The Algerian Connection

The largely French generated causus belli used by the last of the Restoration Bourbon kings, Charles X, to justify the invasion of Algeria is an often told tale (c.f. for example Rachid Tiempi's article in the March 1997 Middle East Quarterly, http://www.meforum.org/article/338) Its consequences were almost immediately disasterous for Muslims and, in a little over a century, for the French as well. The French invasion in the 1830s was brutal and characterized by an almost "ultra-imperialist" attitude of the military and the closely on-following colonists. The property and civil rights of the indigenous Magrhibis were almost totally ignored. The army proceded to declare most of the best land as French, without any reasonable compensation. European colonists were sought in France and other Mediteranean countries; they came in huge numbers at a rush; bought the good land for a song, and were usually taxed at half the rate of that laid on the natives on their arid acres. The administration was structured to over-represent the colonists (the pied-noir) and downplay the rights of the natives. France formally annexed Algeria in 1834, installing a governor-general who embodied both civilian and military authority derived directly from the minister of war in Paris. Abd al Qadir, Algeria's legendary national hero, led a jihad against the conquerors, and rapidly brought large areas of the Maghrib under his control, establishing what the French feared would develop into a functioning Muslim state. An initial peace was subverted by the French who moved more that 100,000 troops into North Africa and General Bugeaud embarked on a scorched earth policy "Bugeaud's strategy was to destroy Abd al Qadir's bases, then to starve the population by destroying its means of subsistence - crops, orchards, and herds. On several occasions, French troops burned or asphyxiated noncombatants hiding from the terror in caves. One by one, the amir's strongholds fell to the French, and many of his ablest commanders were killed or captured so that by 1843 the Muslim state had collapsed. Abd al Qadir took refuge with his ally, the sultan of Morocco, Abd ar Rahman II, and launched raids into Algeria. However, Abd al Qadir was obliged to surrender to the commander of Oran Province, General Louis de Lamoricière, at the end of 1847... Abd al Qadir was promised safe conduct to Egypt or Palestine if his followers laid down their arms and kept the peace. He accepted these conditions, but the minister of war - who years earlier as general in Algeria had been badly defeated by Abd al Qadir - had him consigned to prison in France." (Library of Congress Country Study-Algeria http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query2/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+dz0029)) After decades of almost unbridled imperialism, the government of the Second Republic ended Algeria's colonial status and declared it to be an integral part of France, i.e., "Algerie francaise." Although he reestablished military control, Napoleon III was repelled by the greed of the colons and had ideas about preserving Algeria for the Muslims. "Napoleon III visualized three distinct Algerias: a French colony, an Arab country, and a military camp, each with a distinct form of local government. The second decree, issued in 1865, was designed to recognize the differences in cultural background of the French and the Muslims. As French nationals, Muslims could serve on equal terms in the French armed forces and civil service and could migrate to metropolitan France. They were also granted the protection of French law while retaining the right to adhere to Islamic law in litigation concerning their personal status. But if Muslims wished to become full citizens, they had to accept the full jurisdiction of the French legal code, including laws affecting marriage and inheritance, and reject the competence of the religious courts. In effect, this meant that a Muslim had to renounce his religion in order to become a French citizen. This condition was bitterly resented by Muslims, for whom the only road to political equality became apostasy. Over the next century, fewer than 3,000 Muslims chose to cross the barrier and become French citizens." (Library of Congress Country Study-Algeria (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query2/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+dz0029). In ending the military regime after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, decrees by Adolphe Cremieux provided for a heavily weighted colon representation in the National Assembly, and their further control of local administration. However the pied-noir were not pleased by his almost incidental grant of French citzenship to all Algerian Jews. A new wave of European settlers, refugees from Alsace-Lorrain, further stressed relations with the Muslim majority in the Maghrib. Several years of famine and disease preceded the outbreak of an insurrection in Kybylie (northern mountainous region). This was suppressed and provided an excuse for seizure of about 1.5 million acres of tribal land and subjection of the Kybylie to a special native code, since the French penal code was consided too permissive for application to Muslim natives. The uninhibited course of French imperialism continued until the end of WWI. Wilsonian self determination was not applied to France's North African colonies, or to her Asiatic ones for that matter. It might also be noted that in the Middle East at the time, under the guise of mandates to protect what were still colonies, all lands except Palestine were exempted from investigation by Wilson's commission of inquiry. (Of course it was only Palestine that was arbitrarily and illegally vivisected by the British to make a Jordanian state.) The Algerians were not represented at the Peace conference, and it was only in the mid-1920s that Algerian intellectuals (many of them evoulees - selected by the French for training as mid-level administrative duties in Algeria) began to form societies, some of which were secret and some subversive of French rule. These were frankly imitative of the pre-war Damascus societies - Arab liberation societies - which so easily gulled the British in 1914-1916. They were not nearly as successful. All efforts to obtain reform of the extremely anti-Arab and anti-Berber legal code, were resisted by French authorities. Attempts by the government to grant a form of French citizenship to those few Muslims who would reject shar'ia - Muslim law - were rejected for the most part. In the mid 1930s facing the threat of Nazi Germany, the French goverment reacted to this rejection by further tightening the anti-Moslem laws. The rapid defeat of France in 1940 and the subsequent Petain/Laval goverment resulted in pro-Vichy govenments in the colonies, except for French Equatorial Africa, where General de Gaulle proclaimed the Free French resistance. Allied landings in North Africa in 1942 was followed by replacement of a colon-supported, pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic government with the Free French government of General Giraud. Slowly, against strong colon resistence, some repressive measures were rescinded but Giraud insisted that political arrangements for the Algerian Muslims would have to wait on war's end. In 1943 Muslim leaders framed a manifesto that would make Muslim Algeria autonomous in all but name. This was rejected by a liberated France, which, largely in the interest of the colons, made a counter offer which once again liberated politically only the evoulees. Even most of the moderate Muslims began to favor independence rather than a single-state solution involving integration with the pied-noir in an Algerian government. The turning point was the near famine winter of 1944-5 folloowed by the May Day Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty (AML) demonstrations in Algeria's major cities. This resulted in three dead. The full explosion occured a week later on V-E day in Setif, where police firing on marchers precipitated an anti-European rampage that killed more than 100. The millitary and police riposte with aerial and naval forces participating in attacks on Muslim population centers, resulted 1500 Muslim deaths according to official French figures. Algerian Nationalists believe as many as 45,000 were killed. The AML was outlawed and 5000 or more were arrested. In effect civil war had begun. In the next 2 years there was considerable intranecine strife among various nationalist groups. The MTLD (Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties), with an uncompromising pro-independence program obtained the most widespread Muslim support. It spawned a secret organization, the OS which was created for terrorist operations against the colons and the government. The OS was soon commanded by Ahmed Ben Bella. The 1952 OS actions led to the arrest and deportation and imprisonment of Messali Hadj, the MTLD leader, and Ben Bella's flight to Cairo. There, encouraged by Nasser, he built the organization that came to be known as the National Liberation Front (FLN). The Library of Congress Country Study for Algeria descibes the first round of the FLN offensive In the early morning hours of All Saints' Day, November 1, 1954, FLN maquisards (guerrillas) launched attacks in various parts of Algeria against military installations, police posts, warehouses, communications facilities, and public utilities. From Cairo, the FLN broadcast a proclamation calling on Muslims in Algeria to join in a national struggle for the "restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam." The French minister of interior, socialist Francois Mitterrand, responded sharply that "the only possible negotiation is war." It was the reaction of Premier Pierre Mendes-France, who only a few months before had completed the liquidation of France's empire in Indochina, that set the tone of French policy for the next five years. On November 12, he declared in the National Assembly: "One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic. The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French ... Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession. The FLN was joined by many of the nationalist groups. It rejected the communists and absorbed moderate groups that could no longer hope for an equal place in a French pied-noir-dominated overseas department. One group that refused to join the FLN was Messali Hadj's MTLD which was rather easily eliminated in North African, but had gained strong support among the Algerian workers of the second immigrant wave. The FLN, almost as a portent of things to come, set up powerful forces in metropolitan France, initiating the "café wars" which were almost as viciously violent as the future battles of the pied-noirs and then the OAS with the goons of the de Gaulle government. In Algeria itself, the FLN was tutored by the infamous Frantz Fanon who presented the arguments for the nauseating forms of violence practiced in the name of liberation. Uncommitted Algerians risked liquidation as potential proponents of French compromise. Not to be outdone in savagery, the colons executed Muslims declared merely suspect of FLN membership. Acting with tacit official cooperation, their vigilante murders were out and out counter-terrorism. This lack of discrimination perhaps persuaded the FLN leadership that significant escalation from their policy of only attacking government and military targets was needed. The Philippeville massacre converted the new governor general, Jaques Soustelle, into an advocate of extreme measures. The armed forces, the colons and the police had a counter-terroristic field day; the FLN estimates 12000 Muslims were killed in the process. Soustelle returned to France but maintained connections with both Army and colons. In Paris he began the organization of an Algerian coup d'etat. His aim included a colon-governed Algeria and a return of de Gaulle to power. Soustelle's successor, Robert Lacoste, governed by decree. Captured FLN leaders were imprisoned. At the same time France came to believe that Nasser was the FLN's main support, but the Suez adventure failed to produce a change in Egypt. In the meantime the FLN was gaining leftist international and Arab support in the United Nations. "Specializing in ambushes and night raids and avoiding direct contact with superior French firepower, the internal forces [FLN] targeted army patrols, military encampments, police posts, and colon farms, mines, and factories, as well as transportation and communications facilities. Once an engagement was broken off, the guerrillas merged with the population in the countryside. Kidnapping was commonplace, as were the ritual murder and mutilation of captured French military, colons of both genders and every age, suspected collaborators, and traitors. At first, the revolutionary forces targeted only Muslim officials of the colonial regime; later, they coerced or killed even those civilians who simply refused to support them. Moreover, during the first two years of the conflict, the guerrillas killed about 6,000 Muslims and 1,000 Europeans. The next move of the revolutionaries was a shift to the cities with a plan for a general strike. The strike was eventually broken but not before the French General Jaques Massu had won the Battle of Algiers using methods of terrorism to counter that of the FLN. His paratroopers, recently returned from Vietnam, systematically destroyed the FLN infrastructure of the city. In Europe, the uninvolved of the West reacted adversely to the stories of torture by the French, but remained relatively indifferent to stories of torture by the FLN, who somehow became the "good guys." It was clear that Massu's victory in the city of Algiers did not include the other cities and certainly not much of the countryside. However as a victorious and tough minded general he was the man to lead the Army junta in the coup d'etat, the coup which had been planned by Soustelle when he returned to Paris. Their colleague General Salan abrogated all civil authority. With his Committee of Public Safety he led the junta in the demand for de Gaulle's leadership. The Army both in Algeria and in metropolitan France was convinced that only de Gaulle was capable of rallying France to the task of preserving the North African departments and cancelling the shame of Dien Bien Phu. Rene Coty gave in to the demands and appointed de Gaulle premier of France with power to govern by decree for the next 6 months. De Gaulle declared the Fourth French Republic essentially dead and a draft for the constitution of the Fifth Republic was begun. De Gaulle's first trip to Algeria seemed to promise his adherence to Algerie Francaise He proposed a new set of socio-political and economic reforms. There was no progress but the FLN brought the war to the French homeland. Terrorism by bomb, by murder and by mutilation was brought home to the French. Though most Algerians had voted for the new constitution the FLN's campaign at home and abroad continued. De Gaulle became president of the Fifth Republic and within months was secretly negotiating for a more or less independent Algeria, The background to his decision was that "In 1958-59 the French army had won military control in Algeria and was the closest it would be to victory. During that period in France, however, opposition to the conflict was growing among many segments of the population. Thousands of relatives of conscripts and reserve soldiers suffered loss and pain; revelations of torture and the indiscriminate brutality the army visited on the Muslim population prompted widespread revulsion; and a significant constituency supported the principle of national liberation. International pressure was also building on France to grant Algeria independence. Annually since 1955 the UN General Assembly had considered the Algerian question, and the FLN position was gaining support. France's seeming intransigence in settling a colonial war that tied down half the manpower of its armed forces was also a source of concern to its North American Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. In a September 1959 statement, de Gaulle dramatically reversed his stand and uttered the words "self-determination," which he envisioned as leading to majority rule in an Algeria formally associated with France." (Library of Congress Country Study - Algeria) De Gaulle's betrayal provoked an insurrection of the colons. Support for the colonists at home was widespread. It was sufficient to threaten the government. De Gaulle salvaged the situation by a cleverly timed and phrased televised appeal to the Army. It was obeyed by most units. Leaders of the revolt were imprisoned, but some escaped to form the OAS. These officers, many of them long term veterans of colonial wars, and former devotees of the de Gaulle myth, instituted their own reign of terror including attempts at de Gaulle's assassination. In time, and with de Gaulle's seeming invulnerability, the OAS was infiltrated, decimated and rendered harmless to France and to the new country of Algiers. After a couple of decades of third world prominence and seeming prosperity, Algeria succumbed to the internal contradictions of the Muslim revolutionary state. She is now in the midst of a Civil War that at least matches the brutality and savagery of the war of liberation. Secularists and Islamic fundamentalists struggle to control a country that is almost totally dependent on its oil for any real income.

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The Muslim Brotherhood

In contrast with the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood is a relative newcomer to the Islamic Fundamentalist movement. It was founded by an Egyptian, Hassan al Banna, in 1928. In many respects the Brotherhood was a middle eastern totalitarianism. Al-Banna required and obtained loyalty and obedience from all its members. He alone determined the Brotherhood's policies. It started as a response to the dissatisfaction of middle class Egyptian Moslems with their government's preoccupation with Islamic modernism - the belief that Muslims can incorporate much of the technical and political novelties of the 19th and 20th centuries in their law and economy and still remain Muslim. al Banna prescribed a return to what he believed to be Islamic principles: a system of law which was all shari'a and hadith. In his view there was little room for that aspect of law termed figh or jurisprudence. The scope of shari'a is broader than the western term, law. To al Banna, shari'a with haddith is the necessary and sufficient blueprint for the truly Islamic state. Economically in a Muslim state there should be a wide redistribution of wealth among the believers. Banks should offer shares of increase rather than interest, and the collection of zakah (a form of charity that is one of the pillars of Islam) should be made from all those eligible for the good deed. al Banna's formed his followers into chapters or closed cells, whose structure and function were reminiscent of the first Bolshevik soviets. Each was centered around a mosque or charitable organization. The chapters provided for various aspects of welfare for the members. In the two years following the founding of the movement, the orientation became more overtly political and in opposition to the secularist-modern government. Along with the new direction of activity, paramilitary organizations took shape as cells of the Brotherhood. Political action by "volunteers" was first seen in the Arab revolt against the British rule in Palestine 1936-9. Anti-westernism, especially against the great colonial powers, was basic to the Brotherhood's rejection of Islamic modernism and persisted through changes in leadership and country of operations. In Egypt their opposition to British rule was continued into the post WWII period. It was often expressed in the form of demonstrations and strikes. Again, in the Israeli War of Independence, volunteers fought with Egyptian and other Arab state armies. Israeli victory over massed Arab armies represented a failure that in fantasy at least would not have occurred if Egypt had been an Islamic state. After the war, the defeat was vociferously condemned as the fault of the secular-liberal Egyptian government. Twenty years after the founding of the Moslem Brotherhood, their welfare and political activity was so widely approved that the government considered them a growing threat. One step to stem the Brotherhood's progress was the planned assassination of al Banna; the Egyptian secret police completed the mission in early 1949. But the Islamic fundamentalist movement had the numbers, the organization and the influence to survive the founder's death. The Suez episode was yet another opportunity for Brotherhood volunteers to oppose the British. In this case they acted in support of the government they detested. This in the eyes of some of their supporters reduced their credibility as as revolutionaries. Nasser's government proceded to undercut the opposition parties by a progressive series of land reforms. This rendered them secure enough to abolish all other political parties. At the same time the government's economic policy shifted more to the left, while its foreign policy became unreservedly pan-Arabic. In the course of the formation of the one-party state, the Moslem Brotherhood was driven underground and its sphere of influence in mosques and the Wafd charities was replaced by state control. After Nasser's death, Sadat permitted the gradual rehabilitation of the Brotherhood, but he refused to give it the privileges of a legal political party. The front of good works and charity was maintained despite the desertion of more activist splinters. The Muslim Brotherhood has not limited in its organization to Egypt. Al-Banna and his followers established branch movements in Jordan, Syria, Palestine and in the Sudan. The Jordanian organization was founded in 1946, and at first was closely supportive of the Hashemite kings. After Israel regained the "West Bank" the relationship with the PLO flourished as well. The closer the Brotherhood came to the Arafat gang, the more the problems that King Hussein perceived in the Moslem Brotherhood. They remained even after the expulsion of the PLO, and donned the appearance of an ordinary political party, winning elections in the 1980s. They are financed from Kuwait and most probably Saudi Arabia as well, even though their fundametalism differs widely from the Wahhabis. The Brotherhood supported Iraq during the 1st Gulf War, but the Saudi and Gulf State support has continued nonetheless. The Palestinian branch was founded by al-Banna himself in the very early 1940s. In 1973 the Brotherhood in what was now Israel sponsored as series of welfare, social and religious programs under the leadership of Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, who had Israeli permission for these efforts. Younger Israeli Muslims felt that the Brothers were not attending to the needed essentials of the anti-Israel struggle. Shaykh Yasin split the Brotherhood and formed Hamas. As of 2002 it seems that the Moslem Brotherhood continues to present its benign mask of good deeds with the concurrence of the Israeli government. The Syrian Brotherhood was in fundamental opposition to the Baath party. The activity was effectively ended by the victory of Hafez al-Assad. It was one of the few branches to resort to armed insurrection based in its stronghold of Hama. Al-Hassad made association with the Brotherhood punishable by death, and the Hama fortress was totally destroyed. In Europe it is clear that both the Brotherhood and its relatives like Hamas have Imams and supporters in many of the Moslim communities in Europe and the Near East. The threat of Hamas is overt and tends to divert attention from the Brotherhood activities. The Brotherhood commands broad Muslim community support.

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