Reply #14: The Battle of Algiers

[dArKeR]

(An email from a European friend. He told me to go see "The Fog of War" which I told him I had already seen on PBS. Then he gave me more details on Iraq.)

1. It was projected in some parisian movie theaters last year. It is strange to me to learn that quite a few americans have difficulties with the facts (something must be wrong about the teaching of contemporary History in american high schools).
It sounds like a bad excuse and to me that is scaring. As Mc Namara said a person (or a country) should learn from his mistakes and never repeat them twice. Had America listened to its allies, it would have never gotten into the vietnamese or iraqi's traps!

Americans tend to see the war in Iraq as a part of a "war on terror" to establish a US style democracy in the Middle East. Iraquis see americans as invaders coming to enslave them and steal their oil on behalf of israelis politicians and texan oilmen interests.


2. Many russian archives are now being declassified and almost every months we can learn something new about the cold war in European History magazines. For instance, Gorbatchev knew that Reagan's "stars war" was nothing but pure bluff. Also, the soviet army didn't want to intervene in Afghanistan in 1979 but Brezhnev assured his generals that it would be over "in a few weeks" (a position similar to Rumsfled's cakewalk about Iraq while facing some reluctant US generals).
There doesn't seem to be much interest about those discoveries in the US.


3. Some old french and algerian officials that participated in the franco-algerian war are now talking about the dark side of the war : the use of torture by the french army under government's approval, the elimination of rivals among algerian nationalists, the betrayal of pro french algerians by de Gaulle, the inability of algerian nationalists to totally control their troops, the use of the Saharian dessert to detonate the first french A-bombs...

We also learned that at some point the french state oil company paid some protection money to the algerian rebels for not sabotaging the first pipe line (oil was discovered in Algeria during the last years of colonial rule).

Forty years after the war ended both countries have now started to normalize their relations (you had to wait for one generation to fade away on both sides of the mediterranean). Algeria just recently reintroduced the compulsory teaching of french in elementary schools (their Ministry of Education said he wanted some educated citizens and not some islamists). Some old french colonists go visit their former possessions there and sometimes encounter their old algerian employees or workers.

The facts that 1 million french colonists arrived in the Motherland in May / June 1962 (actually some of them had never been to France - their families being settled in Algeria for 3 generations and many were not of french origins as you had many spaniards, italians, maltese, jews among them) and that 4 millions algerians reside in France complicated relations in between both countries.

You should rent in DVD "The Battle of Algiers" by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966) distributed by Studio Canal (in french with english subtitles) . For 30 years it was forbiden in France (I first saw it in a Taipei' s Barcelona MTV on Hsin Yi Rd...)The Pentagon projected it to the high ranking officers serving in Iraq after realizing in May / June 2003 that the country was out of control...

The movie has be shown again in all movie theaters in France in November 2004 to commemorate the beginning of the algerian war (1954 - 1962).