The Battle for Algeria. Jennifer Johnson
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Even when faced with a humiliating foreign occupation, French administrators were unwilling to acknowledge their contradictory position on empire and claim to Algeria.
Beginning in November 1942, Algerian nationalists, spanning the full political spectrum, received an unexpected boost from the British and American presence in Algeria. The Allies’ landing in North Africa, aimed as a staging ground to attack Germany, had a huge impact on the future revolutionary guard, such as M’hamed Yazid, PPA member and GPRA minister of information (1958–1962), Ramdane Abane, Soummam Congress architect, and Benyoucef Benkhedda, second GPRA president (1961–1962), for not only did they encounter political alternatives and Western generosity, but they formed important contacts with foreigners upon which they later relied.
Hocine Aït Ahmed, a founding FLN member who traveled to New York in the late 1950s in preparation for United Nations sessions and served as GPRA minister of state (1958–1962), recalled in his memoirs the impact of the Allied landing. “One can say that opinion, as a whole, moved on to the Allied side … the population sympathized with the American army. There was a democratic side to the way in which the officers and soldiers behaved.”40 At the time, Ferhat Abbas thought the Americans would make Algeria “an American protectorate that Roosevelt would emancipate at the end of the war.”41 Their presence in North Africa inspired a spirit of optimism among Algerian leaders who hoped the Americans would at the very least support the idea of an Algeria federated with France. They would soon be disappointed to learn defeating Germany was the Allies’ priority, not liberating the Maghrib from the throes of French colonialism.42
In the ensuing fifteen months, a broader coalition of Algerian activists produced three critical documents that increasingly articulated a position for separation and independence. In December 1942, Ferhat Abbas, a former proponent of assimilation, and twenty-four other Algerian leaders wrote a “Message from the Algerian Muslim Representatives to the Responsible Authorities” to protest the governor-general’s conscription preparation, and they presented it to the Allies and French government officials. In it, Abbas recalled “the American President’s commitment to the liberation of peoples, drawing attention to the unfree status of Algerians, and calling for a Muslim conference to draft a new economic, social, and political status for Algeria. In return for its implementation,” the Algerian Muslim Representatives “committed Algerians to sacrifice themselves wholeheartedly for the liberation of metropolitan France.”43
The language Abbas included in this “Message” referenced American president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill’s August 1941 Atlantic Charter. These towering wartime figures met to discuss postwar goals, which included limiting territorial expansion, economic cooperation, disarmament, and international peace and security. Yet, for anticolonial activists around the world, the charter’s most relevant and useful principle was number three, that the United States and the United Kingdom respect “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”44 The Atlantic Charter targeted Western Europe and the United States, but as would become a frequent problem with post–World War II international doctrines, the language was vague. Therefore, African nationalists appropriated the content in these doctrines and argued that they applied to them, as well as to Europeans and Americans.45
Even though Abbas did not specifically cite the Atlantic Charter in his 1942 message, he reminded Allies and French government representatives that the Algerian people remained under forced colonial domination. Therefore, according to the charter’s third principle, they should be working toward Algerian self-government and sovereignty. Abbas’s appeal, based on a set of widely circulated and supposedly universal ideas at the time, shows the antecedents of the FLN’s strategy. By the mid-1950s, the FLN had additional universal discourses and international charters to choose from, as well as prominent international organizations at which to address their claims.
Abbas and his coauthors failed to receive the response they wanted and continued to lobby the colonial authorities for change. In February 1943, Abbas wrote the “Manifesto of the Algerian People,” a nine-page reflection on the realities of colonialism and the Algerian condition. He reminded his readers that “in his declaration [the Atlantic Charter],” President Roosevelt gave assurances that in a postwar world “the rights of all peoples, big and small, would be respected.”46 Based on Roosevelt and Churchill’s words, Abbas called for the “condemnation and abolition of colonization” and an Algerian constitution that guaranteed:
1. The absolute freedom and equality of all its inhabitants without distinction as to race or religion.
2. The abolition of feudal property by a major agrarian reform and the right to well-being of the immense agricultural proletariat.
3. The recognition of the Arabic language as official on the same basis as French.
4. Freedom of press and association.
5. Free compulsory education for children of both sexes.
6. Freedom of religion for all inhabitants and the application to all religions of the principle of separation of church and state.47
For Abbas, these were basic freedoms to which all people in Algeria, regardless of their ethnic or racial origins, were entitled. Even though the manifesto did not state independence as the ultimate goal, its language indicated that Abbas was quite knowledgeable about rights and liberties enjoyed by French citizens and that his political vision demanded more and more equal measures between French and Algerians, a concession Marcel Peyrouton, the governor-general of Algeria, was still unwilling to grant. Moreover, he tried to hold President Roosevelt and his allies accountable to the ideas within the Atlantic Charter by highlighting that Algerians did not choose nor did they want “the form of government under which they lived.”48
Angered over its dismissal, Abbas gathered additional signatures and verbal support from Messali Hadj who was still in prison, and wrote what is commonly referred to as “An Addition to the Manifesto” (Projet de réformes faisant suite au Manifeste). This document, which demanded “the political autonomy of Algeria as a sovereign nation with droit de regard by France and Allied military assistance in case of conflict” after World War II, went farther than the two previous ones in articulating a desire for Algerian sovereignty, distinct and separate from France.49 The addition to the manifesto also represented a rare moment when Abbas and Messali worked together, highlighting how once disparate Algerian political agendas were starting to converge.
Newly appointed governor-general Georges Catroux rejected the manifesto. General Charles de Gaulle, head of the Comité français de libération nationale, tried to appease the activists by passing a 7 March 1944 ordinance that granted citizenship to 65,000 Algerians. Furthermore, he abolished the Native Code that had been in place since 1881. Although de Gaulle’s initiative still focused on preserving and strengthening the colonial relationship, it also marked the first significant political reforms in Algeria since 1919. Despite de Gaulle’s marginal concessions, many Algerian political activists, including Ferhat Abbas, Messali Hadj and his followers, and the reformist ‘ulamā rejected the ordinance as inadequate.
Exactly one week after the 7 March 1944 ordinance, Abbas founded the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (AML), another attempt to build a broad coalition between the ‘ulamā and the Algerian People’s Party followers. He envisioned a more popular movement working toward “an Algerian nation,” an “autonomous republic federated to a new, anticolonial, and anti-imperial French republic.”50 According to the AML statute, Abbas created the group to “familiarize and defend the ‘Manifesto of the Algerian People’ in front of French and Algerian public opinion and to reclaim the freedom of speech and expression for all Algerians.” A second and related goal, Abbas wrote, was for the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté to “participate in the birth of a new world,” which would respect human dignity.51
During the spring of 1944, Abbas moved closer toward Messali Hadj’s political position of total separation from France. For example, on 22 May 1944, at