Phillip C. Naylor - France and Algeria. A History of Decolonization and Transformation (20

France
and Algeria
A History of Decolonization
andTransformation
Phillip C. Naylor
Notes to Pages 000–000 | i
France and Algeria
Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
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Florida State University, Tallahassee
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University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
France and Algeria
A History of Decolonization
andTransformation
Phillip C. Naylor
University Press of Florida
Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton
Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers
Copyright 2000 by the Board of Regents of the State of Florida
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To my parents,
Alexander Chiviges
and
Sappho Dereby
Relations between France and Algeria
cannot be so simple or indifferent.
Michel Jobert
Relations between Algeria and France are always important.
When they are bad, they are important. When they are good,
they are also important.
Abdelaziz Bouteflika
Contents
List of Maps and Tables xi
Preface xiii
Abbreviations xvii
Prologue 1
1. French-Algerian Colonial Relations, 1830–1958 5
2. The Political Decolonization of Algeria and
the Evian Accords, 1958–1962 23
3. Independence with Interdependence, 1962–1965 47
4. The Decline and Demise of Privileged Cooperation,
1965–1971 74
5. Turning the Page, 1972–1980 101
6. Redressing the Relationship, 1981–1988 136
7. Algeria’s “Second Revolution” and France, 1988–1992:
From the October Riots to the Fitna 164
8. The Fitna, 1992–1994: From the Annulment
of the Parliamentary Elections to the Air France Hijacking 189
9. The Fitna, 1995–1998: From the Sant’Egidio Agreement 216
10. Mirrors and Mirages, 1958–1998: Reflections, Refractions,
and Representations 252
11. Conclusion 286
Notes 291
Selected Bibliography 389
Index 429
Maps andTables
Maps
Algeria xv
France xix
Tables
3.1 French Aid, 1963–1965 61
3.2 French Trade with Algeria, 1962–1965 62
3.3 Algerian Petroleum and Natural Gas Production, 1962–1965 66
4.1 French Public Aid and Loans to Algeria, 1965–1970 79
4.2 French Trade with Algeria, 1966–1970 81
4.3 French Participation in Algerian Petroleum Production,
1965–1970 91
5.1 Algerian Investment Plans, 1967–1977 102
5.2 French Trade with Algeria, 1971–1975 107
5.3 French Trade with Algeria, 1976–1980 114
6.1 French Trade with Algeria, 1980–1984 145
6.2 French Trade with Algeria, 1985–1988 162
7.1 French Trade with Algeria, 1988–1991 173
8.1 French Trade with Algeria, 1991–1994 199
9.1 French Trade with Algeria, 1995–1997 247
Preface
The relationship between France and Algeria did not end in 1962. Yet it
seemed that way, given the relative lack of scholarly attention devoted to
the relationship’s postcolonial history as compared with the colonial expe-
rience. I felt that there was a need to continue the inquiry, the story. As I
researched the postcolonial relationship, my mentor, David E. Gardinier,
advised that I study it comprehensively. Having already introduced me to
Frantz Fanon’s work when I was a graduate student, Professor Gardinier
insisted that the complexities of the relationship needed a survey in
breadth and depth. This has resulted in a sweeping study ranging from
beur novels to Saharan hydrocarbon condensates. Though the book
should interest a variety of specialized audiences, my chief purpose was to
write a detailed historical narrative. My hope is that it will inspire other
inquiries concerning the postcolonial histories of former metropolitan
powers and their ex-colonies.
I tried to live this history. My research has taken me from the corporate
headquarters of French and Algerian hydrocarbons enterprises to the refu-
gee tents of proud Sahrawis displaced by the war in Western Sahara. I
traveled with Algerian emigrant workers across the Mediterranean and
shared meals with pieds-noirs, harkis, and Polisario cadres. I also dis-
cussed the relationship or conducted formal interviews with a variety of
people. I thank them for their kindness and consideration. They included
Maurice Couve de Murville, Olivier Wormser, Louis Joxe, Bernard Tricot,
Georges Gorse, François Scheer, Jean Basdevant, Marcel Crozatier,
Georges Jasseron, Stéphane Hessel, Vincent Labouret, Michel Schneider-
Manoury, Marcelle Routier, Jean-Pierre Gonon, Nicole Grimaud, Jean
Déjeux, Alain Gillette, Mohamed Sahnoun, Mihoubi el-Mihoub, Abdel-
hak Belghit, Messafeur Abbas, Kamal Nefti, Ali Khamis, Madjid Abdal-
lah, Mohamed Salem Ould Salek, the Bachaga Said, and Ali Boualam. The
Association France-Algérie (Michèle Moreau) provided research facilities
and contacts. The United States embassy in Algiers provided gracious
hospitality under Ambassadors Ulric Haynes Jr. and Michael Newlin and
their respective staffs. I was also very well received by the Algerian United
Nations delegation and the Algerian embassy in Washington, D.C.
Librarians at the following institutions provided invaluable assistance:
in Aix-en-Provence, the Archives d’outre-mer and the Centre de recher-
xiv | Preface
ches et d’études sur les sociétés méditerranéennes; in Paris, the Biblio-
thèque de la Documentation française and the Institut d’études politiques;
in Algiers, the Bibliothèque nationale, the Centre national d’études his-
toriques, and the Université d’Alger; and in the United States, Marquette
University (Dennis Higgins and Rose Trupiano), Northwestern University
(Mette Shayne and Hans Panofsky), Boston University (Gretchen Walsh),
Merrimack College (Sandy Thomas), Harvard University, and the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
I appreciated the collegial and departmental support at Marquette
University and Merrimack College. The book also benefited from my af-
filiations at the African Studies Center at Boston University and the Center
for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Special thanks for the
contributions and encouragement of David E. Gardinier, John P. Entelis,
Robert A. Mortimer, Alf Andrew Heggoy, Lewis Livesay, Yahia Zoubir,
Susan G. Miller, Peter Ford, Edward G. Roddy, David Knepper, Muham-
mad Bakr Alwan, Abd al-Hamid Alwan, Brigitte Coste, Sylvia Pressman,
Paula Dicks, Carl Schwartz, Thomas C. Anderson, Donna Schenstrom,
and Kevin Lacey. Many others provided encouragement and support
over the years. Among them were Jim Jablonowski, John J. Steinberger,
OSA, Dan Schmidt, Pete deRosa, Don Tubman, Ivan Peterlin, Nick Top-
ping, Jerome Hardt, Gary Giesemann, Helen Bistis, Thomas E. Hachey, F.
Paul Prucha, SJ, Robert W. Reichert, Ronald and Olive Johnson, Mike
Gregory, Elsie D. Mack, Moody Prior, Constance Cryer Ecklund, Esther
Masters, and Thelma and Andy Hamilton. Chris Hofgren of the Univer-
sity Press of Florida conscientiously and constantly pursued this manu-
script; I appreciate the particular attention to the manuscript and its pro-
duction by Jacqueline Kinghorn Brown of the University Press of Florida
and by copy editor Ann Marlowe.
My parents instilled a deep interest in travel and scholarship. This book
is dedicated to them. My brother has profoundly influenced the develop-
ment of my historical consciousness and transcultural interests. My family
has been exceptionally understanding and considerate. Thank you all.
A note on transliterations: I used familiar spellings for Arabic persons
and places, for example, the transliterated French Ahmed Tewfiq for
Ahmad Tawfiq. While Ali Ben (Bin) Hajj or Ben Hadj is now common, it
was initially Belhadj in the Arabic and French press and is still often
spelled that way in English publications. Where a standard English form
exists (Algiers, Muslim, the prophet Muhammad), this is used, although
diverse persons may spell their names Mohamed, Mohammed, or M’ham-
Preface | xv
med. I kept Pouvoir in French and fitna in Arabic since these words appear
in popular as well as scholarly print.
During a photographic exploration of Algiers’s labyrinthine Casbah, I
came across a little girl who was playing alone. She saw me, smiled, and
began to dance. To me she symbolized Algeria, and I hope that, twenty
years later, as her country emerges from a violent decade, she dances
again.
Abbreviations
AAN—Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord
AD—Articles et documents (Documentation française)
AFP—Agence France-Presse
AI—Algérie informations (Association France-Algérie)
APS—Algérie Presse Service
AUFS:NAS—American Universities Field Staff: North African Series
BG—Boston Globe
CCCE—Caisse centrale de coopération économique
CNRS—Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique
CR—Country Report (EIU)
CRESM—Centre de recherches et d’études sur les sociétés
méditerranéennes
CSM—Christian Science Monitor
CT—Coopération technique
DA—dinars algériens
EIU—Economist Intelligence Unit
E-M—El-Moudjahid
ENAL—Entreprise nationale du livre
F-A—France-Algérie (Association France-Algérie)
FBIS—Foreign Broadcast Information Services
FF—French francs
FT—Financial Times
LM—Le Monde
LMdipl—Le Monde diplomatique
MEED—Middle East Economic Digest
MEJ—Middle East Journal
MERIP—Middle East Research & Information Project
MMBtu—million British thermal units
MTM—Marchés tropicaux du monde (to 1958), then Marchés
tropicaux et méditerranéens
ND—Notes et études documentaires (Documentation française)
NES—Near East South Asia Series (FBIS)
NYT—New York Times
OECD—Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
PE—Petroleum Economist
xviii | Abbreviations
PEF—Politique étrangère de la France (Documentation française)
PPS—Petroleum Press Service (after 1 January 1974 PE)
PUF—Presses Universitaires de France
QER—Quarterly Economic Report (EIU)
RA—Révolution africaine
RASJEP—Revue algérienne de sciences juridiques, économiques, et
politiques
RASJPES—Revue algérienne de sciences juridiques, politiques,
économiques et sociales (to 1968, then RASJEP)
RDN—Revue de défense nationale
RFEPA—Revue française d’études politiques africaines
SNED—Société nationale d’édition et de diffusion
SONATRACH—Société nationale pour la recherche, la production, la
transport, transformation et la commercialisation des hydrocarbons
TN—Textes et Notes (Documentation française)
WEU—Western Europe Series (FBIS)
WSJ—Wall Street Journal
Preface | xix
xx | Abbreviations
Prologue
On 1 July 1962, Algerians massively voted for independence not “from
France” but “in cooperation with France.” The referendum marked a
reformulation rather than a repudiation of the relationship between the
metropolitan power and the ex-colony.1
Colonialism had ended, but a
French presence persisted and in many ways still predominated. This re-
sulted in a complex, protracted transformation for both countries rather
than a simpler transfer of power and identity.
France’s transformation relied upon its enduring essentialism. With a
glorious history of grandeur (i.e., political, cultural, moral greatness) and
independence, its unique spirit or essence had been expressed for centuries
as a powerful imperial identity, a gratifying atavism. During the late 1950s
and early 1960s, Charles de Gaulle masterly reworked the imperial dis-
course by presenting the ideal of a “renovated” France “wedded to new
realities” operating independently between the monolithic superpowers.
To de Gaulle, the end of empire marked the beginning of a new enterprise
offering opportunities to influence the world again, as only “eternal
France” could, as a great contributor of culture and civilization. He
opened his Memoirs of Hope with this characteristic essentialist observa-
tion: “France has emerged from the depths of the past. She is a living
entity. She responds to the call of the centuries. Yet she remains herself
through time.”2
This “timeless” heroic perception, a powerful idealization
of France as a great and independent power, expedited the transition from
colonialism to “cooperation.” De Gaulle’s essentialist vision, which also
ascribed a strategic importance to postcolonial Algeria, appealed to his
successors in the Elysée Palace.
Algeria’s transformation, on the other hand, projected an existential-
ism. The new nation found itself dislocated by the multiple disorientations
and deprivations caused by 132 years of colonialism compounded by
its War of Independence (1954–62). Though the Front de Libération
Nationale (FLN) succeeded in producing a polity, it had deferred defining
specific economic, social, and cultural programs. Consequently, the FLN’s
primary postcolonial objective was to conceive and construct a state. Ac-
cording to one official publication: “Real independence remains incom-
plete if it does not liberate both the land and the soul of the people. Algeria
recovered by the Algerians does not suffice. The Algerians must re-become
and remain themselves.”3
This constituted existential engagement. The
2 | France and Algeria: A History of Transformation
FLN posited that by freeing Algeria from its perpetuated postcolonial
dependence upon France, it would finally experience an authentic libera-
tion. The Revolution continued to serve as a unifying matrix, and Algerian
governments sustained a revolutionary discourse after independence,
though in practice this meant delicate and pragmatic compromises with
the neocolonial contradictions inherent in French cooperation.
Therefore, in many ways decolonization was not over in 1962. Instead
there was an ongoing transformation of bilateral power, perception, and
identity. The strong French economic and cultural presence in Algeria
necessitated a number of postcolonial decolonizations. To borrow from
David Prochaska’s important work on colonial history, Algeria engaged in
the postcolonial task of “making Algeria Algerian.” Concurrently, France
endeavored to redefine itself as a postimperial power while evoking its
traditional essentialist ideals of independence and occasionally grandeur.
Beginning with the October 1988 riots, the bilateral relationship en-
tered a convulsive period of discontinuity and displacement. In
Foucauldian terms, it represented an epistemic shift where the
relationship’s familiar discourse and practice, even its recurrent psycho-
dramas, dispersed. This was primarily because Algeria’s “second revolu-
tion” discredited the FLN’s legacy and legitimacy. It repudiated the power
apparatus that had dictated the country’s destiny since 1962. The subse-
quent democratization, destabilization, and, after President Chadli
Benjedid’s deposal in January 1992, the fierce fitna, or “trial” of itself as
a nation, collectively confirmed Algeria’s persistent existential predica-
ment: an inability to define and develop a consensual national identity.
France’s ambivalent response to these events indicated that it, too, had
difficulty adapting to and accepting the rapidly changing conditions in
Algeria. French governments on the right and left considered Algeria “the
door to the Third World,” a bilateral means to multilateral ends. The
objective was to establish or perpetuate positive and occasionally privi-
leged relations with Algeria to enhance France’s image among developing
nations and to extend its influence as a great and independent power.
Algeria’s fall from Third World exemplar to embarrassment had profound
ramifications for France: it marked the end of a strategic political equa-
tion. Compounded by post–Cold War geopolitics, France’s self-perceived
importance—long regarded as anachronistic by many critical specialists,
given the country’s real power and influence—now needed reformulation.
Above all, the crisis ushered in a new period that tragically recalled an old
one, the colonial past. As in 1962, France again faced refashioning its
Prologue | 3
essentialist identity as Algeria, once more a profoundly strife-torn country,
pursued its existential project to restore self and state.
This study surveys the multiplicity of histories composing their com-
plex bilateral relationship. It invokes the French essentialist perspective
and the Algerian existentialist praxis not as thematic reductions or total-
izing metahistorical typologies but as active “ordering frameworks,” pro-
viding coherence and intelligibility to a complicated network of political,
economic, social, and cultural relations. The frameworks present disposi-
tions as well as discourses. Historically, they have subjectified and then
often objectified the reception and perception of the other. They have
created or mediated knowledge, power, and identity.4
The frameworks
serve, too, as interpretive grids that help explain how juxtaposed histori-
cal continuities and discontinuities, reconstituted legitimacies, and imag-
ined national identities produced paradoxes such as independence with
dependence and conflict yet cooperation. The French-Algerian relation-
ship, an unparalleled case study in postcolonial history, not only invites a
sweeping yet syncretic historical methodology and inquiry, but insists
upon such an approach.
There have been several specific works concerning the postcolonial re-
lationship.5
Bilateral ideological and economic differences producing a
multitude of political and social contentions and crises are considered by
Inga Brandell in Les Rapports franco-algériens depuis 1962 (1981) and
especially detailed by Salah Mouhoubi in La Politique de coopération
algéro-française (1986). In the brief Algérie:Avec ou sans la France (1973),
Jean Offredo contends that France’s inability to accept Algeria’s indepen-
dence was the primary cause of postcolonial problems. Ahmad Nazali’s
Relations between Algeria and France (in Arabic, 1978) emphasizes the
overriding political nature of the relationship during the immediate
postcolonial period. Nicole Grimaud’s numerous articles and her first
three chapters in La Politique extérieure de l’Algérie (1984) underscore
the fundamental political and psychological nature of this relationship.
Benjamin Stora in La Gangrène et l’oubli (1992) examines the War of
Independence’s influence upon the national memories of both countries
and has inspired a variety of similar works.6
Given its intricacies and inti-
macies, the study of French-Algerian relations demands pluralist ap-
proaches that take into account cultural representations alongside mate-
rial realities, qualitative and quantitative analyses, epistemological as well
as economic explanations, and, of course, both contesting and collaborat-
ing voices. For example, statistics and novels complement each other to
4 | France and Algeria: A History of Transformation
disclose the dilemmas confronted by the Algerian immigrant community
in France. The strategic value of hydrocarbons equates with independence
and identity as well as with viscosity and volume.
This book begins by briefly examining the colonial period leading to
decolonization and the Evian Accords, which formalized an unavoidably
incomplete transfer of power. The subsequent ...