‘We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.’ Mao Zedong (Zedong 1967)
‘Knowing everything that had happened in our country, it was clear for us there was no option but an armed struggle, and that we had to confront the French, and with violence.’ Zohra Drif (Drif 2017)
The Indochinese and Algerian wars against French colonialism have become foundational to modern politics in both countries. Both independence struggles were to profoundly shape the character of anti-colonial thought over the subsequent decades.
Christopher Goscha argued in his excellent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu that Ho Chi Minh ended up administering two kinds of wartime states, one capable of holding out against the coloniser, in guerilla form, just as the Algerian FLN were to do in North Africa, the other capable of generating the required military and organisational force needed to defeat a Western colonial army in a set-piece battle, of the kind the Chinese communists had created. Thanks to Chinese military assistance and advisers, instruction in modern military science, and the introduction of the draft and mobilisation laws, the Vietnamese communists presided over a military revolution unknown in any other war of decolonisation in the twentieth century (Goscha 2022). Indeed, the Algerian nationalists were not alone in their inability to transition from guerilla warfare to conventional warfare: in no other twentieth-century war of decolonisation was there to be anything like the People’s Army of Vietnam, and there was never to be another Dien Bien Phu. But that did not mean that colonial powers could not be vanquished in other ways, including guerilla warfare.
The Vietnamese anticolonial fight against the French did not take place independently of other events in Asia. The first Indochina war (1945–1954) was taking place in parallel to the Korean war in a context of an expansion of the Cold War in southeast Asia, where the US saw aiding France as a way to fight the Communists. The resumption of the war in Vietnam in 1960 saw the direct entry of the United State into the fray, with its formidable war technology and its belief that its victory was assured. The United States no longer needed the aid of a third country to inflict decisive blows on the Communists in Asia. The American war against Vietnam was to last 15 years before its ‘invincible armada’ was forced to withdraw without glory, leaving behind a devastated country.
The devastation and violence were not unique to Vietnam’s anti-colonial revolutions. The declaration of war in Algeria on 1 November 1954 also initiated one of the longest and bloodiest wars in the history of decolonisation, replete with merciless atrocities (Stora 2004). The FLN leadership had a realistic appreciation of the military balance of power, which starkly favoured France, whose army was the fourth largest in the world at the time. In response to this reality, their strategy was inspired by Ho Chi Minh’s dictum ‘For every nine of us killed we will kill one – in the end you will leave’. The FLN wanted to create a climate of violence and insecurity that would be ultimately intolerable for the French, to internationalise the conflict, and to bring Algeria to the attention of the world (Evans & Phillips 2007). Following this logic, the revolutionary leaders Abane Ramdane and Larbi Ben M’hidi decided to take guerilla warfare into the country’s urban areas, and specifically to launch the battle of Algiers in September 1956.
There is no better way to fully appreciate this key and dramatic moment of sacrifice in the Algerian revolution than watching the classic realist film by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, released in 1966. Initially banned in France, the film powerfully reenacts some of the critical moments of the Algerian resistance in the capital and the French crackdown on it. In one dramatic moment, Colonel Mathieu, a thinly disguised General Massu (who had also fought in the first Indochina War), presents the captured FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi at a press conference, where a journalist questions the morality of hiding bombs in women’s shopping baskets. The journalist asks: ‘Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many people?’ Ben M’hidi replies: ‘And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenceless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets’ (quoted in Fisk 2005).
Djamila Bouhired, a revolutionary icon who has become an inspirational figure in the whole Arab world (especially for Palestinians), as well as beyond, was a key figure in the battle of Algiers and was, alongside Zohra Drif, and Samia Lakhdari and her mother, one of the women who planted bombs across the city. After being captured, raped and severely tortured, she heroically challenged her colonial captors and torturers(external link): ‘I know you will sentence me to death but do not forget that by killing me you will not only assassinate freedom in your country, but you will not prevent Algeria from becoming free and independent.’
Zohra Drif, another heroine of the Algerian War of Independence, well-known for her involvement in the Milk Bar Café bombing in 1956, was an integral part of the FLN’s bombing network in Algiers, working with Ali La Pointe, Djamila Bouhired, Hassiba Ben Bouali and Yacef Saâdi, head of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers. She was eventually captured and was sentenced to 20 years of hard labour by the military tribunal of Algiers for terrorism. Drif was imprisoned in the women’s section of Barbarossa prison. In her memoires, she reflected on the role of Djamila Bouhired: ‘They had their Marianne, we had our Djamila … For colonial France, she was “the soul of terrorism”. For us and for all freedom-loving peoples, she became the soul of liberation and the symbol of Algeria at war, beautiful and rebellious’ (Drif 2017).
Bouhired’s heroic struggle, courage, abnegation, sumud (steadfastness) and sacrifice still reverberate in Palestine and still feed the beating heart and inspire the language and imaginaries of resistance, revolution and the struggle for liberation. Bouhired’s mantle was taken up by the Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled, alongside many others.
The urban revolt in Algiers was eventually crushed without mercy, through the resort to torture on a systematic scale to extract information, including fitting electrodes to genitals (Alleg 1958). By October 1957, the FLN network in Algiers was dismantled, after the blowing up of the last remaining leader Ali La Pointe along with Little Omar, Hassiba Ben Bouali, and Hamid Bouhamidi, in their hiding place in the Casbah. Despite this military loss, the FLN had scored a diplomatic victory: France was isolated internationally because of the scandalous methods of repression it used.
The Algerian experience of urban warfare as part of a decolonisation struggle was not an unprecedented one. Over a decade before the FLN set off bombs in Algiers, the Vietnamese had already fought major urban battles in Saigon, Haiphong and Hanoi. They too were brutal affairs, with the French using tanks, artillery and bombers to blast Vietnamese urban positions. Like the Casbah in Algiers, the Old Quarter of Hanoi was ground zero for the battle for that city (1946–1947). During the fighting, the commander-in-chief of France’s Expeditionary Corps in Indochina, General Jean Vally, instructed his subordinates to ‘hit them hard with the cannon and the bomb….in order to put an end to the resistance and to prove to our adversary the overwhelming superiority of our capabilities’ (Goscha 2022). By the end of the battle, Hanoi’s ‘Casbah’ lay in ruins.
The level of violence inflicted by the French across the Red River Plain and the rest of upper Vietnam from January 1951 until mid-1954 had no equivalent in the preceding history of twentieth-century wars of decolonisation. Among the Vietnamese there were more than a million dead, and hundreds of thousands wounded, including victims of torture, while the losses of the French Expeditionary Corps amounted to 130,000 men. Similarly staggering levels of violence were reached in Algeria. Official estimates suggest a million and a half Algerians were killed in the eight-year war that ended in 1962. A quarter of the population (2.35 million) were confined in concentration camps, at least 3 million people (half the rural population) were displaced, around 8,000 villages were destroyed or burned, hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests were burned or defoliated by napalm bombs, cultivable lands were either sown with mines or declared ‘prohibited zones’, and the country’s livestock was decimated (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964; Bennoune 1973).
In both cases (Algeria and Vietnam), the coloniser’s dirty work of vengeance against the colonised’s daring acts of resistance involved furthering and entrenching the dehumanisation of the ‘other’ and casting hate in racialised terms. For the French and their allies, the Vietnamese and the Algerians were no longer a people, they were bandits, criminals and terrorists. One young French soldier who lost a confidant in Vietnam explained what he wanted to do to the Vietnamese: ‘We have to destroy all of them, without any pity for them, they’re real savages’ (Goscha 2022). The practice of torture was endemic within the French army years before French paratroopers ever set foot in Algiers. The same mechanisms and tactics of dehumanisation are now being used by Israel in Palestine, with Israeli generals, officials and media figures describing Palestinians as ‘human animals’, ‘rats’, ‘barbarians’, and ‘terrorists’ to justify their war crimes, torture and genocidal massacres. Colonialism, and its racialisation strategies, has not ended yet.
In Vietnam, Algeria and Palestine, it is not just the armed forces of the colonial powers that have applied these strategies: the colonists/settlers themselves have also played a role. When the elite paratroopers brought in by the French government to crush the uprising in Algiers, marched down the main street of the city, throngs of ecstatic French settlers came out to greet them. Similar scenes took place in Saigon in 1946 when settlers turned out in droves to welcome the soldiers liberating them from ‘native’ rule (Goscha 2022). In both cases, there was a close alliance between the army and the settler communities, which acquiesced in the colonial violence and cruel repression. Likewise, today, Israeli settler society is overwhelmingly in support of the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza and pursuit of a full-blown war in the whole region. Countless videos and images show Israelis cheering and celebrating the death of Palestinians and explaining how they would like to see them disappear from the lands they have taken away from them.
Source : https://www.tni.org/en/article/vietnam-algeria-palestine
