“Algeria: A French
Quarrel”
Hitchens’ review of Alistair Horne’s book A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.
This is the same period covered in the great film, The Battle of Algiers. Hitchens seems to like Horne’s exploration
of the Algerian war of independence as marking the “…emergence of militant
pan-Arab nationalism as well as, to some extent, the revival of Islam as a
modern political force.”
He also spends some time digging into the role of the FLN and the Algerian Army’s “pitiless” repression on an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s but falls short of answering the question “How was it that Algeria in the 1990s became the first country to defeat a full-scale jihad and takfir rebellion, which had at one point threatened to overwhelm the entire state and society?”All very topical today in light of the Arab Spring movement across North Africa.
He also spends some time digging into the role of the FLN and the Algerian Army’s “pitiless” repression on an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s but falls short of answering the question “How was it that Algeria in the 1990s became the first country to defeat a full-scale jihad and takfir rebellion, which had at one point threatened to overwhelm the entire state and society?”All very topical today in light of the Arab Spring movement across North Africa.
New Learning: The group leading the revolution, the Algerian
Front de Libération Nationale, emerging
from a forerunner that was founded on the day that Dien Bien Phu fell, and had
in its ranks hardened soldiers who had once fought under French colors in
Indochina. They learned insurgency the hard way in Viet Nam.
DVD cover for the film..The Battle of Algeirs:
New Word: pied-noir = “black foot”, term used to describe
French living in Algeria before its independence.
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