Authors: Ryszard Kapuscinski
The most common version is the official one: that Ben Bella is in Algeria and being well treated. It might even be true.
Ben Bella was the leader of Algeria for three years.
Algeria is unique; at every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts. Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.
Algeria is in that group of African countries where European colonialism lasted a long time. The French ruled Algeria for 132 years. Only the Portuguese in Angola and in Mozambique, and the Afrikaaners and English in South Africa, have had a longer colonial tenure. Algeria will bear the mark left by French colonial hegemony for decades. It has crippled and deformed Algeria—more so than in most of the other independent African countries—and in this deformation European settlers have played a major role. They always do. In assessing the devastation, what matters is not only the length of the colonial period, but, perhaps above all, the
number
of settlers: only South Africa has more. Around 1.2 million Europeans settled in Algeria, equal to the number of European settlers in all the twenty-six countries of tropical Africa combined. Settlers made up one tenth of the Algerian population.
There is another important factor: Algeria’s geographical
position. Of all the African colonies, Algeria lay closest to its colonial metropolis. Today, it takes two hours to fly from Algiers to Paris, two hours that are not only a fact of communication but also a symbol of the bond between France and Algeria: one that the French developed over a period of 132 years and which neither the liberation war nor independence has severed. What’s more, Algeria today is, as the statistics reveal, more closely bound (and not only economically) to its former colonial metropolis than any other independent country of Africa.
An image characteristic of a colonial country is the modern automated electronics factory, and beyond its walls are caverns inhabited by people who still use wooden hoes. ‘Look what beautiful highways we’ve built for them,’ say the colonialists. Indeed: but along those highways lie villages where people have yet to emerge from the palaeolithic age.
That is what you see in Algeria.
People who love France will rave about Algiers. It is a French city through and through, and even the Arab district of the Casbah has a French
esprit
. This is not Africa; it is Lyon, Marseille. International shop windows, sublime French cuisine, enchanting bistros. The contrivances of Parisian fashion reach here in a day, like the Parisian press and Parisian gossip.
But forty kilometres from Algiers, from this Paris of Africa, the stone age begins. After half an hour’s drive I feel that I am back in Africa. Sixty kilometres from Algeria begin villages where to this day the people do not know the potter’s wheel. The original Kabyle pots are formed by hand. And a new contrast: in this primitive Kabylia where they believe that washing children causes agonized death, I found a hospital where a Polish doctor who had just
arrived from Kraków on a contract told me: ‘They have an operating room here beyond my wildest dreams, with technical miracles I could never have imagined. I don’t even know how to work these gadgets.’
A journey into the depths of Algeria is a journey in time, withdrawing into remote epochs that continue to exist here, still present, surrounded by the parched steppe or sands of the Sahara.
Nine tenths of Algeria is Sahara.
The Algerian Sahara is famous for the French atomic research centre at Reggane, for the first oil fields and for the stones of Tassilli where the oldest frescoes in the world have been preserved. At the town of Insalah in the Algerian Sahara the largest slave market in the world existed until recently: Ben Bella closed it, dividing the land and date palms of the slave traders among the slaves. Today Insalah is the only place in the world ruled by the slave class, known as the
haratin
(beasts of burden). Thus did Ben Bella make the dream of Spartacus come true.
Colonialism fosters social chasms, and the fissures still run through Algerian society. Colonial policy elevates a class of ‘cultured’ and ‘reliable’ natives while pushing the rest of society down on a stratum of poverty and ignorance. The bureaucrats, the bourgeois and the intelligentsia are cut off, all clearly and undemocratically raised above the rest of society. They have modelled themselves on the French, have adopted their way of living and, to a large degree, of thinking. Their habitat is the city, the desk vacated by the Frenchman, the café. Every Algerian politician is here from reactionaries to communists, united by their lifestyle, not their politics. The people who run Algeria’s political and administrative machine have been recruited from these circles. A command of French is a condition for entry and these people are fluent in French. One more common
characteristic: their isolation from the country. One thing these people are certainly not doing: they are not filling in the chasm between Algiers and Algeria. That is not their job; they do not think about it, mainly because they do not know the country: they live in Algiers, but they do not live in Algeria. ‘It is striking,’ someone told me in conversation, ‘that these people are generally strangers to Algeria. Nobody here knows the countryside. Ben Bella took a slight interest in the villages, but nobody else.’ And the villages are eighty per cent of Algeria.
The war in Algeria lasted seven and a half years and, with China’s and Vietnam’s, was one of the biggest wars of liberation of the last twenty years. The Algerian people showed the highest proof of their heroism, endurance and patriotism.
The war ended in defeat for France.
But Algeria paid a high price for their victory. It is still paying.
One tenth of the Algerian population—more than a million people—died in the war. The killed, the murdered, and the napalmed go by the name of
chuhada
—the martyred.
The French worked enormous destruction upon Algeria. Eight thousand villages were levelled, and millions were left without a roof over their head. Thousands of acres of forest, which shielded the soil from erosion, were burned. The cattle that provided half the peasantry with its livelihood were killed off (only three million head of cattle out of seven million survived). The
fellah
bore the brunt of the war.
The war caused huge migrations. Three million Algerians were driven from their villages and confined to reservations or resettled in the isolated regions. Four
hundred thousand Algerians found themselves in prison or interned. Three hundred thousand fled to Tunisia and Morocco. At the same time, throughout the whole war, people from the villages—where repression hit hardest—fled to the cities, where, today, thirty per cent of the Algerian population now lives. Most of them have no jobs, but they do not want to go back to the villages, or they cannot return because the villages no longer exist.
Beyond the human and material losses, however, the traces of the war persist in the social consciousness. These are
living
traces, both positive and negative. Positive: because Algeria emerged from the war as a country of independent social and political ambitions, as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial country. Negative: because divisions arose in Algerian society paralysing it.
This had never been a homogeneous society. It consisted—and still consists—of a mix of ethnic groups, religious sects, social classes, tribes and clans: a rich and complex mosaic. The war introduced a certain order, drew the majority of Algerians into the struggle for a common goal; but as soon as the war ended, Algerian society began to disintegrate anew. But meanwhile, the war had added a new division: on one side, those who took part in the war: on the other side, those who served the French. And among those who took part were those who fought within the country and those who fought outside its borders.
Guerrillas fought inside the country. Three hundred thousand Algerians are estimated to have taken a direct part in the guerrilla war. They are the ones who shed the most blood. At the same time, the French were recruiting Algerians into its army and administration: their hands in the struggle against the rebels. The dividing line often ran through a single village, through a single family. (‘Tujji does not contain one family,’ writes Jules Roy about an
Algerian town in his book
The War in Algeria
, ‘which would not have been split and which would not have had to come to terms with both the FLN [
Front de Libération National
] and the French army … In a certain family one man joined the rebels and another is in the French army … Why is he in the service of the French? Because there he receives a chunk of bread and a soldier’s pay … Will these divisions vanish when peace comes? The army believes not, believes that on the contrary they will deepen … Is there any way not to share these fears? In Tujji, thirty men serve in the French army and every evening they lie in ambush for their guerrilla brothers.’) The memory of who did what in the war remains alive in Algeria today. Today members of the Algerian professional class come from among the former collaborators, because only they had the opportunity to gain qualifications. Today they make up the administrative cadre: what’s more, even though many of them are engaged in quiet but systematic sabotage, the government has also been forced to take them back into the army. During the conflict with Morocco, Algeria was losing because of the weakness of its support staff and finally concluded that it had to utilize the collaborators because they are the experts.
There is a third group: the emigrants—those who spent the war in French prisons (like Ben Bella) and those who served in the Algerian army that was formed in Morocco and Tunisia (like Boumedienne).
Algeria gained its independence during a profound crisis among members of the guerrilla movement: they had been bled dry, decimated, beaten back into the depths of the country, into the most desolate and inaccessible wasteland. They were being scattered. In the meantime, across the border in Tunisia and Morocco, a strong, expertly organized, excellently armed, well trained, solidly
provisioned young Algerian army was forming. And as the guerrillas took a step towards seizing power, they found that the army had already rolled into Algeria with armoured columns and was enforcing a new order. From that moment in the summer of 1962 the border army has decided, still decides, and will continue to decide
everything
in Algeria.
From that moment too, the political activists, the whole élite that governs and the whole apparatus that administers will fall into three factions, three groups: emigrants, guerrilla veterans and collaborators.
This is the country that Ben Bella took over in 1962. He began under conditions that were not auspicious, the very same conditions that would determine his eventual defeat.
The country was weakened by the war, battered, particularly its villages, which were devastated. A million French colonists had fled in haste, and the country’s own population was only starting to drift back from exile, from reservations, from the camps. The farms stood abandoned; the factories were idle. There was no organized administration, and members of a professional class were scarce, a technical cadre non-existent. Unemployment: universal. And, more than anything else, the society was exhausted, starved. It wanted peace; it wanted to eat. Even today, you can still feel clearly that this society is
tired
.
Ben Bella took power in a country that may be the most difficult land to govern in Africa. When he began, he was
alone
. A few months before, he had been in prison, having spent years in isolation. He arrived without a staff or troops. Most of the active politicians opposed him, blocked him; he was without a devoted and powerful party of his own. There was only one force from which Ben Bella could hope for backing in his struggle for power: the army, the
masterful, confident border army of Boumedienne.
The essential feature of this army was that it was inactive. While the war was being fought inside Algeria, Boumedienne’s army was unable to reach it because the army couldn’t cross the network of impenetrable barriers along the border controlled by Tunisia and Algeria. Blocked in this way, Boumedienne’s army became increasingly political, its political activity compensating for its inability to act militarily. In fact, all along, Boumedienne’s soldiers trained on the revolutionary model, the soldier-political with a rifle in one hand and an agitprop manual in the other. The old guard of politicians gathered around the Algerian Provisional Government and FLN had seen the dangers for a long time: the old politicians, fearing the army, looked for ways to clip its wings, and on 2 July 1962, three days before Algerian independence, the Provisional Government decided to remove Boumedienne and the officers closest to him, who sit today on the Revolutionary Council. But Boumedienne was not about to be unseated. He came out openly against the old politicians. And Ben Bella too, whom the old politicians had refused to admit to power, stood against them. Logic led to Ben Bella allying with Boumedienne. Neither could do without the other. Ben Bella was a name, also at odds with the Provisional Government; he knew how to speak; he backed the idea of a politicized army. The politicized army, the only unified Algerian force at the end of the war, pushed Ben Bella into power. Only the army’s candidate had a chance to take power. Only Ben Bella.
So it happened.
But at the same time, Ben Bella had from the beginning stepped into a snare: the army would be watching; the army knew that finally it could do whatever it wanted.
I want to defend Ben Bella just as I am going to defend Boumedienne. Ben Bella was not the ‘demon’ that the nervous, demagogic communiqué of 19 June accused him of being, no more than Boumedienne is the ‘reactionary’ that
L’Unita
wrote about. Both are victims of the same drama that every Third World politician lives through if he is honest, if he is a patriot. This was the drama of Lumumba and Nehru; it is the drama of Nyerere and Sekou Touré. The essence of the drama lies in the terrible
material resistance
that each one encounters on taking his first, second and third steps up the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and begins to do it and then sees, after a month, after a year, after three years, that it just isn’t happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness, the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists, the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink. Progress comes with great difficulty along such a road. The politician begins to push too hard. He looks for a way out through dictatorship. The dictatorship then fathers an opposition. The opposition organizes a
coup
.