October 5 belongs to the heritage of the revolts of Algerian youth against a certain form of oppression. We should commemorate October 1988, this date which obviously does not appear in the official calendar of Algerian commemorations, however very rich. What is not without derision called “commemorate”, an act of commemorating faster than its shadow, is one of the childhood illnesses of countries that need a symbolic surplus to establish a legitimacy that is not always obvious.
October 5, 1988 is a bit of anti-July 5, 1962, the date of the proclamation of independence.
Why anti? Because July 5 is, among other things, a day of promise. And that on October 5, 1988, the Algerian youth criticized the national state, the political power which legitimized itself with independence, for not having kept these promises.
Of course, things are not that simple. Nevertheless, let us point out some facts and set some thoughts that will perhaps allow us to regret that October 5 is not commemorated by official Algeria.
October 5 belongs to the heritage of the revolts of Algerian youth against a certain form of oppression. To explain this, I need to retrace the history of Algeria before independence. Briefly.
Colonization in 1830 resulted in the standardization of almost the entire population in pauperization, or more exactly of the non-European Algerian population.
This process of oppression, acculturation, colonial negation has led, the contradictions being accentuated to a decisive point, in giving no other choice to the colonized than revolutionary violence to free himself.
The struggle against colonialism contained in fact a dimension of social struggle since the colonial power had kept the colonized in exploitation and illiteracy, leaving intact the immeasurable gulf that separated them from the colonizers.
And the chiefdoms? Well, as always, they sided with the powerful!
The fight for independence was also conceived as a fight against injustices of all kinds, against exploitation, against poverty, against illiteracy, against arbitrariness, against contempt, all things that the colonial power used to against the colonized.
At the end of a 7-year war and a 130-year colonization, the Algerians welcomed independence as the beginning of a process that should lead, if not to equality, at least to struggles against all that. seemed to be the evils indispensable to colonial survival.
In 1988, 26 years after independence, young people took to the streets to say their toll about a State and a political class which, obviously, was enriching itself in an ostentatious and scandalous way, leaving the most large part of the population in social, economic and political stagnation.
In addition to the problems of unemployment, especially housing, the difficulty of young people to foresee the future, the political system based on uniqueness (single party, single union, satellite associations of the single party, single candidacy of the single party to all elections, starting with the presidential election), this system therefore excluded them from any possibility of expression.
Without work, without housing, without the possibility of expressing their aspirations, reduced to a kind of social non-being, young people had no other way of expressing themselves than by rioting.
It is from this period that the word Hittist dates with its charge of wait-and-see fatalism. It was also during this period that a kind of spleen appeared which led young people to leave, for example to take a boat to Australia, to go anywhere to flee Algeria.
Here again, it is a matter of going back in time to describe the major stages which, since independence, have prepared October 1988.
Even before the proclamation of independence, one can observe that the Algerian political elites were more concerned with the seizure of power than with the fate of the country and even less with that of the people. Ben Bella’s coming to power in 1962 was the result of a coup d’etat by a clan led by Boumediène who, 3 years later, on June 19, 1965, ousted the one he had enthroned. This authoritarian and even despotic seizure of power, pushed some historical figures of the war of liberation to take the maquis (Aït Ahmed, Chabani, …) Algeria entered independence in such a row that the Algerians left in the rue shouting: “7 years (of war) is enough!”
Paradoxically, Boumediène’s coup d’état in June 1965 promised a kind of “pacification”, a leveling down, the frank and complete expression of a domination of Algeria by the armed force credited with its nationalism as as heir to the ALN.
Boumediène will put almost all Algerians on the same diet.
A supporter of socialism, he undertook a revolution
n agrarian intended to return “the land to those who work it”, to use the slogan of the time, that is to say the small fellahs, a socialist management of companies, the start of an industrializing industry, free care, that of school made compulsory.
In short, everything that characterizes socialism with the key, the nationalization of hydrocarbons and, on the international level, cooperation with preferably socialist countries, support for progressive and revolutionary causes.
But also the key, the establishment of an authoritarian, police system, where the state is omnipotent and where all political expression fell under the FLN, party-state, and its subservient organizations.
I don’t know the numbers but, despite the shortages, I think that during Boumediène’s time few people lived below the poverty line.
It is also from this period of muzzling of all opposition, of the forced silence of society, that the turmoil aroused in the country by any convulsion of the seraglio dates.
Since it was impossible to question the power in place, everything went through coups d’état.
It is the competition of the clans and it is also from this period that the alternative dates of letting one clan stir up riots and throw them into the hands of another clan.
This is what must have happened in October 1988, except that the tidal wave of the young people engendered this: the riots largely exceeded the framework which was allotted to them to take the proportions of this crack which changed the fate of Algeria.
When Boumediène died in 1978, it was a personalized, bayonet-locked system that somehow lost its key. His successor, Chadli Bendjedid, had neither the firmness of Boumediène’s socialist convictions, nor his grip, nor his stature to establish himself as an inspiration. It felt like a friability, a sort of dilution of authority in something of the order of the clan, and even of the tribal.
This had the advantage of involuntarily allowing the rise of the dissatisfaction of the citizens.
In particular political and intellectual elites marginalized until then, the only ones to speak of democracy, pluralism, individual and political freedom, human rights, all those things which, since independence, were banned from the official glossary of the Algerian power and the FLN.
The Chadli era will be the era of riots. The first will be that of the Berber Spring of April 1980.
This great revolt of the population claimed not bread or semolina but poetry and freedom. It will inspire the course of the revolts of the 1980s, including the one that interests us, that of October 1988
It will also inspire Berber cultural movements in all countries where a Berber community lives, Morocco, Libya, Niger, etc.
The Berber Spring of 1980 is important for many reasons. For the first time, a popular demonstration directly challenges the regime. It was the first time that a large popular demonstration demanded, not housing and work, but democracy and the recognition of Berber culture and language. It was also the first time that a popular demonstration frightened the regime to the point of forcing it to heed the demands.
Tamazight and democracy have ceased to be taboo of taboos. They will now walk in the minds of the Algerians to erupt in a big explosion in October 1988. Other major riots have punctuated this decade. I’m not even talking about the hundreds of thousands of local micro-riots that then became the only means of expression for Algerians: Constantine, Algiers and other big cities. In 1986 “an oil crisis” considerably affected Algeria’s foreign exchange receipts. The energy windfall that gave power to power to buy social peace has dried up. The first to foot the bill were the most vulnerable segments of society.
At the same time as this crisis, an ideological-political conflict broke out in silence between two power clans, over the economic and social policy to be followed.
Around President Chadli, we advocated reforms aimed at liberalizing the economy, at privatizing it, at touching in some way the sacrosanct socialist dogma, a legacy of Boumediene, to move towards something unknown, capitalism. Maintaining the socialist option was defended by the FLN leadership around Mohamed Cherif Messaâdia.
As always in systems that display animism, the debate is not conducted in the open, but through the press, through newspaper contributors linked to one or the other clan.
Algeria-Actuality published the contributions of the “reformers” of the Chadli clan.
African Revolution, the central organ of the FLN, defended the socialist system.
But less than a fight over fundamental options for the country, these struggles overlapped with scuffles for power.
The years 1987 and 1988 were marked by the social consequences of the economic crisis which hit Algeria, as well as by the sharpening of clan struggles, against a background of rising demands contained in germ in the Berber Spring: rights of Man, democracy, equity of justice, social justice, etc.
The summer of 1988 was particularly hot on the social level, marked by strikes by large companies such as the SNVI (National Company of Industrial Vehicles) which, in Rouiba in the suburbs of Algiers, employed 30,000 workers.
The summer of 1988 was also characterized by the resignation of power. While many sectors were on strike and Algerians suffered from chronic food shortages, neither the President of the Republic nor any minister appeared to be in office.
It was not until September 19 that the President of the Republic made his return to the explosive context of Algerian dubious society and that of an FLN congress which promised to stand at loggerheads between the two currents.
In his opening speech at the congress, aimed more at Algerians than FLN activists, the president adopted the tone of an opponent who calls for revolt, to the amazement of observers.
From then on, a word of general strike for Wednesday, October 5 is spread by rumor. We didn’t know where it came from, or who was issuing it, or the slogans. In short, a rumor, nothing more, but that was also Algeria, trompe-l’oeil where everything goes behind the scenes.
On the evening of October 4, the day before D-Day, curious facts occurred. Army police and intelligence services are arresting dozens of activists, including PAGS, across Algeria for unrest that had yet to occur and of which they knew nothing.
From the first hours, many of them will be tortured. A sign of the harshness of the struggles which also augured for the bloody repression that was to follow. Also on the evening of October 4, responding to a sort of invisible injunction, unemployed young people launched the first demonstrations, notably in Bab el Oued, one of the hottest neighborhoods in Algiers.
But until then, apart from the torture undergone by the arrested activists, which we did not yet know, the activists still being in the clutches of the torturers, we could, as a high official had done without fear and without reproach, speak of ” heckling of kids ”.
The next day, October 5, a Wednesday, when we got up in the morning, no one could suspect that that day Algeria’s fate was going to change. First at best, then at worst.
What was notable in Algiers that day was the absence of the police. Usually Algiers is a fairly civilized city. In the city center, there are several police stations and roadblocks at each crossroads.
It looked like someone had ordered the police to leave and leave the field free for rioting and scrapping. This was what was going to happen.
Around 11 a.m., groups of young people took to the streets. Middle and high school students at first, cluttered with their school bags, not having a word of order to shout and not even knowing whose call they were there.
I interviewed a few in situ that same day and no one was able to answer me. Who ? What ? How? ‘Or’ What ? Nothing. We’re here, that’s all. This is what these young people were saying.
Then little by little the demonstrators were infiltrated by adults who started the process of destruction and devastation that would make Algeria almost a field of ruins and blood.
Very quickly all the districts of Algiers will go up in flames. Young people from working-class neighborhoods are making a fist, either at home or in the city center. The big Algerian cities are affected by the same phenomenon. When the police returned to their posts a few hours later, it was too late. Algeria was in the hands of rioters.
Who were the rioters?
Abed Charef, a journalist who wrote a hot book on October 1988 paints a robot portrait of the October protester: “He is between 15 and 20 years old, he is a high school or college student but preferably unemployed, that is. – say recently excluded from the school system. He has no specific training. He has not yet completed his national service. He lives in a cramped apartment in a working-class neighborhood, surrounded by a large family. He has little prospect of finding work immediately. He is a supporter of a football team. ”
We can notice that if the demonstrators did not have political slogans and did not carry banners, the few sentences they shouted were on the tone of the football stadiums.
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The journalist adds, in the portrait of the demonstrator: “Has no political training”, “is outside any system”, “has no link with an association”, “organization or youth party” “he is left to his own devices ”, continually suffers abuse, and so on.
From the evening of the 5th, the demonstrators escaped power and the demonstrators themselves. There were many injured and many arrests.
If indeed, as has been said, and as is likely, the events were fomented by the Chadli clan to harm the opposing clan, it was obvious that the course of events was slipping away.
The rioters broke what symbolizes the state: ministries, police stations, town halls, etc.
But also what symbolizes the shortage and the piston in the distribution of products: the Souk el Fellah, Supermarkets, etc.
The first deaths will be on the evening of the 6th: “Madame Nabila Bouzidi, doctor, was on duty on the 6th evening in a hospital near El Biar (Algiers) when the bodies of the two first dead in October were brought back to her. 1988. It is about two of her nephews whom she discovers… Riad Bouzidi, 14 years old, and his brother, Nadim, 22 years old, killed by a tank commander whose machine broke down and who fired on the demonstrators to free themselves according to the official version. ”
The state of siege had already been declared. Algeria is invaded by tanks and elite troops. The demonstrations will degenerate the next day as unknown shooters infiltrate the protest and provoke the soldiers’ fire in return, accrediting the settling of scores.
500 dead, thousands injured, hundreds tortured, and general trauma.
These events have led to situating who is who and putting down the myth of brotherhood (brothers). To a revision of the Constitution which put an end to the single party. To provoke democratic effervescence including lasting gains such as freedom of the press and multipartyism, even under limited conditions. To set the scene for the long bloody night that was to follow.
And this is also where October 1988 is a crack.
Translated from article by Arezki Metref, le soir d’algérie. 5/10/13
