OTR Comment - February, 2004

The re-release of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers was certain to provoke a spate of comparisons in the press. Long considered iconic for anti-imperialist radicals of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the film was written and co-produced by Saadi Yacef, an ex-leader of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). In France, it remained banned until 1971 because of its sympathetic portrayal of the terrorist tactics employed by the FLN insurgents. Its appearance this month in cinemas is clearly intended to prompt questions about the similarities between the era it portrays and the present one, and I have yet to read a single review that doesn’t either invoke the film as a cautionary tale for US occupation of Iraq, or else, like Christopher Hitchens’ “Guerillas in the Mist,” vehemently deny that it has any relevance to current events whatsoever. In his article “The Pentagon’s Film Festival” Charles Paul Freund relates that the Pentagon even screened the film for its employees last summer as a lesson about urban guerrilla warfare.

The film tells the story of the campaign of tit-for-tat violence between the FLN, a secret revolutionary organization which shelters in the labyrinthine alleyways of the Casbah, and the French colonial security forces, that began in 1956 and was all but snuffed out by 1960. In the opening shots we witness the strategic endgame of the campaign: French paratroopers storm a house in which Ali La Pointe, the last free leader of the rebellion, crouches hidden inside a wall. The French tell him that it is all over; the FLN has lost. The film then flashes back to the initial decision of the FLN to engage in urban warfare. It moves through strike and counter-strike, as the conflict escalates from assassinations of police, to bombings of civilians on both sides, to the attempted cordoning of the “Muslim Quarter” of the city with a security barrier, to the importation of the paratrooper regiment and their terrifyingly calm and reasonable leader, Colonel Mathieu, to put down the uprising. At one point, lecturing his troops on the difficulties of counter-insurgency, Mathieu says that the majority of the people in Algiers aren’t the enemy: it’s only the minority, those who engage in violence that have to be rooted out. He describes the enemy as “faceless,” hiding in the crowd. The resonance with the rhetoric of both the War on Terror and the war in Iraq is unmistakable.

The implications of this speech are born out in the film’s ending, which replays the initial scene of FLN defeat. The French have succeeded in destroying “the organization,” as it is called, by targeting its leaders. But the movie then passes this moment to look at the eventual outcome of the conflict. In 1962, Algeria receives its independence from France anyway, after the insurgency resumes and gathers more strength.

Here, it seems, is the rather straightforward lesson that The Battle of Algiers might usefully teach the citizens of a Western power currently occupying a Muslim country. The tactical and strategic successes of a conflict do not in themselves constitute a resolution. The astonishing achievement in military terms of the campaign in Iraq has only been matched by the failure of the occupation to establish in the aftermath anything that we might recognize as peace. After bombings in which Iraqis are killed by insurgents who are likely to be other Iraqis, crowds gather and chant anti-American slogans. However one understands the insurgency in Iraq, what is very clear is that the Iraqi people overwhelmingly desire the return of sovereignty, though their feelings remain conflicted about the US military presence itself. Even if a different kind of occupation, one that was more internationalized, or came at a different time, might have been received in another spirit, at this point the CPA is perceived as an incompetent, suspect, unwelcome guest.

In the film, during a press conference after a mass detention of striking Algerian workers, Col. Mathieu addresses a question back to the assembled reporters, and by extension, to the French public. The situation is simple, he says. We want to stay and the FLN wants us to leave. Should France stay in Algeria? If the answer to this question is yes, then we will all have to accept the consequences of that decision. This is followed by a montage of torture techniques used against suspected FLN members, which is truly horrifying to watch, and which, according to Freund, the French did actually employ in Algeria. This, the film suggests, is what is necessary to maintain order when consent has evaporated. Mathieu’s question is also relevant to the contemporary situation, but as an inversion of it. Though there have been scattered accusations of mistreatment of POWs (and doubtless more will come out later), and Human Rights Watch recently issued a statement condemning the use of cluster munitions by the US military as brutal and unnecessary, part of the difficulty from a tactical standpoint of the this occupation has been the imperative of restraint on the aggression of US soldiers.  On January 11^th the New York Times magazine carried an article about Major John Nagl, an army expert in counter-insurgency now working in Iraq, that describes soldiers trying desperately not to fire on crowds, to withdraw and retreat rather than engage with anyone not directly firing on them. The French forces in Algeria were defending a population of European colonials numbering several million; the Americans are supposed to be defending Iraqi civilians. For Americans to kill or wound Iraqis, then, constitutes a failure of one of the stated purposes of their mission, and so they may not be prepared to do what, according to the logic of the film, would be necessary to secure the city of Baghdad completely.

Mathieu’s question calls forth another important difference between the two situations. France was an overtly colonial power trying to hold onto one of its last overseas possessions. At one point, Mathieu complains about the press comparing the situation in Algiers to the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the battle that ended French attempts to re-establish a colonial presence in Indochina. Here we should recognize the gulf of time opening between the era of the film and our own, in a way that confuses as much as clarifies the comparison between the two situations. Algiers in 1957 was still part of a world in which it was desirable and respectable to have an empire, in the traditional sense of administering another territory’s government as part of one’s own. The French had a declared strategic purpose to their military presence in North Africa, one that was not open to very much second guessing. The actual purpose and meaning of the American mission in Iraq by contrast seems to be the most vexed question of the entire endeavor, one which divides people both within and outside the United States along new but widening political fault lines.

So the lessons are there, but they are limited. Hitchens stated conviction that no one could find a “single intelligent point of comparison” forgets that comparison can consider differences as well as similarities and that perhaps both are necessary.

The final scene of The Battle of Algiers is a crowd scene of the second wave of protests, strikes and uprisings that swept the country immediately preceding independence. The French troops have released smoke bombs to disorient the crowd. One of the soldiers shouts “What do you want?” and from out of the smoke, come voices shouting “We want liberty,” “Independence,” “Long live Algeria!”  As the smoke clears, we can make out the crowd with increasing clarity, men and women whooping and waving Algerian flags. The final image of the film is a young woman waving a flag above her head and moving in a forward and backward dance just beyond the reach of the police. It accords with Pontecorvo’s Marxism that the film ends with this, a microcosm of the relationship between the guerrilla and the crowd: each time the policeman lunges for her, the girl skips back into the mass of people behind her. The protesters represent the unified will of the Algerian people, and the lesson is that this outcome was inevitable.

The problem with this picture is that, despite the claim of the voice-over that strikes and demonstrations erupted spontaneously several years later “as if out of nowhere,” in fact violent insurgency continued in the rural areas for those intervening years. Also, the FLN was far from unified and engaged in violent internecine strife both before and after independence.

Again, we can draw the difference with Iraq, even on the tactical level. The areas of Iraq away from the capital, outside of the Sunni Triangle as it has come to be known, have been both more supportive of the CPA and also more peaceful than the capital. So far the militias in the north and south of the country – the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Shi’ite Badr – have been working with the Americans. Political organizations with widespread popular support, not only the militias, but the Kurdish political parties and the mainstream Shi’ite religious leadership, feel that they have a stake in cooperating with the CPA. This sense of some shared purpose should not be taken for granted. In the film, one of the French police says bemusedly that the French and the Algerians got on fine for the preceding 130 years.

Emily Mitchell is an OTR Contributing Editor.