Arabs (69 page)

 

Soon after, Pfimlin’s government fell, and the hero of the French resistance in World War II, General Charles de Gaulle, was returned to power by public acclaim in June 1958. Within three months, de Gaulle submitted a new constitution to plebiscite and in September 1958 launched the Fifth Republic.

One of de Gaulle’s first acts was to fly to Algeria to face the rebellious settler community. In a famous speech delivered in Algiers, de Gaulle calmed the restive army and settlers by promising that Algeria would remain French. “I have understood you!” de Gaulle reassured the rapturous crowds. He put forward an ambitious reform platform to develop Algeria and integrate its Arab citizens into the commonwealth of France through industrial development, land distribution, and the creation of 400,000 new jobs.

De Gaulle’s proposals were clearly intended to reassure the army and settlers in Algeria and bring an end to General Salan’s Committee of Public Safety. However, his comments demonstrated how little he understood the nationalist movement behind the FLN’s war. Reflecting on de Gaulle’s pronouncements, Mouloud Feraoun wrote bitterly: “Algerian nationalism? It doesn’t exist. Integration? You’ve got it.” It was as though de Gaulle were going back to the idea of assimilation as first set out in the Blum-Violette proposals of 1930. Assimilation might have held some appeal even as late as 1945. By 1958 it was an irrelevance. To Feraoun, it was as if de Gaulle were saying: “You are French, old man. Nothing else. Don’t give us any more headaches.”

In the face of stubborn FLN resistance, de Gaulle was forced to come to terms with Algerian demands for total independence. In spite of his early promises, de Gaulle reversed his position and began to prepare his countrymen for Algeria’s secession from France. In September 1959 he spoke for the first time of Algerian self-determination, provoking a round of violent demonstrations by settlers in Algeria in January 1960. De Gaulle persisted and in June 1960 convened the first direct negotiations with the provisional government of the Algerian Republic in Evian.

Hard-liners in the settler movement and their allies in the army began to see de Gaulle as a traitor. They formed terrorist organizations, like the Front of French Algeria and the notorious Secret Armed Organization, better known by its French acronym, the OAS, and actively plotted de Gaulle’s assassination. The OAS also unleashed
a violent terror campaign within Algeria that inflicted random violence on Arab civilians.

The Evian negotiations, combined with the breakdown in public security, provoked a political crisis among the settlers and military in Algeria. In January 1961 the French government held a referendum on self-determination in Algeria, which carried with a resounding 75 percent vote in favor. In April 1961 the Foreign Legion parachute regiment in Algiers mutinied in protest against the French government’s moves to concede Algerian independence. However, the mutiny did not gain wider support among the French military, which remained faithful to de Gaulle, and the coup leaders were forced to surrender after only four days.

As the settlers’ position in Algeria grew more tenuous in 1961 and early 1962, the OAS stepped up its terrorist violence inside Algeria. “Now it seems that the OAS doesn’t warn anyone,” Mouloud Feraoun noted in one of his last journal entries, in February 1962. “They murder in cars, on motorcycle, with grenades, with machine-gun fire, with knives. They attack cashiers in banks, post offices, companies . . . with the complicity of some and the cowardice of all.”
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Feraoun’s brave voice of reason was silenced by OAS guns on March 15, just three days before the signing of the Evian Accords.

While violence continued to rage in Algeria, the FLN and de Gaulle’s government made steady progress in their negotiations in Evian. On March 18, 1962, the two sides signed the Evian Accords, conferring full independence on Algeria. The terms of the accords were put to public vote in a plebiscite held in Algeria on July 1. Algerians voted in near unanimity for independence (the vote was 5.9 million in favor, 16,000 opposed). On July 3, de Gaulle proclaimed the independence of Algeria. Celebrations in Algiers were delayed for two days to coincide with the anniversary of the French occupation of the city on July 5, 1830. After 132 years, the Algerians had finally driven the French from their lands.

Ongoing terror and an uncertain future drove the French community from Algeria in massive waves—300,000 left in the month of June 1962 alone. Many settler families had lived for generations in North Africa. By the end of the year, only some 30,000 European settlers remained in Algeria.

But most destructive was the bitter fighting that swiftly broke out between the internal and external leadership of the National Liberation Front in a desperate bid to seize power in the country they had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to win. For the battle-weary Algerian people it was too much. The women of Algiers took to the streets to protest the fighting between their own freedom fighters, chanting “Seven years, enough is enough!”

It was not until Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne secured Algiers in September 1962 that the fighting came to an end. Ben Bella took his place at the
head of government; a year later, after the ratification of the constitution in September 1963, he was elected president. Three years later, Boumedienne displaced him in a bloodless coup, reflecting the continued factionalism within the FLN leadership.

For many, independence proved a hollow victory—particularly for Algerian women. After their courage and sacrifice, they were appalled to hear FLN leader Mohamed Khider insist that women should “return to their couscous.” Baya Hocine, one of the veterans of the Battle of Algiers who suffered torture and years in prison, reflected on the mixed emotions that came with independence:

Algeria had achieved independence—but at a high price. Its population had suffered death and dislocation on a scale unprecedented in Arab history. Its economy was shattered by war and willful destruction by the departing settlers. Its political leadership was divided by factionalism. And its society was divided by the different expectations of what roles men and women should play in the building of independent Algeria. Yet Algeria quickly set about forming a government and took its place among the progressive Arab states as a republic born of revolutionary struggle against imperialism.

 

With the success of the Algerian revolution, Nasser had a new ally in his battle against Arab “reaction.” Egypt, still known as the United Arab Republic after the Syrian secession, had set its sites on wholescale reform of the Arab world as the prelude to achieving Arab unity. Revolutionary Algeria, with its emphasis on anti-imperialism, Arab identity politics, and socialist reform, was a natural partner. Nasser’s new state party, the Arab Socialist Union, drafted a joint communiqué with the FLN in June 1964 to assert their unity of purpose to promote Arab socialism.
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Nasser took some credit for having supported the Algerian revolution from inception to independence. He was moving away from an earlier role as standard bearer of Arab nationalism and now sought to present himself as the champion of progressive
revolutionary values. Carried away by his rhetoric, Nasser found himself providing unquestioning support to Arab revolutionary movements wherever they occurred. When a group of officers toppled the monarchy in Yemen, Nasser gave immediate support—in his own words: “We had to back the Yemeni revolution, even without knowing who was behind it.”
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Y emen, long autonomous within the Ottoman Empire, had secured its independence as a kingdom in 1918. The first ruler of independent Yemen was the Imam Yahya (1869–1948), who as head of the Zaydi sect, a small Shiite community found only in Yemen, provided both religious and political leadership to his country. In the 1920s and 1930s,Yahya extended his rule by dint of conquest over tribal lands across the territory of northern Yemen, much of it inhabited by Sunni Muslims.

Throughout his reign, Yahya faced pressures from Saudi Arabia to the north, which seized ’Asir and Najran from what Yahya considered “historic Yemen,” and from the British in the south, who had held the port city of Aden and its hinterlands as a colony since the 1830s. Nevertheless, Yahya’s ongoing military conquests gave the illusion of unity to a society deeply divided along regional, tribal, and sectarian lines. Under his rule, Yemen had very little exchange with the outside world, remaining focused on pursuing policies that preserved the country’s isolation.

Yemen’s isolation came to an end with Imam Yahya’s rule. Yahya was assassinated by a tribal shaykh in 1948 and was succeeded by his son, the Imam Ahmad (r. 1948–1962). Ahmad had a reputation for ruthlessness that was reinforced when he ascended to power and had his rivals imprisoned and executed. He departed from Yahya’s xenophobia and established diplomatic relations with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in his search for development assistance and military aid.

Yet Ahmad was not secure on his throne. An attempted coup in 1955 made him increasingly suspicious of domestic rivals and threats from abroad—particularly Nasser and his relentless calls for overturning “feudal” regimes. The Egypt-based Voice of the Arabs reached as far as Yemen, carrying its electrifying message of Arab Nationalism and anti-imperialism.
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In Yemen as elsewhere in the Arab world, Nasser’s direct radio appeal to the people placed Imam Ahmad under pressure and was a source of tension between Yemen and Egypt.

Yet Nasser was not consistently hostile to the Yemenis. In 1956 Yemen, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia concluded an anti-British pact in Jiddah, and in 1958 Imam Ahmad gave his full support to the union of Egypt and Syria, joining a federation scheme with the UAR known as the United Arab States. However, Ahmad opposed
Nasser’s vision of Arab socialism, with its state-led economy and nationalization of private companies, which he condemned in verse as “taking property by forbidden means” that was “a crime against Islamic law.”
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Coming right after Syria’s secession from the UAR in 1961, Ahmad’s lecture on Islamic law infuriated Nasser. Egypt severed ties to Yemen, and the Voice of the Arabs stepped up its rhetoric, putting pressure on the Yemenis to topple their “reactionary” monarchy.

The opportunity arose the following year. Imam Ahmad died in his sleep in September 1962, putting the kingdom in the hands of his son and successor Imam Badr. One week later, Badr was overthrown in an officer’s coup, and the Yemen Arab Republic was declared.

Supporters of the Yemeni royal family challenged the coup, with support from the neighboring Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Egypt threw its full weight behind the new republic and its military rulers as part of what Nasser saw as the larger battle between progressives and reactionaries in the Arab world.

The Yemeni revolution quickly devolved into a civil war within Yemen itself, and an inter-Arab war between the Egyptians and the Saudis, between the “progressive” republican order and the “conservative” monarchies in a battle for the future of the Arab world. There were no Egyptian interests at stake, only a confusion between rhetoric and
realpolitik
. This was Nasser’s first war of choice, and it proved to be his Viet Nam.

Egyptian troops began to flood into Yemen after the September 1962 coup. Over the next three years the total deployment swelled from 30,000 at the end of 1963 to a peak of 70,000 in 1965—nearly half the Egyptian army.

From the start, the war in Yemen was unwinnable. The Egyptians faced tribal guerrillas fighting on their own terrain, and more than 10,000 soldiers and officers were killed over the course of five years of war. High casualties and few successes took their toll on troop morale, as the Egyptians failed to advance their lines much beyond the capital city, Sanaa. Whereas the Saudis bankrolled the royalists, and the British gave them covert assistance, the Egyptians had no surplus wealth to underwrite the huge expense of a foreign war. Yet such practical concerns had no impact on Nasser, who was blinded by his mission to promote revolutionary reform in the Arab world. “Withdrawal is impossible,” Nasser told his commander in Yemen. “It would mean the disintegration of the revolution in Yemen.”
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