Muslim franchise in Algeria and “assimilated” thousands of "évolués", as a colonialist project that betrayed socialist principles. Worse still, the government ultimately caved in to pied noir outrage on the matter. 

In January 1937, Messali penned a recriminatory letter to L’Humanité, the main French communist newspaper, accusing the PCF of turning its back on a decade of friendship, shared adventures, and shared imprisonments.

Paradigm Shift, Back to Roots

Philosophically, however, Messali and communism were already drifting apart because he prioritised national liberation over proletarian revolution. While the ENA had participated in various inter-Arab and pan-Islamic initiatives, its leader experienced a revelation when he spent six months in 1935– 1936 hiding from the French police in Geneva, where he kept close company with the influential Arab nationalist figure Shakib Arslan. “Certainly, I am Syrian,” Shakib told the Algerian, “but above all I am an Arab, a Muslim, and a combatant.” He encouraged Messali to reconcile with the Islamic reformist movement in his homeland, which the latter had seen as an elitist project of Algeria’s haughty Ulema, because jihad was a powerful means to national liberation. 

Likewise, the Tunisian nationalist (and future president) Habib Bourguiba recommended combining modern political mobilisation with the expression of national cultural identity: “Both elements are indispensable: the first to spread the Arabic language, history, and religion, the other to organise and struggle.”

Messali saw the wisdom of their counsel. When he returned to Algeria in 1936 to join the surging political ferment there, he sought to combine the political methods and message of social justice that he had developed in France with a new emphasis on cultural “authenticity”—starting with the long flowing beard and robes of a traditional Maghribi Sheikh.

Algeria and the Wilsonian Moment

The Fourteen Points

In the closing stages of World War I, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, unveiled a sweeping vision for a new international order based on “liberal internationalist” principles. In his famous “Fourteen Points” speech to the US Congress in January 1918, Wilson called for the creation of an international organisation, a “league of nations,” that would maintain the peace by regulating disputes between countries, great or small. He stressed the principle of “national self-determination,” arguing that every people had the right to choose their own government, citing specifically his desire to see an independent Poland and independent Turkey emerge from the debris of the Russian and Ottoman Empires, respectively. 

Wilson deliberately disseminated his ideas through the international press and by means of increasingly powerful radio technology, in order to raise widespread support for his agenda before he arrived at the momentous peace conference convened at the Palace of Versailles, in January 1919. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and the United States would decide the fate of their defeated foes— as well as huge swaths of the globe and its inhabitants. 

Wilson was thinking principally of east-central Europe, not “the Orient”, in his advocacy of self-determination and equality between nations. Unintentionally however, his ideas also energised politics in many parts of the colonial world, where activists in places as far apart and diverse as Syria, Korea, Ireland, China, and India championed the Fourteen Points. Rather awkwardly from a diplomatic perspective, crowds of “colonials” shouted the American president’s name in mass protests against their British and French overlords. 

In Egypt

One of the largest such commotions occurred in Egypt, where massive unrest broke out across the country in early 1919 in response to Britain’s tightening control. The initial spark for the uprising came when the British rejected the demand of an otherwise moderate establishment politician, Saa’d Zaghlul, to send a wafd delegation to Versailles to make the case for Egyptian independence. When repression alone failed to quell the unrest, the colonial authorities did finally try to placate the protesters by allowing the wafd to proceed to the conference in April—but only after ensuring that neither Wilson nor anyone else of consequence would receive them. 

The American president’s rebuff would live in infamy in Cairo. “Here was the man of the Fourteen Points ... denying the Egyptian people its right to self- determination and recognising the British protectorate over Egypt,” wrote the famous journalist Mohammed Haykal. “Is this not the ugliest of treacheries?! Is it not the most profound repudiation of principles?!” 

Zaghlul’s Wafd Party, named after the failed mission to Versailles, would play a central role in Egyptian politics until the 1950s. Wilson made less of an ideological impression than a geopolitical one; he did not suggest new possibilities of what independence might be. Rather, he opened up new practical avenues of achieving it by positioning the Anglo-Egyptian power relationship in a wider international context. 

From Egypt to Algeria

Engaged Muslim Algerians, who held Cairo to be the capital of the Arab world, certainly followed Egyptian developments (an early Young Algerian newspaper, El Haq, or “truth,” was subtitled “The Young Egyptian”). The war’s end brought increased instability in Algeria, too. By 1918, a full third of working- age Muslim Algerian men were employed in France as either soldiers or labourers, and they returned home with a new perspective on the world as well as expectations of reward for their service. 

German and Turkish propaganda had also tried to stir up anti-colonial sentiment in French North Africa during the war, and the Algerian Arab public enthusiastically cheered on Kemal Atatürk’s forces in their war with Greece, which broke out in May 1919, because they viewed it as a national struggle against Franco-British imperialism. In this light, the modest political reforms that Georges Clemenceau’s government implemented in February 1919— increasing to 500,000 the number of Muslims allowed to vote in a dual-college system that gave Arabs very limited say over their own affairs without challenging the pieds-noirs’ supremacy— were an inadequate response to rising discontent and a surge in directionless, uncoordinated violence. 

Early Militant Nationalism : The Emir Khaled

Yet even in these circumstances it was very surprising that the emir Khaled, the assimilationist, demanded in January 1919 that an Algerian delegation be allowed to attend the Versailles conference in a capacity similar to the representatives of Britain’s dominions.

Khaled's Letter to Wilson

Like Zaghlul, he set out for Paris with four companions in May, though he too managed only to deliver a letter to Woodrow Wilson’s staff. Addressed to “the honourable President of American Liberty,” it asked that an investigatory delegation be dispatched to Algeria in order to “decide our future fate, under the aegis of the Society of Nations.” Naturally, the letter made no impact on the Versailles proceedings, and there is no evidence that the American president actually read it. Nevertheless, the endeavour incensed the pied-noir community, who branded Khaled a dangerous subversive in thrall to foreign designs and succeeded in having him exiled to Damascus in 1924. 

The substance of Khaled’s appeal to Wilson, undeniably at least proto-nationalist in its implications, was so discordant with his otherwise impeccable record as a Francophile assimilationist that scholars believed for many years that the pied-noir lobby had simply made the story up. 

Yet eminent French historian Charles-Robert Ageron was eventually stunned to find a copy of the letter to Wilson in the American archives, prompting him to completely re-evaluate Khaled as the budding nationalist. 

Revealingly, the FLN’s “official” history also came to treat him as such, reflecting the legitimacy conferred posthumously by this fleeting diplomatic initiative in spite of the rest of Khaled’s recorded positions being so anathema to the nationalist narrative. 

Even if he did sincerely renounce the letter’s implications, his having written it demonstrates how new methods of political action could radicalise the goals those methods were meant to serve.

French Algeria: What Was it Like for the Natives?

Although the conquest began in 1830, in terms of its basic political and economic characteristics, l’Algérie française (French Algeria) proper emerged in 1870, when the growing number of European settlers, or colons insisted that civilian governance take over from the military. Immigration accelerated as the colons set about taking over most of Algeria’s prime farmland and building a society whose raison d’être was the exploitation of the native Muslim population and their descendants. 

Integral Part of France

In 1881, the government in Paris declared Algeria an integral part of sovereign French territory, in accordance with the constitution of the Third Republic. From that point, the colons in Algeria were “normal” French citizens who just happened to live in three départements (France’s basic administrative regions) that were located across the Mediterranean but legally identical to, say, Normandy or Provence. 

Native Code

Like their compatriots on the mainland, the Algerian French elected their local deputies to the National Assembly in Paris, where they formed an uncompromising, united bloc on settler-colonial issues. At the same time, however, the 1881 Code de l’indigénat (Native Code) relegated Algeria’s Muslims to an entirely separate and repressive legal framework that sharply curtailed personal freedoms, neglected due process for criminal matters, and placed domestic matters under the auspices of Islamic courts. 

Subjects Not Citizens

Subjects not citizens, most Muslim Algerians lived in the communes mixtes (mixed communities), areas whose administrators and judges (cadis) were appointed by the colonial authorities. Therefore, the defining division of colonial Algerian society was that between Muslim and non-Muslim — a truth made explicit in the 1870 Crémieux Decrees that extended French citizenship to Algeria’s 25,000 Jews (a community that boasted many centuries of history in that land) and stipulated that those very few Muslim évolués (literally, “evolved”) who were deemed worthy of French citizenship had to renounce Islam first. In social terms, some of the old elites did integrate into the colonial system, while a thin strata of middle- and working-class Arabs gradually emerged in the larger towns and cities in the twentieth century, but the vast majority of Algeria’s Muslims belonged to either the near-destitute peasantry or the pool of cheap labour that served colon farms and colon homes.

Algeria and the Third World Project

With independence achieved in July 1962, the new République Algérienne Démocratique et Populaire (People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, RADP) continued to express its identity and pursue its ambitions through those relationships and international initiatives that its diplomats referred to as “this Third World project.” 

Forged in the crucible of the FLN’s pioneering international campaign, that unusually capable diplomatic team allowed Algeria to assume disproportionate responsibility, in relation to its size, for the maintenance of globe-spanning coalitions like Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77 (G77) that maximised the developing countries’ influence in world affairs. 

In the same spirit, the Algerians played a central role in the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in April 1963, which they considered the prototype for a postcolonial order free of systemic Western interference. At the same time, portraying their country as a “pilot state,”.

Ben Bella (first President of independent Algeria) and his colleagues presented Algeria’s socialist experiment as an example for others to follow. They accepted an influx of foreign anarchists, Trotskyists, and other assorted fellow militants and freedom fighters who were eager to build a new world amid the wreckage of colonialism. In the words of a French diplomat posted to the embassy in Algiers in the early 1960s, the atmosphere there was “simultaneously convivial, revolutionary, disorganised, and generous.” 

For those disillusioned with both the Western and Eastern examples, Algeria seemed set to fulfil the Third World’s promise of a third way, a better way.

Postcolonial Algeria, 1962-78

The creation of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria was formally proclaimed on September 25, 1962. The following day, after being named premier, Ahmed Ben Bella formed a cabinet that linked the leadership of the three power bases—the army, the party, and the government. However, Ben Bella's ambitions and authoritarian tendencies ultimately led the triumvirate to unravel and provoked increasing discontent among Algerians. 

The war of national liberation and its aftermath had severely disrupted Algeria's society and economy. In addition to the physical destruction, the exodus of the colons deprived the country of most of its managers, civil servants, engineers, teachers, physicians, and skilled workers. The homeless and displaced numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many suffering from illness, and some 70 percent of the work force was unemployed. The months immediately following independence had witnessed the pell-mell rush of Algerians, their government, and its officials to claim the property and jobs left behind by the Europeans. In the 1963 March Decrees, Ben Bella declared that all agricultural, industrial, and commercial properties previously owned and operated by Europeans were vacant, thereby legalizing confiscation by the state. 

A new constitution drawn up under close FLN supervision was approved by nationwide referendum in September 1963, and Ben Bella was confirmed as the party's choice to lead the country for a five-year term. Under the new constitution, Ben Bella as president combined the functions of chief of state and head of government with those of supreme commander of the armed forces. He formed his government with no need for legislative approval and was solely responsible for the definition and direction of its policies. Essentially, he had no effective institutional check on his powers. 

Opposition leader Hosine Ait-Ahmed quit the National Assembly in 1963 to protest the increasingly dictatorial tendencies of the regime and formed a clandestine resistance movement, the Front of Socialist Forces (Front des Forces Socialistes—FFS) dedicated to overthrowing the Ben Bella regime by force. Late summer 1963 saw sporadic incidents attributed to the FFS. More serious fighting broke out a year later. The army moved quickly and in force to crush the rebellion. As minister of defense, Houari Boumediene had no qualms about sending the army to put down regional uprisings because he felt they posed a threat to the state. However, when Ben Bella attempted to co-opt allies from among some of those regionalists, tensions increased between Boumediene and Ben Bella. On June 19, 1965, Boumediene deposed Ben Bella in a military coup d'état that was both swift and bloodless.

Boumediene immediately dissolved the National Assembly and suspended the 1963 constitution. Political power resided in the Council of the Revolution, a predominantly military body intended to foster cooperation among various factions in the army and the party. Boumediene’s position as head of government and head of state was not secure initially, but following attempted coups and a failed assassination attempt in 1967–68, Boumediene succeeded in consolidating power. Eleven years after he took power and after much public debate, a long-promised new constitution was promulgated in November 1976, and Boumediene was elected president with a 95 percent majority.

Boumediene’s death on December 27, 1978, set off a struggle within the FLN to choose a successor.

source : Library of Congress, 2008
 

Islam and Dynasties in Algeria

The first Arab military expeditions into the Maghrib, between 642 and 669, resulted in the spread of Islam. By 711 the Umayyads (a Muslim dynasty based in Damascus from 661 to 750), helped by Berber converts to Islam, had conquered all of North Africa. 

In 750 the Abbasids succeeded the Umayyads as Muslim rulers and moved the caliphate to Baghdad. 

Under the Abbasids, the Rustumid imamate (761–909) actually ruled most of the central Maghrib from Tahirt, southwest of Algiers. The imams gained a reputation for honesty, piety, and justice, and the court of Tahirt was noted for its support of scholarship. The Rustumid imams failed, however, to organize a reliable standing army, which opened the way for Tahirt’s demise under the assault of the Fatimid dynasty. 

With their interest focused primarily on Egypt and Muslim lands beyond, the Fatimids left the rule of most of Algeria to the Zirids (972–1148), a Berber dynasty that centered significant local power in Algeria for the first time. This period was marked by constant conflict, political instability, and economic decline. Following a large incursion of Arab bedouins from Egypt beginning in the first half of the eleventh century, the use of Arabic spread to the countryside, and sedentary Berbers were gradually Arabized.

The Almoravid (“those who have made a religious retreat”) movement developed early in the eleventh century among the Sanhaja Berbers of the western Sahara. The movement’s initial impetus was religious, an attempt by a tribal leader to impose moral discipline and strict adherence to Islamic principles on followers. But the Almoravid movement shifted to engaging in military conquest after 1054. By 1106 the Almoravids had conquered Morocco, the Maghrib as far east as Algiers, and Spain up to the Ebro River. 

Like the Almoravids, the Almohads (“unitarians”) found their inspiration in Islamic reform. The Almohads took control of Morocco by 1146, captured Algiers around 1151, and by 1160 had completed the conquest of the central Maghrib. The zenith of Almohad power occurred between 1163 and 1199. For the first time, the Maghrib was united under a local regime, but the continuing wars in Spain overtaxed the resources of the Almohads, and in the Maghrib their position was compromised by factional strife and a renewal of tribal warfare. In the central Maghrib, the Zayanids founded a dynasty at Tlemcen in Algeria. 

For more than 300 years, until the region came under Ottoman suzerainty in the sixteenth century, the Zayanids kept a tenuous hold in the central Maghrib. Many coastal cities asserted their autonomy as municipal republics governed by merchant oligarchies, tribal chieftains from the surrounding countryside, or the privateers who operated out of their ports. Nonetheless, Tlemcen, the “pearl of the Maghrib,” prospered as a commercial center.

source : Library of Congress, May 2008

Algeria: Political Timeline, 1954-2020

1954 - Creation of the FLN (National Liberation Front); the MTLD dissolves, superseded by the MNA.  National liberation revolution begins.

1955 - Major war escalation; huge increase in French army presence in Algeria.

1956 - Leftist "peace coalition" wins French elections; "special powers" voted by French National Assembly for major increase in repression; FLN Soum­mam Congress, creation of CNRA; French hijack plane with FLN leaders; exchanges of bombings in Algiers.

1957 - French paratroopers launch repression in Algiers; murder of Abane Ramdane.

1958 - Algiers-originated military coup ends French Fourth Republic, replaced by de Gaulle and fifth Republic; creation of GPRA (Provisional Algerian Govern­ment) led by Ferhat Abbas.

1959 - De Gaulle announces principle of Algerian self-determination.

1960 - First publicised peace talks; failure of new coup attempt in Algiers; Mani­festo of the 121 in France; UN recognition of Algerian right to independence.

1961 - Creation of OAS; failed "generals coup" in Algiers.

1962 - Evian peace accord; national independence; competition for power won with force by Ben Bella-Boumediene coalition; flight of Europeans and emer­gence of biens vacants, first wave of workers' self-management.

1963 - Government expansion and "regularisation" of autogestion sector; FFS created; Kabyle uprising.

1964 - First FLN congress and adoption of "Algiers Charter".

1965 - Boumediene-led coup deposes Ben Bella, new regime formed; new opposition group (ORP) quickly repressed.

1968 - First waves of industrial sector nationalisations.

1971 - Nationalisation of petrochemicals sector, new major source of state revenue; agrarian reform launched.

1976 - National Charter (new constitution) proclaimed, calls for generalised use of Arabic language.

1978 - Death of Boumediene.

1979 - Chadli becomes president.

1980 - "Berber Spring" demonstrations and rebellion.

1981 - First underground radical Islamist guerrilla group (the MIA).

1982 - Arabisation of basic schooling and some university sectors completed.

1985 - Rapid drop of world oil prices; creation of Algerian human rights league, LADDH; Chadli embraces economic reforms : liberalisation/privatisation.

1987 - Beginning of IMF-imposed economic restructuring.

1988 - Huge riots and demonstrations in Algiers and massive repression "5th October". 

1989 - New constitution creates multi-party system and freer press; Islamist FIS launched.

1990 - Huge separate demonstrations by FIS and FFS in Algiers; FIS sweeps municipal elections.

1991 - New rapid drop in oil export prices; further IMF-and World Bank-imposed economic restructuring; clashes between police and FIS forces; FIS decisively wins first round of National Assembly elections.

1992 - Military coup prevents second election round, Chadli forced out, state of emergency proclaimed; State High Committee formed, headed by Boudiaf; first major armed clashes between Islamists and state forces, formation of radical Islamist GIA; Boudiaf assassinated.

1993 - Escalation of violent clashes; many assassinations of intellectuals, journalists, professionals.

1994 - Zeroual appointed president; first FIS negotiations with regime and other political parties; supposed-GIA attacks in France; restructuring of Algerian external debt with strict IMF requirements.

1995 - Pact of Rome Platform; Zeroual elected president.

1997 - FIS/AIS ceasefire.

1998 - Zeroual retires.

1999 - Bouteflika "elected" president; FIS/AIS accepts disarmament; Civil Con­cord passed in referendum.

2000 - Amnesty for thousands of AIS militants; GIA and GSPC continue guerrilla war.

2001 - Strife in Kabylia, emergence of Arouch movement; huge march to Algiers.

2004 - Bouteflika elected for a second term.

2005 - Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation approved by referendum, allows further amnesties and muzzles critiques.

2006 - GSPC allegedly becomes AQMI, local affiliate of AI-Qaida.

2007 - Trial of Khalifa financial and business empire symbolises massive corrup­tion of regime.

2009 - Bouteflika elected to third term.

2011 - New wave of riots and demonstrations throughout Algeria; continuous demands by political reformers for regime change.

2011 - Feb 3, Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said the state of emergency, in force for the past 19 years, will be lifted in the very near future.

2012 - May 10, Algeria held parliamentary elections. 44 political parties competed for 462 seats. The ruling party dominated elections, taking nearly half of the seats in the 462 person assembly, dramatically increasing its share.  President Bouteflika's National Liberation Front tightened its grip on power by securing 220 seats.

2014 - Apr 17, Algeria held presidential elections. Preliminary results indicated that President Bouteflika with 15 years in power won a 4th term.

2017 - May 4, Algerians voted in parliamentary elections. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's party and its coalition ally won a majority in parliamentary elections in a vote marred by low turnout.

2017 - May 24, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika appointed Abdelmadjid Tebboune as prime minister, replacing Abdelmalek Sellal in the wake of parliamentary elections. Tebboune (71) was the housing minister of the outgoing government.

2017 - Aug 16, In Algeria Ahmed Ouyahia began a fourth term as Prime Minister and held that position until March 12, 2019.

2019 - Feb 22, In Algeria several hundred demonstrators rallied in Algiers in defiance of a ban on demonstrations, and in other cities as well, against a bid by ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to win a fifth term. 

2019 - Apr 1, Algeria's Pres. Abdelaziz Bouteflika said he will step down before his fourth term ends on April 28.

2019 - Apr 3, Algeria's Constitutional Council said it had accepted Bouteflika's resignation and informed parliament that his position was officially vacant. The speaker of the upper house of parliament,  Abdelkader Bensalah (77), acts as interim leader for up to 90 days during which a presidential election must be organised.

2019        Dec 28, Algeria's newly elected Pres. Abdelmadjid Tebboune reached beyond the political class to name educator and diplomat Abdelaziz Djerad as prime minister.

2020        Feb 26, Algeria reported its first cases of the coronavirus.