Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed - A Review

Evans, Martin, and John Phillips. Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. xvi + 352 pages. Acknowledgements. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Martin Evans is an academic, John Phillips is a journalist, and together they have produced a readable and quite thorough book on Algeria. I noticed some minor errors, such as a reference to William Burns as the “Deputy Secretary of State for North African Affairs”, rather than Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (p. 288). But there is a wealth of detail here, much of it not available elsewhere in English.

For the reader who has little or no background in Algeria, or in North Africa in general, this may be a particularly useful book. It has some material on the period before the French invasion in 1830, locating Algeria in the history of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. This is very brief, and the authors really pick up the story on 14 June 1830, when French troops landed at Sidi Ferruch, just west of Algiers. The story of relations with the French, the continued Algerian attempts to throw off the colonizers, the suppression of Algerian culture, and the encouragement of European settlement on the fertile lands near the Mediterranean coast will be familiar to anyone who has read Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace. But it is well-told here.

Horne’s book may be better on the period of the War of Independence and its precursors, beginning with the 1945 violence at Sétif, but Evans and Phillips tell the story competently, and they have the advantage of some additional information. They take us through the formation of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), which became the country’s single political party until the late 1980s. This is where the authors pick up their theme: they assert that many of Algeria’s current problems are rooted in the suppression of historical memory. Few, if any, Algerians know the history of their country, or they know it only through interested accounts by the French, the FLN, or Islamist preachers.

Thus, the French tried to suppress the memory of an independent Algeria, to privilege Europeans over Arabs, Christians and Jews over Muslims, and Francophones over speakers of Arabic. The FLN, in its turn, suppressed the history of the in-fighting within the independence movement, asserting that there was one war, led by the FLN, all of whose one million martyrs were victims of the French. Actually, the military formations of the FLN, which were based in Morocco and Tunisia, did relatively little of the fighting against the French, and were, therefore, in a position to wipe out internal opposition when the French gave up the fight. After Houari Boumedienne, of the Oujda group in the army, ousted Ahmed Ben Bella in a coup in 1965, Ben Bella’s role disappeared from accounts of Algeria’s early days.

The authors assert, as does Horne, that the Islamic (and Islamist) element in the fight for independence has been overlooked, partly because the FLN’s image of the revolution allowed for no divisions. When the Islamists arose in the 1980s under the banner of the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut), it was an unwelcome shock to the military leaders behind the government. The military coup of 1992, which stopped elections the FIS was certain to win, was welcomed in some circles (including in France and the United States), but it led to a period of bloodshed in which at least 100,000 and possibly close to one million Algerians died. Again the opacity of Algerian politics is demonstrated by the widespread ignorance of who committed many of the atrocities, and for whom they were ultimately working.

The authors take us up to the period of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was Foreign Minister, I believe, when I was in Algiers in 1979 and 1980. Evans and Phillips argue, with a good deal of supporting evidence, that Bouteflika has been a front for the generals, whose corrupt control of the Algerian economy, particularly imports and exports, would be threatened by any real change in the regime. Finally, the authors argue that the problems of the Algerian economy, society, and polity cannot be resolved without facing up to the past, acknowledging wrong-doing by the military and the security forces, as well as by the Salafists, and giving the Algerian people a real stake in their society.

Evans and Phillips, out of the good European leftist tradition, place too much emphasis, perhaps, on the forces of imperialism; France and the United States have certainly tried to influence the course of events in Algeria, and their interests may not be those of the Algerian people, but most of Algeria’s problems are internal. Evans and Phillips identify quite correctly Algeria’s single biggest problem: youth unemployment. Unemployment in Algeria may be as high as 30%, and 75-80% of those unemployed are young men. That unemployment, in turn, may or may not be due to corruption in the higher levels of government, but it is certain that the government has not managed to invest its oil and gas revenues to create productive employment.

These unemployed young men have become the foot soldiers of various insurgent movements, left, right, and Salafist. The Islamist rebel group GSPC (the French initials for the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) has renamed itself the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb. Algeria is an obvious recruiting ground for extremist groups. And Evans and Phillips conclude that there is no chance of reforming Algeria as long as the generals have the “war on terror” as an excuse for their suppression of dissent.

This is grim reading, and a lot of the analysis in this book is very accurate. The real question, one to which the authors have no answer, is whether there is any way out of the impasse in which Algeria has entrapped itself. Another round of internal violence may have to play itself out, unless the government is prepared to commit itself to a thorough-going reform of the political system.