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Algeria 312 – 9th Anniversary of the Algerian Revolution photographed by Joseph Morris is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
“The Algerians were revolutionists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with France, they wanted some land, not some France.”
― Malcolm X
Following the end of World War II, cries for freedom against the French escalated into a long and drawn-out war of violence and terror before the French would grant Algeria their independence. But even after French departure, the violence re-emerged when various groups within Algeria violently expressed their hatred for the repressive regime leading the newly established country. Seemingly endless violence and hostility between French colonizers and Algerian insurgents throughout the fifties and sixties, followed by violent uprisings against an oppressive Algerian government in the nineties, led to a lifetime of uncertainty, deception, and violence for both Algerian Muslims and French colons.
The conflict happening inside of Algeria would come in two different stages. First, the Algerian War for Independence, which lasted from 1956 to 1962, would lead to Algeria’s liberation from French rule. Roughly thirty years later, the Algerian Civil War took place from 1990 to 1999, playing out many of the tensions that still remained in the country. While both stages of conflict in Algeria could be summarized by the sheer violence and terror they brought, each stage had its own unique characteristics that contributed to a roughly sixty-year timeline of brutal guerilla war. For example, in the war for Algeria’s independence, the insurgent group known as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), used brutal – but strategic – forms of guerilla warfare to effectively combat the French colonial power and gain political autonomy. But in the case of the Algerian Civil War, strong dissent against the by-then oppressive FLN grew amongst fragmented groups, creating an ultimately unsuccessful variety of insurgency efforts to overthrow the regime.
Many comparisons exist between the two main Algerian conflicts in Algeria. Most notably, all groups involved in either conflict resorted to shocking and indiscriminate violence as a primary tactic for achieving their political goals. While this shaped the blueprint for what would be a cathedral of never-ending violence, some of the violence was effective against the standing regime, while in other instances, it was not. In Algeria’s insurgency against the French, the FLN adopted Carlos Marighella’s theory of militarization, which proved to be an invaluable philosophy in their fight against the French. It is also important to understand John Nagl’s theories, which help explain why the two stages of conflict were similar, but ended with different outcomes.
This chapter seeks to detail an overview of each stage of the Algerian revolution, in addition to relating the events that took place to specific revolutionary theorists. After analyzing both stages of the Algerian revolution, it is clear that each insurgency saw the use of violence as the most effective way to get their ideologies recognized. In the first case, the FLN used Marighella’s militarization strategy to combat the French, who in turn used indirect counterinsurgency strategy as described by John Nagl. Thirty years later, the FLN was able to outlast Islamist insurgent uprisings, despite relatively ineffective warfare tactics. While the use of violence is surely not a failsafe method for creating desired policy and results, this chapter will show, in the context of Algeria, that insurgencies can face different outcomes despite similar methods of warfare.
The Algerian Independence War, 1956-1962
On May 8, 1945, the day of Allied victory in Europe and long before true war in Algeria broke out, the violence that would characterize the conflicts began. In the Algerian town of Sétif, thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest continued French possession of Algeria and the economic and agricultural struggles the Algerian Muslims faced. Indeed, French and Algerian relations were becoming increasingly unsteady on both sides. But when police fired several shots into the crowd, the demonstration quickly surged out of control. For five days, rioters overran the French and Europeans of Sétif and its surrounding countryside, indiscriminately murdering Europeans in retaliation; ultimately, they killed 103 Europeans (Lilley, 2012, p.2) and mutilated many more.
The violence at Sétif was a culmination of political and cultural frustrations that had been building in the country for years. The Algerian Muslims had been vocal in their desire for French withdrawal since at least 1926, when a number of liberal and leftist reform groups emerged in the public sphere (Metz, 1985). These movements grew along with demands for Algerian representation in Algerian governance. In response, the French government proposed the ill-conceived Viollette Plan of 1936, which hoped to pacify the demanding masses and would have allowed French citizenship only to elite classes of Algerian Muslims. The masses, in return, became increasingly disillusioned with their French rulers, and shifted further from a cooperative French-Algerian end goal. Likewise, the French colons living in Algeria soundly rejected the proposal, deepening political polarization. But while the colons dominated political power, the Algerians constituted a vast and threatening population majority, limiting France’s options for political reconciliation. Leading up to World War II, Algeria was already fragmented and increasingly unstable, which combined with France’s perceived weakness and occupation during the war would lead to the outbreak of violence and growth of Algerian nationalism for years to come.
French police responded to Sétif with mass arrests, extrajudicial executions, and aerial bombing which killed anywhere from 1,300 to 15,000 Algerians (Metz, 1985). They sought to control the nationalist sentiment in and around Sétif with fear, but their inability to adapt to the Algerians’ demands ultimately led to the growth of the Algerian nationalist movement and, by 1954, to outright war.
The Algerian Independence War officially began on November 1, 1954, with a guerilla attack by the FLN. In the following years, Algerian insurgent tactics frequently involved brutal killings and mutilations, as well as a “triangular” organizational format that was designed to outlast the French government’s best counterinsurgency methods. While the FLN’s use of violence against Europeans in Algeria was brutal and shocking, the French response was no more humane, and continued the tone of disproportional violence that had been set after Sétif. Ultimately, French counterinsurgency efforts were unsuccessful because, according to John Nagl’s lessons of insurgency, they failed to address the entire problem of the Algerian revolution.
Nagl and the Algerian Independence War
Nagl’s theories are based on the comparison of Antoine-Henri Jomini, who advocated for massive conventional warfare even against the most embedded insurgencies, and Carl von Clausewitz, who believed that insurgencies could not be defeated simply by military might. Clausewitz wrote on the basis that war acts as an extension of politics, that once a political situation no longer requires a war, it will end. At the root of this political situation is his “remarkable trinity” (Nagl, 2002, p. 17), which he identifies as the people, the government, and the army. According to Nagl, a counterinsurgency must address each of these elements: it must provide political satisfaction, physical protection, and good faith in the military in order to remove the political need for violent insurgency. Once this is done, Maoist counterinsurgency theory asserts that an insurgency must be separated from the people that provide it resources, to “separate the fish from the water” (Nagl, 2002, p. 28). By addressing the war-causing trinity, the insurgency becomes unnecessary to the general population, which in turn will stop harboring it.
In Algeria, the French could not make the FLN irrelevant simply by beating them into submission; they needed to address the political needs of the Algerian people, as well as implement military and police reforms that would deprive the FLN of support and resources. As it was, the French conducted a brutal counterinsurgency operation involving extreme, punitive executions that killed ten Algerians for every European death. Rather than scare Algerian Muslims out of revolution, this doctrine of “collective responsibility” increased anti-French sentiment among them (Christopher and Clarke, et. al, 2013, p. 79). In a Maoist sense, the French sought to starve out the FLN by scaring Algerian Muslims into rejecting the insurgents – to separate them from the resources that sustained them. But by using fear and violence, rather than protection and provision, as a motivator, they failed in their political pursuit of the hearts and minds of the Algerian people. Rather, even their best attempts at indirect counterinsurgency were misguided and overly violent, leaving the Algerian people no choice but to support the insurgency.
At their most Clausewitzian, the French implemented a system called quadrillage, under which Algerians were garrisoned into small sectors, each of which was under heavy surveillance and control. These sectors were intended to isolate the people from the dangers of the insurgency and the insurgency from the people’s resources (Lilley, 2012, p. 4). But by Nagl’s assertion of the importance of the counterinsurgency trinity, the French barely managed to address the FLN’s political reliance on the Algerian people; rather than provide for them within these garrisons, they inflicted collective responsibility on them, fueling support for the revolutionaries. Additionally, French military carried out brutal, indiscriminate punishments to any villages suspected of supporting the insurgents and forced large rural populations into camps. The punishments resulted in the neglect and destruction of crops, which fueled an agricultural crisis and further disrupted Algerian life. In terms of military and police, the French conducted Jominian tactics based on total annihilation of the enemy (Nagl, 2002, p. 17) and failed to win over the people who made the FLN’s survival possible.
Marighella and the Algerian Independence War
The rebels’ use of insurgency tactics was able to overwhelm the French forces. For Carlos Marighella, the route to a revolutionary outcome involves the guerillas encouraging an over-response from the government forces to give legitimacy to your cause (Marighella, 1969). The FLN achieved these types of over-reactions and atrocities that effectively reduced the French’s hold on power. The brutal force of the police and military on the French side alienated their legitimacy. Marighella talks extensively of small group street tactics and the importance of quick, small attacks that the guerilla can escape swiftly (1969). The rebels were organized into small, disconnected cells and conducted quick, segregated attacks against French infrastructure during November 1954 (Lilley, 2012) (Christopher and Clarke, et. al, 2013). That paradigm is wholly consistent with the tactics outlined by Marigela as they were against strategic French assets like law enforcement posts, communication infrastructure, and security force assets (Christopher and Clarke, et. al, 2013). The FLN and forces used against the French-run government were in line with small but impactful attacks that prompted fear and overreaction from the opposition. These quick-in, quick-out attacks allowed the FLN to remain on the offensive side using short-range tactics integral to the urban guerilla according to Marighella (1969).
The small-scale attacks were insufficient to earn popular support and the FLN began to create recruitment cells. By 1956, the FLN had enough popular support to form civil communities that collected taxes and provided a form of governance (Christopher and Clarke, et. al, 2013). As their numbers grew, the FLN had begun to use larger-scale attacks directed at French settlements and even Muslim areas if they were thought to be at all sympathetic to the colonial power (Lilley, 2012) (Christopher and Clarke, et. al, 2013). The FLN attack on civilians around Philippeville resulted in more than 120 deaths, but the government’s response killed 1273 as a “conservative estimate” (Lilly, 2012, p. 4). The pattern of violence is easy to predict. France responded with significant force in the Battle of Algiers, 1957. The Battle of Algiers was nine months of the 10th Parachute Division executing, rounding up, and torturing insurgents (Christopher and Clark, et. al, 2013). The French imposed brutal direct counterinsurgency tactics like quadrillage and ratissage which lost the support of the people that the FLN then gained.
Revolutionary Outcome
Amid swelling support for the FLN, France found that they could not continue to trust the police and the military to protect their interests. The torture and otherwise morally questionable methods police used for interrogation were gaining more attention in and outside of Algeria, and the violence was becoming expensive and unsustainable (Metz, 1985). By 1961, de Gaulle had abandoned the hope of keeping Algeria French, and even feared an Algerian takeover of the military in France (ibid.). On March 18, 1962, talks in Evian, France, concluded, with an agreement on a ceasefire and a subsequent vote on Algerian independence. Thus, the French counterinsurgency tactics failed to address the political demands of the Algerian people and failed to suppress the Algerian revolution.
The Algerian Civil War 1988-1999
The Algerian Civil War of the 1990s came about after the 1988 Black October Riots spurred on from economic distress. (Lilley, 2012). The populace’s discontent included rising unemployment, inflation, and government mismanagement in addition to the drop in the price of oil (Tlemcani 2008). Violent repression by the FLN government followed the events of the 1988 Black October Riots and became the inciting incident for the upcoming Civil War. Out of the frustration and dissent, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was created in 1989. Previously, the only party authorized was the FLN, but the National People’s Assembly rescinded the one-party rule paving the way for the FIS to gain almost 200 seats in the general election of 1991 (Lilley, 2012). The FLN saw this electoral success as a threat to their monopoly on power and so the military cancelled elections and installed Mohammed Boudiaf, a founder of the FLN, as president. The post-coup government declared a state of emergency to use what is effectively martial law and disbanded the FIS. However, the FIS had an armed wing, Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) and other anti-regime groups became active (Lilley, 2012). One group in particular, the Armed Islamic Group or GIA contended that violence was the only way to de-platform the FLN (Lilley, 2012). They used largely symbolic targets for sporadic terror and eventually graduated to targeting all foreigners and non-Muslims (Lilley, 2012).
FLN Response and Atrocities
The FLN succeeded as an insurgent force once but now the regime faced one. They opted for a more Clauswitzian indirect approach by installing officers in security forces as informants for intelligence gathering and for stirring divisions among the fighters (Tlemçani, 2008). The FLN attempted to push the GIA to be more radical in order to make the population side with the state for protection. Additionally, the FLN trained its forces in anti-guerilla warfare tactics as the conflict brought the number of insurgents to over 20,000 by 1993. (Lilley, 2012). The state authorized harsh interrogation methods and instilled fear in the general populace to prevent cooperation with the insurgencies (Lilley, 2012). The FLN attempted to push the insurgents into being more extreme in theory and praxis not so much as a Marighellian coercion into overreaction, but in order to alienate allies and divide the groups (Lilley, 2012). It seemed to be taking up similar tactics that the French Colonial forces were using in order to split the insurgents from the regular populace as a resource.
Eventually, infighting and disagreement among the armed groups’ use of violence led to their factionalizing and resultant loss of effectiveness (Lilley, 2012). The army was able to infiltrate enough of the GIA to force division and work with local militias to extend their counterinsurgency efforts (Tlemcani 2008). In 1995, the state was able to hold elections where General Zeroual was elected President (Lilley, 2012). Unfortunately, this did not, on its own, restore legitimacy to the FLN government, but they did maintain the upper hand militarily. The GIA and other groups began losing ground. The Armed Islamic Group was thought to be the most ideologically extreme of the anti-regime groups (Mass Atrocity Endings, 2015). Ultimately, this would lead to its demise. Between 1997 and 1998 the GIA committed enough atrocities to lose support on account of its indiscriminate use of violence against civilian targets without a political end (Lilley, 2012). The GIA’s loss of legitimacy resulted in negotiations between the AIS and the government (Lilley, 2012). In 1999 Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected President and he successfully fostered enough civil discourse and military supremacy to make the last remnants of the GIA largely obsolete as a threat (Lilley, 2012).
Nagl and the Algerian Civil War
The FLN’s tactics to discourage FIS members from becoming insurgents were strikingly similar to the French tactics in the Independence war. Following the political disenfranchisement of the FIS and the subsequent rise of the GIA and AIS, the FLN interrogated suspected insurgents with inhumane treatments such as sexual abuse, water torture, and electrocution (Lilley, 2012: p.9). As with the Independence War, these were Jominian means to a Clausewitzian end; by using brutality against suspects, they sought to frighten Algerians out of supporting the insurgents. This period of time marked an intense campaign of indirect counterinsurgency strategy in Algeria of ambiguous success. Although the FLN’s tactics were not strictly Jominian, neither did they address Clausewitz’s counterinsurgency trinity. Rather, constant encounters with random killings, severe stress, and intense scrutiny kept the Algerian people on edge and uncertain of their surroundings (ibid. p.9). And while the constant threat of suspicion polarized Algerians either towards or away from the insurgent groups, it also allowed those groups to demand legitimacy from the Algerian government. Ultimately, the insurgents’ own dissonance led to their downfall.
The Clausewitzian notion that war is a continuation of politics means that these various groups naturally banded together to achieve their political goals (ibid. p.11); however, their fragmented ideologies kept them from combining for collective strength. The addition of the FLN’s heavy use of fear tactics, which kept noncombatant Algerians close to their homes and disconnected from each other, meant that the insurgencies had little network among the people. When the GIA, specifically, failed, it was because their doctrine of never-ending terror no longer served the interests of the people, and instead lost legitimacy in their eyes.
The FLN’s similarity to France’s tactics did not lead to the same results in the civil war. According to Mao’s “fish in the sea” counterinsurgency theory, which simply says that an insurgency survives because it stays connected to the communities that give it resources, the FLN conducted a successful indirect counterinsurgency. (Nagl, 2002: p. 28). Under these strategies, the AIS and the GIA became increasingly fragmented and, in the GIA’s case especially, alienated from the interests of the people. But this shift cannot be credited in large part to the FLN, when the insurgents did so much to harm their own case. The exceptional brutality conducted by the GIA contributed heavily to the FLN’s ability to turn the populace against the insurgencies and win their political support. While the FLN did not necessarily defeat the insurgent groups, they simply outlasted them, allowing them to become disconnected from their own support bases and eventually become irrelevant.
No Revolutionary Outcome
The GIA and other armed groups did not overthrow the FLN government. They ultimately ended up conceding to the negotiations via the FIS (Lilley, 2012). There was not a significant revolutionary outcome since the insurgent groups did not come to power over the existing government. The FLN applied Marighellian thinking as he advocated for guerilla fighters to be hyper conscious of infiltration and spying (Marighella, 1969). However, it appears the FLN was able to infiltrate and cause divisions and infighting within and among the groups anyway. The legacy of the war for independence the decades prior may have had the regime at the advantage since they were familiar with recent asymmetrical warfare and applying Marighella. The armed groups were not able to capitalize on the advantages of being more mobile and they were up against a regime that consisted of the institution that conducted a successful insurgency campaign prior. In this case the insurgents were fighting an entity that had already fought a guerilla insurgency and thus were at a disadvantage. Marighella’s ideas were present in both sides of the civil war, but the GIA could not hold onto legitimacy long enough to drain the states’ political will.
Conclusion
Algeria’s tumultuous history presents a pair of similar revolutionary situations with vastly different revolutionary outcomes. In both cases, all sides used some level of violence for their political goals, but only in the first case was the opposition against the state successful in overthrowing the status quo. In both cases, Marighella’s influence was apparent particularly with the FLN against the French in the Independence War. In terms of Nagl’s theories of counterinsurgencies, the ruling governments in both cases failed to conduct truly effective operations; it just so happens that the FLN was able to outlast the multiple insurgent groups that hoped to overthrow them. The incredible brutality used on both sides, in both the Independence War and the Civil War, followed Jominian tactics to achieve their own political ends: ultimately, both wars followed Clausewitzian patterns in which the war ended when the political goals were in sight.
Still, these two main conflicts of Algeria’s contemporary history present striking examples of revolutionary situations with vastly different outcomes, despite the similarities of the conduct. Amidst shocking violence, indiscriminate guerilla tactics, and state-sponsored torture, two Algerian insurgencies met vastly different fates against the governments they opposed.
Marighella, Carlos. Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla. Montreal, QC: Abraham Guillen Press, 2002.
Metz, Helen Chapin. Algeria: A Country Study. Edited by Harold D. Nelson. Washington, D.C.: American University, Foreign Area Studies, 1995.
Nagl, John. Learning to Eat Soup with A Knife. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Paul, Christopher, Colin P. Clarke, Beth Grill, and Molly Dunigan. “Algerian Independence, 1954–1962: Case Outcome: COIN Loss.” In Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies, 75-93. RAND Corporation, 2013. Accessed November 20, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt5hhsjk.16.
