The Battle for Algeria. Jennifer Johnson
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Long Road to War
On Monday, 20 August 1956, a warm summer day two years into the Algerian war, six National Liberation Front (FLN) leaders, Mohamed Larbi Ben M’hidi, Ramdane Abane, Amar Ouamrane, Belkacem Krim, Lakhdar Bentobbal, and Youcef Zighoud, gathered in northern Algeria, in the Soummam Valley, to convene the Soummam Congress and discuss the future of their struggle for national liberation. The previous twenty-one months had been disappointing for FLN leaders. They struggled to recruit participants, obtain vital arms and financial support, eliminate and absorb their political rivals, and simultaneously combat aggressive French military action and repressive policies such as the April 1955 State of Emergency and March 1956 Special Powers Law, both of which suspended civil liberties and granted the military carte blanche. The FLN needed revitalization and a renewed focus and the Soummam Congress was just the event to do so.
Ben M’hidi and Abane, two central FLN figures who did not live to see independent Algeria, worked together to create an agenda for Soummam.1 The men prioritized ten major areas to cover throughout the day, including financial and political matters, administrative and material needs inside and outside of Algeria, engaging with the United Nations and negotiating cease-fire terms.2 The wide variety of agenda items targeted local, national, and international dimensions that facilitated controlling the land and people within Algeria’s territorial borders and could yield external recognition of Algeria’s right to sovereignty.
Belkacem Krim, one of the six men who planned the 1 November 1954 attacks that began the war and whose name by the summer of 1956 had taken on a “quasi mythical dimension,” gave the first substantial regional report on Kabylia. He explained significant progress had been made in recruitment and finances. He claimed that the number of FLN soldiers had risen from 450 in November 1954 to 3,100 in August 1956. Krim shared similarly impressive financial increases for the same period, noting that at the start of the war Kabylia had one million francs, whereas at the time of the Soummam Congress, it held 445 million francs. He told the other five men that the people and combatants’ spirits were “very good,” but that “everyone is asking us for arms.”3 Amar Ouamrane, a former soldier in the French army who belonged to several political parties in the late 1940s and early 1950s before joining the FLN in 1954, delivered a report for the Algiers region that revealed miniscule soldier numbers in November 1954 (only fifty). But he presented the steady increase to one thousand in August 1956, and he boasted 200 million francs in the region’s war chest. Ben M’hidi gave the status update for the Oran region and, although the number of soldiers had not surpassed 1,500 in May 1956, he proudly conveyed “excellent” relations between the FLN-ALN and the people. Ben M’hidi echoed Krim’s words when he told the room that the people and combatants’ spirits were “very good.”4 They concluded the morning session by outlining their principal political tasks that lie ahead, organizing and educating the people and propaganda. They also reiterated the importance of “psychological war,” which the minutes explained as establishing “relations with the people, the European minority, and prisoners of war.”5 This revised political agenda would contribute to strengthening how the FLN operated, in general terms, in Algeria.
During the afternoon sessions, the nationalists discussed political structures and international efforts that would secure external recognition of their right to rule Algeria. They created the thirty-four-person National Council of the Algerian Revolution (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne, CNRA), which they wanted “to meet annually as long as the hostilities continue.”6 They also established the five-member Coordination and Execution Committee (Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution, CCE), made up of Ben M’hidi, Abane, Krim, Benyoucef Benkhedda, and Saad Dahlab, and granted it “the power to control the political, military, economic, and social organisms.”7 The congress participants specified “political primacy over that of the military” and the supremacy “of the interior over the exterior,” taking direct aim at FLN comrades abroad.
It was the Soummam Congress’s ninth agenda item, calendar of work, where Abane, Ben M’hidi, Ouramane, Krim, Zighoud, and Bentobbal revealed the depths of their political acumen and demonstrated an appreciation for the international political climate and mastery of acceptable codes of conduct. The men agreed that “only the National Council of the Algerian Revolution is authorized to order the cease-fire whose framework will be based on the United Nations platform…. The interior will have to provide all of the information we have to facilitate the task of our representatives at the United Nations.” They issued strict orders to soldiers regarding their treatment of civilians and prisoners and said, “no officer, no matter his rank, henceforth has the right to pronounce a death sentence … slitting throats is formally forbidden in the future, those sentenced to death will be shot. The accused has the right to choose a defense. Mutilation is officially prohibited.” They banned “the execution of prisoners of war” and advised that “a prisoner of war service be created in each wilaya [province],” for in their estimation, “it would be essential in popularizing the legality of our struggle.” In closing, they briefly mentioned the need to build up a health-services division and that “each new recruit undergo a medical visit, when possible.”8 The leadership’s attention to these particular matters suggests a fluency with the contemporary state of international laws of war, most notably the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and their desire to transform the FLN and ALN into modern entities their allies and opponents would have to recognize. They wanted to implement humane practices at every level and send a clear message that the FLN was committed to and capable of running a modern nation-state, even though it would not be internationally recognized as such for six more years.
This historic one-day event, initiated at the behest of Ramdane Abane, was one of the most important political developments for the Algerian nationalist side throughout the eight-year conflict. The Soummam Congress crystallized the direction of the party for years to come and influenced the shape and tenor of the liberation struggle until its conclusion in 1962. The summit’s positive outcomes, however, could not mask harsh political realities and internal conflicts within the FLN. Nationalist representatives outside of Algeria, notably Ahmed Ben Bella, future first president of independent Algeria, Mohamed Khider, future Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) minister of information, and Hocine Aït Ahmed, future GPRA minister of state, were not present at Soummam. In fact, they had been deliberately excluded from the meeting’s proceedings and received a summary account after the fact. In an early fall 1956 letter, Ben Bella wrote to the internal FLN delegation and expressed his disappointment at having been marginalized from such a significant event. He asked that they “postpone the publication of [the Soummam] decisions until all points of view of all of the brothers … are considered.”9 Ben Bella’s wish was not fulfilled. On 22 October he was arrested when his plane, scheduled to fly from Rabat, Morocco, to Tunis, was intercepted over French airspace and he was imprisoned until the Evian negotiations six years later.
These initial glimpses into the FLN leadership present an alternative narrative about the nationalist movement. They raise questions about how the FLN ultimately became the nationalist party that diplomatically defeated the French, as Matthew Connelly has shown, and claimed sovereignty of Algeria. The FLN of 1962 was not the only party vying for power and its vision for how to achieve liberation was not the only course explored.
The long history of French colonial rule in Algeria is littered with instances of violence, legal and political inequality, a small but extremely influential European settler population, and repeated failure by innumerable colonial administrators to implement meaningful reform. Beginning in the 1920s, Algerian elites began formulating political groups, and for the next thirty years before the official start of the war for national liberation they pursued avenues ranging from assimilation to a Pan-Islamic ‘umma (community). Important moments in Franco-Algerian relations during the 1930s and 1940s further strengthened nationalist sentiment, yet I argue World War II outcomes—the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the American presence in Algeria beginning in the fall of 1942, the May 1945 Sétif and Guelma massacres, the creation of the United Nations and its charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949—were the most critical developments for Algerian nationalists. The texts provided a new discourse about rights from which anticolonial activists drew liberally, depending