A founding period of contemporary Algeria
In the early 1960s, the newly independent Algeria became a standard-bearer of the Third World. The country had a great aura, born of the bloody war of liberation which opposed the Algerian people to one of the greatest powers, France. At the end of the war, Algeria became a refuge for all kinds of revolutionaries, providing unrestrained support to anti-colonial and revolutionary movements from all around the globe.
This article will therefore highlight this period that extends for over a decade, from 1962 to 1974. Little known, this founding period of independent Algeria has marked many Algerians. Algiers still bears the traces of this heritage.
It is no coincidence that one of the oldest bookstores in the capital is the legendary Third World Bookshop (Librairie du Tiers-Monde). The city pays also tribute to many representatives of the Third World. Among them, Frantz Fanon is certainly the most represented. This French psychiatrist who defended the Algerian cause, gives today his name to many hospitals, boulevards, streets and circles of reflection throughout the city and the country.
After the war of independence, the construction of an original system
This revolutionary commitment was not free of contradictions. Openly socialist till its denomination, the young People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria was built around a strong power. The legitimacy of the National Liberation Front (FLN) that took power in Algiers was enshrined in the Constitution. This original movement, composed of several currents, was then dominated by a leftist, nationalist and revolutionary ideology.
The now-only party then banned all other movements, including the Algerian Communist Party. While Algeria was hosting revolutionaries from all around the world and proud of its relations with communist countries (especially with Cuba – read Zéhira’s portrait), leftist movements were sacked and their militants repressed.
How paradoxical was this independent Algeria, which launches an agrarian reform by devoting the self-management in the old colonial agricultural domains, which collectivized the small businesses and which reaffirmed the importance of Islam in the country. Algeria, supported in this by the Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser, defended a second path, a socialism that was not ready to get rid of religion.
Algiers, “Mecca of revolutionaries“
During this period, a visit to Algiers could be likened to a pilgrimage in rebel ground. Algiers the white had become Algiers the red (Alger la rouge). The city has hosted many illustrious representatives of anti-imperialism and third-worldism. Among them were: Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Mehdi Ben Barka or Malcolm X.
Only a few months after independence and despite both financial and economic difficulties, Algeria opened its doors, welcoming many movements fighting against colonial or racial oppression. Welcomed and supported both financially and militarily, these groups found in Algiers a rear base and a place of revolutionary socialization.
To settle in Algiers was to have the chance to share the daily life of many movements and to learn from each other in an atmosphere of revolutionary emulation. For the African national liberation movements, it was to create a pan-African network that will ultimately lead to victory against the Portuguese Empire, the last one in Africa.
The “Mecca of the revolutionaries” was for the African liberation movements a kind of sounding board in their struggle against the colonial yoke. It is therefore not a coincidence that we owe the authorship of this expression to Amílcar Cabral, the founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, who then justified it by saying that: “Muslims go to Mecca, Christians to the Vatican and national liberation movements to Algiers.”
For all, the Algerian independence movement was a model, both for its military strategy and for its diplomatic and international relations.
A proudly African Algeria
Africa was then about to change sides. More than a dozen countries began an armed struggle against the colonial system, an externally imposed system or apartheid. Algerians felt African and considered that their struggle for independence implies the liberation of all people of the continent.
At the inaugural meeting of the all-new Organization of African Unity in 1963, Ben Bella implored the organization to become more involved. “We do not have the right to think about eating better when people fall in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa. […] let’s agree to die a little or totally, so that African unity is not a hollow word.” Despite claiming to have 10,000 volunteers, he did not get the creation of battalions to help liberation movements on the continent.
Ben Bella was pushed into this by his people. Indeed, since independence in July 1962, events and meetings succeeded in the country. The Algerians were supporting their African brothers and sisters seeking to get rid of colonial rule.
It is no coincidence that the first movement hosted in Algiers in 1963 was Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). The relations between the one who said one day “Algeria is my country” and the Algerian national liberation movement are old. As early as March 1962, Nelson Mandela was in Oujda, Morocco, where he participated in military training. From this experience alongside the FLN he remembered that military victory is not the main objective of the armed struggle; the goal is to free the political forces that will bring down the enemy.
Very soon, the ANC was joined by representatives of Namibia and Rhodesia. In 1964 the revolutionary circle extended, when joined by movements of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Angola.
Blacks from all over the world will then flowed and found in the Algerian capital a tribune. During the summer of 1969, Algiers became the capital of Africa by hosting the first Pan-African festival. Miriame Makeba, a committed singer expelled from her country, South Africa, sang in Arabic her gratitude for the organizing country: “I am free in Algeria, the mother of the martyrs.”
Tense relations with the United States
In addition to being African, Algerians also felt Arabs. The leader of the Arab world, the Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser was welcomed as a hero in the streets of Algiers. The ideological links between the Algerian government and him were strong. The Algerians have not forgotten the support given by Nasser and Cuba in their struggle against their brother enemy, Morocco, when the latter tried, in 1963, to seize territories he coveted (to learn more: read the article on Morocco-Algeria relations).
The relations with the United States which promised to be constructive yielded to the Algerian commitment. In 1962 Ahmed Ben Bella was received in Washington, making the United States the first country visited by the head of state of the young Algerian republic. Despite the opposition of his host, he flew directly to Cuba, breaking the American embargo imposed on Fidel Castro’s island.
In June 1967, the six-day war broke out and Israel destroyed the military potential of three neighboring Arab countries, including Egypt, tripling its territory in a few days. The defeated armies were forced to sign a ceasefire, which the Algerian street never accepted. Although far from the battlefield, Algerians felt humiliated and demanded revenge and continuation of the war. Volunteers said they were ready to join their Egyptian brothers. The Algerian president mobilized its army that that was sent to Egypt but Egypt was not ready to resume the fight. “Anglo-American imperialism” was however blamed and accused of arming Israel.
The Algerian government broke off relations with the United States and American representations were sacked. The relations between the two countries were only restored in 1974.
An internationalization of the fight
At the same time, the South Vietnam Liberation Front had an embassy in Algiers. This leftist movement had been fighting for years against American imperialism, which intended to impose a government in this part of the country. Many Americans were revolted by a war that they considered unfair. African Americans were probably the most hostile to it.
Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Black Panther Party who pushed blacks to desert the army found refuge in Algiers in 1968. Eldridge Cleaver joined him a year later in Algiers where he sought political asylum. Welcomed generously by the Algerian authorities, they created an international section of the Black Panther and shined in Algiers the African-American culture, at a period when the United States no longer had diplomatic representation in the country.
In the early 1970s, Algiers welcomed the Summit of the Non-Aligned Mouvement as a leader of the Third World. Soviets and Americans were then put on an equal footing by an organization that advocates for the union of southern countries against rich ones.
In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly appointed Abdelaziz Bouteflika (the current Algerian president) to chair its 29th session. He made this assembly an amplifier for liberation movements. Among his masterpieces is the invitation of Yasser Arafat to the platform and the exclusion of the Assembly of apartheid South Africa, despite the opposition of the United States and Britain.
At the same time, Algiers welcomed 40 Brazilian militants, just out of the jails of the dictatorship. Algeria has been the home of all those who have fought against dictatorship in Brazil since 1964. Some even remained there until the amnesty decided by their government in 1979.
Towards the end of a model
In the summer of 1972, two hijacked planes landed in Algiers. On board were ransoms extorted from American companies and activists determined to join the struggle of the Black Panther. Even if they were finally allowed to join their comrades, the ransoms were confiscated and returned to the airlines, much to the dismay of activists who will let everyone know. The Algerian government was then accused of being under the orders of the United States, an accusation it did not accept. The episode marked the end of the Black Panther Movement in Algiers. Deprived of their financial support by the Algerian authorities and placed under house arrest, they eventually left the country.
With the end of the dictatorship in Portugal in April 1974, the road to the independence of African countries became clearer. A few months later, it is in Algiers that a peace agreement was signed between representatives of Portugal and Guinea. Then followed the independence of the other territories under Portuguese domination.
Thus, from the beginning of the 1970s, it will be essentially on the diplomatic and institutional level that the Algerian activism will unfold. Though, te country remained for a few more years a preferred destination for hijackers and hostage takers of all kinds. For example, Carlos decided in 1975 to land in Algiers to free the oil ministers of the OPEC countries, taken hostage in Vienna, Austria …
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Many thanks