French politicians spoke about their “civilising mission” in Algeria. This was a monstrous lie. In 1834 a French general reported that virtually all the native population could read and write, with schools for boys and girls in each village. A century later only a quarter of the Muslim population could read Arabic. Less than one in ten could read French.
(...) [Setif:] But now the settlers wanted to assert their power. Large numbers of troops were brought in, including Senegalese soldiers, who unfortunately did not make common cause with the local population... Probably at least 15,000 died, though some claim as many as 50,000. Even on the lowest estimate, the Europeans killed 50 Muslims for every European life lost.
Showing posts with label algeria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label algeria. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
lecture 12, "french imperialism"
charles keith (john merriman's course)
----------
topic of lecture: French imperialism from 1871-1914
citing a novel from an army officer who speaks about his expedition to Sudan as compensation/consolation for the anger at Alsace-Lorraine's annexation.
during the period we're discussing, the French empire exploded: at the outset, had been little more than outposts in Algeria, military presence in parts of North Africa, Southeast Asia, few "small spits of land" in the Pacific and the Carribean--exploded to include large swathes of North Africa, West Africa, most of mainland Southeast Asia, parts of the Middle East, and territories in the Pacific/Carribean.
by the end of WWI, the French Empire exercised sovereignty over 100 million inhabitants--twice as many people as lived in metropolitan France at that time, roughly.
the passage captures the two central themes at this juncture in French imperial history
(1) serving in the army to recapture prestige lost in the disastrous war with Prussia. officer sees the site of revenge overseas--French nationalism, in this sense, became increasingly inseparable from the idea of a strong, healthy French empire. the fusion of a more modern, French nationalism was new to French history at this period.
(2) the passage comes from a novel, a part of popular culture--during the late 19th century, Empire became something that more and more French people experienced directly, either through popular culture, serving in the army or colonial administrations, or settling lands for the motherland.
take-away from the lecture: Empire, during the Third Republic, became central to French nationalism--it was in the national curriculum, in the national newspapers, and in political discussion. in many ways, it became a "common experience." Empire was a central part of making people French, in sum.
----------
Empire, of course, had a long past in French history.
during the 17th and 18th centuries, French had a colonial history in the Caribbean and in North America, though many of these possessions were lost around the time of the French revolution. one of the revolution's powerful legacies, in fact, was a conviction to carry the revolution across French borders--to bring the rights of man to the monarchies of the continent. Napoleon of course, continued this--who carried the reach of the Empire across Europe, all the way to Russia.
at the turn of the 19th century, in fact, Napoleon even tried to colonize Egypt--an event which spoke to his messianic belief in science/progress and French civilization. an absence of any real knowledge, of course, about the non-Western world (and a predisposition to the idea of non-Western inferiority). This potent combination, the mission civilizatrice, was to drive French empire until the end.
at the birth of the Third Republic, however, the various tumult in French history prior meant that the Empire was pretty small. it was, correspondingly, fairly marginal in national imaginary. in the years before the French defeat to Prussia, the main urge to expand often came from soldiers/sailors and/or missionaries. even the bulk of Algerian expansion after 1830 was largely the work of Generals, who defied the national government in Paris. at this stage, in a way, the French empire was a giant system of relief for the French military (something to "occupy" them).
BUT: after the loss to Prussia, an acute sense of national inferiority prevailed. Critics attacked the Republic as a cesspool of corruption, etc. Emasculated militarily, slumping economically, shrinking demographically--at this juncture, many people obviously turned to colonial expansion. Jules Very was perhaps the most prominent advocate of this belief.
in his words, "colonial policy was the daugher of industrial policy... export is an essential factor in public prosperity" -- colonies were essential to a strong national economy. France needed exclusive access to new markets and raw materials. furthermore, closely tried to these objectives were political-strategic ones--a policy of abstention was "the road to decadence". Expansion in Africa and Asia was necessary to make France great in the panoply of nations, according to Very.
he also believed in the civilizing mission: "superior races have a right, but also a duty" to bring civilization to other nations. it was the colonial empire that would save France, and elevate their subjects.
----------
So: colonial objectives were brought into national politics, big-time, especially after Very and the Republicans came to power in 1879.
first attempt to expand was in Vietnam, where the endeavored to take over what is now its Northern half (then called Tonkin--had failed on several occasions before). on the pretext of protecting catholics and prosecuting pirates; the campaign was unpopular and failed. general's head ended up on a pike-staff.
nevertheless, this prefigured Empire's future prominence--colonial expansion accelerated from this point on, as France rushed to compete with Britain and Germany.
debates over colonial policy would become a standard part of French political discourse in the 1890s. every government after Jules Very presided over a steadily expanding colonial Empire.
----------
this new prominence was, in many ways, due to the influence of a growing colonial lobby in French society--this lobby was very influential in spreading the idea of Empire as national redemption. it was a diverse group of individuals, who put forth the idea for expansion in many different ways (it was not particularly organized)--included men like informal group of explorers/geographers, shipbuilders, railway magnates, factory owners (path to material wealth), missionairies (converts in the heathen races--declining religiosity in the homeland, don't forget), writers and journalists.
so they weren't united by the same interests--but it is precisely their diversity that shows how compelling Empire had become, for France.
the assumption had become, indeed, that Empire served France, as a whole. Empire as a solution to domestic, national problems ("colonies as a laboratory for modernity"). before the Third Republic, the social value of colonies was little more than a way to get rid of people that the State considered undesirable (French penal colony in New Colony, where over 4,000 of the communards had been sent). but toward the end of the 19th century, this began to change--a potential home for landless peasants, unemployed workers, etc, even.
French engineers, and social planners, came to see colonies as a vast work-site--building from scratch, in a sense. Colonies:France, as what Far West:America (says a colonial administrator in Morocco). a "training ground", for many of these bureaucrats.
----------
in popular culture: schoolchildren began reading about colonies in textbooks (Ministry of Education directive: "it must not be forgotten that France is a world power... Let us not have any scruples about...giving them as rich an image of their country... the mother country and her distant daughters"). the urban middle-classes visiting the Museum of Natural History began to see objects collected in the colonies. and in the massive expositions (in 1900, colonies given their own staging grounds--entire buildings were transported from the Empire).
the Empire was more than a periodic spectacle--crept into the most mundane forms of everyday life. in newspapers, day-in day-out--articles focused on military encounters, of course (vs. a "savage enemy"). captured in novels, as well.
the French encountered an Empire in cafes, dance halls, etc. even goods that people bought evoked the Empire (the yellow "banana" box). even in Church--the last third of the 19th century was a time of intense missionary activity, and people heard financial pleas from these missionaries.
----------
of course, no better way to experience it than go there. though, by the late 1880s and 1890s, there were few Frenchpeople in the colonies (with the exception of Algeria: 300,000 French settlers in 1871)--little more than administrators and garrison--gradually, though, more and more came.
the most drastically affected, of course, were soldiers in the military, as France attempted to expand, and consolidate her Empire (in the face of fierce resistance). long sea journeys, tropical diseases, and miserable pay.
missionairies, too, went overseas more and more.
settlers went to the colonies in order to stay--often committed for life. took to the colonies whatever Capital and possessions they may have had. distance from home, hostility from natives, etc., were all serious obstacles. many were drawn by inducements from people who owned large tracts of land (land-owners also sought Italian and Spanish immigrants, when they couldn't find enough Frenchfolk).
-----------
as Empire grew, life in the colonies became more regularized. administrators/civil service generally took over from soldiers/military, and started to collect taxes, keeping law and order--often having to sanction violence against deviants and those who resisted. increasingly, these people came not from the military, but from civilians who were trained at specific schools in the metropole (Ecole Colonial, for example--founded in 1877).
French government also did its best to draw professionals to the colonies (lawyers, doctors, etc.). Paris offered subsidies.
more and more women came, as well, to these places. in a way, this reflected the taming and the "making domestic" of the colonies--the regularization. women going to seek husbands, etc. many women worked in humanitarian capacities, which is ironic considering what their husbands would be doing.
----------
by WWI, there would be almost 500,000 French citizens scattered throughout the French empire. what was life like? few people found adventure, of course. disease took a large toll (malaria, yellow fever, etc.). attack/accidents were almost always a concern. medical care was often inadequate. colonial goods were often susceptible to rapidly changing market conditions, meaning that settlers didn't always thrive. social life, in the colonies, was fairly limited--in many places (presumably rural), some citizens might even spend months without seeing other Europeans (!).
most never relinquished their sense of superiority. these attitudes were reinforced by French laws and institutions, and well-established spatial and social segregation.
-----------
to WWI--when "Guns of August" began to roar in 1914, the French empire was at its peak (second only to the British). colonial promoters lauded the benefit of the colonies: (1) prestige, (2) secure site of investment, (3) captive markets, (4) raw materials/cheap labor, (5) reserve army of soldiers. Empire had become a popular part of popular culture. in short, Empire had become a fundamental part of national identity/hubris (as in the rest of Europe).
few French people in 1914 could see few things that might threaten this happy equilibrium. for many people, France had recovered from the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (and Empire was central to this national revival). "The renewal of France," in the words of a colonial official in 1912.
----------
of course, not all was well in the Emipre. haven't spoken about the effect of French colonialism on those in the colonies. needless to say, French imperialism didn't coincide with the "best of French civilization"
few accepted French expansion without struggle; but few, of course, could match the technology of the French, at the same time.
as French police, legal systems, etc., replaced the overtly military presence of the earlier age--occupation and repression paraded as "integration"/"assimilation"
by 1914, cracks began to appear in the edifice. not everyboy had been swept up by French dreams. a small anti-colonial lobby in the homeland began to appear. for some, expansion seemed a dangerous overextension of French power. others, seeing that promised financial concerns were underwhelming, began to criticize it practically. others yet protested on moral grounds--at a protest in 1906, the famous novelist Anatole France thundered, "whites do not communicate with blacks and yellow men but through arms... the people we call barbarians know us through" our barbarism. Jean Jaures went even further--refuting the mission of the civilizing mission (in this case, in Morocco)--arguing that a civilization existed, in Morocco, that had hope for the future. "And I cannot pardon those who have crushed this hope."
during the 1920s and 1930s, anti-colonialism would become a more potent voice in the metropole. (in 1931, a famous anti-colonial exposition would be organized, in opposition to the colonial expo--nothing similar had happened in 1900).
however: it was not the French themselves who would eventually succeed in crumbling the edifice of Empire. ultimately, it collapsed, first and foremost, because of the many forms of resistance waged by those under their yoke.
in many ways, WWI was a tipping point--the myths sustaining French rule had been very powerful, many in the colonized world had asked themselves whether colonial power was unchallengable and inevitable (and, for some intellectuals, maybe a "good thing"). during the war, about a half a million colonial subjects were conscripted--donning the blue uniform and fighting for France. many others came to the metropole to work. those who came saw religious, economic, political rifts at the home--and they saw a war that gave the lie to French civilization.
for countless people across the world, the Great War showed that France could not and did not correspond to its lofty myths. it dealt a terrible blow to their moral standing; Europeans savagely killing each other, for four years. the contrast between savagery and civilization was now reversed.
after WWI, for growing numbers in France, Emipre seemed to expensive (especially during the depression), immoral, and unwieldy to retain. what had been a source of unification became a source for disunion.
the opposite was true in the colonies. in the 1930s and 1940s, an anti-colonial nationalism was born--in the years after WWI, this would culminate in widespread liberation.
charles keith (john merriman's course)
----------
topic of lecture: French imperialism from 1871-1914
citing a novel from an army officer who speaks about his expedition to Sudan as compensation/consolation for the anger at Alsace-Lorraine's annexation.
during the period we're discussing, the French empire exploded: at the outset, had been little more than outposts in Algeria, military presence in parts of North Africa, Southeast Asia, few "small spits of land" in the Pacific and the Carribean--exploded to include large swathes of North Africa, West Africa, most of mainland Southeast Asia, parts of the Middle East, and territories in the Pacific/Carribean.
by the end of WWI, the French Empire exercised sovereignty over 100 million inhabitants--twice as many people as lived in metropolitan France at that time, roughly.
the passage captures the two central themes at this juncture in French imperial history
(1) serving in the army to recapture prestige lost in the disastrous war with Prussia. officer sees the site of revenge overseas--French nationalism, in this sense, became increasingly inseparable from the idea of a strong, healthy French empire. the fusion of a more modern, French nationalism was new to French history at this period.
(2) the passage comes from a novel, a part of popular culture--during the late 19th century, Empire became something that more and more French people experienced directly, either through popular culture, serving in the army or colonial administrations, or settling lands for the motherland.
take-away from the lecture: Empire, during the Third Republic, became central to French nationalism--it was in the national curriculum, in the national newspapers, and in political discussion. in many ways, it became a "common experience." Empire was a central part of making people French, in sum.
----------
Empire, of course, had a long past in French history.
during the 17th and 18th centuries, French had a colonial history in the Caribbean and in North America, though many of these possessions were lost around the time of the French revolution. one of the revolution's powerful legacies, in fact, was a conviction to carry the revolution across French borders--to bring the rights of man to the monarchies of the continent. Napoleon of course, continued this--who carried the reach of the Empire across Europe, all the way to Russia.
at the turn of the 19th century, in fact, Napoleon even tried to colonize Egypt--an event which spoke to his messianic belief in science/progress and French civilization. an absence of any real knowledge, of course, about the non-Western world (and a predisposition to the idea of non-Western inferiority). This potent combination, the mission civilizatrice, was to drive French empire until the end.
at the birth of the Third Republic, however, the various tumult in French history prior meant that the Empire was pretty small. it was, correspondingly, fairly marginal in national imaginary. in the years before the French defeat to Prussia, the main urge to expand often came from soldiers/sailors and/or missionaries. even the bulk of Algerian expansion after 1830 was largely the work of Generals, who defied the national government in Paris. at this stage, in a way, the French empire was a giant system of relief for the French military (something to "occupy" them).
BUT: after the loss to Prussia, an acute sense of national inferiority prevailed. Critics attacked the Republic as a cesspool of corruption, etc. Emasculated militarily, slumping economically, shrinking demographically--at this juncture, many people obviously turned to colonial expansion. Jules Very was perhaps the most prominent advocate of this belief.
in his words, "colonial policy was the daugher of industrial policy... export is an essential factor in public prosperity" -- colonies were essential to a strong national economy. France needed exclusive access to new markets and raw materials. furthermore, closely tried to these objectives were political-strategic ones--a policy of abstention was "the road to decadence". Expansion in Africa and Asia was necessary to make France great in the panoply of nations, according to Very.
he also believed in the civilizing mission: "superior races have a right, but also a duty" to bring civilization to other nations. it was the colonial empire that would save France, and elevate their subjects.
----------
So: colonial objectives were brought into national politics, big-time, especially after Very and the Republicans came to power in 1879.
first attempt to expand was in Vietnam, where the endeavored to take over what is now its Northern half (then called Tonkin--had failed on several occasions before). on the pretext of protecting catholics and prosecuting pirates; the campaign was unpopular and failed. general's head ended up on a pike-staff.
nevertheless, this prefigured Empire's future prominence--colonial expansion accelerated from this point on, as France rushed to compete with Britain and Germany.
debates over colonial policy would become a standard part of French political discourse in the 1890s. every government after Jules Very presided over a steadily expanding colonial Empire.
----------
this new prominence was, in many ways, due to the influence of a growing colonial lobby in French society--this lobby was very influential in spreading the idea of Empire as national redemption. it was a diverse group of individuals, who put forth the idea for expansion in many different ways (it was not particularly organized)--included men like informal group of explorers/geographers, shipbuilders, railway magnates, factory owners (path to material wealth), missionairies (converts in the heathen races--declining religiosity in the homeland, don't forget), writers and journalists.
so they weren't united by the same interests--but it is precisely their diversity that shows how compelling Empire had become, for France.
the assumption had become, indeed, that Empire served France, as a whole. Empire as a solution to domestic, national problems ("colonies as a laboratory for modernity"). before the Third Republic, the social value of colonies was little more than a way to get rid of people that the State considered undesirable (French penal colony in New Colony, where over 4,000 of the communards had been sent). but toward the end of the 19th century, this began to change--a potential home for landless peasants, unemployed workers, etc, even.
French engineers, and social planners, came to see colonies as a vast work-site--building from scratch, in a sense. Colonies:France, as what Far West:America (says a colonial administrator in Morocco). a "training ground", for many of these bureaucrats.
----------
in popular culture: schoolchildren began reading about colonies in textbooks (Ministry of Education directive: "it must not be forgotten that France is a world power... Let us not have any scruples about...giving them as rich an image of their country... the mother country and her distant daughters"). the urban middle-classes visiting the Museum of Natural History began to see objects collected in the colonies. and in the massive expositions (in 1900, colonies given their own staging grounds--entire buildings were transported from the Empire).
the Empire was more than a periodic spectacle--crept into the most mundane forms of everyday life. in newspapers, day-in day-out--articles focused on military encounters, of course (vs. a "savage enemy"). captured in novels, as well.
the French encountered an Empire in cafes, dance halls, etc. even goods that people bought evoked the Empire (the yellow "banana" box). even in Church--the last third of the 19th century was a time of intense missionary activity, and people heard financial pleas from these missionaries.
----------
of course, no better way to experience it than go there. though, by the late 1880s and 1890s, there were few Frenchpeople in the colonies (with the exception of Algeria: 300,000 French settlers in 1871)--little more than administrators and garrison--gradually, though, more and more came.
the most drastically affected, of course, were soldiers in the military, as France attempted to expand, and consolidate her Empire (in the face of fierce resistance). long sea journeys, tropical diseases, and miserable pay.
missionairies, too, went overseas more and more.
settlers went to the colonies in order to stay--often committed for life. took to the colonies whatever Capital and possessions they may have had. distance from home, hostility from natives, etc., were all serious obstacles. many were drawn by inducements from people who owned large tracts of land (land-owners also sought Italian and Spanish immigrants, when they couldn't find enough Frenchfolk).
-----------
as Empire grew, life in the colonies became more regularized. administrators/civil service generally took over from soldiers/military, and started to collect taxes, keeping law and order--often having to sanction violence against deviants and those who resisted. increasingly, these people came not from the military, but from civilians who were trained at specific schools in the metropole (Ecole Colonial, for example--founded in 1877).
French government also did its best to draw professionals to the colonies (lawyers, doctors, etc.). Paris offered subsidies.
more and more women came, as well, to these places. in a way, this reflected the taming and the "making domestic" of the colonies--the regularization. women going to seek husbands, etc. many women worked in humanitarian capacities, which is ironic considering what their husbands would be doing.
----------
by WWI, there would be almost 500,000 French citizens scattered throughout the French empire. what was life like? few people found adventure, of course. disease took a large toll (malaria, yellow fever, etc.). attack/accidents were almost always a concern. medical care was often inadequate. colonial goods were often susceptible to rapidly changing market conditions, meaning that settlers didn't always thrive. social life, in the colonies, was fairly limited--in many places (presumably rural), some citizens might even spend months without seeing other Europeans (!).
most never relinquished their sense of superiority. these attitudes were reinforced by French laws and institutions, and well-established spatial and social segregation.
-----------
to WWI--when "Guns of August" began to roar in 1914, the French empire was at its peak (second only to the British). colonial promoters lauded the benefit of the colonies: (1) prestige, (2) secure site of investment, (3) captive markets, (4) raw materials/cheap labor, (5) reserve army of soldiers. Empire had become a popular part of popular culture. in short, Empire had become a fundamental part of national identity/hubris (as in the rest of Europe).
few French people in 1914 could see few things that might threaten this happy equilibrium. for many people, France had recovered from the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (and Empire was central to this national revival). "The renewal of France," in the words of a colonial official in 1912.
----------
of course, not all was well in the Emipre. haven't spoken about the effect of French colonialism on those in the colonies. needless to say, French imperialism didn't coincide with the "best of French civilization"
few accepted French expansion without struggle; but few, of course, could match the technology of the French, at the same time.
as French police, legal systems, etc., replaced the overtly military presence of the earlier age--occupation and repression paraded as "integration"/"assimilation"
by 1914, cracks began to appear in the edifice. not everyboy had been swept up by French dreams. a small anti-colonial lobby in the homeland began to appear. for some, expansion seemed a dangerous overextension of French power. others, seeing that promised financial concerns were underwhelming, began to criticize it practically. others yet protested on moral grounds--at a protest in 1906, the famous novelist Anatole France thundered, "whites do not communicate with blacks and yellow men but through arms... the people we call barbarians know us through" our barbarism. Jean Jaures went even further--refuting the mission of the civilizing mission (in this case, in Morocco)--arguing that a civilization existed, in Morocco, that had hope for the future. "And I cannot pardon those who have crushed this hope."
during the 1920s and 1930s, anti-colonialism would become a more potent voice in the metropole. (in 1931, a famous anti-colonial exposition would be organized, in opposition to the colonial expo--nothing similar had happened in 1900).
however: it was not the French themselves who would eventually succeed in crumbling the edifice of Empire. ultimately, it collapsed, first and foremost, because of the many forms of resistance waged by those under their yoke.
in many ways, WWI was a tipping point--the myths sustaining French rule had been very powerful, many in the colonized world had asked themselves whether colonial power was unchallengable and inevitable (and, for some intellectuals, maybe a "good thing"). during the war, about a half a million colonial subjects were conscripted--donning the blue uniform and fighting for France. many others came to the metropole to work. those who came saw religious, economic, political rifts at the home--and they saw a war that gave the lie to French civilization.
for countless people across the world, the Great War showed that France could not and did not correspond to its lofty myths. it dealt a terrible blow to their moral standing; Europeans savagely killing each other, for four years. the contrast between savagery and civilization was now reversed.
after WWI, for growing numbers in France, Emipre seemed to expensive (especially during the depression), immoral, and unwieldy to retain. what had been a source of unification became a source for disunion.
the opposite was true in the colonies. in the 1930s and 1940s, an anti-colonial nationalism was born--in the years after WWI, this would culminate in widespread liberation.
Friday, February 27, 2009
from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part II)
(62): After centuries of imperialism, the new nations had been left with economies that relied on the sale of raw material and the import of finished goods. This fundamental imbalance meant that countries like Argentina had to export vast amounts of raw materials at relatively low prices, whereas their import bills would be inflated with the high prices commanded by industrially manufactured goods.
(62-63): Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina had no brief for nation building. The oligarchs... ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which mean that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina's economic strength). This detachment of the elite fueled the growth of a socialist movement... Argentina's industrialization grew in the breach, when European and US capital neglected the region for the period between the Depression of the 1920s and the wars of the 1940s... British capital owned most of Argentina's railroads and the Swiss, the United States, and the British owned almost half of its industries. The authoritarian populist Juan Peron bought the railroads from the British...
(63-64): A combination of technological advantages, unionization, and the vagaries of the prices of primary products meant that the core enjoyed a sizable gain in the "terms of trade."
(66): Why is India poor, asked Dadabhai Naoroji? It is not the pitiless operation of economic laws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless action of the British policy; it is the pitiless eating of India's substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is the pitiless perversion of economic laws by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected, that is destroying India." The Third World bled to make Europe grow. Modernization theory avoided this, and rather sought to "Protestantize" the cultures of the world to seed capitalist culture.
(66): Colonialism ravaged the world, and left more than half of it bereft of capital and with a surfeit of poverty. In 1500, the average per capita income in Europe ran only three times more than that in Africa and Asia, whereas in 1960, it was ten times greater.
(67): Prebisch rejected the theory of comparative advantage, because he demonstrated that each region of the world could enjoy the fruits of modernity as much as the others. [T]rade is crucial because some regions have smaller markets than otehrs, and raw materials and agricultural lands are not evenly distributed along national lines. But the basis of trade had to be altered. It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development.
(68): The contempt of the First World's economists was palpable. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, complained to the English government about the invitations being sent out to the darker nations for the Bretton Woods Conference. Those that had been invited from Colombia to Venezuela, from Liberia to the Philippines, he noted, "clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground." For Keynes, this is "the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years." Only technocrats from the advanced industrial states should be allowed to formulate the rules, because otherwise thsoe from the raw material states would begin to make unbearable demands.
(71): The US president of the World Bank, Eugene Black, quite forthrightly remarked, "Our foreign aid programs constitute a distinct benefit to American business. The three major benefits are (1) foreign aid provides a substantial and immediate market for United States goods and services, (2) foreign aid stimulates the development of new overseas markets for United States' companies, (3) foreign aid orients national economies toward a free enterprise system in which United States' firms can prosper.
(73): [BARAN'S CRITIQUE OF ISI] Paul Baran published The Political Economy of Growth in which he demonstrated the futility of foreign aid and the import-substitution industrialization strategy... While Baran might have overstated his thesis and the role of monopoly capitalism within the darker nations, his critique on the reliance on the growth strategy was on point. The aid from outside (whether capitalist or socialist) purchased time for the dominant elites, who used that money to prevent necessary social transformation. A more substantial way for development would be the destruction of feudal social relations, band by the socialization of production. These parasitic elites acceded to the Prebisch logic in order to benefit their own class interests, rather than move their societies to socialism. The cominant classes in each of these societies purchased third-rate, out-of-date plants and machinery from the advanced industrial states, and paid top dollar for them... Prebisch recognized this major limitation in the Third World order: "We thought that an acceleration of the rate of growth would solve all problems. This was our great mistake." What was needed alongside growth were "changes in the social structure," indeed "a complete social transformation."
(74): It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in consideration for equity.
(75): One million dollars. That's all it took in 1953 for the CIA to overthrow a nationalist government. Langley's man in Tehran was Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. Ordered to take out the democratically elected National Front government led by Muhammed Mosaddeq and restore the Shah of Iran, Roosevelt spread the cash and waited for it to do its magic...
(76): The Tudeh Party (heir to the Communist Party founded in 1920) had a cadre of 25,000, while its union federation boasted a membership of 335,000. The influence of the Tudeh angered the US establishment, which offered the National Front leader a choice: either crush the Communists, take US aid and remain in power, or else fall under Soviet-Communist influence. On May 2, 1953, Mosaddeq revealed the shallowness fo his class, whose investment in nationalism and national sovereignty only went as far as it would guarantee its rule and luxury; he wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which he cowered, "Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration." Afraid of the Soviets, Mosaddeq crushed the Tudeh Party, thereby destroying the most organized defenders of Iranian sovereignty, and then fell before a coup engineered by the CIA's representative and a far more reliable US ally, the Shah.
(76-77): The Shah exiled tens of thousands of National Party members and Communists, and killed thousands of both... The Tudeh was paralyzed by the coup. The USSR paid it little heed, preferring to make every concession to the Shah in hopes of pacifying a border state and gaining access to the oil--all this despite the close relationship between the United States and the Shah.
(80): Although Iran had never been formerly colonized, it belonged with the hungry.... English oil firms... had dominated Iran's oil fields since 1901... Iran's government paid for the infrastructure to remove the oil, and earned a pittance from the oil company cartel. Not for nothing did Mossadeq's struggle over oil earn him the affection of the masses.
(97): Whereas when the Bolshevik Revolution took Russia out of World War I in an anti-imperialist flourish (the new government revealed the hidden imperialist correspondence of the European regimes), the Soviet state under Stalin had a much more cautious approach toward the new postcolonial states. The Soviet Union had been battered by the war... The USSR could neither afford to rest easy nor antagonize the hoards that gathered on its borders. In this vise, the USSR's principle leadership offered two contrary theses: that any entente between the United States and the USSR was "perfectly feasible" (as Stalin put it in December 1946), and that the United States and its allies were "rapacious imperialists" who were on the verge of defeat by the tide of socialism... Zhadanov's two-camp theory privileged the national Communist parties at the same time as the USSR's commissars made arrangements with bourgeois forces within the postcolonial states at the expense of the local Communists. This vacillation manifested itself in the ambiguity over the Soviet position regarding the Third World and peaceful co-existence. After the demise of Stalin, the new leadership led by Khruschchev and Bulganin adopted peaceful co-existence and pledged their support to the bourgeois nationalist regimes (often against the domestic Communists). The unclear situation suggested that the USSR seemed keener to push its own national interests than those of the national Communist parties to which it pledged verbal fealty.
(98): Secretary of State Dulles traveled to both Egypt and India in 1953. In South Asia, Dulles found Nehru "utterly impractical," whereas he enjoyed the "martial and religious qualities of the Pakistanis."
(100-101): In 1961, the other big three welcomed the representatives of twenty-two states from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe to Belgrade to create NAM, an institution that gre in stregnth from conference to conference, within and without the UN, and lumbers on today. The nature of the regimes that participated in the NAM meeting reflects its limitations. With their pageantry came the monarchs... This was a mixed crowd, and its sheer political diversity made an ideologically coherent and unified stance by NAM almost impossible. NAM would remain a political platform, a sub-United Nations, but it would only be able to act in concert on two broad issues: to champion global nuclear disarmament, and to democratize the United Nations.
(103): Cabral acknowledged that while PAIGC's struggle is also the struggle "for peaceful co-existence and for peace," he made it clear that "to co-exist one must first of all exist, so the imperialists and the colonists must be forced to retreat so that we can make a contribution to human civilization, based on the work, the dynamic personality and the culture of our peoples."
(104): In early December 1964, Che Guevara took this message to the floor of the UN General Assembly: "We should like to wake up this Assembly. Imperialism wants to convert this meeting into a useless oratorical tournament instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent them from doing this... As Marxists we maintain that peaceful co-existence does not include co-existence between exploiters and exploited."
(106): Between 1900 and 1933, the US military intervened to scuttle the national hopes of the people of Cuba (four times), the Dominican Republic (four times, including an eight-year occupation), Guatemala (once), Haiti (twice, including a nineteen-year occupation), Honduras (seven times), Nicaragua (twice), and Panama (six times).
(106): For Castro, part of the problem lay in the new doctrine that had been developed by the Third World project and adopted by the Soviets, the "strange concept of peaceful co-existence for some and war for others." Castro expected NAM and the USSR to do something concrete for Vietnam as well as other colonized people.
(108): In a letter to the Tricontinental, Che asked the hardest question of all: What is the value of solidarity when the imperialist guns were not challenged? "The solidarity of the progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today," he wrote, "is similar to the bitter irony of the plebians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victims of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory."
(110): Nehru and Sukarno had been ruthless against the Communist movements in their own countries, and they were incapable of a genuine challenge to finance capital. Like Nehru and Sukarno, Nkrumah of Ghana enjoyed the momentum of a successful freedom struggle and disliked any opposition. His Preventive Detention Act and use of the state apparatus against the rail workers in 1961 led inexorably to the creation of a one-party state in 1964 with Nkrumah as Osagyefo or Redeemer... Nkrumah's populatrity plummeted along with world cocoa prices, and in 1966, the CIA encouraged his opposition to conduct a coup against him.
(120): The FLN's gambit succeeded politically, even if the military cost was enormous. During the course of the war, from 1954 to 1962, between three hundred thousand and a million people lost their lives. It was a heavy price to pay. All the factions within Algeria, even the liberals, lined up behind the FLN.
(123): The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parties except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of state policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella. The 1964 Charter of Algiers defended the abolishment of parties other than FLN. "The multiparty system allows all particular interests to organize into different pressure groups. It frustrated the general interest, that is, the workers' interest," and therefore, in the workers' name, there should only be one party, the "vanguard party."
(125): The seven-and-a-half year war and the long period of colonial rule (1830-1962) had drained Algerian society. The FLN inherited the desiccated earth... Algeria's wealth had been siphoned off by the First World... Few factories, few schools, and few hospitals--the emblems of modernity had been built around the colonial maintenance of "tradition."...Of the twelve million Algerians, four and a half million lived in poverty, and two million had been locked in concentration camps, from which they went to abandoned herds and overgrown lands.
(127): National liberation parties that came to power without a well-honed class analysis opened themselves up to pressure from the newly confident mercantile and industrial classes, whose own position was greatly enhanced by the national liberation agenda for the domestic creation of industry, for the creation of a national economy. Although the national liberation party remained largely beholden to the bureaucratic-managerial-intellectual (sometimes military) elite, it did build close ties to the industrial class. Import-substitution type projects opened some space for institutional reform and social-development projects, but in most cases they simply protected domestic industrialists who had no long-term commitment to the Third World agenda.
(128): [IMPORTANT] Algeria followed a tradition already established and defended in large parts of postcolonial Africa, whether ruled by governments of the "Right" or the "Left"--in Guinea (1958), Congo (1960), Ivory Coast (1961), Tanzania (1963), Malawi (1963), and Kenya (1964). The defenders of the "one-party staet" argued that rival parties "have generally little interest for the great majority of the people."...The one party vision is one of fear of the people, fear that any devolution of power would lead to antinational activity... A state that acted bureaucratically on a population had a built-in tendency to rely on congealed, traditional sources of social power and control. Older forms of association returned to the fore, such as tribal and class loyalties. These power bases became indispensable for elections or the implementation of the state's development agenda. The national liberation state that came into being as the instrument of popular power now turned to the very agents who had often not supported it to enact its policies.
(129) [ATTEMPTS AT FIGHTING THE BUREAUCRACY] At the 1961 Second Congress of the Vietnam Workers' Party, Ho Chi Minh warned his party and nation about the tendency toward bureaucratization and commandism, for the bureaucratic attitude "shows in fondness for red tape, divorce from the masses of the people and reluctance to learn the experiences of the masses," while commandism did not allow the people to "work on their own initiative and own accord tand to use compulsion to do unexplained tasks." ... Che's lyrical esays on volunteerism and Communist morality come from and engendered the "work councils" that continue to be a feature of Cuban social life. Cabral's speeches on the duty of the Communist address the problem. Within a year of Guniea-Bissau's freedom from Portuguese rule, Cabral's government invited the renowned Brazilian educator Paolo Freire to visit the country, study its educational system, and provide assistance on a popular pedagogy for the creation of a nonbureaucratic society.
(132): By the late 1960s, Algeria had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military.
(136) : [BOLIVIA] The second reform came in 1953, when the MNR conducted farily extensive land redistribution on behalf of the landless labor, the campesinos. The 6 percent of the landowners who owned more than a thousand hectares, the hacendados, controlled 92 percent of the land, and they had not more than 1.5 percent of that land under cultivation... Despite the drawbacks of the revolution, Bolivia in the early 1950s was in the same sort of social ferment as Algeria a decade later. For a few years, Bolivia trod a path unfamiliar to most Third World states... From 1952 until the late 1950s, the MNR attempted to dismantle the military and hand over the power of the gun to the militias of the campesions and the tin miners, and the MNR's own grupos de honor. Its 1951 experience with the military led the MNR to shut down the Colegio Militar, dismiss a fifth of the officer corps, drastically cut the expenditure for the army from 22 percent in 1952 to 7 percent in 1957), and even consider the complete elimination of the armed forces...
(137-138) [ALAS]... the MNR had by the late 1950s already begun to build up the military and had ceaed to rely on its central allies for popular support... [Coup in 1964].
(138): The events in Bolivia replicated those elsewhere in the darker nations, from its neighbor Paraguay's 1954 coup led by General Alfredo Stroessner to the distant Thailand's 1957 coup led by Army Chief Sarit Tanarat. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, one scholar estimates that at the most two hundred coups took place in Africa and Asia as well as Central and South America.
(138-139): [THE ARMY] Where every other instituion had been batttered by colonialism and neocolonialism, the military stood out as efficient and disciplined. The bureaucracy is often poorly trained and prone to corruption, whereas the political parties are frequently, even in South America, better at the struggle for freedom or the creation of manifestos than governance. In this situation, and with the general demobilization and disarmament of the population, the military is an obvious actor for social order. Fanon has a prescrption to prevent the golpe. "The only way to avoid this menace," he writes, "is to educate the army politically, in other words to nationalize it."... Indeed, Third World states that did not disarm the population, and that created citizens' militias and retained the population in a general political mobilization, did not succumb to coups or easy intervention by imperialism. The classic case is revolutionary Cuba.
(140): Most new nations that demobilized and disarmed their populations fell prey to military intervention, often driven by imperialist pressure.... The US-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example... Whereas the evidence of US involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the US military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973). This is the short, uncontroversial list.
(146-148): I want to distinguish betwen at least two kinds of coups: the generals' coups and the colonel's coups. All coups are structurally reactionary, because they adorn the military with the solitary role for social change... Some coups are, however, more reactionary than others. Coups that are conducted in countries that have had either a national liberation struggle... or an electoral victory against the oligarchs tend to be reacitonary. The military frequently takes power to reverse the gains... The generals often lead these goups... To the rank and file, the generals say that the revolutionary government wanted to cut back on the role of the military in social life... The aggreived military brass in Algeria (1965), Dahomey (1965), Ghana (1966), Togo (1967), Uganda (1971), and Chad (1975) [and Pakistan (1958, 1977), Chile (1973)]. (...) For states where there is no national liberation movement, and where there is no hope for social reform, the coup d'etat is often the means for aggrieved social classes within the military to asser the rule not so much of the military as for their social class. These are the colonels' coups.... The modular form of this coup is the Egyptian overthrow of the monarchy in 1952... The latest variant of the colonels' coup comes from Colonel Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 1999. The colonels' coups succumbed to their authoritarian roots in military culture... Even if the colonels' cop comes with tremendous promise, it can only momentarily deliver the administrative apparatus to energetic officers.... The military in power, as Frist shows, regardless of its motivations, freezes the political process and cuts down the ability of social movements to move the historical process in a progressive direction. Nothing good comes from a military dictatorship.
(152): Unhappy with the nationalist negotiations with the Dutch, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) urged a popular uprising agaisnt both the Dutch and the newly emergent bourgeoisie in Indonesia... The army killed many of the PKI's leaders, jailed about 36,000 people, and crushed the party into relative insignificance. The "adventure of 1948" ended swiftly. President Sukarno's rise to power came with the blood of the Communists on his hands. His fall, in 1965, would be accompanied by the murder of one or perhaps two million Communists and sympathizers. [in 1965... the party commanded the oloyalty of more than 20 million Indonesians, in a country of 110 million]
(153): The PKI followed a well-hewed analysis among Marxists across the Third World: that a relatively nonindustrial society cannot have a proletarian revolution, and so the Communist Party must work alongside progressive sections of the bourgeoisie to create democratic capitalism. When the conditions of industry are more developed, the Communists can come to state power.
(62): After centuries of imperialism, the new nations had been left with economies that relied on the sale of raw material and the import of finished goods. This fundamental imbalance meant that countries like Argentina had to export vast amounts of raw materials at relatively low prices, whereas their import bills would be inflated with the high prices commanded by industrially manufactured goods.
(62-63): Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina had no brief for nation building. The oligarchs... ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which mean that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina's economic strength). This detachment of the elite fueled the growth of a socialist movement... Argentina's industrialization grew in the breach, when European and US capital neglected the region for the period between the Depression of the 1920s and the wars of the 1940s... British capital owned most of Argentina's railroads and the Swiss, the United States, and the British owned almost half of its industries. The authoritarian populist Juan Peron bought the railroads from the British...
(63-64): A combination of technological advantages, unionization, and the vagaries of the prices of primary products meant that the core enjoyed a sizable gain in the "terms of trade."
(66): Why is India poor, asked Dadabhai Naoroji? It is not the pitiless operation of economic laws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless action of the British policy; it is the pitiless eating of India's substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is the pitiless perversion of economic laws by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected, that is destroying India." The Third World bled to make Europe grow. Modernization theory avoided this, and rather sought to "Protestantize" the cultures of the world to seed capitalist culture.
(66): Colonialism ravaged the world, and left more than half of it bereft of capital and with a surfeit of poverty. In 1500, the average per capita income in Europe ran only three times more than that in Africa and Asia, whereas in 1960, it was ten times greater.
(67): Prebisch rejected the theory of comparative advantage, because he demonstrated that each region of the world could enjoy the fruits of modernity as much as the others. [T]rade is crucial because some regions have smaller markets than otehrs, and raw materials and agricultural lands are not evenly distributed along national lines. But the basis of trade had to be altered. It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development.
(68): The contempt of the First World's economists was palpable. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, complained to the English government about the invitations being sent out to the darker nations for the Bretton Woods Conference. Those that had been invited from Colombia to Venezuela, from Liberia to the Philippines, he noted, "clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground." For Keynes, this is "the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years." Only technocrats from the advanced industrial states should be allowed to formulate the rules, because otherwise thsoe from the raw material states would begin to make unbearable demands.
(71): The US president of the World Bank, Eugene Black, quite forthrightly remarked, "Our foreign aid programs constitute a distinct benefit to American business. The three major benefits are (1) foreign aid provides a substantial and immediate market for United States goods and services, (2) foreign aid stimulates the development of new overseas markets for United States' companies, (3) foreign aid orients national economies toward a free enterprise system in which United States' firms can prosper.
(73): [BARAN'S CRITIQUE OF ISI] Paul Baran published The Political Economy of Growth in which he demonstrated the futility of foreign aid and the import-substitution industrialization strategy... While Baran might have overstated his thesis and the role of monopoly capitalism within the darker nations, his critique on the reliance on the growth strategy was on point. The aid from outside (whether capitalist or socialist) purchased time for the dominant elites, who used that money to prevent necessary social transformation. A more substantial way for development would be the destruction of feudal social relations, band by the socialization of production. These parasitic elites acceded to the Prebisch logic in order to benefit their own class interests, rather than move their societies to socialism. The cominant classes in each of these societies purchased third-rate, out-of-date plants and machinery from the advanced industrial states, and paid top dollar for them... Prebisch recognized this major limitation in the Third World order: "We thought that an acceleration of the rate of growth would solve all problems. This was our great mistake." What was needed alongside growth were "changes in the social structure," indeed "a complete social transformation."
(74): It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in consideration for equity.
(75): One million dollars. That's all it took in 1953 for the CIA to overthrow a nationalist government. Langley's man in Tehran was Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. Ordered to take out the democratically elected National Front government led by Muhammed Mosaddeq and restore the Shah of Iran, Roosevelt spread the cash and waited for it to do its magic...
(76): The Tudeh Party (heir to the Communist Party founded in 1920) had a cadre of 25,000, while its union federation boasted a membership of 335,000. The influence of the Tudeh angered the US establishment, which offered the National Front leader a choice: either crush the Communists, take US aid and remain in power, or else fall under Soviet-Communist influence. On May 2, 1953, Mosaddeq revealed the shallowness fo his class, whose investment in nationalism and national sovereignty only went as far as it would guarantee its rule and luxury; he wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which he cowered, "Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration." Afraid of the Soviets, Mosaddeq crushed the Tudeh Party, thereby destroying the most organized defenders of Iranian sovereignty, and then fell before a coup engineered by the CIA's representative and a far more reliable US ally, the Shah.
(76-77): The Shah exiled tens of thousands of National Party members and Communists, and killed thousands of both... The Tudeh was paralyzed by the coup. The USSR paid it little heed, preferring to make every concession to the Shah in hopes of pacifying a border state and gaining access to the oil--all this despite the close relationship between the United States and the Shah.
(80): Although Iran had never been formerly colonized, it belonged with the hungry.... English oil firms... had dominated Iran's oil fields since 1901... Iran's government paid for the infrastructure to remove the oil, and earned a pittance from the oil company cartel. Not for nothing did Mossadeq's struggle over oil earn him the affection of the masses.
(97): Whereas when the Bolshevik Revolution took Russia out of World War I in an anti-imperialist flourish (the new government revealed the hidden imperialist correspondence of the European regimes), the Soviet state under Stalin had a much more cautious approach toward the new postcolonial states. The Soviet Union had been battered by the war... The USSR could neither afford to rest easy nor antagonize the hoards that gathered on its borders. In this vise, the USSR's principle leadership offered two contrary theses: that any entente between the United States and the USSR was "perfectly feasible" (as Stalin put it in December 1946), and that the United States and its allies were "rapacious imperialists" who were on the verge of defeat by the tide of socialism... Zhadanov's two-camp theory privileged the national Communist parties at the same time as the USSR's commissars made arrangements with bourgeois forces within the postcolonial states at the expense of the local Communists. This vacillation manifested itself in the ambiguity over the Soviet position regarding the Third World and peaceful co-existence. After the demise of Stalin, the new leadership led by Khruschchev and Bulganin adopted peaceful co-existence and pledged their support to the bourgeois nationalist regimes (often against the domestic Communists). The unclear situation suggested that the USSR seemed keener to push its own national interests than those of the national Communist parties to which it pledged verbal fealty.
(98): Secretary of State Dulles traveled to both Egypt and India in 1953. In South Asia, Dulles found Nehru "utterly impractical," whereas he enjoyed the "martial and religious qualities of the Pakistanis."
(100-101): In 1961, the other big three welcomed the representatives of twenty-two states from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe to Belgrade to create NAM, an institution that gre in stregnth from conference to conference, within and without the UN, and lumbers on today. The nature of the regimes that participated in the NAM meeting reflects its limitations. With their pageantry came the monarchs... This was a mixed crowd, and its sheer political diversity made an ideologically coherent and unified stance by NAM almost impossible. NAM would remain a political platform, a sub-United Nations, but it would only be able to act in concert on two broad issues: to champion global nuclear disarmament, and to democratize the United Nations.
(103): Cabral acknowledged that while PAIGC's struggle is also the struggle "for peaceful co-existence and for peace," he made it clear that "to co-exist one must first of all exist, so the imperialists and the colonists must be forced to retreat so that we can make a contribution to human civilization, based on the work, the dynamic personality and the culture of our peoples."
(104): In early December 1964, Che Guevara took this message to the floor of the UN General Assembly: "We should like to wake up this Assembly. Imperialism wants to convert this meeting into a useless oratorical tournament instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent them from doing this... As Marxists we maintain that peaceful co-existence does not include co-existence between exploiters and exploited."
(106): Between 1900 and 1933, the US military intervened to scuttle the national hopes of the people of Cuba (four times), the Dominican Republic (four times, including an eight-year occupation), Guatemala (once), Haiti (twice, including a nineteen-year occupation), Honduras (seven times), Nicaragua (twice), and Panama (six times).
(106): For Castro, part of the problem lay in the new doctrine that had been developed by the Third World project and adopted by the Soviets, the "strange concept of peaceful co-existence for some and war for others." Castro expected NAM and the USSR to do something concrete for Vietnam as well as other colonized people.
(108): In a letter to the Tricontinental, Che asked the hardest question of all: What is the value of solidarity when the imperialist guns were not challenged? "The solidarity of the progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today," he wrote, "is similar to the bitter irony of the plebians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victims of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory."
(110): Nehru and Sukarno had been ruthless against the Communist movements in their own countries, and they were incapable of a genuine challenge to finance capital. Like Nehru and Sukarno, Nkrumah of Ghana enjoyed the momentum of a successful freedom struggle and disliked any opposition. His Preventive Detention Act and use of the state apparatus against the rail workers in 1961 led inexorably to the creation of a one-party state in 1964 with Nkrumah as Osagyefo or Redeemer... Nkrumah's populatrity plummeted along with world cocoa prices, and in 1966, the CIA encouraged his opposition to conduct a coup against him.
(120): The FLN's gambit succeeded politically, even if the military cost was enormous. During the course of the war, from 1954 to 1962, between three hundred thousand and a million people lost their lives. It was a heavy price to pay. All the factions within Algeria, even the liberals, lined up behind the FLN.
(123): The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parties except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of state policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella. The 1964 Charter of Algiers defended the abolishment of parties other than FLN. "The multiparty system allows all particular interests to organize into different pressure groups. It frustrated the general interest, that is, the workers' interest," and therefore, in the workers' name, there should only be one party, the "vanguard party."
(125): The seven-and-a-half year war and the long period of colonial rule (1830-1962) had drained Algerian society. The FLN inherited the desiccated earth... Algeria's wealth had been siphoned off by the First World... Few factories, few schools, and few hospitals--the emblems of modernity had been built around the colonial maintenance of "tradition."...Of the twelve million Algerians, four and a half million lived in poverty, and two million had been locked in concentration camps, from which they went to abandoned herds and overgrown lands.
(127): National liberation parties that came to power without a well-honed class analysis opened themselves up to pressure from the newly confident mercantile and industrial classes, whose own position was greatly enhanced by the national liberation agenda for the domestic creation of industry, for the creation of a national economy. Although the national liberation party remained largely beholden to the bureaucratic-managerial-intellectual (sometimes military) elite, it did build close ties to the industrial class. Import-substitution type projects opened some space for institutional reform and social-development projects, but in most cases they simply protected domestic industrialists who had no long-term commitment to the Third World agenda.
(128): [IMPORTANT] Algeria followed a tradition already established and defended in large parts of postcolonial Africa, whether ruled by governments of the "Right" or the "Left"--in Guinea (1958), Congo (1960), Ivory Coast (1961), Tanzania (1963), Malawi (1963), and Kenya (1964). The defenders of the "one-party staet" argued that rival parties "have generally little interest for the great majority of the people."...The one party vision is one of fear of the people, fear that any devolution of power would lead to antinational activity... A state that acted bureaucratically on a population had a built-in tendency to rely on congealed, traditional sources of social power and control. Older forms of association returned to the fore, such as tribal and class loyalties. These power bases became indispensable for elections or the implementation of the state's development agenda. The national liberation state that came into being as the instrument of popular power now turned to the very agents who had often not supported it to enact its policies.
(129) [ATTEMPTS AT FIGHTING THE BUREAUCRACY] At the 1961 Second Congress of the Vietnam Workers' Party, Ho Chi Minh warned his party and nation about the tendency toward bureaucratization and commandism, for the bureaucratic attitude "shows in fondness for red tape, divorce from the masses of the people and reluctance to learn the experiences of the masses," while commandism did not allow the people to "work on their own initiative and own accord tand to use compulsion to do unexplained tasks." ... Che's lyrical esays on volunteerism and Communist morality come from and engendered the "work councils" that continue to be a feature of Cuban social life. Cabral's speeches on the duty of the Communist address the problem. Within a year of Guniea-Bissau's freedom from Portuguese rule, Cabral's government invited the renowned Brazilian educator Paolo Freire to visit the country, study its educational system, and provide assistance on a popular pedagogy for the creation of a nonbureaucratic society.
(132): By the late 1960s, Algeria had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military.
(136) : [BOLIVIA] The second reform came in 1953, when the MNR conducted farily extensive land redistribution on behalf of the landless labor, the campesinos. The 6 percent of the landowners who owned more than a thousand hectares, the hacendados, controlled 92 percent of the land, and they had not more than 1.5 percent of that land under cultivation... Despite the drawbacks of the revolution, Bolivia in the early 1950s was in the same sort of social ferment as Algeria a decade later. For a few years, Bolivia trod a path unfamiliar to most Third World states... From 1952 until the late 1950s, the MNR attempted to dismantle the military and hand over the power of the gun to the militias of the campesions and the tin miners, and the MNR's own grupos de honor. Its 1951 experience with the military led the MNR to shut down the Colegio Militar, dismiss a fifth of the officer corps, drastically cut the expenditure for the army from 22 percent in 1952 to 7 percent in 1957), and even consider the complete elimination of the armed forces...
(137-138) [ALAS]... the MNR had by the late 1950s already begun to build up the military and had ceaed to rely on its central allies for popular support... [Coup in 1964].
(138): The events in Bolivia replicated those elsewhere in the darker nations, from its neighbor Paraguay's 1954 coup led by General Alfredo Stroessner to the distant Thailand's 1957 coup led by Army Chief Sarit Tanarat. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, one scholar estimates that at the most two hundred coups took place in Africa and Asia as well as Central and South America.
(138-139): [THE ARMY] Where every other instituion had been batttered by colonialism and neocolonialism, the military stood out as efficient and disciplined. The bureaucracy is often poorly trained and prone to corruption, whereas the political parties are frequently, even in South America, better at the struggle for freedom or the creation of manifestos than governance. In this situation, and with the general demobilization and disarmament of the population, the military is an obvious actor for social order. Fanon has a prescrption to prevent the golpe. "The only way to avoid this menace," he writes, "is to educate the army politically, in other words to nationalize it."... Indeed, Third World states that did not disarm the population, and that created citizens' militias and retained the population in a general political mobilization, did not succumb to coups or easy intervention by imperialism. The classic case is revolutionary Cuba.
(140): Most new nations that demobilized and disarmed their populations fell prey to military intervention, often driven by imperialist pressure.... The US-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example... Whereas the evidence of US involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the US military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973). This is the short, uncontroversial list.
(146-148): I want to distinguish betwen at least two kinds of coups: the generals' coups and the colonel's coups. All coups are structurally reactionary, because they adorn the military with the solitary role for social change... Some coups are, however, more reactionary than others. Coups that are conducted in countries that have had either a national liberation struggle... or an electoral victory against the oligarchs tend to be reacitonary. The military frequently takes power to reverse the gains... The generals often lead these goups... To the rank and file, the generals say that the revolutionary government wanted to cut back on the role of the military in social life... The aggreived military brass in Algeria (1965), Dahomey (1965), Ghana (1966), Togo (1967), Uganda (1971), and Chad (1975) [and Pakistan (1958, 1977), Chile (1973)]. (...) For states where there is no national liberation movement, and where there is no hope for social reform, the coup d'etat is often the means for aggrieved social classes within the military to asser the rule not so much of the military as for their social class. These are the colonels' coups.... The modular form of this coup is the Egyptian overthrow of the monarchy in 1952... The latest variant of the colonels' coup comes from Colonel Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 1999. The colonels' coups succumbed to their authoritarian roots in military culture... Even if the colonels' cop comes with tremendous promise, it can only momentarily deliver the administrative apparatus to energetic officers.... The military in power, as Frist shows, regardless of its motivations, freezes the political process and cuts down the ability of social movements to move the historical process in a progressive direction. Nothing good comes from a military dictatorship.
(152): Unhappy with the nationalist negotiations with the Dutch, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) urged a popular uprising agaisnt both the Dutch and the newly emergent bourgeoisie in Indonesia... The army killed many of the PKI's leaders, jailed about 36,000 people, and crushed the party into relative insignificance. The "adventure of 1948" ended swiftly. President Sukarno's rise to power came with the blood of the Communists on his hands. His fall, in 1965, would be accompanied by the murder of one or perhaps two million Communists and sympathizers. [in 1965... the party commanded the oloyalty of more than 20 million Indonesians, in a country of 110 million]
(153): The PKI followed a well-hewed analysis among Marxists across the Third World: that a relatively nonindustrial society cannot have a proletarian revolution, and so the Communist Party must work alongside progressive sections of the bourgeoisie to create democratic capitalism. When the conditions of industry are more developed, the Communists can come to state power.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
ALGERIA
NUMBERS
population: 33,769,668 (July 2008 est.)
land use: arable land, 3.17%; permanent crops, 0.28%; other, 96.55% (2005)
ethnic groups: Arab-Berber 99%, European less than 1% (NB: almost all Algerians are Berber in origin, not Arab; the minority who identify themselves as Berber live mostly in the mountainous region of Kabylie east of Algiers; the Berbers are also Muslim but identify with their Berber rather than Arab cultural heritage; Berbers have long agitated, sometimes violently, for autonomy; the government is unlikely to grant autonomy but has offered to begin sponsoring teaching Berber language in schools)
religions: Sunni Muslim (state religion) 99%, Christian and Jewish 1%
literacy: total population, 69.9%; male, 79.6%; female, 60.1% (2002 est.)
economy: The hydrocarbons sector is the backbone of the economy, accounting for roughly 60% of budget revenues, 30% of GDP, and over 95% of export earnings. Algeria has the eighth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world and is the fourth-largest gas exporter; it ranks 15th in oil reserves. Sustained high oil prices in recent years have helped improve Algeria's financial and macroeconomic indicators.
GDP composition, by sector: agriculture, 8.1%; industry, 62.5%; services, 29.4%
labor force: 9.44 million (or, about 28% of the total population)
labor force by occupation: agriculture 14%, industry 13.4%, construction and public works 10%, trade 14.6%, government 32%, other 16%
HISTORY
THE PRE-COLONIAL PERIOD (-1830)
1000BC-642AD(appx.): The indigenous Berbers (who had inhabited the region since at least 10,000BC) of the area repelled, were subjugated, and/or coexisted with successive invasions and settlement: (1) the Carthaginians, who arrived around 900BC, established Carthage in 814BC (in present-day Tunisia), incompletely subjugated the Berbers to their South, but fell apart after the Punic Wars (264-146BC) --as a result, "by the second century B.C., several large but loosely administered Berber kingdoms had emerged. Two of them were established in Numidia, behind the coastal areas controlled by Carthage" (2) the Romans, who retained a tenuous grip on the Berbers (their lands were the "breadbasket" of the Empire, allegedly) until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD; (3) the Byzantines, who under the leadership of Justinian I, in the mid-500s (AD), expelled the Vandal tribes who had settled in and around Carthage after the fall of the Romans. They exercised a "precarious grip" over the Berbers until the Arab invasions: "Local opposition delayed full Byzantine control of the region for twelve years, however, and imperial control, when it came, was but a shadow of the control exercised by Rome. Although an impressive series of fortifications were built, Byzantine rule was compromised by official corruption, incompetence, military weakness, and lack of concern in Constantinople for African affairs. As a result, many rural areas reverted to Berber rule."
642-909: From 642 to 669, a series of sporadic, almost mercenary Arab invasions first spread Islam to these areas. The Ummayads (661-750) launched a more systematic campaign in 670, recognizing the strategic import of these territories. "By 711 Umayyad forces helped by Berber converts to Islam had conquered all of North Africa." However resistance to the heavy-handedness of the ruling Arabs (taxation, discrimination, and even enslavement) soon took the form of an open revolt from 739-740, under the banner of Kharijite Islam (which was, in contrast to Ummayad doctrine, egalitarian and anti-racist). The Ummayads were succeeded by the Abbasids (750-1258) in 750, and exercised control over North Africa by proxy: the East was governed by Al Aghab; in the West, the Rustumid Imamate prevailed from (761-909), notable for the fact that its rulers were elected by "leading citizens."
909-1518: The Fatimids, a Shia caliphate organized by missionaries to North Africa over the course of the 800s, overthrew the Sunni rulers of the region. Though they expanded westward from the site of their first victory at Kairouan (in modern-day Tunisia) in 909, their ultimate ambitions lay in the Mashreq. As a result, they appointed a Berber dynasty (the Zirids: 972-1148) to rule in their stead. Despite these measures, "this period was marked by constant conflict, political instability, and economic decline." "For the first time, the extensive use of Arabic spread to the countryside."
For the latter half of this period, the Almoravids (1106-1147) ruled the Western portion of North Africa, after conquering "Morocco, the Maghrib as far east as Algiers, and Spain up to the Ebro River by 1106". They acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad; under their rule, "Muslim Spain (Andalus in Arabic) was a great source of artistic and intellectual inspiration." The Almoravids were toppled by the Almohads (so-called for their emphasis on the unity of God), who "took control of Morocco in 1146, captured Algiers around 1151, and by 1160 had completed the conquest of the central Maghrib and advanced to Tripolitania." Their dynasty, which hosted two of this region's most famous thinkers, Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), fell eventually in 1271.
The following three hundred years (ca. 1200-1500) saw the Western territories ruled by the Almohads in the hands of the Hafsid dynasty, which was based in Tunis. In the central Maghrib, the Zayanids exercised a tenuous hold. For much of this period, effective authority was less centralized: "Many coastal cities defied the ruling dynasties and asserted their autonomy as municipal republics. They were governed by their merchant oligarchies, by tribal chieftains from the surrounding countryside, or by the privateers who operated out of their ports. " Furthermore, the "aridity of official Islam had little appeal outside the mosques and schools of the cities"--as a result, marabouts were strong influences in rural areas, inspiring numerous uprisings and small autonomous republics.
1518-1830: In the early 1500s, after the reconquest of Grenada in 1492, the Spanish had moved to establish their authority on the Maghribi coast, "taking control of Mers el Kebir in 1505, Oran in 1509, and Tlemcen, Mostaganem, and Ténès, all west of Algiers, in 1510." However, despite the relative "ease" of these campaigns (of course they were brutal), Christian Spain never attempted to establish their authority south of these preliminary (and costly) outposts--perhaps because they sought to concentrate their efforts around the Mediterranean. Their failure to do this made it possible for the Ottomans to assert their control, instead.
In 1518, the prominent Barbary pirate Khair ad Din (aka "Redbeard" or "Barbossa"), who, together with his brother Aruj, had been operating under the Hafsids from Tunis, began a campaign to subdue the coastal region around Algeria (more-or-less establishing the modern, northern boundaries of Algeria). He did this with the patronage of the Ottomans, who in 1533 made him admiral of their fleet. "Under Khair ad Din's regency, Algiers became the center of Ottoman authority in the Maghrib, from which Tunis, Tripoli, and Tlemcen would be overcome and Morocco's independence would be threatened."
By 1587, 44 years after Khair ad Din's son had succeeded his father as beylerbey (provincial governor), the Ottomans instituted a more regular form of administration, relying upon pashas (governors) who served three-year terms (who were assisted by janissaries, recruited from Anatolian peasants, and known in Algeria as the ojaq). Turkish was the official language of the court; Arabs and Berbers were prohibited from government posts.
Over the course of the next two hundred and fifty years, this system ran into trouble on numerous occasions, and was re-formed accordingly (not by design, but by those victorious in the various feuds). From 1671-1830, for example, a dey exercised power; he was chosen by a divan, comprised of sixty nobles (at first this was the ojaq, more or less, but it gradually evolved into a group of the dey's lackeys). Remarkably, "[though] the dey was elected for a life term, ...in the 159 years (1671-1830) that the system survived, fourteen of the twenty-nine deys were removed from office by assassination."
The exact details are perhaps relatively unimportant (see, though, the block quote that follows)--the most salient fact was that the administration, like any other pre-capitalist Empire, depended heavily on the local powers that presided over any number of effectively autonomous provinces under its nominal control. In that sense, effective authority for the average citizen rested not in Constantinople, but in institutions that were entirely more local.
"The dey had direct administrative control only in the regent's enclave, the Dar as Sultan (Domain of the Sultan), which included the city of Algiers and its environs and the fertile Mitidja Plain. The rest of the territory under the regency was divided into three provinces (beyliks): Constantine in the east; Titteri in the central region, with its capital at Médéa; and a western province that after 1791 had its seat at Oran, abandoned that year by Spain when the city was destroyed in an earthquake. Each province was governed by a bey appointed by the dey, usually from the same circle of families. A contingent of the ojaq was assigned to each bey, who also had at his disposal the provincial auxiliaries provided by the privileged makhzen tribes, traditionally exempted from paying taxes on condition that they collect them from other tribes. Tax revenues were conveyed from the provinces to Algiers twice yearly, but the beys were otherwise left to their own devices. Although the regency patronized the tribal chieftains, it never had the unanimous allegiance of the countryside, where heavy taxation frequently provoked unrest. Autonomous tribal states were tolerated, and the regency's authority was seldom applied in the Kabylie."THE COLONIAL PERIOD (1830-1962)
1830-1954: In the aftermath of decades-long tensions over piracy in the Mediterranean (eventually settled by superior European technology, ending in the Barbary Treaties; this defeat for the Dey preceded heightening tensions between him and the French), the French captured Algeria in a three-week campaign in 1930. The war pitted 34,000 of their soldiers against "7,000 janissaries, 19,000 troops from the beys of Constantine and Oran, and about 17,000 Kabyles." The invasion was violent and vicious (allegedly "disappearing" one-third of the entire Algerian population?). Almost as soon as French troops took Algiers, Charles X (of the Bourbon Restoration), who had authorized the military invasion in order to counter his declining domestic popularity, was deposed. He was replaced by Louis Philippe, the "citizen-king," who was surrounded by opponents to Charles X's decision to invade--nonetheless, withdrawing proved more difficult than invading, and in 1834 it was decided to annex the occupied population (about 3 million Muslims at that time) as a colony.
Intensive French settlement, encouraged by a nexus of private and official commercial interests, resulted in the influx of tens of thousands of European settlers (pied noirs) in the first decades of colonial rule.
the European settlers were largely of peasant farmer or working-class origin from the poor southern areas of Italy, Spain, and France. Others were criminal and political deportees from France, transported under sentence in large numbers to Algeria. In the 1840s and 1850s, to encourage settlement in rural areas official policy was to offer grants of land for a fee and a promise that improvements would be made. A distinction soon developed between the grands colons (great colonists) at one end of the scale, often self-made men who had accumulated large estates or built successful businesses, and the petits blancs (little whites), smallholders and workers at the other end, whose lot was often not much better than that of their Muslim counterparts. According to historian John Ruedy, although by 1848 only 15,000 of the 109,000 European settlers were in rural areas, "by systematically expropriating both pastoralists and farmers, rural colonization was the most important single factor in the destructuring of traditional society."By 1848, nearly all of Northern Algeria was under French control, though not without encountering significant resistance (most notably the establishment of a Muslim state by Abd Al Qadir (he had fought the Ottomans, as well), who controlled two-thirds of Algeria in 1839; he eventually surrendered in 1847 when fully one-third of the French Army was employed, brutally and indiscriminately, against him and his rural support base).
The system of colonial administration employed by the French is best assessed in the context of the shifting contours of the mainland government: (1) till 1848, Algeria remained under military control, with the exception of pockets of civil administration in those areas where settlement was most intense (while the colons argued for full legal rights and integration with mainland France, the military argued that such measures would jeopardize colonial authority); (2) after the Revolution of 1848 till the advent of the Second Empire in 1852, some moves were made in this direction in three "civil" territories (Algiers, Oran, and Constantine), which were organized as French provinces under civil administration; (3) from 1852 to 1870, Napoleon III, who returned the colony to military rule, instituted a motley set of reforms that antagonized the colons while also not properly attending to the concerns of the bulk of the indigenous population. Though he imagined that European settlement would remain confined to the coast, his intentions were defied by the effects of his 1863 and 1865 decrees, which, it seems, accelerated the break-up of traditional institutions (like communal property) by allowing the individuals to whom they'd been given to sell to speculators; (4) from the birth of the Third Republic in 1870 onwards, civil administration was returned to Algeria; the gov't confirmed its intention to assimilate the colony into France. Over time, an "apartheid" system congealed (not that what went before was any distinct, conceptually), premised on the enfranchisement of the colons, and founded on the suppression, discrimination, and immiseration of the indigenous Muslim population (the Jews, against the will of the colons, were made citizens in 1870).
In 1871, in the aftermath of famines following from grain shortages owing to the Crimean War of 1854-1856 (in a three year period, an estimated 20% of the Muslim population of Constantine had perished), but in direct response to the 1870 order extending civil authority to previously self-governing tribal regions, rebellion racked the Kabyle region. It was suppressed in standard fashion, by collectively punishing the whole Muslim population.
Some assorted statistics relating to French apartheid:
- Because of the many restrictions imposed by the authorities, by 1915 only 50,000 Muslims were eligible to vote in elections in the civil communes.
- The bulk of Algeria's wealth in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and trade was controlled by the grands colons. The modern European-owned and -managed sector of the economy centered around small industry and a highly developed export trade, designed to provide food and raw materials to France in return for capital and consumer goods. Europeans held about 30% of the total arable land, including the bulk of the most fertile land and most of the areas under irrigation. By 1900, Europeans produced more than two-thirds of the value of output in agriculture and practically all agricultural exports.
- In 1909... Muslims, who made up almost 90% of the population but produced 20% of Algeria's income, paid 70% of direct taxes and 45% of the total taxes collected. And colons controlled how these revenues would be spent. As a result, colon towns had handsome municipal buildings, paved streets lined with trees, fountains and statues, while Algerian villages and rural areas benefited little if at all from tax revenues.
1954-1962: In various forms, the struggle for independence had continued, through the events of WWII (Algeria had been governed by the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1942, of course)--after the 1945 massacre at Setif (of anywhere between 6,000 to 45,000 civilians, after a march organized by Abbas's AML, which had the support of Hadj and the ulema, for national liberation had turned violent and killed 103 Europeans), affairs had arguably become irreversibly polarized. On November 1, 1954, the FLN launched an uprising which marked the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. Their increasing success over the next two years was met with very harsh repression by the French (which began, in particular, after the FLN killed 123 Pied Noir civilians in August 1955). By 1956, many nationalist groups, spurred by the repression of the colonial state, had joined the FLN, (with the notable exception of Messali Hadj, whose feud with the FLN resulted in almost 5,000 deaths in "Cafe Wars" in France.) 1956 also saw the Battle of Algiers, as the FLN sought to take the fight to the cities. Though General Jacques Massu employed "whatever means necessary" to dismantle the FLN infrastructure in Algiers, the battle had demonstrated the fact of their popular support.
By 1957, the FLN had evolved into a force of 40,000--in general, they fought as a guerrilla force, and were hardly engaged conventionally. Even still, by 1956, the French had committed almost 400,000 troops against them (including about 170,000 Muslim Algerians)--counterinsurgency tactics, as expected, ranged from napalm and aerial bombardment to the mass relocation of Algerian peasants to "safe zones" (almost 2 million, in all!).
In 1958, the crisis in Algeria led to the overthrow of the French Fourth Republic in a coup d'etat--De Gaulle took over on May 29, 1958, after Parliament approved his candidacy. The idea was that he was the only man who could give direction to the French government (the French feared a repeat of the 1954 debacle in Indochina). Though upon taking power, he had reassured the pied noir population of his support (and had proposed a new constitution for the French Fifth Republic that included an integrated Algeria), events turned in the FLN's favor by 1959. De Gaulle, in September of that year, spoke of self-determination for the Algerian population.
In January 1960, the pieds noir in Algeria, feeling betrayed, launched an insurrection as the police and army stood by. Though it was eventually pacified, another insurrection in April 1961 (this time a "general's putsch", organized by some renegade units and colons vigilantes) threatened the government's writ in a very serious way. De Gaulle was now ready to abandon the pieds noirs. From this, independence became an inevitability: talks with the FLN re-opened in May 1961, a ceasefire was agreed to, effective March 19, 1962--in their final form, these Evian Accords legislated Algerian independence. A vicious three month campaign of pro-pieds noir terrorism notwithstanding (120 bombs a day planted by the OAS), on July 1, 1962, Algerians held a referendum on independence. The vote was nearly unanimous. A few days later, independent Algeria was established.
INDEPENDENCE AND AFTER (1962-2009)
1962-1965: In the immediate aftermath of independence, almost 10% of the population fled for Paris (" most of the 1,025,000 Pieds-Noirs, as well as 81,000 Harkis (pro-French Algerians serving in the French Army"). Appended to the devastation of war, this exodus left Algeria in tatters: "the exodus of the colons deprived the country of most of its managers, civil servants, engineers, teachers, physicians, and skilled workers--all occupations from which the Muslim population had been excluded or discouraged from pursuing by colonial policy. The homeless and displaced numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many suffering from illness, and some 70 percent of the work force was unemployed. Distribution of goods was at a standstill. Departing colons destroyed or carried off public records and utility plans, leaving public services in a shambles. "
FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella took over as independent Algeria's first president. In his March Decrees of 1963, he announced a program to bring the abandoned land, houses, factories, etc., under state control; additionally, however, the spontaneous cooperatives that had emerged amidst the chaos were to be supported.
At the same time, under Ben Bella's authority, bureaucratic and dictatorial tendencies were clearly in evidence. As Vijay Prashad writes, "The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parities except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of State policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella."
Similarly, the FLN's somewhat opportunistic seizure of the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle reflected the tenuous nature of the alliances that had formed in opposition to the French. It was unsurprising, then, that these began to come apart at the seams, as the FLN one-party state congealed. Indeed, talk of securing the power of the vanguard party against those defying the "general interest" are best situated in the context of these anxieties. Thus, though Ben Bella had support in the National Assembly, he moved to repress other resistance to his rule (in the form of an opposition group eventually led by Ait Ahmed (the FFS-- a Berber Socialist party founded in 1963, and still in existence today); general opposition included also the communists, Messali Hadj, Mohamed Boudiaf of the PRS (or Socialist Revolution Party)). There were also regional insurgencies that needed supressing--in the Kabylie and Southern Sahara (These partly merged with what was left of the general resistance led by Ait Ahmed and Boudiaf).
Ben Bella attempted to further establish his authority by purging figures who were loyal to then minister of defense, Boumediene. Up until this point, it seems, Boumediene had been complicit in the construction of a one-party State, who sought to command the national liberation project in the name of the people (and, of course, against their explicit politics). Nonetheless, Ben Bella went too far, his attempts eventually backfiring in a bloodless military coup, on June 9, 1965. (According to Prashad, however, it was actually Ben Bella's rapproachment with the organized left, perhaps threatening the Army, that inspired to Boumediene to action).
1965-1978: Under Boumediene's authority, "the state dominated society and ruled in the name of socialism." Nationalization increasingly stood for anti-democratic control by the State. "The military played a larger role in society." Revenue from oil and gas reserves played a significant role in the charade of socialism from above. Politically, he cracked down further on the organized left. In all these senses and more, Prashad argues, by the late 1960s Algeria "had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military."
1978-1992: Boumediene died in December 1978, after which a struggle for succession ensued. As a compromise to the two principal candidates, a relative outsider (but also army man), Chadli Bendjedid, took power in February 1979. He moved to liberalize the economy; in his first Five Year Plan (1980-1984), for example, which turned many state-controlled industries over to private hands. Nonetheless, Algeria suffered from a serious economic crisis throughout the 80's--a state of affairs which deteriorated after a dramatic 1986 fall in the price of oil (oil prices had been declining throughout the decade).
Benjdedid also had to confront an increasingly militant Islamist opposition (can this be theorized as the inevitable outcome of the failure to meaningfully politicize the public?)--he did so by a combination of appeasement and repression: arresting prominent activists but also modifying family law in patriarchal ways. A wave of general outrage from 1985 to 1988 culminated in the the riots of October 1988 (which began as student and worker strikes). In the State's effort to re-assert its control through declaring a State of Emergency, about 500 were estimated killed and 3,000 arrested.
Widespread public agitation in the wake of this incident prompted Benjedid to move towards reform. A new constitution was promulgated in February 1989 (dropping "socialist" from the description of the Algerian state), liberalizing the political sphere but also curtailing women's rights. Local and provincial elections in June 1990 were won by the Islamists (the FIS), but largely because secular parties boycotted--in the aftermath, the FLN attempted to curb electoral laws in their favor, and declared martial law from June to September 1991 under a gov't of national reconciliation, after the FIS responded with a general strike and general agitation.
Nonetheless, the FIS contested the first round of the December 1991 elections, and won handily, trouncing the FLN. This prompted panic amongst the ruling elite, who feared an FIS takeover--on January 11, 1992, members of Benjedid's cabinet dissolved parliament and declared the elections null and void, cancelling the second round and banning all religious parties. Both the FIS and FLN clamored for a return to the electoral process, but police and troops countered with arrests and repression. On February 9th, 1992, a one year state of emergency was announced--Mohammed Boudiaf returned from exile to head the caretaker government.
Massive demonstrations erupted in cities.
1992-2009: All this, of course, set the stage for the Algerian civil war, a conflict which claimed more than 160,000 lives between 1992 and 2002, and pitted the MIA (guerillas in mountains) and the GIA (guerillas in towns)--whose stregnth peaked at 40,000 in 1994, which is also when the GIA and MIA split (which became the AIS), over the question of the latter's loyalty to the FIS (who were locked in soon-to-fail peace talks)--against the military. It was notoriously brutal, claiming the lives of significant numbers of civilians. Nonetheless, it began to subside in intensity after 1997, when the AIS opted for a unilateral ceasefire; the GIA was rent apart by internal divisions, though sporadic fighting continued until about 2002.
Elections in Algeria resumed in 1995 (parliamentary elections were held in 1997). Both of these were won by the Army's party, the National Democratic Rally (RND). In 1999, however, the FLN candidate, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had allied himself with Boumedienne at the time of Ben Bella's overthrow, won the presidency in ultimately uncontested elections (opposition candidates had pulled out, citing fraud concerns). Even still, in April 2004, he was re-elected, with 85% of the vote in an election deemed free and fair (though his opponents cite State control of the media). He is seeking a constitutional amendment, which would allow him to seek a third term.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
fisk on blair and torture:
Sandwiched beneath a headline which read "Saudi reforms lose momentum" - surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press - it quoted our dear Prime Minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians home because their government represented a "different political system". The "foregrounded" element, of course, is the word "different". This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason why the committee declined to return these men to their country was not - as Blair well knew - because Algeria possesses a "different" political system but because the Algerian "system" allows it to torture to death its prisoners. I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Chateauneuf police station in Algiers - where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died
(...) Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. He knows this. So how does he dare lie about the "different" political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A "different" political system indeed.
(...) But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell's statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated - with such wisdom - by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."
Sandwiched beneath a headline which read "Saudi reforms lose momentum" - surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press - it quoted our dear Prime Minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians home because their government represented a "different political system". The "foregrounded" element, of course, is the word "different". This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason why the committee declined to return these men to their country was not - as Blair well knew - because Algeria possesses a "different" political system but because the Algerian "system" allows it to torture to death its prisoners. I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Chateauneuf police station in Algiers - where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died
(...) Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. He knows this. So how does he dare lie about the "different" political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A "different" political system indeed.
(...) But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell's statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated - with such wisdom - by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."
Friday, April 13, 2007
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