Re: The fall from grace will be a hard one. To leave is not just to throw away the years or decades invested in building houses, businesses, farms and communities and to search, perhaps fruitlessly, for new jobs. It is to return to an Israel that has grown alien: to being, as Mr Aran puts it, “rank-and-file citizens in a stinking political and civic reality”.
The Algerian prequel:
The Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) was a period of guerrilla strikes, maquis fighting, terrorism against civilians on both sides, and riots between the French army and colonists in Algeria and the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) and other pro-independence Algerians. Although the French government of the time considered all Algerian violence, including violence against the French military, to be crimes or terrorism, some French people, such as former anti-Nazi guerrilla and lawyer Jacques Verges[*] have compared French resistance to Nazi German occupation to Algerian resistance to French occupation.
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The Evian Accords
The "generals' putsch" marked the turning point in the official attitude toward the Algerian war. De Gaulle was now prepared to abandon the colons, the group that no previous French government could have written off. The army had been discredited by the putsch and kept a low profile politically throughout the rest of France's involvement with Algeria. Talks with the FLN reopened at Evian in May 1961; after several false starts, the French government decreed that a ceasefire would take effect on March 19, 1962. In their final form, the Evian Accords allowed the colons equal legal protection with Algerians over a three year period. These rights included respect for property, participation in public affairs, and a full range of civil and cultural rights. At the end of that period, however, Europeans would be obliged to become Algerian citizens or be classified as aliens with the attendant loss of rights. The French electorate approved the Evian Accords by an overwhelming 91 percent vote in a referendum held in June 1962.
During the three months between the cease-fire and the French referendum on Algeria, the OAS [Organisation Armée Secrète **] unleashed a new terrorist campaign. The OAS sought to provoke a major breach in the ceasefire by the FLN but the terrorism now was aimed also against the French army and police enforcing the accords as well as against Muslims. It was the most wanton carnage that Algeria had witnessed in eight years of savage warfare. OAS operatives set off an average of 120 bombs per day in March, with targets including hospitals and schools. Ultimately, the terrorism failed in its objectives, and the OAS and the FLN concluded a truce on June 17, 1962. In the same month, more than 350,000 colons left Algeria. Within a year, 1.4 million refugees, including almost the entire Jewish community and some pro-French Muslims, had joined the exodus to France. Fewer than 30,000 Europeans chose to remain.
On July 1, 1962, some 6 million of a total Algerian electorate of 6.5 million cast their ballots in the referendum on independence. The vote was nearly unanimous. De Gaulle pronounced Algeria an independent country on July 3. The Provisional Executive, however, proclaimed July 5, the 132nd anniversary of the French entry into Algeria, as the day of national independence.
The pieds-noirs' and harkis' exodus
Pieds-noirs (including Jews) and harkis accounted for 13% of the total population of Algeria in 1962. For the sake of clarity, each group's exodus is described separately here, although their fate shared many common elements.
Pieds-noirs
Pied-noir (literally "black foot") is a term used to describe the European-descended population that had been in Algeria for generations; it is sometimes used to include the Jewish population as well, which likewise emigrated after 1962. The Europeans had arrived as colonists from all over the Mediterranean (particularly France, Spain, and Malta), starting in 1830. The Jews had arrived in several waves, some coming in Roman times while most had arrived as refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and had largely embraced French citizenship and identity after the décret Crémieux in 1871. In 1959, the pieds-noirs numbered 1,025,000 (85% of European descent, and 15% of Jewish descent), and accounted for 10.4% of the total population of Algeria. In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 of these Europeans and Jews left the country, the first prior to the referendum, in the most massive relocation of population to Europe since the Second World War. A motto among the European and Jewish community was "Suitcase or coffin" ("La valise ou le cercueil").
The French government had not planned that such a massive number would leave, at the most it estimated that maybe 200,000 or 300,000 may chose to go to metropolitan France temporarily. Consequently, nothing was planned for their return, and many had to sleep in streets or abandoned farms on their arrival in metropolitan France. Some departing pieds-noirs destroyed their possessions before departure, in a sign of [rage and] despair, but the vast majority of their goods and houses were left intact and abandoned. Scenes of thousands of panicked people camping for weeks on the docks of Algerian harbors waiting for a space on a boat to France were common from April to August 1962. For most, departure was meant to be without an idea of return, and despair was general at leaving the land where they were born. About 100,000 pieds-noirs chose to remain, but most of those gradually left over the 1960s and 1970s.
Harkis
The so-called harkis, from the Arabic word haraka (movement), were the Muslim Algerians (as opposed to Europeans or Jews) who fought on the side of the French army. The term also came to include non-fighting Muslim Algerians who supported a French Algeria. According to France, in 1962 there were 236,000 Algerian Muslims fighting for the French army; some estimates suggest that, with their families, they may have numbered at much as 1 million, but 400,000 is more commonly cited.
In 1962, around 91,000 harkis fled to France, despite French policy against this. The harkis were seen as traitors by many Algerians, and many of those who stayed behind suffered severe reprisals after independence. French historians estimate that somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 harkis were killed by the FLN or by lynch mobs in Algeria, sometimes after torture.
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encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com
[*] smh.com.au
[**] ldh-toulon.net |
