Algerian War the 1 November 1954
(War for Algerian independence from France. The movement for independence began during World War I (1914 – 18) and gained momentum after French promises of greater self-rule in Algeria went unfulfilled after World War II (1939 – 45). In 1954 the National Liberation Front (FLN) began a guerrilla war against France and sought diplomatic recognition at the UN to establish a sovereign Algerian state. Although Algerian fighters operated in the countryside — particularly along the country's borders — the most serious fighting took place in and around Algiers, where FLN fighters launched a series of violent urban attacks that came to be known as the Battle of Algiers (1956 – 57). French forces (that increased to 500,000 troops) managed to regain control but only through brutal measures, and the ferocity of the fighting sapped the political will of the French to continue the conflict. In 1959 Charles de Gaulle declared that the Algerians had the right to determine their own future. Despite terrorist acts by French Algerians opposed to independence and an attempted coup in France by elements of the French army, an agreement was signed in 1962, and Algeria became independent. See also Raoul Salan.
The first November 1954
November 1, 1954. Emboldened by the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the Front de Liberation National (FLN) launches armed revolts throughout Algeria and issues a proclamation calling for a sovereign Algerian state. The French are unimpressed but deploy troops to monitor the situation.
The Algerian War had a particularly significant impact on French anarchists and colonial French society in general. As Boulouque describes in the initial chapters of Les comrades des frères, Algeria wasn’t simply administered and exploited by a French bureaucracy and army. Approximately 1,000,000 French colonials had settled in Algeria by the time guerrilla units of the Front de liberation national (FLN) attacked French military posts and police stations in the early morning of November 1st, 1954. Moreover, the impoverishment of Arab and Muslim Algerians under colonial rule forced thousands to migrate to the metropolis where they were exploited in French factories, and interacted with French workers. Thus, the distance—geographic and moral—between the colonized and their colonizers was substantially less than during Indochina’s anti-colonial war. Indeed the war was ultimately fought not only in the Algerian maquis (brush-land), but in French settlers’ quarters in Algeria and in French cafés in the metropolis.
During the decades that preceded the war, Messali Hadj founded both l’Etoile nord-africaine (North African Star, 1926) and the popular Party Algerian (Algerian People’s Party, 1930), nationalist organizations of Algerian workers that set the stage for the independence struggle. In 1947, the PPA became the Movement pour le triumphed des liberties democratiques (Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, MTLD). Power-struggles developed and one faction within the organization remained faithful to Messali. Another faction formed the Comity revolutionaries d’unité et d’action (Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action, CRUA) in 1954 which in turn split several months later to form the FLN and its military organization, the Armée de liberation national (National Liberation Army). In response, Messali founded the Movement national Algerian (National Algerian Movement, MNA), an organization also oriented to armed struggle for the purpose of national liberation. The FLN and the MNA engaged in a deadly “café war” for control over the struggle for Algerian independence, in which bombings and shootings caused 5,000 casualties. By 1957, the FLN more or less predominated.
On March 12, 1956, the French government voted to give itself “special powers” to subdue the guerrilla war, which the army set about doing by means of torture and collective punishment as well as standard counterinsurgency measures. But the FLN persisted and the fighting went on, requiring that increasing numbers of French troops be sent to Algeria. Movements of draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors sprang up in France. The FLN escalated the cost of war by bringing the conflict out of the mountains and into urban centers with the Battle of Algiers in 1957, set off by the bombing of an Air France office and two other locations in the downtown center. French civilians’ support for the war waned after 1958. In spite of colonial uprisings attacking the French administration in Algeria in 1960, the Gaullist regime signed a cease-fire treaty with the FLN in 1962, thereby ending the war and granting Algeria independence. Estimates maintain that between 350,000 and one million people were killed during the eight years of the conflict.
About the Algerian war
The Algerian War (French: Guerre d'Algérie), also known as Algerian War of Independence, took place between 1954 and 1962 and led to Algerian independence from France. One of the most important decolonization wars, it was a complex conflict characterized by guerrilla warfare, maquis fighting, terrorism against civilians, use of torture on both sides and counter-terrorism operations by the French Army. Effectively started on 1 November 1954 during the Toussaint Rouge (Red All Saints day), the conflict shook the French Fourth Republic's (1946–58) foundations and led to its collapse. Under the directives from Guy Mollet's (SFIO) government, the French Army initiated a campaign of "pacification" of what was still considered at the time to be fully part of France. This "public order operation" quickly grew to a size where it could be called a full-scale war. Algerians, who at first were mostly in favor of peace and tranquility, turned increasingly toward the goal of independence, supported by other Arab countries and, more generally, by worldwide public opinion gained by anti-colonialist ideas. Meanwhile, French divided themselves on the issues of "French Algeria" (l'Algérie Française), of the conservation of the status quo, the acceptance of negotiations and of an intermediate status between independence and complete integration in the French Republic, and independence.
Affected by parliamentary instability, the Fourth Republic was dissolved with Charles de Gaulle's return to power during the May 1958 crisis and his subsequent founding of the Fifth Republic and the establishment of a new Constitution tailored by himself and his Gaullist followers. De Gaulle's return to power was supposed, according to the Army, to ensure Algeria's continued integration with the French Community, which had replaced the French Union which gathered France's colonies. However, De Gaulle progressively shifted in favor of Algerian independence, seeing it as inevitable. He thus engaged in negotiations with the FLN, leading to the March 1962 Evian Accords which organized the independence of Algeria. After the failed April 1961 Algiers putsch organized by Generals hostile to the negotiations headed by Michel Debré's Gaullist government, the OAS (Organization de l'armée secrète), which grouped far-right radicals, initiated a campaign of bombings in Algeria in order to block the implementation of the Evian Accords and the exile of the colons. Ahmed Ben Bella, who had been arrested in 1956 along with other FLN leaders, became the first President of Algeria. To this day, the war has provided an important strategy frame for counter-insurgency thinkers, while the use of torture by the French Army has provoked a moral and political debate on the legitimacy and effectiveness of such methods. This debate is far from being settled as torture was used by both sides.
The Algerian war is a founding event of Algerian history. It left long-standing scars in French society, and still affects some segments of society in present-day France. After the 1997 legislative elections, won by the Socialist Party (PS), the National Assembly officially acknowledged in June 1999, a full 37 years after the Evian agreements, that a "war" had taken place (official terminology was a "public order operation");[2] while the Paris massacre of 1961 was recognized by the French state only in October 2001; on the other hand the Oran massacre of 1962 by the FLN has not been recognized yet by the Algerian state. Relations between France and Algeria are still deeply marked by this conflict and its aftermath.
الأربعاء أكتوبر 03, 2012 8:43 pm من طرف fatima zohra
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