Beyond the human and material losses, however, the traces of the war persist in the social consciousness. These are living traces, both positive and negative. Positive: because Algeria emerged from the war as a country of independent social and political ambitions, as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial country. Negative: because divisions arose in Algerian society paralysing it.
This had never been a homogeneous society. It consisted — and still consists — of a mix of ethnic groups, religious sects, social classes, tribes and clans: a rich and complex mosaic. The war introduced a certain order, drew the majority of Algerians into the struggle for a common goal; but as soon as the war ended, Algerian society began to disintegrate anew. But meanwhile, the war had added a new division: on one side, those who took part in the war: on the other side, those who served the French. And among those who took part were those who fought within the country and those who fought outside its borders.
Guerrillas fought inside the country. Three hundred thousand Algerians are estimated to have taken a direct part in the guerrilla war. They are the ones who shed the most blood. At the same time, the French were recruiting Algerians into its army and administration: their hands in the struggle against the rebels. The dividing line often ran through a single village, through a single family. (‘Tujji does not contain one family,’ writes Jules Roy about an Algerian town in his book The War in Algeria, ‘which would not have been split and which would not have had to come to terms with both the FLN [Front de Libération National] and the French army … In a certain family one man joined the rebels and another is in the French army … Why is he in the service of the French? Because there he receives a chunk of bread and a soldier’s pay … Will these divisions vanish when peace comes? The army believes not, believes that on the contrary they will deepen … Is there any way not to share these fears? In Tujji, thirty men serve in the French army and every evening they lie in ambush for their guerrilla brothers.’) The memory of who did what in the war remains alive in Algeria today. Today members of the Algerian professional class come from among the former collaborators, because only they had the opportunity to gain qualifications. Today they make up the administrative cadre: what’s more, even though many of them are engaged in quiet but systematic sabotage, the government has also been forced to take them back into the army. During the conflict with Morocco, Algeria was losing because of the weakness of its support staff and finally concluded that it had to utilize the collaborators because they are the experts.
There is a third group: the emigrants — those who spent the war in French prisons (like Ben Bella) and those who served in the Algerian army that was formed in Morocco and Tunisia (like Boumedienne).
Algeria gained its independence during a profound crisis among members of the guerrilla movement: they had been bled dry, decimated, beaten back into the depths of the country, into the most desolate and inaccessible wasteland. They were being scattered. In the meantime, across the border in Tunisia and Morocco, a strong, expertly organized, excellently armed, well trained, solidly provisioned young Algerian army was forming. And as the guerrillas took a step towards seizing power, they found that the army had already rolled into Algeria with armoured columns and was enforcing a new order. From that moment in the summer of 1962 the border army has decided, still decides, and will continue to decide everything in Algeria.
From that moment too, the political activists, the whole élite that governs and the whole apparatus that administers will fall into three factions, three groups: emigrants, guerrilla veterans and collaborators.
This is the country that Ben Bella took over in 1962. He began under conditions that were not auspicious, the very same conditions that would determine his eventual defeat.
The country was weakened by the war, battered, particularly its villages, which were devastated. A million French colonists had fled in haste, and the country’s own population was only starting to drift back from exile, from reservations, from the camps. The farms stood abandoned; the factories were idle. There was no organized administration, and members of a professional class were scarce, a technical cadre non-existent. Unemployment: universal. And, more than anything else, the society was exhausted, starved. It wanted peace; it wanted to eat. Even today, you can still feel clearly that this society is tired.
Ben Bella took power in a country that may be the most difficult land to govern in Africa. When he began, he was alone. A few months before, he had been in prison, having spent years in isolation. He arrived without a staff or troops. Most of the active politicians opposed him, blocked him; he was without a devoted and powerful party of his own. There was only one force from which Ben Bella could hope for backing in his struggle for power: the army, the masterful, confident border army of Boumedienne.
The essential feature of this army was that it was inactive. While the war was being fought inside Algeria, Boumedienne’s army was unable to reach it because the army couldn’t cross the network of impenetrable barriers along the border controlled by Tunisia and Algeria. Blocked in this way, Boumedienne’s army became increasingly political, its political activity compensating for its inability to act militarily. In fact, all along, Boumedienne’s soldiers trained on the revolutionary model, the soldier-political with a rifle in one hand and an agitprop manual in the other. The old guard of politicians gathered around the Algerian Provisional Government and FLN had seen the dangers for a long time: the old politicians, fearing the army, looked for ways to clip its wings, and on 2 July 1962, three days before Algerian independence, the Provisional Government decided to remove Boumedienne and the officers closest to him, who sit today on the Revolutionary Council. But Boumedienne was not about to be unseated. He came out openly against the old politicians. And Ben Bella too, whom the old politicians had refused to admit to power, stood against them. Logic led to Ben Bella allying with Boumedienne. Neither could do without the other. Ben Bella was a name, also at odds with the Provisional Government; he knew how to speak; he backed the idea of a politicized army. The politicized army, the only unified Algerian force at the end of the war, pushed Ben Bella into power. Only the army’s candidate had a chance to take power. Only Ben Bella.
So it happened.
But at the same time, Ben Bella had from the beginning stepped into a snare: the army would be watching; the army knew that finally it could do whatever it wanted.
I want to defend Ben Bella just as I am going to defend Boumedienne. Ben Bella was not the ‘demon’ that the nervous, demagogic communiqué of 19 June accused him of being, no more than Boumedienne is the ‘reactionary’ that L’Unita wrote about. Both are victims of the same drama that every Third World politician lives through if he is honest, if he is a patriot. This was the drama of Lumumba and Nehru; it is the drama of Nyerere and Sekou Touré. The essence of the drama lies in the terrible material resistance that each one encounters on taking his first, second and third steps up the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and begins to do it and then sees, after a month, after a year, after three years, that it just isn’t happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness, the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists, the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink. Progress comes with great difficulty along such a road. The politician begins to push too hard. He looks for a way out through dictatorship. The dictatorship then fathers an opposition. The opposition organizes a coup.