The Other Battle of Algiers

Abstract

Algeria is most vivid in the imaginations of many non-Algerians as it was depicted by Gillo Pontecorvo and Yacef Saadi in their now-classic 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers. Set in the Algerian capital, it animated the city with revolution, showing men running clumsily through the winding streets of the Casbah, the old Islamic city, disguised in the archetypical, enveloping white veil worn by Algéroises women. Their heavy shoes, visible beneath the hems of these disguises, is what ultimately gives them away to the French military officers. The wide, well-swept streets of the European district of Bab el Oued are shot from the perspective of an unlucky vegetable seller. He is depicted staring up at wrought-iron balconies, over which lean enraged settlers bent on scapegoating him for the assassination of French police officers throughout Algiers. These strategic killings were actually conducted by agents of the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN), an act that constituted one of the opening shots of the Battle of Algiers in 1956, itself an important escalation in a war of liberation from the French that lasted from 1954 to mid-summer of 1962. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, fictional representations of legendary militants Zohra Drif, Samia Lakdari, and Djamila Bouhaired pass checkpoints into the French quarter wearing European drag and carrying beach baskets filled with bomb components.In real life, Zohra Drif walked out of the Casbah and into one of the centers of European urban life at the time, the Place Bugeaud, named for French military officer Maréchal Bugeaud. The Maréchal had won renown for defeating Emir Abdel Kader, a 19th-century Algerian military leader who was a key figure in one of the many waves of armed resistance to French conquest. A monumental bronze statue of the Maréchal graced the center of the square at the time of The Battle of Algiers, which Drif passed on her way to a popular café named the Milk Bar, where she was to place one of the most explosive and controversial bombs of the war before walking back out into the viscous Mediterranean sunlight.The Milk Bar and the elegant urban square flanked by 19th-century French architecture still exist. The café is across the street from the Third World Bookstore, though its name has been translated into Arabic script on one side of its façade. Bugeaud’s statue has been replaced by an equally monumental bronze statue of Abdel Kader, the man he vanquished in battle. Drif became a lawyer, and for many years ran a law office out of one of those elegant 19th-century buildings facing Abdel Kader’s raised scimitar. The monumental substitution now distracts from the severe infrastructural neglect in both traditional Muslim districts and in the colonial neighborhoods of contemporary Algiers.When the French left Algeria after 132 years of colonial rule, they left an economic and architectural landscape built to disenfranchise and control indigenous populations. There is, undoubtedly, a direct link between this history and the state of Algiers today, but it cannot be simply drawn. Algérois urban planning has a conflicted legacy, one perpetuated by a post-independence government that long assumed issues could be resolved by simply replacing settlers with Algerians. After the French fled the country in 1962, the government ignored bigger problems. It assumed the housing stock left behind would be sufficient to meet local demand, and it maintained the legacy of the colonial urban planning program, the Constantine Plan, for more than a decade after independence without questioning its ideological ground.Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Algeria lived through the Black Decade, a period of extremist religious violence that divided families and left hundreds of thousands dead. French historian Benjamin Stora is one voice among many who argue that this moment was at least partly the result of a general amnesty on both sides for crimes committed during the war of liberation. Just as there was no collective mourning process after the war, or a broad effort to recount its effects on everyday Algerians, there has also not been any substantive consideration of Algiers as a city designed to function as a colonial mechanism. It’s likely that efforts have been stymied by the fact that documentation of urban policies is notoriously hard to come by, and often didn’t reflect on-the-ground realities: While the government would say it did things one way, the truth was always much more complicated. But the field is not entirely blank. Since the 1950s, films produced in Algeria by Algerians have elegantly illustrated some of the ways people came to live in the city, and how their lives have been shaped by its tumultuous history.As the colonial center for the region, Algiers was rebuilt for French settlers and the colonial administration over the 19th and early 20th centuries. Architect Abdelnour Djellouli has argued that during this period, the city was constructed specifically to exclude Algerians. This was not only true of checkpoints built during the war to control the flow of labor in and out of the Casbah and the European districts, but at every level of design. The 19th-century French city, with its giant boulevards and floor-to-ceiling windows facing onto the street, was intended as a counterpoint to the closed social universes of the Casbah. Algiers is built on a curving hillside in tiers that slope into and around an enormous bay. The honeycomb structure of the old city was particularly well adapted to its environment, scaling the steep landscape incrementally, and responding to natural flow patterns of rainwater and to the luminosity of the Southern Mediterranean. Houses in the Casbah are large, built for extended family structures in which several generations live together around a central, interior courtyard, where everything important happens. Streets are built like capillaries rather than arteries, winding between hollow volumes that compose the old city.The French considered the urban fabric of the Casbah chaotic and anarchic, just as its people were considered irrational and degenerate. Colonialism sought to tear open the old walled city, to force upon it an arterial logic. It mandated a transparent city plan, one governed by geometric regularity, and plotted according to the “rational” perspective on space produced by Haussmannian boulevards. It began by destroying and replacing what is now called the Lower Casbah, the sections on flat land near the harbor, before branching out to either side of the older settlement. The colonial city eventually surrounded the Casbah, suffocating the parts it could not simply destroy and restructure.Architecture scholars Karim Hadjri and Mohamed Osmani point out that over the course of the second half of the 20th century, “Algiers ‘dilated’ from a single core, the Casbah, to a complex conglomerate of urban units, stretching out in a long curve along the coastline.” This development pattern was the result of late colonial policy: While the old core of the city, the Upper Casbah, was permitted to remain in its ancient form, populated by Arabs and ethnic Berber Kabyles, by the early 20th century the rest of the city’s demographic was largely European. Rural migrants and the forcibly displaced were relegated to informal settlements called bidonvilles on the outskirts of the metropolitan area. These settlements formed a ring around the colonial city.In the post-colonial period, urban planning focused on new construction in these zones, pushing the most destitute further out along the sea. The Casbah was classed a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1992, and as a symbol of Algerian nationalism, its rehabilitation has been a core government priority since the 1960s, yet old houses regularly collapse from structural insecurity. A powerful earthquake in 2003 contributed to the decline of the Casbah’s architectural integrity, leaving the medina’s sloping, labyrinthine fabric dotted with voids of rubble, its streets fixed with wooden scaffolding to maintain supporting walls on either side of its passage. Newer developments fared even worse, with entire eight- and nine-story modernist housing blocks completely destroyed by aftershocks.Today, Algiers is a city of relatively isolated neighborhoods that have developed independently in response to the urgent pressure of a booming population. Since the 1960s, the city has grown by nearly half a million people each decade, and though there has been some low-income housing construction—mostly notably the Socialist Villages and the New Urban Housing Zones (ZHUN) of the 1970s—there have not been any sustained efforts at maintaining or renovating either the Casbah or the now-overcrowded old colonial districts. Further, as geographer Nora Semmoud argues, in the later decades of the 20th century, space in Algeria was “brutally shaped by the civil war.” But Algiers is recovering, as ambitious plans for the development of the Bay of Algiers and the current re-conceptualization of the city as an African eco-metropolis attest. Still, the legacy of officials having managed the city’s population like an ongoing crisis remains an indelible part of urban reality, especially for the economically vulnerable.Algiers entered the post-colonial period as a city designed to remind Algerians of their place in the erstwhile order. This problem was not attenuated by the literal appropriation of apartments and offices owned by European settlers. On the eve of Algerian independence from France in 1962, roughly a million settlers of diverse European origins left the African side of the Mediterranean to return to the continent. Most were French, but there were also Spanish, Italian, Maltese, and Polish migrants, all of whom had become naturalized French citizens. Some Europeans left out of fear of violence by the National Liberation Army; others feared becoming collateral damage in a vitriolic revolt by the far-right European militia, the Secret Army Organization (OAS).The exodus took place very quickly, essentially over the summer, in a manner that caught both the National Liberation Front and the French government off guard. This surprise was in keeping—at least on the French side—with a general misunderstanding of the depth of ill will between settlers and their former subjects. In Algiers alone, 300,000 settlers abandoned more than 98,000 housing units. People simply left, handing their keys to trusted servants or just walking away from their property and belongings to board the boats to Marseille. While many farms and industrial facilities in the outlying wilaya (the equivalent of states under the Franco-Algerian administration) were sabotaged, the center of Algiers was left relatively unscathed by the mass departure.After assuming control, the new socialist government nationalized all abandoned properties and officially took charge of reallocating lodging with preference for those men and their families who had served in the Algerian Liberation Army, the armed wing of the FLN, during the war. This policy is vividly described in Algérie du possible (A Possible Algeria), a 2016 film directed by Viviane Candas, who was the daughter of a French lawyer partly responsible for the legal architecture behind the nationalization of real estate. Simply put, the new Algerian state considered all abandoned properties to be spoils of war. The official stance was firm and idealistic, and it could afford to be: Algeria was in a strong position internationally and in metropolitan France at the end of the war. As historian Matthew Connelly has masterfully outlined, in the 1950s Algerian negotiators began to implicate the American, British, German, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, and Egyptian governments in their claim for national sovereignty. Under new Algerian laws, private French citizens would not be remunerated, and the redistribution of property was to be at the sole discretion of the government, at least in theory.In the chaos that resulted, Algerians from the Casbah and from the neighborhoods bordering the affluent center took over apartments, villas, hotels, and bars almost as fast as their colonial inhabitants were fleeing. This shift had two major effects: The more established families in the Casbah, attracted to the modern conveniences and better infrastructure, moved en masse to these European districts, resulting in an eventual disinvestment in the older part of the city by the Algerian upper class. Second, because it was wrongly assumed that colonial housing stock in the center of the city could absorb farm laborers suddenly left without work, military personnel returned from combat, and populations from relocation camps, neither Ahmed Ben Bella, the country’s first president, nor his successor, Houari Boumédiène, recognized the pressing need to address the housing shortage.By the end of the exodus, more than 400,000 Europeans had left Algiers. According to a municipal Algerian government study, between 1966 and 1970 roughly 440,000 Algerians left surrounding villages to settle in their place. When members of an overwhelmingly rural population appropriated the homes of their former colonizers, new problems arose. They moved into fully furnished living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens, all constructed according to Western ideas of where individuals should eat and sleep and constitute a family. People had to adapt overnight to spaces that were constructed according to social norms defined in opposition to their own.Adjusting to the former colonial city meant accepting a drastic constriction of domestic space. This dynamic is rendered with marvelous psychological subtly in Merzak Allouache’s first feature film from 1976, Omar Gatlato. Omar Gatlato was hugely popular at the time of its release in part because it was one of the first films to pay homage to everyday Algerian people and their living conditions. It showed how social tension escalated at scale of the family, partly as a result of a breakdown in the traditional segregation of space according to gender. Omar, the film’s main protagonist and narrator, describes sleeping in the family apartment’s only bedroom with his adolescent sister, and he articulates the shame of this arrangement in a direct address to the camera.The film tracks Omar through his daily interactions at home, on the streets of Algiers in the mid-1970s, and at the government fraud office where he works. Allouache’s shots pan across enormous building complexes that were already showing signs of over-occupancy, bristling with radio antennas and television satellite dishes, festooned with colorful laundry, their façades dingy from automobile exhaust. The film testifies to the enormous amount of time young Algérois were forced, by housing conditions, to spend outdoors and in the streets. Omar’s alienation from the other members of his family illustrates the profound impact of supposedly single-family units on the fabric of a society used to living in family compounds. Furthermore, it illustrates how the socialist government’s official proclamations about property redistribution only went so far. While rent was kept low for working-class Algerians living in previously European neighborhoods, officials allowed market forces to dictate rents for larger villas and bourgeois apartments in more affluent areas.Another account of the domestic issues that emerged during this transitional period comes from Abdelkrim Bahloul’s film, Voyage à Alger (Journey to Algiers), released in 2009 and set in the mid-1960s. Based on actual events, the narrative is shot from the perspective of an indomitable war widow and mother of six. When a French colonial official’s contract is up, he gives her the keys to his townhouse in the center of the provincial city of Saida. He bases his decision on their friendship and her reputation as an Algerian patriot. The widow accepts, but not because she covets nice things or even desires the middle-class European lifestyle the house symbolizes. Rather, the house is near the sports complex and the library and the school, and she wants to be able to offer these things to her children.As soon as the widow takes possession of the property, her claim is contested by an Algerian with influence over the municipal government. A former collaborator, he harasses her, cuts the power and water service to her home, and threatens to have her forcibly removed. He believes that she is not of high enough class to occupy so well appointed and centrally located a property. It is simply not her place. She counters that she worked for years to feed revolutionaries, and made the ultimate sacrifice when the French killed her husband. Leaving one of her children to guard the front door with a pot of boiling water, she travels to Algiers to plead her case to the president himself. The widow targets the person at the top, demands an audience on moral grounds, and simply stands in the rain until she is granted one.What is remarkable about the film is not so much that it depicts a woman as a war hero fighting vociferously and ingeniously against a male political figure—this is rather typical of Algerian cinema—but that the conflict it describes is paradigmatic of ones that arose after postwar planning policies went into effect. The former collaborator is genuine (insofar as a collaborator can be genuine) in his dismissal of the widow’s claim to the property. He has achieved a certain class status on the basis of his ability to thrive within the colonial system, and doesn’t recognize her claim because, as a woman and a peasant, she had no official position in either the Algerian or the French administrations. Further, she could aspire to none, as an illiterate person and the mother of six orphans. The widow, on the other hand, does not conceive of power as something that exists within bureaucracy. She operates according to an entirely different model, one in which intimate and local ties are the ones that bind.The confusion these films render so lucidly was never officially resolved, and more than five decades later, a coherent urban plan has yet to take root. Between independence and the early years of the new millennium, urban planning policy could be characterized as cyclical: Periods of idealism and laissez-faire growth were closely tethered to the rhythm of political events. From the 60s on, a series of urban master plans were introduced in succession: The Permanent Committee for the Study and Organization of Greater Algiers (COMEDOR) was launched in 1968 to develop a plan for the city through 1985. When it was abandoned, the Plan for General Organization (POG) was adopted in 1975, with projects envisioned through the year 2000. By 1979, this, too, was also abandoned. Throughout the 1980s Algiers’ city planning was nominally governed by the Directive Urbanism Plan (PUD), which did complete a number of important projects, but also ceded power to municipal officials who waved through unregulated construction, resulting in chaotic and uneven urban growth. The PUD’s successor took over in 1990 only to have its municipal governing authority reappropriated by the state governor of Algiers a decade later. History repeats itself, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than onscreen.Karim Moussaoui’s recent film, En attendant les hirondelles (Awaiting the Swallows) from 2017, deals with the same contradictions of Voyage à Alger, though in the context of the present-day Algeria. Shot as contiguous portraits—one of a real estate mogul, another of a doctor confronted by a woman he did not save from rape by terrorists during the civil war of the 1990s—Messaoui’s film pictures an affluent class of Algerians amid an impossible negotiation between competing notions of responsibility. The real estate mogul’s chronic corruption leaves him adrift and alienated. The abused woman’s fierce demand for recognition, made from her cinderblock home in a shantytown on the edge of the city, is the other side of this world. The film is a portrait of society without recourse to the heroic revolutionary idols of the 1960s and 70s—or to their joyous, effervescent occupation of the city. Yet the struggles here are analogous. How can one act with integrity, or make a claim of recognition, while living within two disparate systems at once?What is at stake, as geographer Nora Semmoud pointed out in a 2003 analysis of informal settlements, illegal renovations, and black-market real estate in Algiers, is that without the government playing a leadership role in urban policy, a resegregation of Algerian society is taking place along the class lines depicted in both Messasoui and Bahloul’s films. A city that had been designed to exclude all Algerians was being replaced by a city designed to exclude poor, rural, and illiterate Algerians. Semmoud points to the forced displacement of poor residents and to the monopoly that the affluent hold on the central districts of the city. She calls for greater government involvement in planning affordable housing for the working-class populations of Algiers. Yet, this presents a problem: If a centralized urban plan was the colonial technology par excellence, how could this also constitute the basis of a post-colonial city?Abdelnour Djellouli, the Algerian architect, argues that to set Algiers on the right course, Eurocentric spaces should be formally integrated into the hybrid, dynamic city. For example: Carrière-Jaubert is a huge block of apartments built by the French at the end of the 1950s in a working-class neighborhood north of Algiers. When repairs became necessary, rather than simply tearing everything down and constructing new, cheaper housing farther away from the center, Djellouli proposed to renovate the building and integrate the site—originally conceived by French housing authorities as an isolated complex—into adjoining neighborhoods. Should this happen on a large scale, it would mark a radical change. By breaking the logic of exclusion that governs the city’s planning policies, and connecting zones designed to buffer the city from its own margins, Djellouli’s plan would help reverse a reality that has impaired the city for decades. If such aims were ever realized, it would constitute a significant step toward a truly post-colonial Algiers.