Avuncular American

Harkis - Reminder Of Those Left Behind

A chance flick of the radio dial reminded me that today, 25 September, is the "Journée Nationale d'Hommage aux Harkis" in France.  The radio program is the excellent daily show "2000 ans d'histoire" on France Inter, and you can listen to a podcast of today's rebroadcast of the 2006 interview with author Tom Charbit.

The Harkis were Algerians who served the French cause in what British historian Alistair Horne called the "Savage War of Peace," Algeria's war for independence from 1954 to 1962.  Several films have touched on the torn allegiances of Algerians during that dark period, including L'ennemi intime and La trahison.  They only hint at the violence meted out to Harkis upon independence, meriting Horne's use of "savage" in every sense of the term.

Those who escaped, and there were over 100,000 with their families, were interned in camps as isolated and forlorn as that of Camp Joffre in Rivesaltes, pictured here.  The camp, which was used originally to house Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, is on a dusty coastal plain at the foot of the Pyrenees.  Some Harki children were born and grew up in camps like this, finally protesting their plight in the mid-Seventies.  Check this excellent French government site for more photos and historical notes on Camp Joffre.

Whatever your political stance on Algeria's war for independence, you'd have to be pretty hardcore and hard hearted not to admit that the Harkis got a bad deal.  Scorned (when they weren't massacred) by fellow Algerians, they got little of the honor they deserved by the country they served.  President Chirac started their rehabilitation, calling them "brothers in arms," when he established the day of commemoration in 2001.  Two years ago, just after returning from a trip to Algeria, President Sarkozy acknowledged the "debt" owed those who had given up everything for the lost cause of "Algérie française."

But it's an uphill battle, and the political debates of a half century ago still echo.  In 2006, Socialist politician Georges Frêche of Montpelier referred to Harkis as "sous-hommes" ("sub-humans") when some rallied to the UMP successors of de Gaulle.

A half century after their war, France's Harkis still have to struggle to get recognition for their role.  Let's see how historians, fifty years hence, will judge the West's contemporary allies in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Will they get to write the official history, or will it be someone whose eduction was in a madrassa?

14 Kilometers, But Oceans Apart: Trans-Mediterranean Migration

Spanish writer/director Gerardo Olivares' film 14 Kilómetros tells us how far the Moroccan coastline is separated from Spain.  Tantalizingly close, visible from your window whether you're in Tangier on the African side or Tarifa on the European coast.  But if you are one of the thousands of desperate African migrants who has spent your last cent crossing the Sahara getting to the jump off point, you are not going to let 14 Km get in your way.  Or you are going to die trying, as thousands do.

Dr. Bichara Khader of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CERMAC) at Belgium's Université Catholique de Louvain knows this world of mass migration, and has made the study of it his life's work.  Today's presentation at MEDEA's "Mediterranean Midday" was largely devoted to Maghrebi migration to Europe, but the Africans of 14 Kilómetros were never far from our minds.

The fictionalized trio of francophone Africans in Olivares' film (amateurs recruited on the streets of Mali and Niger) start a little hesitantly, and at first appear to be reciting their lines a bit mechanically.  But that impression passes, and the viewer is left with just the three protagonists and the utter vastness of the Sahara.  One of the film's most lingering images is of the impossibly overloaded truck (Olivares was reminded of "boat people" on wheels) lumbering through the desert, dropping people off at some unmarked crossroad in the sand: Libya to the right, Algeria and Morocco to the left.

Our trio takes the latter route, and add to the 100,000 or so sub-Saharan Africans living in the limbo of the Maghreb.  Their Algerian and Moroccan "hosts" may still attempt to make the crossing themselves, but the heyday of North African migration to Europe in the boom time of the Sixties and Seventies is long over.  With Maghrebi birthrates dropping to European levels, how long will it be, asks Dr. Khader, until the Africans simply start to replace the missing Maghrebi workers and give up on their dreams of Europe?

For the crossing is increasingly difficult.  Whether it is 14 Kilometers in the Strait of Gibraltar or hundreds of kilometers to the Italian coast from Libya, European nations are increasing their pressure on the countries of the Maghreb to prevent the African migrants from crossing.  With their detention centers and increasingly sophisticated patrol boats, are the North African countries becoming, in Dr. Khader's words, "the gendarmes of Europe?"

In Olivares' film, the characters are shunted between border posts, safe houses, and brothels.  We come to care for the characters, and to root for them as they confront traffickers whose only interest is in their well-hidden wads of Euros.  We hold our breath as they risk being discovered by Algerian, Moroccan, or Spanish border guards.

For what?  To spend their lives on the edge of society, performing "Difficult, Dirty, Dangerous" jobs shunned by Westerners?

Gerardo Olivares' amateur actors have no such illusions.  As the director told Nicolas Crousse of Le Soir, at the Madrid opening of his film, they saw how African migrants lived in the Spanish capital.  "If it's like that," they told him, "we prefer staying in our own countries."

(Image: Strait of Gibraltar, NASA Earth Observatory)

Secret Défense: Who Killed French Monks In Algeria?

Yesterday's Le Monde article on revelations of testimony by a former French military attaché in Algiers has caused somewhat of a stir on both sides of the Mediterranean.  The former attaché, General François Buchwalter, testified that the seven monks beheaded in 1996 during the worst years of Algeria's civil war, had in fact been killed by the Algerian Army.

Algerian media reaction (a selection here via Algeria Watch) has been quick, seeing a nefarious post-colonial, anti-Algerian motivation: "The Delirium Of A General," or "The Return of 'Who Killed Who'?"  The latter, "Qui tue qui?", is shorthand for calling into question responsibility for thousands of deaths during the dirty war.  According to several former Algerian military, not all "terrorist" killings were carried out by Islamic militants.

Today, French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to declassify documents relating to the investigation.  As L'Express points out, Sarkozy was not in the Chirac government during the period in question.

In their 2007 book Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, Martin Evans and John Phillips wrote extensively about the monks and the events leading up to their deaths, saying "the monks' deaths could be seen as the consequence of a counter-insurgency game that went disastrously wrong."  Evans and Phillips draw on previous revelations, notably by a former Algerian government infiltrator in the armed groups.

The British authors know of what they speak: Phillips was the Times (London) correspondent in Algeria during the worst years of the war, including during the monks' killing at Tibéhirine. "Reporting from Algeria," they write, "with a regime one of whose characteristics was disinformation on a grand scale, was notoriously hazardous."  One of the main areas of focus in the current French investigation is whether the French authorities were complicit in covering up the disinformation.

Algeria's 2005 National Reconciliation Charter was supposed to have unleashed a kind of "live and let live" spirit, but as Liam Stack wrote recently in the Christian Science Monitor, it has instead "focused on forgetting the past," at least for those in the government.  French justice, not bound by the Algerian charter, is free to look where the truth may take it.

Unfinished Business: France's Colonial Liberators

64, not being a memorable number, doesn't have the same symbolism as, say, 65.  I'm talking about commemorations, as in today's ceremonies throughout France and other European countries, marking the beginning of the end of World War II - "V.E. Day."  Victory in Europe, May 8, 1945 - sixty four years ago.

Bill Clinton did the right thing by traveling to Moscow for the last big one, the 50th in 1995.  We tend to forget the crucial Soviet role in defeating the Nazis these days - but Russian President Medvedev won't let that happen.

Forgotten too are the promises made to rectify the unjust treatment of "colonial" troops who helped liberate France in the Second World War (the photo at left is of one of the Algerian tirailleurs buried in the First World War cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette, regularly desecrated by vandals).

Today French President Nicolas Sarkozy, marking the anniversary of the German surrender at Reims, decided to travel to the Mediterranean coast, the scene of the landing by (mostly colonial) French forces in August 1944, and today a gathering of much of France's naval might.

"France will never forget their sacrifice," said the President of the colonial soldiers, nor their "admirable courage."  Perhaps.

But by choosing this particular site and by singling out the colonial troops, he called attention to one of the major items of unfinished business in post-war France: how it is that 64 years after the end of the war, the average metropolitan French war veteran gets an $800 monthly pension and the average North African gets about $100?

Was this a conscious decision to make them return to their villages in the Atlas Mountains?  Separate them from their children, born in France?  Many of these veterans still have only limited rights when it comes to length of stay in France.

"Les oubliés de la République," as they are called by an association of the same name (logo below right), do indeed appear to be forgotten by the Republic that they helped save.  As one of their members noted wryly on French radio, "will the last indigène get a state burial and then be forgotten?"  Indigènes, the 2006 film that brought then-President Jacques Chirac to pledge an end to discriminatory treatment of the colonial veterans, was a reasonably good war film that portrayed a group of North African French soldiers, "Band of Brothers" style.  It packed a powerful ending: a few minutes of flash-forward showing one of the heroes in present-day France, eking out a living in a decrepit one-room apartment.

The disgraceful treatment of these French soldiers of color began early, and not only at the hands of the French.  As German troops blitzkrieged their way through Belgium and France in May-June 1940, some 17,000 African soldiers were killed, many executed by the Germans after they had surrendered.  But the Allies were little more enlightened in matters of color.  Last month the BBC unearthed documents that showed how American and British generals insisted that their French counterparts constitute photogenic "all-white" units to parade through liberated Paris.

On this day of solemn commemoration and pious hypocrisy, "Les oubliés de la République" reminded us that President Sarkozy's first act in office was to give a generous "bouclier fiscal" or tax cut to his wealthier constituents.  And that it would cost a fraction of that bill to give the dwindling ranks of "les oubliés" a decent living.

Algerian Elections: A Very Easy Call

Dilem, Liberte-Algerie.com

Algeria has gone full circle: 19 years ago, I arrived in Algiers in advance of the June 1990 regional and municipal elections, which saw the emergence of the Islamist FIS Party as a force to be reckoned with (the reckoning came when the Algerian Army quashed the second FIS victory in as many years, the December 1991 parliamentary elections whose cancellation signaled the beginning of Algeria's bloody years of political violence).

In 1990, while monitoring the elections in a one-man mission for the US Embassy, I took a lunch break for a plate of couscous.  The government clerk sitting at the table next to me wasn't a "man on the street," but he would do.  "Voted yet?" I asked.  "Not going to," the functionary answered.  "The FLN will win again, as it always does," a reference to the previous one-party rule of the National Liberation Front.

My lunch partner was, of course, wrong: the FIS won, and won big, because they got out the vote.  Fast forward to 2009, and today's presidential elections.   Don't know if my clerk is still around, but if he sat out the election this time, his cynicism would be well-placed.  As the excellent Maghreb-watching blog "The Moor Next Door" puts it, this is a "cakewalk" for the re-election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Though Algerian politics has been far from fair, at least it had avoided the "President For Life" malady that afflicts it North African neighbors.  As Ahmed Aghrout and Yahia H. Zoubir write in Middle East Report Online MERIP

Until recently,  Algeria was the North African exception -- Article 74 of its  1996 constitution set two five-year terms as the limit on the  mandate of a given president. On November 12, 2008, however, the parliament voted overwhelmingly to approve several constitutional  amendments, the most important of which removed the stipulations  of Article 74. This far-reaching amendment opened the way for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to run for a third successive  term, as he will do on April 9, despite his poor health and controversial performance. Algerians are convinced that, as in Tunisia or Egypt, the result of this election is a foregone conclusion.

If you count out the FIS, which was disbanded after the Army coup in 1992, most of the remaining credible politicians and parties are boycotting the election (see this useful BBC Q & A).  There are international observers in Algeria for the event: the African Union has agreed to deploy 100 monitors.  But three prominent French weeklies, including L'Express, have been banned for apparently getting too close to the inconvenient truth.

As a service to readers who want to browse previous coverage of Algerian topics, here's a link to my "Algeria" tag category.

FYI, for myopic readers who haven't clicked on Dilem's "Presidential Elections" cartoon above, that ballot box is a shredder.

 

La Graine et le Mulet - Secret of the Grain

A Franco-Arab Immigrant Version of "Big Night"

The Germans have entitled it "Warten auf Couscous," the original title is "La graine et le mulet," and it will be known as "Secret of the Grain" when it is eventually brought to the anglophone world.  Yes, couscous does feature prominently in the film, but that is like saying that "Gone With the Wind" should have been called "She Grows Cotton."

La graine et le mulet (the couscous in question is the mullet variety, as those who know Tunisia's fish couscous have come to appreciate) is a French film by a Tunisian-born director, Abdelatif Kechiche.  French, because it's almost all in French, takes place in Sete, a Mediterranean fishing port, and with a cast almost exclusively composed of hyphenated French, mostly of North African origin.

Kechiche has explored this world before, in "La Faute a Voltaire" and "L'esquive," both of which garnered awards in European film festivals, as has La graine et le mulet.  But here's the thing: in his latest film, there's not a Muslim fundamentalist to be seen.  You would be hard-pressed to guess that the Maghrebi families depicted practice any religion - it's just not shown to be a part of their lives.

What we do see are lots of family: extended family, immigrant family, second generation family, mixed marriages, divorces, infidelity, and love.  The only skin you'll see is during an extended belly dance at the family restaurant (that's the converted fishing boat you see in the poster).  But I would say that certain fundamentalist elements in European Muslim communities will rail against the film, simply for its naturalistic depiction of secular Muslims going about the business of adapting to life in Europe.

For someone who has spent a chunk of his life in North Africa, the film is a joy.  The acting is natural, understated at most times, volcanic when the situation calls for emotion.  There is humor, pathos, and an uncanny feel for relations among and across France's communities.  The film's acting revelation is Hafsia Herzi, under twenty when the film was made in 2005 (it was only released in 2007).  If Marion Cotillard just won a very deserved Golden Globe for her portrayal of Edith Piaf, then Hafsia Herzi deserves honors for this, her first film role (she did win the "Marcello Mastoianni Prize" at the Venice Film Festival).

As the Hollywood Reporter said of Kechiche at Venice, "the director's lack of discipline in failing to yell cut while he's ahead" is really the only serious criticism that can be rendered against this two and a half hour film.  In all other respects, it's all thumbs up for La Graine et le Mulet.

(Note: this post was originally published in January 2008; photo source: Unifrance.org)

Spies On the Prowl: Romeos and Rapists

Two stories, related only in that they involve spies, sex, and women as victims.

The first story is of the alleged rape of Algerian women by a CIA operations officer, Andrew Warren, who was the station chief in Algiers until removed after accusations that he had raped Algerian women after drugging them.  Yesterday, the Washington Post carried an extensive article about the scandal, which has the potential to cause problems in US-Algerian relations.  The excellent English-language blog on North African affairs, "The Moor Next Door," provides insights on the Algerian reaction.

In the process of explaining spy tradecraft, WaPo's Joby Warrick and Jeffrey Smith tell us that

As CIA case officers attempt to recruit a foreign spy, they often offer personal inducements, ranging from cash to medical care. In some cases, a potential recruit may be taken to a strip club or even to a prostitute if it is deemed critical to cementing the relationship, longtime officers say.

Now, we've always known that women have been used as enticements in all manner of circumstances, and it probably comes as no surprise that Puritan America is not beyond practicing the "honeytrap" approach in its spy operations.  The allegations against Warren go way beyond this, however, and would put him in the same category as John Worboys, the London taxi serial rapist who drugged his victims.

But how about when men are used to entrap women?  I recommend listening to BBC World Service radio's "Assignment" program, here on podcast, on the East German Stasi's use of "Romeo Spies," specially selected male specimens who lured unsuspecting West German women to spy for the East during the Cold War.  The program profiles the case of Gabriele Kliem, who was recruited by the Stasi for her access to US secrets as an employee of the American Embassy in Bonn, and who lost everything as a result.  The program points out that while some 30 western women were prosecuted in similar cases, ex-Stasi agents have been largely able to get away scot-free.

There is no link, as I say, between the Algerian and East German cases.  But the juxtapostion this week of the two stories this week is fascinating.

Former African Granaries, Algeria to Zimbabwe

Today is Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's 85th birthday.  To read about his "obscenely" lavish party, read Martin Fletcher's report in the Times of London.

You've seen the TV footage of the misery reigning in the country where he holds the reins of power; here is what (Obama advisor) Samantha Power wrote in The Atlantic in December 2003, "How to Kill a Country."

A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women.

Imagine - the above was written when Zimbabwe's inflation rate was reaching an "unprecedented" 700 percent.  In other words, in the golden days of 3 digit inflation, before today's 6.5 quindecillion percent (I confess I didn't know of this measure) inflation and cholera epidemic.  Wait a minute - inflation may have reached 10 sextillion percent.  Hard to keep track.

How does a country go from being a "net exporter" of food to a situation where 7 million of its citizens require international food aid?  "Governance" practiced as "power grab" is the point of departure.  Then you dispossess the heretofore productive farmers of their land, to the point where they seek refuge in Nigeria, which welcomes their agricultural know-how.

Normally I wouldn't put Zimbabwe and Algeria in the same post, except if I were listing African countries in alphabetical order.  But the latter was also a breadbasket, and you don't even have to go as far back as the days when it was "the granary of the Roman Empire" (above left, map of the Roman Province of "Africa," from a site dedicated to subjects Roman, UNRV.com).

In the early '90s when we lived in Oran, Algeria's second city and major port, the American Consulate overlooked the harbor, where the grain facility was located (photo at right, Wikipedia).  When it was built by the French, its purpose was to export Algeria's considerable wheat production.  When we lived there, some thirty years after Algerian independence, it served to import huge quantities of foreign grain.  Here's what an upbeat (for grain farmers) Canadian Government site says about the Algerian market:

Algeria is the largest importer of agricultural goods in Africa, making it an attractive market, holding immense potential. Agricultural imports provide for most of the consumption needs due to unfavorable harvest conditions often resulting from drought. In 2007 Algeria imported $4.8 billion in foodstuffs from all countries; of these, $1.8 billion (38%) were grains, $1.1 billion (22%) dairy and $348 million (8%) was sugar. Algeria's largest import in 2007 was wheat at $940 million.

Don't get me wrong: whatever problems Algeria has, and they are legion (canceled elections leading to terrorism, huge youth unemployment, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the ruling class), it is not a Zimbabwe.  But through a combination of hubristic industrialization and its leadership equating "agriculture" with "French colonialism," it threw away its indigenous source of sustenance.

Algeria, Zimbabwe - Africa's list of granaries and breadbaskets, past, present, and future is mainly a matter of good governance.  But talk to African economists, and you'll hear that American and European farm subsidies hurt African farmers.  In the new world of recession and retrenchment, let's see where the "trade not aid" argument takes us.

But don't count on those white Zimbabwean farmers in Nigeria returning "home."  That home exists no more.

Fewer Coups, But Men-With-Guns Thrive

"Why coups are less and less popular," a fascinating chart on The Economist website, is worth a look.  It's a snazzier version of the report put out by the very serious HIIK, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, as part of the Human Security Report Project (HSRP).

It shows how "le coup d'etat" is way down as a means of toppling governments.  From its heyday in 1963, when there were 25 coups, through 2007, when there was just one.

Of course you never know: there used to be a joke in US embassies about how a CIA station in West Africa would submit an annual coup prediction, knowing that they'd eventually get it right.

I only experienced one coup, whose initial stage was largely bloodless: the Algerian Army's overthrow of one of its own, President Chadli Bendjedid in 1992, and its subsequent cancellation of elections that the Islamist FIS party was poised to win.  We had a view from the living room of the tanks below our window, streaming down the waterfront boulevard in Oran.

Though the coup itself was relatively bloodless, the aftermath has been more than a decade and a half of bloodletting: Algeria descended into a spiral of terrorist violence and reprisal from which it has yet to fully emerge.

I'm sure that the people who developed the coup chart are meticulous in their methodology, and have footnotes to annotate instances of regime-change, where, like in Iraq in 2003, the coup was administered from the outside.

And then there's the category of regime-change in a stateless territory, like the overthrow of the Somali Islamic Courts by US surrogate Ethiopia, which Aidan Hartley ("The Zanzibar Chest") describes so well in the current Vanity Fair.  That's a "coup" for you: the only group which is capable of reining in on the anarchic warlords and pirates is overthrown.

Sometimes militaries don't need to carry out a coup to exert their power, as Steven Cook illustrates in his book "Ruling But Not Governing."  In which he shows how the militaries in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey, in ways both overt and subtle, exercise the real power behind the scene.

Coups beget coups.  My diplomatic career began in 1979, in the same month that the Shah of Iran was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution.  His career had begun in a coup, helped to power in 1953 by the CIA.  Some of my diplomatic classmates wound up as hostages in the 1979 US Embassy takeover.

I went off to the "quiet" Caribbean, and just missed witnessing the pro-Cuban coup on the island of Grenada in March 1979.  During my time in the Eastern Caribbean, I dealt with some of the aftermath of Maurice Bishop's coup.  He in turn was killed in a 1983 coup, which precipitated (presaged is another word) Ronald Reagan's "rescue" of the island from the Cuban menace.  Live by coup, die by coup.

This is beginning to resemble something from Forrest Gump, interloping on history.  Sorry.

So I will end with today's "Analysis" from BBC World Service, which you can listen to here.   It's full of examples - like Condoleezza Rice meeting first with Army chief General Kayani during her recent visit, before she even sees the elected civilian leaders - of why in Pakistan, it's still the Army that calls the shots.

Coups: they may be falling out of favor, but their absence is not proof of democracy's rise.  In much of the world, men-with-guns, whether of the respectable kind that have traded their uniforms for business suits, or those who command child soldiers, are still very much with us.

Muslim Eid in Europe Tested by Extremists

The extremists in this case being a particular brand of European racist who uses a peaceful Muslim holy feast to desecrate - again - the tombs of hundreds of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian soldiers at one of France's largest World War I cemeteries last night.  The tombs of Jewish soldiers were also defaced with swastikas.  The photo at left was taken after graffiti was removed from a previous desecration earlier this year.

Today is the feast of Eid al-Adha or Aid al-Kabir, which coincides with the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca.  The world over, Muslim families are gathering for a feast of lamb, and perhaps a visit to a cemetery.  Whoever desecrated the soldiers' graves knew the significance of their act.

The first time we experienced the Eid was in Tunis, in a middle class neighborhood where each back garden was sure to have orange or lemon trees.  In the days leading up to the Eid, the bleating of lambs was added to the occasional barking of dogs or street cats battling it out over garbage left on the sidewalk.

Until the Eid, when the bleating stopped.

All over Europe, authorities have taken steps to accommodate their Muslim citizens' need to slaughter sheep.  Here in Brussels, where at least 17% of the population is Muslim, this has included setting up several additional temporary slaughterhouses.  In some neighborhood schools, principals can expect up to 90% of their pupils to miss class, since the Eid doesn't have the status of a school holiday like certain Christian feast days.

The Economist recently featured an article that chronicles the impact of large Muslim populations in many of Europe's major cities:

In some of these places bad relations between Muslims, non-Muslims and the authorities are creating political opportunities for the far right.  Yet talk of civilisational war in Europe’s cobblestoned streets is out of line in one respect: it understates the ability of democratic politics, especially local politics, to adapt to new social phenomena. For cities to work, compromises have to be struck and coalitions assembled.

Here in Brussels and in other cities with large immigrant populations, first and second generation Muslims have run for and been elected to office.  Even where the local politicians are not Muslim, they are attuned to the needs of their voters.  We should expect this, and take it as a natural part of the process of immigration and assimilation that has always taken place.  I wouldn't object to hearing the occasional call to prayer - it would bring back memories of Alexandria or Algiers.  Or maybe the ecumenical mix of Melilla in northern Morocco, where the Spanish enclave featured muezzins and church bells.

Speaking of church bells reminds me that it's not just the Eid this December 8.  It's also the Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception.   Happy feast day, and Eid mubarak.  And a plague on the house of all extremists who can't live with a little bit of religious diversity in their midst.