The Battle for Algeria. Jennifer Johnson
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of the political landscape and moral stakes of the moment. He had the ear of the man running the most influential humanitarian organization of his day and he wanted to make sure he played the opportunity correctly. Abbas demonstrated intimate knowledge of the Geneva Conventions, which helped redefine human rights for individual civilians and noncombatants by extending basic physical and legal protections to previously excluded categories of people.2 The revised Geneva Conventions were a significant victory for anticolonial national liberation armies because they chipped away at colonial hegemony and opened the door for nonstate actors in an internal colonial conflict to make claims about their fundamental human rights.
Figure 1. Ferhat Abbas in his office in Tunis, 1961. (Getty)
Two years later in April 1960, after numerous exchanges with the ICRC, highly publicized prisoner release ceremonies, and international campaigns in support of Algerian independence, Abbas finally replied that the GPRA agreed to uphold the Geneva Conventions despite the fact that French president Charles de Gaulle did not promise to meet all of the aforementioned conditions. Abbas made a calculated decision. He showed that he knew the intricacies of the Geneva Conventions and he, along with various Algerian nationalist branches, spent years demonstrating their steadfast commitment to them in the international arena. By the time the GPRA officially signed the conventions on 11 June 1960, it was largely a symbolic gesture.3 Countries and organizations around the world already perceived the Algerians fighting for liberation as humanitarians capable of running a modern nation-state.
This book offers a new interpretation of one of the most violent wars of decolonization: the Algerian war (1954–1962). I argue that the conflict was about who—France or the FLN—would exercise sovereignty of Algeria. The fight between the two sides was not simply a military affair; it also involved diverse and competing claims about who was positioned to better care for the Algerian people’s health and welfare.
Even though the French outmaneuvered the Algerians on the battlefield, ultimately, the FLN was more successful at achieving its aims. To better understand the conflict and the unlikely triumph of the FLN over one of the most powerful Western countries in the world, I argue that one must examine the local context of the war as it evolved in Algeria as well as its international dimensions, which played out in every corner of the globe. I rely heavily on Algerian sources, which make clear the centrality of health and humanitarianism to their war effort. They reveal how the nationalist leadership constructed national health-care institutions that provided critical care for the population and functioned as a proto-state. Moreover, its representatives used postwar rhetoric about rights and national self-determination to legitimize their claims, which led to international recognition of Algerian sovereignty.
Scholars have examined the diplomatic dimensions of Algerian nationalists’ efforts to internationalize the conflict, but they did not focus on Algerian agency nor did they significantly rely on Algerian archives.4 Other scholars have analyzed the military and political dimensions of the war and many placed a heavy emphasis on colonial violence, torture, and terror committed by the French military and police during this period.5 Frantz Fanon, the noted revolutionary theorist from Martinique who penned the scathing critique of colonialism The Wretched of the Earth, has also left us with enduring observations about the corroding nature of French colonial rule and violence during the war. His cautionary message in “Concerning Violence,” that violence begets violence, proved all too true in Algeria.6 Fanon’s training in psychiatry and his years treating Algerian and French patients enabled him to share insights that few of his contemporaries could. Yet, he was not Algerian and his work frequently lapses into Manichean generalizations. As such, the book uses him sparingly. The extreme violence and atrocities committed by both sides, like Fanon, also remain in the background here.
Instead, this study analyzes the war through the eyes of the Algerian participants and privileges their voices and agency. It concentrates on French and Algerian efforts to engage one another off the physical battlefield and highlights the social dimensions of the FLN’s winning strategy, which targeted the local and international arenas.
Both sides mobilized recently redefined notions of welfare and rights to appeal for support from a wide array of sources. The colonial administration used medicine and health care to try to win the hearts and minds of the population. The Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS), the most comprehensive wartime initiative, aimed to facilitate political rapprochement between the Algerian population and the colonial state. A significant portion of their efforts focused on medical care.7 Teams of physicians, nurses, and assistants visited rural areas and provided free care, taught hygiene classes for women, and offered vaccinations. In some cases, their visits were the first time state services penetrated the interior, and the administration devoted serious attention toward remedying this neglect through peaceful pacifiers, instructed to conquer with medicine rather than bullets.8
Algerian nationalists also used the provision of medicine, health care, and personnel to win over the Algerian people by showing them “that they could care for the welfare of ‘their’ populations better than [could an] alien colonial government,” as did other anticolonialists in the Third World.9 Nationalists worked to construct an organized and vibrant health-services division that could rival that of the French state and convince locals that not only could they assume responsibility for the people’s care, but that they were ready, effective immediately, to do so.10 Anticolonial leaders across the globe, including India and Southeast Asia, engaged in similar endeavors that showed their willingness and readiness to care for the local population.
The health-services division was a key component of the internal FLN strategy to establish and project state power in Algeria to Algerians. Consequently, the division’s duties targeted different groups within Algeria, including Algerian soldiers, Algerian civilians sympathetic to the FLN, and Algerian civilians who may have supported political rivals. Moreover, the health-services division sent a clear message to the people and the French administration that the nationalists were capable of building and running public welfare institutions.
In addition to FLN domestic medical efforts, the nationalists embarked upon international diplomatic and humanitarian initiatives. Starting in 1957, the nationalists concentrated on expanding their health-care initiatives beyond Algeria and sought international aid and support through a refined humanitarian message. The Algerian Red Crescent (Croissant-Rouge Algérien, CRA), the primary vehicle for disseminating this position and soliciting financial and material aid abroad, and its leadership appropriated the universal language of humanitarianism and rights to substantiate their claims for sovereignty. Nationalists built upon Arab alliances and viewed the internationalization of medical aid outside of Algeria as a critical tactic in gaining additional support. They believed an organization with international ties and widespread appeal would be most successful in projecting their cause to a global audience.
Algerian leaders continued their international outreach by lobbying the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations to recognize Algerian independence. They fought to capitalize on the organizations’ moral and political authority and manipulated the language within their founding documents to make strong arguments for why the nationalists were entitled to rule Algeria. They were extremely shrewd political weapons deployed against their colonial opponent.
FLN representatives set up an Algerian Red Crescent office in Geneva and they met frequently with ICRC delegates. These meetings put the international organization and its staff in a difficult position and highlighted the limitations of their humanitarian mandate.11 On the one hand, the Red Cross was committed to providing aid regardless of race, religion, or gender. On the other hand, the organization did not have clear guidelines for how to handle internal conflicts, as many wars for decolonization were classified. Therefore, by meeting with and supplying assistance to Algerians, the Swiss representatives found themselves embroiled in a politically explosive diplomatic situation with the French colonial administration. The FLN understood the moral capital the ICRC could provide and they used it to their advantage.
Unlike the ICRC, Algerian nationalists