Front De Liberation Nationale Research Articles

An Interview with Henri Alleg

The journalist Henri Alleg (pseudonym for Harry Salem), a major anticolonial figure of the twentieh century, died on July 17, 2013. AFranco-Algerian citizen, Alleg was born in London in 1921 to a Jewish family-an English mother and a Polish father-who later settled in France. In 1940, at the age of nineteen and by mere chance, Alleg moved to Algeria, where he eventually joined the Parti Communiste Algerien (PCA) and fought for Algeria's liberation from French colonialism. From 1951 to 1955, when it was banned by the French colonial government, Alleg served as the editor-in-chief of Alger Republicain, the proindependence newspaper to which Albert Camus and Kateb Yacine occasionally contributed.After his arrest in 1957 at the home of his friend Maurice Audin (who had himself been arrested the day before and would not be seen again), Alleg began writing his seminal anticolonial work, La Question, a firsthand account of the torture he had experienced at the detention center of El-Biar. Bit by bit, this account was smuggled out of prison by Alleg's lawyers and typed in by his wife, Gilberte Salem-Alleg, who had been expelled from Algeria with their two children. The manuscript, first entitled Interrogatoires sous la torture, was picked up and subsequently printed by Jerome Lindon's Editions de Minuit in February 1958.1 More than sixty thousand copies of La Question were sold within two weeks. The French government's ban of the book a month later (France's first ban since the eighteenth century) promptly triggered a new publication by Nils Andersson, in Switzerland, with a preface byJean-Paul Sartre.To fully understand the considerable stir La Question caused in France, one needs to put it in historical context. In colonial Algeria, torture was a long-standing fact of life, which the press, threatened with censorship, generally avoided mentioning. Anticolonial activists in Algeria knew that their arrest would likely lead to torture. In France, however, torture was largely denied, and people clung to a vision of that country as a land of civilization. Those who dared denounce torture were considered antipatriotic and shunned, whether or not they might have fought against Nazism during the Second World War. When, on rare occasions, the reality of torture in colonial Algeria was evoked, the French government differentiated between the torture inflicted by the French army and that inflicted by the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). Torture was framed as a justified response to a barbaric onslaught menacing social order and progress.Alleg was a well-known journalist affiliated with the Federation de la Presse, a member of the PCA with many contacts, and the director of a daily that pointed to the injustices and violence borne of (French) colonialism at every turn. His denunciation of the torture that he had suffered at the hands of brutal French paratroopers provided a devastatingly direct yet eloquent testimony, which jolted French society. It gave rise to a greater demand for accountability on the part of the colonial government, blew apart France's ethical pretenses, and initiated the long and sinuous process of historical reexamination that continues to this day.La Question, which Pierre Vidal-Naquet viewed as one of the two most beautiful narratives inspired by the Algerian struggle (1998:132), has retained its evocative and indictive potency, and not just in relation to a French context.^ Because torture is a universal and recurring issue, new translations of the book appear regularly which apply to new countries and assist in analyzing and combatting it.Sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for atteinte a la surete exterieure de la France (violation of the state's external security) and reconstitution de ligue dissoute (reconstitution of a dissolved league), Alleg was transferred to Rennes, France, in 1960. After escaping from prison, he rejoined his family and fellow militants in Czechoslovakia. …

Combating Non-State Organizations’ Deep Reach Understanding the Expanded Influence of Non-State Actors and the Methodologies Required to Counter Their Future Growth

Abstract : Over the years, organizations such as the Hezbollah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) have provided examples of successful frameworks for the development of violent non-state actors that have the ability to influence populations inside a nation-state. In many instances, these organizations are complex and sometimes maintain state sponsorship links outside of the nation-state itself. Furthermore, well-equipped militias and quasi-governmental frameworks provide services to the local populace in order to broaden the violent non-state organization's political influence in the area. In fact, some incidents indicate that the populace often depends solely upon these organizations for their fundamental needs to include food, water, sanitation, and security. Understanding this evolving process, however, and the mechanisms that lead to the existence of these groups is critical in formulating adequate responses and effectively countering the influential growth of these organizations. As noted in the 2006 Israeli response in Lebanon, understanding the enemy and their organizational design is merely one piece of the larger puzzle. Indeed, fully comprehending ones own organizational limitations and biases is critical in the development of sound strategies to counter the growing influence of non-state actors. In fact, recent developments in South America's Tri-Border Area (TBA) involving organizations like Hezbollah and al-Qaeda illustrate a growing need to redefine western models and approaches in countering these groups. In doing so, new flexible and unstructured techniques are developed that help reformulate the fundamental tools used by nations in identifying and solving issues in emerging hotspots.

The Role of European Women and the Question of Mixed Couples in the Algerian Nationalist Movement in France, Circa 1918–1962

Interwar migration of Algerian workers to France, predominantly a movement of single males, led to the formation of numerous mixed couples, a pattern that was remarkably different from the high level of ethnic and religious segregation in the colony. This article examines the significant but largely unrecognized role of European women in the émigré nationalist movement. After 1945, and in particular with the start of the War of Independence, family reunification led to a rapid increase in female emigration, enabling a more “patriotic” form of marriage. Concurrently, the influence of the reformist Ulema, which opposed mixed marriage as a symbol of Western assimilation and the subversion of Arabic culture, language, and identity, spread into the nationalist movement. In the latent conflict between more secular, socialist, and progressive currents in the French Federation of the Front de Libération Nationale that accepted or engaged in mixed-couple relations and a religiously inspired, exclusionary, and chauvinistic form of nationalism, the latter won out in the postcolonial state, initiating a long phase of antifeminist reaction. La migration des travailleurs algériens en France entre les deux guerres, composée essentiellement d'hommes seuls, mena à la formation de nombreux couples d'origines mixtes, condition très différente de celle de la colonie, caractérisée par un haut niveau de ségrégation ethnique et religieuse. L'article examine le rôle considérable des femmes européennes dans le mouvement nationaliste des émigrés algériens, rôle jusqu'ici très peu reconnu. Après 1945, et surtout à partir du début de la guerre d'indépendance, une tendance vers la réunification familiale et l'émigration féminine facilitait des mariages de caractère plus « patriotique ». En même temps, l'influence réformiste des ulémas pénétrait le mouvement nationaliste, s'opposant au mariage mixte, qu'ils représentaient comme symbole d'une domination occidentale et comme une subversion de la culture, langue et identité arabes. Dans le conflit larvé qui opposait d'une part un courant laïc, socialiste et progressiste de la Fédération de France du Front de libération nationale, qui acceptait et pratiquait le couple mixte, et d'autre part un nationalisme d'inspiration plus religieuse, conservatrice et chauvine, c'est ce dernier qui triompha dans l'état postcolonial, ce qui initia une longue période de réaction antiféministe.

'You Never Look at Me From Where I See You': Postcolonial Guilt In Caché

Abstract Michael Haneke's much-discussed film Cache (2005) explores the psychodynamics of postcolonial guilt as they are made manifest in the specific arena of the field of vision. To the puzzled consternation of many a critic and viewer, Cache objectifies the return of the colonial real in the form of a gaze, a gaze indexed by videotapes left anonymously for Georges on his doorstep. These tapes contain images shot from a camera the status of which is eminently paradoxical. Both included within and banished from the film's diegesis, this camera torments Georges with memories of his childhood, memories that we see in the form of harrowing flashbacks or dream sequences. The video footage is also the film's principle means of creating suspense: it incites our desire as viewers to solve the perplexing enigma of its 'impossible' hidden camera. Through a reconsideration of the gaze through the lens of Lacan's analysis of Diderot's Letter on the Blind (1749), this essay draws out how Georges' desperate attempt to control the conditions of his own visibility reflects a refusal to acknowledge his complicity in the shameful colonial history of France. Keywords Film theory, psychoanalysis, Lacan, Haneke, Cache, gaze, Diderot, Algeria, shame, colonialism. On 17 October 1961 French-based leaders of the FLN (Front de liberation nationale), the political wing of the main Algerian anticolonial group, organised a peaceful demonstration against an 8:30pm curfew imposed by police on 'Muslim French Algerians' in the Paris region. An estimated 30,000 people, mainly of North African origin or descent, assembled at the event. By this late stage of the Franco-Algerian war, all but the most delusional among both the pied noir community and their metropolitan supporters had recognised, without of course accepting, that the Algerians had sided decisively with the revolution and would refuse to lay down arms until all remnants of the French administration had been ousted from national territory. Tensions between police and France's Algerian population had escalated sharply during the preceding year. Overwhelmingly invested in the idea of a French Algeria, the forces of order had looked upon President Charles de Gaulle's efforts to smooth over relations with France's North African population ahead of the Evian negotiations that would lead, the following year, to formal Algerian independence as a subversion of their authority and an outright betrayal of the republican interest. Shaken by a record twenty-two deaths at the hands of FLN activists in nine months, police had mounted a campaign of harassment and humiliation against French Algerians. That murderous October night saw the culmination of this campaign: 1 2,000 demonstrators arrested and between 50 and 350 killed. The fact that the bodies of most victims were thrown into the Seine, many never to be found or acknowledged on the public record, explains the shock value of these estimates, which can be qualified without overstatement as wildly divergent.1 The prefect of the Paris police force at the time was none other than Maurice Papon, the notorious French administrator who died in February 2007 while serving time for crimes against humanity. Papon's record of public service presents a shameful litany of racist and reactionary administrative sadism. As Secretary General of the Bordeaux region during the Second World War's collaborationist Vichy regime, he authorised the deportation of 1,690 jews to the Drancy internment camp. As prefect of the Constantinois region of eastern Algeria during the war in that country, he oversaw the brutal suppression ol numerous anticolonial demonstrations. And in 1962, less than a year after the massacre of the previous October, Papon instigated another deadly police attack, this time in Paris' Charonne metro station in the aftermath of a Communist Party-organised demonstration against the OAS (Organisation armee secrete), the pied noir guerrilla operation that had been terrorising both the Algerian insurrection and the Gaullist forces sent across the Mediterranean to effect decolonisation. …

Transgressing Boundaries: Gender, Race, Religion, and “Françaises Musulmanes” during the Algerian War of Independence

Taking the example of women active in the Algerian National Liberation Front during the War of Independence, this article examines how different typologies of “the Muslim woman” were challenged, subverted, and reconfigured between 1954 and 1962. The article looks at how women who did not conform to colonial gendered ethnoreligious stereotypes came to threaten the continuing existence of French Algeria both on the ground and on the international stage. It then turns to consider the sexual abuse and rape that women often experienced when captured by the French army. Finally, the article examines the relationship between women, Islamic principles, and the independence movement. Based on extensive interviews with female participants in the war, the article focuses throughout on women's appropriation and subversion of assigned roles and assumptions. A central concern is to compare the analytic categories of “gender” and “race” with the frames of reference these women use to articulate their own lives. Prenant pour cas d'étude l'exemple de femmes algériennes actives dans le Front de libération nationale pendant la guerre d'indépendance algérienne, cet article analyse comment les différentes typologies de « la femme musulmane » ont été remises en question, subverties et reconfigurées entre 1954 et 1962. L'article examine comment les femmes qui ne correspondaient pas aux stéréotypes genrés et ethno-religieux du système colonial sont devenues une menace pour le maintien de l'Algérie française. Ensuite, il considère les cas d'abus sexuel et de viol subis par les femmes capturées par l'armée française. Enfin, cet article examine les liens entre les femmes, les principes musulmans et le mouvement d'indépendance. Basé sur des entretiens réalisés avec des femmes ayant participé à la guerre, l'accent est mis sur les réponses de ces femmes aux rôles que l'on leur a assignés et comment elles se sont appropriés ces rôles et les ont subvertis. On compare également les catégories d'analyse « genre » et « race » avec les cadres de référence que ces femmes emploient pour articuler leur vie.

The Migration of Professional Algerian Footballers to the French Championship, 1956–82: The ‘Desire for France’ and the Prevailing National Contexts

Using previously unpublished material to further socio-historic research into the migration of top footballers, this contribution studies changing national contexts in France and Algeria resulting in the dramatic fall in migration by Algerian footballers – the third largest ‘foreign’ population (since 1962) to play in the French Championship after professionalization. It also questions whether acculturation persisted in Algeria after independence. A quantitative analysis of 25 interviews carried out mainly in Algeria with ex-champions who had played for French clubs (colonial and postcolonial), shows that between 1956 and 1982 there did exist a ‘desire for France’. Despite changes to the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) sports policies nationalizing Algerian football, this desire for France remained founded on socio-economic advancement and a fascination for life in the ex-homeland.

"You Cannot Continually Inflict": An Interview with Saadi Yacef

The Battle of Algiers (DZ/IT, 1966) remains one of the most powerful films ever made on war, colonialism, and imperialism. The film, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and scripted by Franco Solinas, was inspired by the book written by Saadi Yacef, Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger. It depicts a grim and brutal episode in a war that resulted in between 300,000 to 1.5 million Algerian and 18,000 French deaths. The war uprooted and turned into refugees over two million people out of a total of nearly nine million. In contrast, the current war in Iraq has turned into refugees about four million out of a population of twenty million. The issues raised by the film are as relevant today as they were in 1966 when the film was released: among these are the brutal effects of counterinsurgency. The use of torture dominates the headlines today as it did during the Algerian War. As the composite figure of Colonel Matthieu, the French paratroop colonel, says in the film in response to a question about the use of torture at a press conference, I'll ask you a question myself: Should France stay in Algeria? If the answer is still yes, you'll have to accept all the necessary consequences. The international uproar over renditions, Abu Ghraib, and the legal arguments inside the Bush administration since 9/11 justifying torture will see disturbing parallels with the issues raised more than forty years ago in The Battle of Algiers. Saadi Yacef joined the national liberation movement, Front de Liberation Nationale, in 1945 and by 1956 was the FLN's military chief of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers. He was captured by French troops during the Battle of Algiers, which was waged from January to October 1957. His capture and whether he broke under torture, revealing vital information to the French, remains a source of controversy to this day. A senior French officer, Paul Aussaresses, created an international political firestorm in 2001 when he asserted in Le Monde that the use of torture was sanctioned by the French government. Furthermore, Aussaresses said that then Minister of Justice, Francois Mitterand, had full knowledge and colluded with the French military during the Battle of Algiers to ward off criticism of their brutal methods. As today with the Bush administration's deliberate policy to ignore the application of the Geneva Convention protecting belligerents as regards Al- Qaeda and others in the Global War on Terror, the French military did not regard the combatants of the Algerian Liberation Movement as combatants deserving the protection of the Geneva Convention that prohibited the use of torture. In a fashion familiar to us today after 9/11, they were considered terrorists and deprived of the rights accorded to belligerents in war. The war was marked by the systematic use of torture, illegal executions, and disappearances by the French military in an effort to break the will of the Algerian Liberation movement. Aussaresses admitted in his 2001 memoir, Services speciaux, Algerie, 1955-1957 that he ordered his men to hang Larbi Ben M'Hidi and give out the story that he had committed suicide. He also said that he ordered an Algerian nationalist, Ali Boumendjel, to be thrown out of a building. Suicide was also offered as the alibi. All these issues made the release in 2004 of a new print of The Battle of Algiers in the United States timely in the midst of an increasingly difficult and bitter war in Iraq and Afghanistan for the United States and its allies. While much was made of an August 2003 screening by the Pentagon of the film, it should not be imagined that this was something new for the U.S. military. To the contrary, The Battle of Algiers had been known and seen by members of the U.S. military and defense intelligentsia for years. What was different with this release was that the creator and active participant in the making of the film (he plays himself in the movie), Saadi Yacef came to the United States in January 2004 to publicize the re-release of the film by Rialto. …

Local Responses to French Medical Imperialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Algeria

This article offers the first account of the lives of Algerian-born doctors working in the French colonial medical service between 1870 and 1900. Their stories reveal the manner in which the idea of medical imperialism had collapsed in Algeria, as a result of maladministration, racial policies, competition between civil and military authorities, budgetary constraints and the rise of the colons. The article also indicates the way in which medicine became a locus of opposition to French rule. It shows how the first decades of the Third Republic were critical in terms of a shift from the earlier idea of medicine serving as an emblem of the mission civilisatrice to the ideological potential of medicine being seen in much more nuanced terms by both French settlers and Algerian locals. It is argued that the notion of cultural resistance to imperialism through medicine emerges in the 1870s and 1880s, thereby prefiguring the work of Fanon and the Front de Liberation Nationale's later analysis of the 'sickness' of colonial Algerian society.

Sartre’s Philosophical Itinerary

Sartre is famous for the conflictual, negative, violent, abstract Cartesian philosophy of the works of his early and middle years. In La Nausee, the protagonist is in complete disarray in front of the contingency of being. In L'Etre et Neant, there is a surreptitious conflict between the for-itself and the in-itself, bad faith is quasi unavoidable; and it is impossible as well to avoid objectification of the other through the gaze. In La Critique de la Raison Dialectique, the search for is undergirded by violence, even within the fused group. Finally, Sartre's search for emancipation and solidarity with oppressed peoples led him to join violent causes: communism in the early fifties, the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale in the late fifties, and the French Maoists in the late sixties. Consistent with this traditional image of Sartre, his colleagues at Les Temps Modernes-including-Beauvoir-totally rejected L 'Espoir Maintenant (the text which he published, together with Benny Levy, weeks before he, Sartre, died in 1980). The Sartrians felt suddenly confronted by a solidarity reached through being-for-others; by the abandonment of violence and its replacement by gifting and the bond; and by a new fraternity based on feeling and rooted in le matriciel (the as matrix). They saw the text as a complete with Sartre's earlier philosophy and called it unsartrian. Never mind Cahiers pour une Morale, post-humously published in 1983, but written in 1947 and 1948, in which Sartre demolished much of the structure of L'Etre et Neant with his studies of gifting, the appeal, generosity, and authentic love. Never mind L'Idiot de la Famille (1968-73) in which the role of the mother's love is primordial in the fashioning of the child's future self. Never mind the 1974 interviews with Sartre in which Sartre tells her that intersubjectivity in sexual relations is reached via mutual self-abandon. And never mind the 1975 Autoportrait a 70 ans, in which Sartre tells Michel Contât that complete openness to the other is essential to intersubjectivity. The Sartrians attributed Sartre's break to coercion by Levy, Sartre's interviewer in L'Espoir. But a reading of the text indicates that Levy totally disagreed with Sartre's ideas on le matriciel or the new reached without violence. Sartre himself iterated most clearly to Jean Daniel, the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur who published L'Espoir Maintenant, that colleagues do not understand my itinerary - not even Beauvoir (Cohen-Solal, 514). A psychoanalytic and feminist interpretation of this itinerary explains it perfectly. This is the approach which Sartre himself began to take in 1968 when, in interview with the New Left Review (published as Itinerary of a Thought) he openly adopted the notion of neurosis and discussed the way in which a neurosis affects and is affected by Ie vecu (lived experience). He also pointed out how his discovery of the existence of neuroses had dramatically affected his itinerary. He had already confessed in Les Mots to a long-time dream of incest, and admitted that it was still the only family relationship which moved him, but he had camouflaged his forbidden by suggesting that it was directed toward a fictitious younger sister-not toward his real older sister, his (Sartre 1964a, 46). This subterfuge should not mislead us. Lacan has posited that masculine subjects, especially neurotic ones, do everything in their power to conceal their repression of incestuous desire for their mother-repression on which their would-be subjectivity is grounded (Butler, 45). Through her exhaustive Freudian psychoanalysis of Sartre's autobiographies (among which she includes Nausea) and of his biographies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert, Josette Pacaly has certainly laid bare Sartre's neurosis. But I cannot agree with her verdict that Sartre remained fixated in a pre-oedipal stage, that he refused to recognize the interdiction of incest, and that he had an archaic fixation on his mother (90). …

Power, Censorship, and the Press: The Case of Postcolonial Algeria

The history of the press in Algeria is linked to and closely reflects the contradictions of this North African country's postcolonial regime as well as the evolution of its social and political movements and its struggle for democracy. In this respect, the context of its emergence, its operating conditions, and its changing status are directly related to the forces that created and have continued to control the modern Algerian economy, political structures, and institutions for more than thirty years. Indeed, since the country's independence in 1962, the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN, the National Liberation Front), a military and political structure conceived and born during the anti-French resistance and National Liberation War (1954-62), has been determining all aspects ofthe economy, education, political organizations, and state institutions, as well as the dissemination of information nationwide.

Sustainable Development in New Caledonia

N EWCALEDONIA has been a colony of France since 1853 and, along with French Polynesia, it is a strategic part of France's South Pacific territories. Since the 1970s the native peoples of the territory the Kanaks' have been engaged in a struggle for independence from French rule. In the 1980s this fight led to losses of life for the Kanak community, the French security forces and the European settlers. In an effort to avoid civil war, France's prime minister, Michel Rocard, brought together members of the FLNKS (Front de liberation nationale kanake socialiste a coalition of the Kanak political parties that favours independence from France) and the RPCR (Rassemblement pour la Caledonie dans la Republique the settlerdominated conservative political party which favours retaining a relationship with France) to decide the future of the territory. The results of these negotiations are known as the Matignon accords and they herald a tenyear peace period during which the French government will attempt to redress the socioeconomic inequalities in the territory, particularly by promoting development and training programs in Kanak communities. In 1998, at the end of this ten-year period, New Caledonians will be asked to choose between independence and staying within the French Republic. This paper concerns the issue of sustainable development in New Caledonia and the consequences of this for the future self-determination of