8. The Legacy of Violence: Reflections on the Revolution in Two Nations

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The fundamentalists invoke Islam to justify a priority and legitimize all their words and deeds. But I don’t think any religious text, whatever it may be, contains within itself any orders about how it should be interpreted. It is what men make of it, depending on their political or social ambitions, and on their psychological makeup.

KHALIDA TOUMI, 1995

How to withstand mourning for our friends, our colleagues, without first having sought to understand the why of yesterday’s funerals, those of the Algerian utopia? The white of a sullied dawn.

ASSIA DJEBAR, 1995

Today, the long-term impact of the identity politics that surfaced through-out the French-Algerian War cannot be ignored. This is especially true in the postcolonial and post–September 11 world. When I published the first edition of Uncivil War in the summer of 2001, I already believed (and still do) that the war had fundamentally transformed how the French and Algerians would think of national identity, their relationship to a joined colonial past, to Islam, and finally to each other.

As a historian who spent much of his adult life in France, I had, to be sure, the benefit of a historian’s sixth sense. During the 1980s and the 1990s, when I continued to live on and off in Paris over the course of several years, I could see firsthand the French struggling to come to terms with the memory of the Algerian conflict. The past several years have shown that France is no nearer to turning the page on the Algerian question than it was in 1962. In fact more controversial information about the use of torture by France has continued to emerge since Uncivil War first went to press, and these revelations have prompted me to add this new chapter. I offer this as a set of reflections on recent history in which I attempt to sketch out some ways the war has continued to haunt French considerations of national identity.

The reality of colonial violence has no doubt remained a grave problem in France because it has simply taken the French state far too long to acknowledge its actions during the war. This delay has, as William Cohen demonstrated, allowed for a very striking separation of the French public from the French state vis-à-vis the war, with French intellectuals and the public engaging in wide-ranging debates on the war and the French state remaining obstinately reticent. This separation remains all the more clear because French intellectuals had been vocal in their denunciations of torture since the mid-1950s and continue to press the state today for answers. The state, however, has been at pains to keep the past buried and even irretrievable.

I believe it is equally important in this new edition of Uncivil War to outline briefly some of the ways that Algeria attempted to assume a new postcolonial identity. On this question, I have the benefit of a historical record showing how the notion of “authenticity,” as announced by anticolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon during the revolution, could be recast as a major cultural issue by Algerian politicians after independence, including Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi (the first minister of education and the man who once criticized Albert Camus in an open letter written from prison). This historical record also shows how the question of authenticity would resurface with the Islamist movement in the 1980s and 1990s. This is to say that authenticity has, in debates over language, democracy, Islam, and ethnicity, remained the basis for much of Algeria’s postcolonial cultural contests and political strife. Yet it is important to keep in mind, as I argued earlier in this book and elsewhere, that the seeds of Algeria’s future internal conflicts were clearly sown in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it became clear to many observers that Algeria was well on its way to political and social upheaval.¹ Even before the Evian Accords were signed in mid-March 1962 and Algeria’s independence from France was formalized on July 3, Algeria had begun to move in the direction of a militaristic, authoritarian, one-party, socialist state that, in the words of Hugh Roberts, acted primarily as a “façade party” until it had finally outlived its usefulness.²

That France and Algeria would continue to wrestle with the legacy of the French-Algerian War should hardly come as a surprise. After all, among the many wars of national liberation during the era of decolonization, Algeria’s was by far one of the most brutal and celebrated. As in many other colonial conflicts throughout the Third World (to use the term crafted at Bandung in 1955 by the agents of decolonization themselves), the identity politics that came along with decolonization in metropolitan France and Algeria have remained central to postcolonial debates about the nation and nationalist politics in both countries. And these debates have taken on added meaning in recent years.

To understand the importance of the shadow cast by colonial violence, I return first to 1962 and to the French writer Jacques Julliard’s discussion of how the torture of Algerians would haunt French society. Indeed it can be said that Julliard’s essay “La morale en question”—along with Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s Torture: Cancer of Democracy, France, and Algeria, 1954–1962 (1963)— best anticipated the aftereffect of the war on France. Penned for Esprit in October 1962—just months after Algerian independence—Julliard’s essay (which bears an uncanny resemblance and some important connections to the recent debates about America’s use of torture in Iraq) states that while France had begun to forget the “phantoms” of the Algerian conflict, such phantoms “would never disappear.”³ “Today,” he noted, “no one discusses seriously the reality of the facts that were furiously contested just a few months ago. No judge protests, even for show, when an officer affirms that he and his colleagues have received the order to torture. The sound is that of realism: all of that is past—and over with.” The problem with this attitude was, as Julliard stated, that between four and five million French soldiers served in this conflict, and therefore the problem of a fundamental lack of moral accountability by the French will haunt the nation.

The past could be buried, but the results could not. The soldier who learned how to fight with any means at his disposal, even means that debase himself and the nation, would be conditioned by a “contagious climate and rendered crazy by violence” (361). In the future, Julliard wondered, how could the French (or the modern military) discriminate between Nazi-like actions and actions in the interest of the state? Where would the lines be drawn? Ultimately this ethical confusion would mean that society as a whole would have “assisted with the bankruptcy of a system of moral education.” The Algerian conflict, he continued, was a total moral defeat for the French nation, not because Algeria achieved independence but because France had forfeited its morals in the process of defending French North Africa: “The Algerian war revealed us to ourselves: in place of the traditional (and conventional image) of revolutionary France, the country of the rights of man and universal brotherhood, another image has been substituted: that of a petty France, haunted by the spirit of possession and a little too stingy with its means” (362).

In a much more thorough fashion, Vidal-Naquet asked similar questions about how torture had transformed France. As he stated in the opening sentence of Torture: “Can a great nation, liberal by tradition, allow its institutions, its army, and its system of justice to degenerate over the span of a few years as a result of the use of torture, and by its concealment and deception of such a vital issue call the whole Western concept of human dignity and the rights of the individual into question?”⁴ The answer was simply yes. France had not only degenerated but had allowed its sacred institutions and political structures to be hijacked by the same political necessity that led nations into totalitarianism. This was because the Algerian revolution was an internal problem, and thus France’s “machinery of the State” and the “full forces of the nation” could be mobilized. “The willingness to use any means, even torture, was bound to lead to a totalitarian system” (27). The police and the entire administrative apparatus became enmeshed in the application and hiding of torture. Even worse, knowing full well that amnesty would render self-interrogation impossible, the state used amnesty to render the truth unreachable. Hence, by putting an “end to any possible proceedings against the torturers, ‘amnesty’ set the seal on the hypocritical attitude which the State had always adopted toward this vital problem. It legitimized, a posteriori, actions that the State had neither been able nor willing to stop. The State has, so to speak, decreed an ‘amnesty for itself ’ ” (161–62). This would mean, quite clearly, that the only answer to this deliberately created “legal” problem now was “political.” And the only honorable political solution was to brand those who had used torture with “some sort of ‘national ignominy’ ” (164).

In addition to the moral quagmire created for France by torture and the state’s decision to cover itself with amnesty, the French military (along with the FLN’s brutal methods) shared part of the blame for Algeria’s premature unraveling because of the sheer terror that military and paramilitary forces brought to bear on the country. After all, once it became clear that the French state was going to negotiate with the FLN, the OAS—as the most organized and violent of the French paramilitary forces—terrorized the civilian populations in Algeria and France in the final years of the war with great effect. As true believers, OAS thugs and killers pursued a private crusade against an independent Algeria and, after the loss of Algeria, against the “treasonous” Gaullist “dictatorship” that had sold out the French colons there.⁵ The OAS’s war against the French state was taken to extreme measures, including failed attempts to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, as well as other notables including André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre. Before the OAS’s schizophrenic rampage was over, it had murdered countless innocent Algerian civilians and set the stage for a profound threat of right-wing violence that lasted in France until 1968.

As I have written elsewhere, this threat of right-wing, if not neofascist, violence only ended in 1968, when the leadership of the reconstituted Conseil National de la Résistance (cnr)—the political wing of the OAS—along with the other imprisoned or fugitive leaders of the OAS, were granted amnesty by de Gaulle. Suddenly and without warning, the three remaining at-large leaders of the CNR—Jacques Soustelle, George Bidault, and Paul Gardy (only Antoine Argoud had been caught, tried, and imprisoned in France)— returned from exile and were allowed to enter France with impunity.

The French state began to forget about the war in very peculiar ways, but now, despite the state’s efforts to suppress the truth about torture and colonial crimes, the reality of what happened in Algeria is gradually seeping into the public historical record with a vengeance. One very powerful illustration of how this historical record continues to elude the French state’s control is Death Squadrons: The French School (2003), a French documentary film directed by Marie-Monique Robin. As this documentary shows in great detail, members of the OAS and other members of France’s elite torturers (especially General Paul Aussaresses, whom we will turn to shortly) became special consultants in the exportation of systematic torture around the world—including to the military juntas in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil as well as to the American military at Fort Bragg in 1961, which was eager to learn the techniques of “interrogation” from the French as it geared up for the impending war in Vietnam.⁶

Perhaps because of the fact that some French officers were already engaged in the business of franchising international torture before the French-Algerian War was even over, it seems fair to say that forgetting (or writing out of the official memory) the numerous crimes committed in Algeria became easier for the French state than forgetting the French crimes of the Vichy era. However, a greater reason is that de Gaulle had decided to grant amnesty to renegade politicians, to known OAS murderers and to military personnel—including those men who had organized failed putsches. Hence de Gaulle’s shocking final amnesty decision in 1968—when he lifted the arrest warrants for his own would-be assassins and mutineers—reveals a disturbing pattern of avoidance within the French state. For example, in the spring of 1962, de Gaulle decreed several amnesties for French soldiers and police involved in the war and for the Algerian combatants. As William Cohen has written, amnesty—decided on by de Gaulle for reasons of political exigency—fostered amnesia (by absolving or negating acts) and did little to bring closure to the war. In fact, it was not until 1999 that the French state began to acknowledge that what had happened in Algeria was indeed a real war.⁷ Yet as the exiled Algerian historian Mohammed Harbi has said in a recent interview, from his residence in Paris: “They’ve admitted it was a war but wait! That was because the veterans of Algeria demanded a statue honoring French combatants! It had nothing to do with Algerians” (309).

The cultural, political, and national anxiety about the war has added greatly to the French postcolonial malaise, especially with regard to its North African immigrants.⁸ Furthermore, the brutality of the French methods of suppressing the revolution and the deliberate disregard of those crimes (through amnesty) continue to prompt contemporary public discussion in France and abroad. And since the issue of the French military’s use of torture has permeated recent debates in France about the effect of decolonization, it is not surprising that General Jacques Massu (commander of the French Tenth Division of Paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers) has often been at the center of these scandals.

In 1962 the publication of Yacef Saadi’s memoirs, Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger, ignited more controversy. Saadi, the leader of the FLN in Algiers during the so-called Battle of Algiers in 1957, and the man who would appear as himself in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic and recently rereleased film The Battle of Algiers (1966), accused the military of torture and attacked the French for pursuing a brutal, inhumane war against the nationalists. Not wanting to be outdone by this Algerian account, General Massu eventually published his response, La Vraie Bataille d’Alger (1971). As a defense of the French campaign, Massu’s reply to Saadi (and the FLN) came very close to being a public justification for the use of torture by the French military during the war, and General Massu made no effort to disguise the fact that the French used torture during the “interrogation” process to get the job done. The job was simply to prevent the terrorists from killing innocent civilians. Furthermore, as Massu phrased it, the “extreme savagery” of the Algerians far outweighed the violence that the French used to get information out of would-be thugs and killers.⁹ Massu’s book, although penned as a reply to an Algerian FLN leader, provoked several responses, including one from France written by Jules Roy. In his book, J’Accuse le général Massu (1972), Roy indicted Massu (again invoking the Dreyfusard’s battle cry, “J’accuse,” that became the anticolonial mantra during the Algerian conflict) of dishonoring the French nation and military by allowing for the systemization of torture within the French military arsenal. As Roy stated:

Do you know why I accuse you?

Because the name of Massu has become synonymous with abomination; because one can now confuse the hatred of Massu with hatred of the [French] military. Because when we now try to encourage our youth to serve in the army, they hesitate to run the risk of obeying; because, due to your actions, the scent of our army in the minds of our youth and our intelligentsia is reduced to execration. (90).

Although Massu periodically reappeared in the national media, by far the biggest public storm he caused occurred near the end of his life. As before, his public pronouncements were tied to an Algerian’s statements about the conduct of the French military. The most recent controversy involving Massu started in 2000, when Louisette Ighilahriz, an FLN combatant during the war, gave an interview in Le Monde on June 20 in which she accused Massu and another retired French general, Marcel-Maurice Bigeard, of having presided over her torture sessions (which included rape and beatings and which went on for months).¹⁰ However, she also praised the young medical doctor who helped save her life and asked for help in finding him in order to thank him. In reply to Ighilahriz’s accusations, General Massu gave an interview in Le Monde on June 22, 2000, in which he finally complied with Jules Roy’s three-decades-old request by expressing his regret for sanctioning the use of torture. As General Massu put it in Le Monde: “No, torture was not indispensable in time of war; we could have done without it. When I think of Algeria, it makes me sad, because that is all part of a certain ambiance. We should have done things differently.” Without further hesitation, Le Monde continued, the general expressed his “regrets.” At the same time, the debate continued to widen in France when other senior French officers broke their silence to either defend or deny the use of torture. On June 22, 2000, General Bigeard even went so far as to denounce Ighilahriz’s accusations in her interview with Florence Beauge as “a stream of lies.”¹¹

Veteran intellectuals from the era of the French-Algerian War again entered the public debate on October 31, 2000. Sickened by the hypocrisy of the recent pronouncements of the French commanders, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Henri Alleg, and Germaine Tillion among others, referred to as “the Twelve,” organized a petition known as “L’Appel des douze” that was published in L’Humanité. The signatories called on French President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to denounce retroactively the use of torture during the French-Algerian War. The document, entitled “L’appel à la condamnation de la torture durant la guerre d’Algérie,” was signed by Henri Alleg, Josette Audin (the wife of Maurice Audin, who was disappeared by the French in 1957), Simone de Bollardière (the widow of General Jacques Paris de Bollardière, who opposed torture during the war and consequently spent ten months under house arrest for his public opposition to the French military’s actions), Nicole Dreyfus (a lawyer), Noël Favrelière, Gisèle Halimi (the lawyer for Djamila Boupacha), Alban Liechti (a draft dodger from the war), Madeleine Rebérioux, Laurent Schwartz, Germaine Tillion, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. The petition stated that the two peoples on both sides of the Mediterranean would remain “haunted by the horror that marked the Algerian war as long as the truth has not been said or recognized.”¹² The Twelve asked for five things: (1) the urgent condemnation of torture, (2) that the truth about the facts be established, (3) the setting aside of a special day for teaching about colonialism in schools, (4) to seek reconciliation between the French and the Algerians, and (5) that a delegation representing the Twelve be met by the president and prime minister. Their request fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, General Bigeard, who had been named by Ighilahriz as an overseer of the torture process in her interview in Le Monde, went even further a few months later by penning a longer reply to her in the form of his J’ai mal à la France (2001), in which he again categorically denied overseeing her torture. While Ighilahriz hoped for some sort of historical closure to old wounds, General Bigeard’s words recalled the anger of the war and the military’s sense of betrayal. Written nearly forty years after the war as a defense of his actions, General Bigeard’s claims in J’ai mal à la France sound stale and unseasoned by time: “From the moment that the FLN started its action in 1954, France only had two choices: to fight to the death, or to leave Algeria.”¹³ But were these really the only choices that the military had?

For Bigeard there had been no question which path the military should pursue, and thus the military was charged, in the face of heinous acts of violence against European settlers, with the protection of the civilian population (as his fictional manifestation in the film The Battle of Algiers, Colonel Mathieu, poignantly described it). Moreover, Bigeard continued, the military was charged with police duties during the Battle of Algiers, and during that time, his men never “harassed or inflicted unnecessary violence” (134). Bigeard did admit, however, that the circumstance of having to stop a potential terrorist immediately forced the military to resort to unpleasant “interrogation techniques,” including electric shock (181). But he stopped far short of admitting to torture, noting instead that, “[t]hanks to these methods, we were able to check the FLN, despite the fact that its members called us torturers. That’s false! The torturers, those were the ones who massacred unarmed civilians with the blind bombs. We didn’t like this ‘job’ at all” (182).

Not surprisingly, but shocking nonetheless, Bigeard recycled some of the very same photographs that first appeared in the Green Book in 1957 under the direction of Robert Lacoste’s government in Algeria (covered in detail in chapter 6). Hence, over three decades later, the controversial images of corpses were used again to justify, without remorse, the brutality of the French military; and, in so doing, the Algerian nationalists’ humanity was again demonized for the next generation of Frenchmen by the worn-out labels of Muslim fanatics and FLN terrorists. A defiant Bigeard simultaneously reshuffled the photos of mutilated bodies and decried the loss of French patriotism with the age-old refrain that the glories of the France of his youth were being robbed by treasonous bleeding-heart, nonviolent liberalism.

His reply was countered by Louisette Ighilahriz herself in her own book, L’Algérienne (2001), in which she described her torture as overseen by Bigeard and Massu but carried out by another man named Graziani. However, rather than merely laying blame on the French, Ighilahriz’s stated intention was to help both nations, Algeria and France, come to terms with the past. As she phrased it:

With this book, which follows my testimony [from Le Monde], I hope that the truth will break. I hope that the French know that in Algeria, between 1954 and 1962, it was never a question of an operation to “maintain order,” nor was it one of “pacification.” I write it to recall that there was an atrocious war in Algeria, and that it was not easy for us to achieve independence. Our liberty was acquired at a price of over a million deaths, unknown sacrifices, and a terrible effort of psychological demolition of a people [entreprise de démolition psychologique de la personne humaine]. I say this without hate.

Because the young generations don’t know. The grand majority follow [se fie] the official history, now filtrated and disinfected. Now, one cannot elude these tragic years, continue to lie by omission about the subject…. Memory is heavy to carry. Atheists or believers, it pierces both, I hope that we never again hear of mental and physical torture.¹⁴

A few months after Ighilahriz’s story first broke in the summer of 2000 in Le Monde, and certainly fully aware that because of the several amnesty deals struck at the end of the Algerian conflict he would be protected from prosecution for torturing, murdering, and “disappearing” Algerians during the war, General Paul Aussaresses brazenly admitted to sanctioning torture during the war and refused to apologize for it. No doubt angry with Massu for expressing his belated regret for ordering torture and the denials of others, Aussaresses decided to make his own public declarations on November 23, 2000, in Le Monde.¹⁵ Expressing no contrition whatsoever, he proudly admitted to overseeing torture sessions as well as summary executions of many Algerians. His confessions unleashed a torrent of public debate. As if spurred on by the public’s outcries against him, Aussaresses decided to go into more detail about his military views and misdeeds.

General Aussaresses thus joined in the publishing fray with his sensational, best-selling, tell-all memoir, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955–1957. Ausseresses’s book finally shattered existing illusions about the war and the role of the French state in torture. But far from apologizing, he stated that torture was nothing to be ashamed of. According to him, torture was necessary, systematic, and condoned by the French metropolitan political authorities all the way to the top. Everyone, or nearly everyone, in the political, judicial, and military establishments knew the facts about the systemization of torture—however much they pretended otherwise throughout the war and afterward.

There are many shocking details about the banalization of torture and cruelty in Aussaresses’s account, but a few incidents stand out. For example, Aussaresses described how he arrested and murdered Larbi Ben M’Hidi, the FLN’s so-called mastermind of the Battle of Algiers: “We grabbed Ben M’Hidi and hanged him by the neck to make it look like suicide. Once I was sure he was dead, I immediately had him taken down and brought the body to the hospital. I immediately phone Massu. ‘General, Ben M’Hidi has just committed suicide. His body is at the hospital. I will bring you my report tomorrow.’ Massu grunted and hung up the phone. He knew full well that my report had been ready since early afternoon” (140).

Aussaresses also recounted how he ordered the execution of the Algerian lawyer Ali Boumendjel in 1957, and he recorded all this in his private testimony without remorse. In his own words, Aussaresses declares:

What I did in Algeria was undertaken for my country in good faith, even through I didn’t enjoy it. One must never regret anything accomplished in the line of duty one believes in. Only too often today condemning others means acquiring a certificate of morality for just about anyone. I write only about myself in my memoir. I don’t attempt to justify my actions, but only to explain that once a country demands that its army fight an enemy who is using terror to compel an indifferent population to join its ranks and provoke a repression that will in turn outrage international public opinion, it becomes impossible for the army to avoid using extreme measures. (xiii)

Ausseresses’s defense of murder and torture in his book, as well as in the media before its publication, crossed an unspoken political line in France. President Jacques Chirac, himself a veteran of the French-Algerian War, was eventually forced—no doubt because of mounting public pressure—to reply to the issue of torture by removing Aussaresses from the French Legion of Honor and by forbidding him the customary privilege of wearing his uniform in public. But neither Chirac nor Jospin, who was an antiwar protester at the time, could bring themselves to deal more forcefully with the legacy of the war. Hence, despite growing public pressure for trying Algerian War criminals, Chirac and Jospin stalled. As Jospin put it, “I’ll never do anything to harm the memory or the honor of the men who fought for France. In these sorts of events, the best thing is to stand back and let history do its work.”¹⁶ Disingenuously passing the problem on to history and the historians’ shoulders was an easy course to take, but it would also require opening up all archives and other state documents for investigation, which France has been unwilling to do.

Protected by French laws and a state unwilling legitimately to open the debate, Aussaresses remained steadfast, and in November 2002, during the trial brought against him by human rights groups as a result of his book, Aussaresses again refused to apologize, restating that his “actions appeared justified,” and he added that he “would do the same thing again today against Osama bin Laden.”¹⁷ Aussaresses’s point, as he repeated it throughout his book and to the media, was that military-backed torture represented the only effective means to combat terrorism and that he had a professional duty to protect innocents from the enemy’s bombs by any means at his disposal—be it rope, rape, poison, bullets, knives, water, fire, or any variety of sadistic instruments (many of which he invented).

On January 25, 2002, at the age of eighty-three, retired general Aussaresses was finally convicted in a French court, though absurdly, for “trying to justify war,” and fined approximately $6,500. What is most startling about his conviction was not the fact that he was put on trial for the confessed murder of dozens of Algerians during the war but rather that he was convicted by a French court for telling his story. Even his publishers (the president and senior editor of the publishing house that brought out his book) were convicted and fined thirteen thousand dollars for letting the story be told. Aussaresses’s lawyer, Gilbert Collard, claimed that the court’s decision constituted the first censorship of a personal account in French history.

Perhaps even more ironic and troubling, between Aussaresses’s trial and his sentencing by the French courts, the highly celebrated American news magazine 60 Minutes ran an interview on December 18, 2001, in which Aussaresses was allowed (interviewed by Mike Wallace) to pose as the man from whom the United States could learn much in its own so-called war on terrorism in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. (Wallace was apparently not aware that Aussaresses had already schooled the Americans—North and South—on “interrogation” techniques during the Cold War.) The same 60 Minutes segment, appropriately entitled “Torture,” also featured an interview with the controversial Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. During that segment, Dershowitz made a stunningly rational plea for the legalization of torture in the United States in the form of “torture warrants.”

At the same time, Alan Dershowitz’s own best-selling book, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (2002)— published on the heels of the September 11 attacks as a clumsy and unabashed effort to put the blame of most modern terrorism on the shoulders of the Palestinians—continued to advance the need for “torture warrants” in the United States. However regretful Dershowitz’s misuse of history is, in this case, to justify Israel’s position vis-à-vis Palestine, it is interesting to note that Dershowitz seems to understand France’s real historical failure to deal with torture as a means to combat terrorism. As Dershowitz put it:

Perhaps the most extreme example of such a hypocritical approach to torture comes—not surprisingly—from the French experience in Algeria. The French army used torture extensively in seeking to prevent terrorism during the brutal colonial war from 1955 to 1957. An officer who supervised this torture, General Paul Aussaresses, wrote a book recounting what he had done and seen, including the torture of dozens of Algerians. “The best way to make a terrorist talk when he refused to say what he knows was to torture him,” he boasted. Although the book was published decades after the war was over, the general was prosecuted—but not for what he had done to the Algerians. Instead, he was prosecuted for revealing what he had done, and seeking to justify it.

In a democracy governed by the rule of law, we should never want our soldiers or our president to take any action that we deem wrong or illegal. A good test of whether an action should or should not be done is whether we are prepared to have it disclosed—per-haps not immediately, but certainly after some time has passed. No legal system operating under the rule of law should ever tolerate an “off-the-books” approach to necessity. The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity made by those responsible for the security of the nation.¹⁸

As Dershowitz’s comments on Aussaresses help illustrate, many observers have indicated that there are striking parallels between the French position during the French-Algerian War and the dilemmas facing U.S. foreign policy makers in the twenty-first century. Like the French, Americans today are forced to think about the repercussions of their own self-declared war on terrorism. This is especially true in light of revelations of prisoner abuse and torture in Iraq by American soldiers. However, even before this scandal broke, many argued that the French war in Algeria might be used as a case study of how to win or lose the so-called war on terror. One important example relates to the decision of the Pentagon to screen Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers for Pentagon officials. In an opinion column for the Washington Post, David Ignatius reported that important officials in the Pentagon viewed the film in order to learn how the French “won” the war yet lost the hearts and minds of Algerians in the process. According to the Pentagon’s advertisement: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad furor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film” (quoted in the Washington Post, August 26, 2003).

Whether or not the Pentagon learned much from the film is a matter of debate, but the overwhelming interest that came as a result of reports about the Pentagon showing have been wonderful for the film itself, which was enhanced and rereleased and is now out in a three-volume dvd collection that includes interviews about the film with directors such as Spike Lee and with Richard Clark, President George W. Bush’s former terrorism advisor. However it is also worth pointing out that comparisons between The Battle of Algiers and other current events are not particularly new. In fact, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many reviewers of the film argued that it could be used to understand the race riots in Watts and Harlem, as well as black women’s empowerment. It was also used by Latin American juntas as a training film in the fight against so-called Communist subversion in the 1970s and 1980s. More creatively, the film was used in Marie-Monique Robin’s documentary Death Squadrons: The French School as a backdrop to interviews with the French officers most involved in torture during the historical Battle of Algiers, thus bringing the fictionalized characters to life as they are set against their real-life personas. Robin’s documentary is of particular interest here because she interviews Paul Aussaresses and Marcel-Maurice Bigeard, among others, about how the French perfected the “interrogation” techniques during the Battle of Algiers and then began, often as officials representing the French government, to export these to other governments. In referring to his work in the military after Robert Lacoste (the French official who served as resident minister from 1956–59) handed over civilian police powers to the army, General Bigeard states that he simply did the “police work quickly.” Robin then later asks Aussaresses if he has seen Pontecorvo’s film and what he thought of it, and Aussaresses replied gleefully: “Magnificent! Magnificent!” He added that the colonel in the film who oversaw the entire operation was Bigeard. Going even further, Aussaresses brags that the term “disappearing” was invented in Algeria and used systematically for the first time in order to get rid of suspected revolutionaries without a trace. Commenting on the subject of the “disappeared,” Aussaresses says to the camera: “Bigeard’s shrimp! That’s what we called them.”¹⁹

“Bigeard’s shrimp,” indeed. “Un ‘bon mot’ des assassins,” as Henri Alleg also attested in a compelling set of interviews with Gilles Martin, published in 2001 under the title of Retour sur “La Question”, conducted in response to the recent torture scandals.²⁰ Coming after the public statements and publications of Massu, Bigeard, and Aussaresses, Henri Alleg’s statements, as a victim of French torture during the infamous Battle of Algiers, ring with clarity. In speaking of the so-called Battle of Algiers and of Massu’s role, Alleg stated that Massu “always presented himself as the victor in the Battle of Algiers. In reality, there never was a battle; only a gigantic police operation carried out with an exceptional savagery and in violation of all the laws” (21).

In response to Bigeard’s June 21, 2000, Le Monde declarations, in which the general denounced Louisette Ighilahriz’s statements as a “stream of lies,” Alleg replied:

Bigeard is the type of roughneck soldier who neither forgets nor learns anything. Never forgets because today he still uses the same lines as if the Algerian war were still being fought. Back then, torturers and assassins at the highest level, like Massu himself, swore, with their hand on their heart, that the statements by victims of torture were nothing but slander. Bigeard and his men had the assurance that in Algiers, with Governor General Lacoste, just as in Paris, President Guy Mollet and his ministers (including François Mitterrand) would not refute them. But today, despite the countless obstacles put up over the years to prevent it from happening, the truth has finally broken out. Bigeard, it seems, never noticed this, and his pigheaded denials are not just indecent, they are also ridiculous…. His name has remained associated with the form of summary execution largely used in Algeria and elsewhere [Latin America] and of which I have already spoken: tossing prisoners with their feet in cement out of high-flying helicopters.

During that time, crimes of war did not hinder the career of the colonel. Quite to the contrary, as he continued to earn his stripes until he became a general, and with the benediction of then-president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he was even asked to serve from 1974 to 1975 as secretary of state in charge of defense, a quasi–cabinet minister. Who would dare say that the republic is ungrateful to its loyal servants? (35–36).

As France sustained its uneasy dialogue with the past and while Generals Aussaresses and Bigeard continued to justify torture as a necessary method in the French war on terror, Massu died at the age of ninety-four in October 2002. Jacques Chirac paid his respects to the retired and controversial commander and stated very clearly that despite Massu’s December 2000 admission of torture, Massu had always acted in France’s best interest. “At the sunset of his life, as France engages in a debate over the sad pages of its recent history, General Massu assumed his responsibilities with dignity, courage, and honor.”²¹

Others in France, especially many of those who had been at the forefront of the campaign against torture during the French-Algerian War, did not believe that France had yet done enough. On May 16, 2001, having failed to get an audience with either President Chirac or Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, the Twelve again asked both Chirac and Jospin to acknowledge and condemn the use of torture during the war. On March 18, 2002, during the extremely controversial presidential elections, the group published a communiqué in L’Humanité calling for all candidates to denounce the use of torture during the French-Algerian War (a move that was particularly vexing to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had long been accused of torturing Algerians during his service in Algeria).

Finally, in another attempt to put Jacques Chirac—who became one of Europe’s most outspoken critics of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003— on the spot, the Twelve connected the issue of torture during the French-Algerian War to the American occupation of Iraq. Seizing on the worldwide outrage cause by the revelations of the Abu Ghraib Prison abuse scandal that broke in May 2004, the Twelve published a new Manifesto on May 12, 2004, again in L’Humanité, asking the French president to acknowledge and condemn the use of torture in Algeria once and for all. However, clearly understanding that France’s own credibility to denounce the use of torture by the Americans in Iraq was called into question by the French government’s historic inability to confront its own historical past, the Twelve also acknowledged that, despite the American actions, the Americans had at least had the courage to made the abuses public and to deal with the scandal in a public manner. France never had this courage, and, as a result, its right to speak about atrocities in Iraq was crippled by its own moral failures. As the Twelve put it:

This urgency concerns all the citizens for whom over the course of the past forty years the question of intervention has played a major role in the open debates in our country. But if France wants to have its voice heard at the highest levels, it is imperative that it not be content merely to deplore practices “among others,” in as much (d’autant) as the Americans and the British who have been shocked by what happened [regarding torture] in Iraq and by the conduct of their governments who knew how to act without waiting. It [France] must firmly condemn the torture for which it was responsible in Algeria. They [the concerned citizens] demand for this reason that the authorities of our country no longer delay this recognition, thereby setting an example that rejects the use of such practices that stain [entachent] the honor of an entire people.²²

If the French state’s failure to come to terms with its deeds during decolonization has continued to haunt French society with such ferocity, it is also appropriate to ask in concluding this work how Algeria fared after the war. To address important aspects of Algeria’s part of this story, it is now necessary to briefly sketch some of Algeria’s intellectual and political responses to changes in the postcolonial era.

The Algerian Troubles

By the time Jean-Paul Sartre’s lungs collapsed on April 15, 1980, at the age of seventy-five, Algeria had begun its political free fall. In fact, during that fatal spring, the Algerian state was gearing up for an unavoidable duel with the Kabyles, who comprised over 20 percent of Algeria’s total population. The troubles began in mid-March, when the FLN forbade the Algerian intellectual Mouloud Mammeri from giving a lecture on ancient Berber poetry in Kabylia’s capital city, Tizi-Ouzou. This refusal made sense within the monolingual logic of the Algerian National Charter of 1976 (which ignored the Kabyle population’s demands for cultural and linguistic recognition) but incensed Kabyles and set off a wave of protests that culminated in the occupation of the University of Tizi-Ouzou by protesters and a general strike throughout Kabylia. Only five days after Sartre’s death, the crisis, later known as the “Berber Spring,” erupted in full force.²³ Before this protest against the linguistic policies of the Algerian government was over, more than thirty protesters (mostly Kabyle) had been killed by the state authorities, with over two hundred wounded and many more jailed.

These protests would continue to simmer until 2001, when the Algerian military would again crack down on Kabylia by killing dozens of unarmed protesters there. After years of conflict, the Algerian government finally made the long-awaited concession to the Kabyle by naming Tamazight (the Berber language) an officially sanctioned national language in the summer of 2002.

The language issue had been brewing in Algeria since before the revolution, but it was with the help of Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, the man who once wrote to Albert Camus as “Ahmed Taleb” in his letter from prison (and whose request to found an Islamist party was denied by the Algerian government in 2000), that the language issue took center stage immediately after the war. In an article published in December 1962, Ibrahimi cited Aimé Césaire and others in his efforts to demonstrate that Algerians had been “deculturated” by colonialism. It was up to Algerians to discover their true identity. As he put it, “The Algerian should therefore seize the richness of his past and he cannot do this without knowledge of Arabic.”²⁴ Appointed to the post of the first minister of education for the newly independent Algeria, Ibrahimi thereafter pushed hard for a progressive Arabization program that would use bilingualism only as a transitional tool. As Ibrahimi put it: “Only bilingual instruction can assist in the transition from colonial education to authentic national education” (19). Three years later, in a speech to Algerian students, entitled “Rootedness and Authenticity” (“Enracinement et authenticité”), Ibrahimi stressed the need for Algeria’s youth, and especially its intellectuals, to reconnect with Arabic, which he tied again to the notion of authenticity, asking them to search out their own “Arabo-Islamic roots” (27).

Though language was certainly one of the important postcolonial issues that Algerians faced immediately after the war, others should be mentioned here as well. By independence in July 1962, political rivalries within the Algerian nationalist movement triggered thousands of assassinations and murders, coupled with vicious reprisals against those Algerians suspected of collaborating with French forces during decolonization. Hence, while Algerian politicians trumpeted the nation as a unified and cohesive national sphere and as a would-be showpiece of Third World emancipation, it had become clear to many observers that Algeria’s unity was more illusion than reality and that the revolution had been hijacked by the external military wing of the FLN (the Armée des Frontières). In the famous words of Ferhat Abbas, Algeria would be left with “confiscated independence” in the decades to follow.²⁵

The FLN, backed by the Armée des Frontières, did in fact confiscate the revolution on the eve of independence and immediately rendered any real transition to a democratic republic improbable. In claiming to be the only legitimate political entity after independence—the guarantor and therefore the inheritor of political legitimacy—the FLN turned Algeria into a oneparty state and outlawed rival parties for more than thirty years. The subsequent centralization of authority by the FLN during the war by brutal, repressive means (a process many French intellectuals such as Sartre and de Beauvoir condoned) became concrete during the first months of Ahmed Ben Bella’s presidency (1962–65), which was subsequently overthrown by Houari Boumediene in a coup d’état in 1965; it continued under the powerhungry leadership of Houari Boumediène (1965–78), and was capped off by Chadli Bendjedid’s regime (1979–89).

At the same time, FLN leaders and spokesmen—eager to claim their own version of Third World “authenticity” articulated by anticolonial theorists during the revolution—had begun to work with Islamists from the beginning of the revolutionary period. After independence, the import of this uneasy alliance between a secular, socialist state and religious, Islamic backers became clearer with the passing of the Algerian constitution of 1976, establishing Islam as the religion of the state.

Led, ironically, by the staunch secular socialist Boumediène, the FLN presented the National Charter of 1976 as a means to unify the nation, basing it on the centrist notion that ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences would divide the country—if they were addressed at all. Under Ben Bella and Boumediene, Algeria also began to institute its controversial Arabization program, a process that took many years to move through the state’s primary, secondary, and university education system. When Chadli Bendjedid assumed power after Boumediene’s premature death in December 1979, the government continued to centralize authority, move against a linguistic openness that would include the Berbers and other ethnic groups, and by 1997 did away with bilingualism altogether—jettisoning French and making Arabic the official language. Most importantly, the Algerian state continued to flirt with Islamists. Unfortunately, according to Benjamin Stora, “[t]he state nationalized Islam without wishing to modify it.”²⁶

As many observers have remarked, women’s rights were unquestionably one of the clearest casualties of the growing power of Islam in Algeria after decolonization. The final blow to the women’s movement came under pressure from Islamic reformers when the FLN passed the Family Code in 1984. Under the Family Code, women were rendered legally subservient to their husbands and their husband’s family, forbidden to travel without the direct supervision of a male family member, could not apply for a divorce, and could not apply for marriage contracts unless approved of by a male adult family member.²⁷

Two years after the Algerian Family Code became law, Simone de Beauvoir, a longtime supporter of women’s rights and an intellectual very much associated with the Algerian nationalist cause, died in Paris at the age of seventy-eight. Neither she nor Sartre could have forecasted such catastrophic postcolonial political outcomes in Algeria. However, as a supporter of the FLN during decolonization, she had certainly inspired countless Algerian feminists and nationalists during and after decolonization.

Khalida [Messaoudi] Toumi, one of Algeria’s best-known feminist activists, who was inspired by de Beavoir’s feminist politics and who deserves considerable attention here, put Chadli’s decision to adopt the Family Code this way in her conversations with Elizabeth Schemla, published in Unbowed: An Algerian Woman Confronts Islamic Fundamentalism (1995): “Chadli, in contrast to Boumediene, was not a strong man who seized power himself. He was the pawn of a clan, a certain current of the FLN and the army: namely, the Islamo-baasist camp.”²⁸ As a result, the “Islamo-baasists”— those who favored Arabization and the creation of an Islamic state in the spirit of the Baath party in Iraq—got their way and Algerian women were denied the right to travel without being accompanied by a man. Eventually, Toumi explains, the Family Code allowed women to exist “henceforth only as ‘daughters of,’ ‘mothers of,’ or ‘wives of’ ” (52).

Toumi acted against the FLN’s position on women beginning on March 8, 1980—International Women’s Day. As a student, she helped organize a successful protest in defense of women’s rights, forcing the government to back down momentarily (49). However, Chadli remained under pressure from Islamic hardliners and continued to push forward with the Code. The women’s movement could not withstand the pressure of the regime and was defeated by the government. Khalida Toumi’s actions led to her arrest in 1981, but, after her release, she went on to teach mathematics in a lycée in Algiers in the mid-1980s. As a math teacher, she witnessed another phenomenon associated with the problem of authenticity that she found disturbing: Arabization. According to her, it had disastrous effects on Algerian children, who were being handicapped, especially in the sciences, by Algeria’s policy, because it cut off Algeria’s important linguistic and cultural ties to Western nations, including France.²⁹

Toumi is not alone here. Assia Djebar, another well-known Algerian writer and an important feminist, believes that Arabization programs created unnecessary problems in Algeria. Hence, rather than having French serve as a unique advantage for Algerians, the Algerian state’s educational reforms (directed by men like Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi) were caught up in absurd identity politics after decolonization. As Djebar put it in her reflections on contemporary Algeria, Algeria White, which she first published in 1995:

Today it is Arabic again, modern Arabic as it is called, which is taught to the young under the pompous guise of our “national language.”

The institutionalized mediocrity of the educational system since 1962—despite a clear effort toward making the population literate: literacy has almost tripled in thirty years—was practiced on two levels: promoting the “national language” by officially restricting the living space of the other languages; then, in addition to this sterilizing monolingualism, the diglossia peculiar to Arabic (the structure’s vertical variability that can give the child who is being educated a precious agility of mind) was handled badly by comparison with other Arab countries, by banishing a dialect that was vivid in its regional iridescence, subtle in the strength of its challenges and its dream.

Thus, the denial of an entire population’s genius went hand in hand with the mistrust of a minority of French-language writers whose production, in spite of the lack of anything better, continued in exile.

Jacques Berque, declaring in 1992 that “Islamism thinks of itself as a material modernity, as it wholly refuses any intellectual bases,” comes to Algeria and its linguistic choices: “Here is a situation,” he says, “that exists in none of the other twenty Arab countries” also confronted with diglossia and the presence of one or two other languages. “One may say,” he concludes, “that Algeria has shown a talent for creating a major problem out of something that began as an advantage!”³⁰

The issue of Arabic aside, Khalida Toumi became increasingly active in the women’s movement. In 1985 she became the founding president of the Association pour l’Égalité des Droits entre les Femmes et les Hommes; in 1989 she became the founding president of the Association Indépendante pour le Triomphe du Droit des Femmes, one of the organizations acknowledged by the FLN. Also in 1989, in an inevitable and important sign of democratic reform, the FLN recognized the Front Islamique du Salut (fis). As it turned out, this effort by the FLN to liberalize the election process and allow for alternative political parties had enormous consequences for Algerian politics; as Benjamin Stora has pointed out, between 1989 and 1990 over forty new parties came into existence in Algeria (198). By far, the most important of these was the FIS, led by Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadji, which aspired to create a theocratic, Islamic republic. According to Stora, the sudden liberalization of Algerian politics by the FLN under Chadli was a case of too much, too late. The sudden reform was, in Stora’s words,

too great an innovation: for the first time, an Arab and Muslim country authorized a party that had Islam as its foundation, and the instillation of an ‘Islamic republic’ as its openly announced goal. The army chiefs thought that the legalization of an Islamist party was a mistake in a country where religion played such a strong role and constituted one of the levers of national cohesion. Others, like Chadli Bendjedid and his prime minister, Mouloud Hamrouche, felt that institutional guarantees were enough to ward off any subversive threat. (203).

However “subversive” the FIS turned out to be, it was not the only political party that enjoyed a relative burst of democratic freedom in Algeria. In fact, in the early 1990s, Khalida Toumi became vice president of the Mouvement pour la République, which was founded by Said Sadi.³¹ Sadi was then a member of the Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Démocratie (rcd) and also remained a member until May 2001. As a movement that grew out of the Berber opposition, the RCD campaigned on a secularist platform, separating Islam from state politics in Algeria, though Toumi eventually broke with the RCD on ideological grounds.

Khalida Toumi, who had been harassed and intimidated by the FLN since 1981, received national attention on March 22, 1990, when she confronted Abassi Madani (the coleader of the FIS)in a political debate on Algerian national television. The following month, over one hundred thousand supporters of the FIS gathered in Algiers and demanded the application of shair’a (Islamic law) along with an end to Algeria’s bilingualism. Soon thereafter, on June 12, the FIS won the municipal elections, taking most of the large cities throughout Algeria. Toumi noted the irony of the FIS’s sweeping electoral victories: “I viewed it as one of the injustices of history. We paid very dearly in the precious fight for democracy we’d been waging for more than a decade, and it was the ‘Barbus’ [‘Bearded Ones’] who were reaping the benefits” (97–98). The tragic and ironic part of this was that the FIS party made it perfectly clear that once it won the first-ever national democratic elections in Algeria’s history, it would henceforth cancel the election process and institute shair’a

When the First Gulf War started at the beginning of 1991, the Islamist movement in Algeria watched in shame and awe at the Saudia Arabian government’s decision to side with the Americans in the war against Iraq, despite the Algerian Islamists’ distaste for the secularism of Saddam Hussein. As Stora records it, the FIS Islamists’ abhorrence of the collaboration of the Saudi regime with the United States produced statements like this from Algerian extremists: “Let us brandish the torch of Islam. Let us brandish the jihad. Down with the servants of colonialism! No to Iraqi intervention in Kuwait, no to the intervention of unbelievers in Saudi Arabia, no to the governments that have compromised with the West” (208). In other words, in connections that have become all too apparent after September 11, 2001, there were increasingly important links between the militant Islamic groups such as the Group Islamique Armée (GIA) in Algeria in the 1990s and growing worldwide terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda. The Islamists in Algeria took the Saudis’ decision to comply with the American request for airbases during the First Gulf War as their cue to seek the expulsion of the Western infidels (including Jews) from the Islamic Holy Lands. This reaction would ripple through radical Islamic groups elsewhere, including Osama bin Laden and those in Afghanistan’s Taliban.

Less than six months after the First Gulf War started, the FIS called for a general strike in Algeria in an effort to cripple the government. In retaliation, two weeks later, on June 30, both Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadj were arrested and imprisoned. (They were sentenced to twelve-year terms and were only released in 2003. They are currently banned from all political and public activity by the Algerian government, and, as a result, journalists can neither interview nor cite them.) Finally, despite President Chadli’s efforts to stop the Islamic movement in Algeria with the arrest of the leaders of the FIS, on December 26, 1991, the FIS won in the first round of national legislative elections. About three weeks later, on January 11, 1992, Chadli was forced by the military to step down from office. Within a day, the military nullified the previous elections (showing the FIS victory) and dissolved the Algerian National Assembly. That same month, a new military-backed political body, known as the High State Committee (hsc) and initially directed by Mohamed Boudiaf—a hero of the war of liberation who was assassinated, just six months later—filled the void left by the FLN’s sudden demise.

In March 1992 the FIS was outlawed, with their leaders being sent to concentration camps in the south or “disappeared” (a technique learned from the French) by the Algerian military in its own brutal repression of Islamic movements. As evidenced here, Algeria’s lightening-speed political liberalization had led directly into one of the most severe political crises in recent history. By the time of Boudiaf’s murder, Algeria was well on its way to full-scale civil war from which it has yet to recover. Liamine Zéroual was appointed president by the military clans in January 1994. Nevertheless, several armed Islamic guerrilla movements (including the GIA) continued throughout the 1990s to clash with the military-backed state. The result, according to William Quandt, was that between 1992 and 1998 an average of about two hundred Algerians died per week.³² In 1999 elections were held again, and Abdelaziz Bouteflika, with the support of the omnipresent military, became the new Algerian president.

Throughout these political shifts, Khalida Toumi continued to agitate for democracy and women’s rights in Algeria as the civil conflict raged. Already afraid of an assassination attempt on her life, she was formally condemned to death by the FIS in 1993 and subsequently went on to survive at least three confirmed Islamists’ attempts to kill her, including one in 1994 that wounded her and killed a bodyguard and another person. Yet she continued to serve in the Algerian parliament.

In 2002, especially after its massacres of unarmed civilians in Kabylia in 2001, the government knew that if it was going to continue to receive international assistance (in particular from the U.S. government) in its battle against Islamic militancy and compete for foreign investment, it would have to reform its image and make real progressive efforts to reform Algerian domestic politics. The prime minister, Ali Benflis (FLN), called for a bold restructuring of the ministries in June 2002. Five feminists were appointed to top governmental posts, including Mouredine Salah, Rachid Harraoubia, and Khalida Toumi. Khalida Toumi was named Algeria’s first woman minister of communications and culture and the official spokesperson for the Algerian government. She accepted the post, as she says, in order to place women on the agenda of the Algerian government, and this includes working toward the repeal of the repressive Family Code. As she stated in a March 2003 interview with Cédric Morin: “It’s up to elected women, me in this case, to make their voices heard where we are. It’s a matter of persuading as many ministers as possible, to call their attention, at every occasion, to the condition of women.”³³

Ghost of the Past

In the first edition of Uncivil War I cited a play written by Khalida Toumi’s brother, Alek Toumi, originally published under his pen name (Alek Baylee) and entitled Madah-Sartre (which was published in France in 1998). After Uncivil War was published in 2001, with the help of a colleague I was able to find Alek Toumi and ask him about his work. During my first interview with him, I learned that his sister was Khalida Toumi, and I also learned that long before Alek Toumi could ever dream of seeing his sister become a minister in the Algerian government, the escalating civil war in Algeria in the early 1990s had had a profound impact on him and other Algerian intellectuals in exile.

With his sister condemned to death by fundamentalists and persecuted by the government for her unflinching criticism of its treatment of women, Alek Toumi feared the worst for his family in Algeria during the 1990s. But, as he told me, he and his family were no strangers to adversity.³⁴ Literally a child of the Algerian revolution, Alek was born on October 2, 1955, in a small village in Kabylia. Too young to recall many of the events except for hearing gunfire outside the home, he does remember the unusual diversity within his village, in which he lived among other Kabyles, Arabs, pieds noirs, and Jews. However, during the war, his father, who was both a mayoral advisor and sympathetic toward the FLN, was arrested by the French, tortured, and put in a concentration camp—euphemistically called a “relocation camp” by the French—for six months. In 1965, at the age of nine and a half, his father sent the young Toumi to study at Les Pères-Blancs, an all-boys Catholic boarding school in Algiers. The language at the school was French, the orientation Cartesian rationalism. But before Toumi left for boarding school, his father was arrested a second time—this time by the FLN for being an original member of the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS), which was created by Hocine Aït Ahmed in September 1963 in order to oppose Ben Bella’s regime. Ben Bella ordered the army to put down the opposition in Kabylia in October 1963, and the elder Toumi was blacklisted after his release from the FLN’s political prison.

The young Toumi was old enough to remember the arrest of his father by the FLN and especially the cruelty of the neighborhood kids who ridiculed him and his family (interview). Perhaps even more traumatic, the FLN labeled the FFS as a separatist movement in 1963. Hence his earlier nom de plume, Alek Baylee, pronounced as one word: “Alekbaylee,” or “the Kabyle.” He received his baccalaureate in 1974 and in 1976 moved to the United States to study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After returning to Algeria in 1982, he again left in 1984 to pursue a Ph-D at the University of Wisconsin and has remained in the United States.

Alek Toumi received his PhD in French in 1993 and, as is the case with many in the Algerian diaspora, paid critical attention to the political developments at home and kept in frequent contact with his family. In particular, Toumi followed the course of events leading to Algeria’s “glasnost” along with his sister’s dangerous political career. He was especially concerned with the gruesome displays of violence and spectacular acts of continuing terrorism perpetrated against Algerian intellectuals.³⁵

One of the most prominent assassinations was that of Tahar Djaout. By January 1993, Djaout was one of Algeria’s leading intellectual voices. At the time he was a thirty-nine-year-old novelist and journalist for Algérie-Actualité and had cofounded Ruptures—a respected magazine critical of both the Islamists and the state. Djaout’s position on intellectual freedom in the context of the civil war was legendary, and he refused to remain silent. Tragically, he was shot in the head by Islamists on May 26, 1993, and died a week later. The wave of assassinations of prominent Algerian intellectuals continued, including those of Abdelkader Alloula, Mahfoud Boucebci, M’Hamed Boukhobza, Saïd Mekbel, and Youssef Sebti.

From the United States Toumi followed the news of attacks on Algeria’s intelligentsia. In Toumi’s words: “I was terrified about what they were going to do to my sister and to my parents. They killed Djaout, then they started killing [other] intellectuals. Then, in 1994 they [the FIS] had initiated the marriages de jouissances, which had never appeared before, where they would kidnap these girls—sometimes as young as twelve—and they gang rape them, then they decapitate them, and so on” (interview). For Toumi, Algeria had become a nightmare that had to be lived, on the outside, where he was helpless to defend his family and his friends and where he began to think of how best to channel his anxiety. As with many other exiled intellectuals throughout history, Toumi’s decision to write flowed from this predicament.

Alek Toumi began to pen his first play in 1993 and was particularly interested in revisiting Sartre and de Beauvoir. It was this first play that originally attracted my attention due to his clever reincarnation of the characters of Sartre and de Beauvoir and their insertion into the middle of Algeria’s civil war. As Toumi put it to me: “I imagined that Sartre went to Djaout’s funeral and got kidnapped. But if Sartre comes back, logically you can’t have Sartre without de Beauvoir. They always go together, and from a theatrical point of view, you don’t need to present Sartre; he’s intellectual with a capital I. And de Beauvoir’s the mother of feminism.” Toumi also noted that Sartre and de Beauvoir had supported the FLN during the revolution and commented that Sartre would be of special interest because “today he would be caught between a rock and a hard place,” between his former support for the FLN, which he could seemingly no longer maintain, and the FIS,“which he would reject” (interview).

Madah-Sartre’s story is that of two Algerias and, indirectly, one of two siblings, an exiled writer and his activist sister. It is a story in which two protagonists, the ghosts of Sartre and de Beauvoir, square off against the antagonists of a FIS-GIA terrorist cell led by Madah (short for Mad-d-Allah, a cocktail-like word symbolizing religious extremism). Finally, it is a powerful comment on the intellectuals of the Algerian diaspora, for Madah also represents the fictionalization of Anouar Haddam, an exiled FIS leader with whom Toumi was uncomfortably sharing the space of the Algerian diaspora within the United States (interview).³⁶

Inspired by the play Marat-Sade, written by Peter Weiss, Madah-Sartre starts in the heavens with Simone de Beauvoir asking Sartre if he is certain he wants to attend the funeral of Djaout. Soon after Sartre and de Beauvoir descend to earth, they are stopped and kidnapped by the GIA. They are immediately separated, in Toumi’s spoof of Sartre’s No Exit, with de Beauvoir being taken by women captors and Sartre by men. In reading the play, it becomes immediately clear why Toumi published Madah-Sartre under a pen name. Knowing that the model for his central fictional antagonist was living only a few states away, Toumi’s fears were understandable—especially given Toumi’s penchant for stridently lampooning Islamic extremists. For example, in an early scene in which Sartre talks to an artist who has also been kidnapped, Sartre asks why the GIA carried out the abduction, and the artist replies: “They are convinced that they are the ‘Soldiers of God.’ But… they are only thugs, opportunists, sadistic and psychotic men who use God” (18). The artist continues later: “They loot in the name of God. They kill in the name of God. They rape in the name of God” (19).

Madah-Sartre is more than an attack on Algerian Islamists; it is also an unequivocal critique of Le Pouvoir, the military extremists who have terrorized the entire Algerian population. Madah-Sartre is, however, part of a much wider literary corpus devoted to multipronged criticism of contemporary Algerian politics. For example, Tahar Djaout’s last novel, Le Dernier été de la raison—first published in 1999 and then published in English as The Last Summer of Reason (2001)—which Djaout was writing when he was murdered, has a similar and equally devastating critique of both Le Pouvoir and the religious terrorists. What makes Toumi’s writings stand out is the way in which he carefully crafted his unflinching attack around the theme of intellectuals and the legacy of the French-Algerian War.

Fed up with the Islamists’ policy of killing intellectuals, Toumi ridicules the terrorists for their murderous impiety. In deriding Islamists, he simultaneously celebrates the intellectuals’ role in society. “For the last ten years,” as he stated in his interview with me, “especially since ’93, it has been extremely dangerous to be an intellectual because you have to be openly critical of the fundamentalists, who have been against intellectuals since the early 1980s, but also of the corrupt, FLN-backed generals, who are a mafia of corrupt people that created the FIS. When you do that [criticize these people], you risk not only your own life but also the lives of your immediate family. Being an intellectual means that the right of dissent is sacred. If you take that away I don’t think you can have intellectuals. That’s something nonnegotiable” (interview).

Toumi’s defense of the intellectual’s right of dissent is perhaps best illustrated in act 3, “Intellectuals are Jews.” Here Sartre meets Madah, the leader of the terrorist cell. Madah, a fanatical Islamist, explains to Sartre that it was his defense of Algerians during the war of liberation that “redeem[ed]” him and rendered his soul worth saving. When Sartre questions why he was taken, Madah replies that Sartre had encouraged “critics and critical thinking,” but that his worst sin of all was also his raison d’être: being an intellectual (22). Madah explains that, as the “prototype” of an intellectual, it was Sartre who convinced others to question authority.

Thirty years after independence, Madah reminds Sartre’s ghost that he had endorsed extreme violence in Algeria as a means to refashion postcolonial authenticity. The important difference being, Madah states, that whereas Sartre had acted in a universe without God and had erred in supporting women’s rights, these actions remained unpardonable crimes for Madah: “A society without God and governed by women is doomed to failure” (24). Admitting to some of his own errors over the years, Sartre counters by comparing the discourse of the FIS with that of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front: “Your discourse is the same as the French extreme right, based on exclusion. Jean-Marie with a turban would look very much like you.”

As counterintuitive as it may seem, Toumi does have a point in stressing this connection between Jean-Marie Le Pen and the FIS. Le Pen had stated publicly that his (albeit xenophobic) movement was interested in working with the FIS before they were disbanded—despite his virulent antiimmigration, anti-Arab position—because the FIS would not encourage Muslim immigration and had, in fact, pledged to Le Pen that it would work to repatriate Algerian immigrants living in France. Hence Madah’s Pétainlike reaction to Sartre: “We [the FIS and the fn] have the same enemies: Jews, feminists and secular intellectuals, those who are against God. ‘God, country, and family’ ” (25).

After another heated exchange between Sartre and Madah, Toumi moves to the issue of alterity, a critical dimension of the play, of Sartrian philosophy, and a central concern of Uncivil War. “You have an obsession,” Sartre continues, with “the Other. Eliminate others who are different” (26). Toumi parlays alterity into a discussion of democratic pluralism in contemporary Algeria. For Toumi, this is a conflict in which there remain only two incompatible solutions: adoption of full democratization of society or the imposition of theocracy. The ghost of Sartre, and Toumi himself, remain committed to democracy. In Toumi’s view, “the concept of an Islamic republic is a completely ludicrous idea” (interview).

Throughout Madah-Sartre, Sartre stays true to his secular ideals and refuses to convert to Islam, though Madah refuses to give up hope. But the Algerian Islamists (“fascislamists,” to use Toumi’s word for them) in Madah-Sartre want to do more than purify Algeria of infidels. Algeria must, they say, free itself of feminists. For this reason, Sartre is encouraged by Madah to sacrifice de Beauvoir, to shed her blood to save his soul. Admitting his frustration, Sartre asks a simple question of Madah. “Have you ever wondered why you have this hate in you?” (35). To which Madah replies in exasperation, “Who gave you the right to speak for the third world?… Why should we adopt your values?” (36). To which Sartre retorts: “Democracy and freedom are not Western luxuries, but rather a right for everyone… All Others who are different I accept… That’s called tolerance. But you, Madah, you hate difference, you fight it. You claim responsibility for the killing of secular and Muslim intellectuals, poets, and actors” (37).

At a key point in this exchange between Sartre and his captor, Madah holds up an image of the playwright’s sister, Khalida (though not identified by her full name, Khalida Toumi) during her famous debate on Algerian national television with Abbasi Madani, the FIS leader, and states: “Look at her. She came in front of the cameras without a veil: that’s forbidden. She wore tight pants: forbidden. She wore makeup: forbidden. She went to the hair salon and curled her red hair: forbidden. She spoke French: forbidden. She looked at him in the eye: sacrilegious. She came to challenge our values and (furious)… broke… seven rules! Seven! She is the sister of Satan. If Khalida thinks she is flouting us, she’ll pay for it one day” (37).

The playwright’s decision to insert his sister here is powerfully effective. Understanding the connection between Khalida and Alek Toumi also helps us understand why Toumi devotes considerable attention to feminism throughout the play. In fact one of the most heated exchanges between Sartre and Madah concerns the issue of women’s rights. As Madah explains to Sartre: “Women are the devil, Satan, temptation…. And your Simone with her theories has only corrupted our girls” (38).

While the play has a number of very serious points, such as the discussion of the raping of women and children, there are also a number of lighthearted moments. One of the most humorous occurs during act 5, or the “Third Attempt at Conversion.” Here we find Sartre and Madah engaged in a discussion about heaven. Madah confidently asserts that he has nothing to fear after death, and Sartre—hardly a candidate to fall from heaven to discuss the virtues of the afterlife with an Islamic extremist—banters with Madah about the mysteries of God’s identity. Near the end of the play, Sartre does let Madah in on a secret: that God is a woman. Madah accuses Sartre of heresy, and Sartre continues: “But it is Satan who is a man … The devil is a guy, macho, bearded, sexist and misogynist. The antithesis of God” (92).

After several attempts by the Islamists to convert Sartre, Toumi reintroduces de Beauvoir. The scenes involving her focus mostly on women attempting to get her to wear a chador and convert to Islam. In one effort to have de Beauvoir don a veil, the “First Chadorette” smiles at her and says. “Your name … Simone de ‘Beau-voir’ means ‘beautiful-to-see.’ Wear it and become Simone de Beau-veil” (57). De Beauvoir remains steadfast in her disapproval of the veil and refuses to entertain the notion of wearing one. She responds to these efforts by borrowing the criticisms of Khalida Toumi: “They [Islamists] have fabricated a new Other … the woman. They force you to wear this chador. This fundamentalist veil, the chador is your yellow star” (61).³⁷ To which the “Chief Chador” replies, again recalling Khalida Toumi: “Feminist propaganda. That is the work of Kahina. Not only has she read your books, but now, it is you who read hers … Unbowed! She did escape twice … next time, she’ll pay for it” (61).

In fact, it is in Unbowed that Khalida Toumi outlines the reasons for the Islamists’ hatred for women’s sexuality and why the veil was suddenly being imposed on women. According to her, the Islamists—building, in Algeria’s case, upon the preexisting biases of the Mediterranean patriarchal system and the enfeeblement done to women during the colonial era—were simply following their totalitarian urge to control women and hide overt signs of sexual differences. The women who refuse to submit to this gendered manipulation of themselves and their bodies simply become alien and therefore dangerous to the hegemony the Islamists seek to impose with the veil. The result, Khalida Toumi explains, is clear: Those women “become perfect targets because they embody the Other that fundamentalists need to mobilize and rally people to their cause” (109).

As it turns out, though, Madah-Sartre is not just the story of the miraculous return of deceased intellectuals. One of the most important characters, indeed, perhaps the most important, is the poor taxi driver, who becomes the principal protagonist in the sequel to Madah-Sartre, Taxieur (2001). The taxi driver is trapped in both plays in the dangerous no-man’s-land of Algeria’s quasi–civil war. Sadly, like most of his compatriots, he cannot escape from the violence and is consequently caught in the deadly vice between the wrath of the Islamists and state-sponsored terrorism. Hence, when the taxi driver is stopped twice in the play by “police officers,” he is asked to identify which side he is on: that of Le Pouvoir or that of the FIS/GIA. Unable to appease either “policeman,” the taxi driver has his face slashed by each man, and he appears in various scenes throughout the play in a desperate attempt to find someone able to suture his gaping cheeks.

Taxieur, which features the various characters seen in the 1996 play, in-cluding the taxi driver and Sartre, pushes debates over the civil war in Algeria still further. In Taxieur, we discover that Madah has been killed in a shootout with the Algerian authorities, and we again find Sartre in dialogue with Algerians in the midst of a civil war. In several exchanges, Sartre converses with a character by the name of Maréchalissime—an old FLN militant from the war of independence now retired from politics. Maréchalissime, who clearly represents the Algerian state’s interest, explains the ins and outs of the contemporary conflict to Sartre. Maréchalissime outlines how the Islamic terrorist groups have evolved during the past several years, pushing the situation in Algeria from bad to worse. Different Islamic movements such as the GIA and the Armée Islamique (ais) are killing each other as clans, each carrying on its own war against both the state and innocent civilians. At one point, Sartre hints at the allegations that the massacres of innocents were being perpetrated not only by the Islamists but also by the Algerian military itself and states that he knows this through his recent conversations in heaven with new arrivals from the Algerian killing fields (50).

Toward the end of the play, Sartre, being Sartre, asks for a press conference after it is revealed that he and de Beauvoir were “alive” and well in Algiers. They escaped from the terrorists by the same method that Sartre had used earlier in the play, after tiring of arguing with his captors, by simply walking through the wall. In other words, Sartre and de Beauvoir had slipped through the GIA’s hands by simply walking through the walls and onto the streets of Algiers. Several journalists line up in a flurry of questions: How were the conditions of captivity? Did they talk to the terrorists? Was Sartre now a dialoguiste, a person trying to compromise with the terrorists or an éradicateur, a person who refuses negotiations and is in favor of annihilating the fundamentalists? As the press conference concludes, before Sartre is once again driven away by the taxi driver, he is asked if there is a solution. Sartre confesses that the Algerian situation is extremely complex and it was now “up to the Algerians to make their own chorba [soup]” (70). At the conclusion of Taxieur, after he drops off Sartre at the airport, the taxi driver reenters Algiers and listens to the news on the radio that there have been more massacres and another bombing in Bab El Oued. At the same time, the dj plays a song by Matoub Lounés, who was assassinated by Islamists in Kabylia on June 25, 1998, and one of the people to whom Toumi dedicated his play.

Given the recent testimony of former Algerian officers such as Habib Souaïdia in La sale guerre (Dirty War), in which Souaïdia has recently accused the Algerian military of torturing and killing innocent civilians, Toumi’s work is a distressing reminder of the perils of contemporary Algeria.³⁸ His decision to write Madah-Sartre and Taxieur in one of Algeria’s most dangerous moments is itself an affirmation of the power of art and a reminder that writing can be a mighty weapon in the fight against the powerlessness of exile. Far away from his homeland, Toumi was able to address the crippling effects that violence has had on Algeria since the 1980s and especially since the cancellation of the 1992 elections. But the decision to write did not come easily. One of the first obstacles to overcome was the feeling of guilt. As Toumi states: “Exile makes you in the beginning feel guilty because here you’re very safe” (interview).

However, safe or not, Toumi felt as though he had to write because he believed in the call of the intellectual to work for tolerance. First Madah-Sartre and then Taxieur present, despite their comedic effects, a powerful meditation on the degree to which Algeria has succeeded in turning the postcolonial page and on Algeria’s very real problems—especially the failure to develop genuine political and religious tolerance in the postcolonial era. As Toumi puts it: “For the fundamentalists, they are convinced that they are authentic…. Authenticity is a notion that is very hard to define and has led to a blood bath…. The fundamentalists want to establish what I call a fascislamist state. One way to avoid the conflict again is to accept diversity” (interview). The acceptance of diversity, according to Toumi, is Algeria’s only chance for a dignified recovery from the abuses of state power since independence.

In his newest plays, Albert Camus: Entre la mère et l’injustice, Ben M’hidi, and De beauvoir à beau voile, Toumi returns to the history of the war and its legacy today.³⁹ In De beauvoir à beau voile, Toumi addresses the recent debates in France regarding secularism, the schools, the headscarf, and rape by returning once again to Simone de Beauvoir. In Ben M’hidi he presents an imagined last three days of Ben M’hidi’s life before he was murdered by Aussaresses. Throughout the play, Ben M’hidi converses with the fictionalized character of Marcel-Maurice Bigeard (Colonel Gee), the colonel who allegedly guarded Ben M’hidi before he was hanged by Aussaresses (Commandant O). Inspired by Ausseresses’s confessions and the debate it provoked, Ben M’hidi is a fiercely imaginative examination of the nature of terrorism and the odd mutual respect that these two combatants held for each other, whereas Albert Camus is a compelling reconsideration of the paradoxes of Camus’s life as he tried to work though the colonial issues. In particular, as Toumi used Sartre’s play No Exit to address the contemporary themes found in Madah-Sartre, he used the moral dilemma posed in Camus’s volume of short stories, L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom, 1957), to address the issues left by the question of Camus after his Stockholm address. As Daru, the hero of Camus’s powerful and evocative short story “L’Hôte,” the only work written in Camus’s lifetime that touches on the Algerian War, states in Toumi’s brilliant rewriting for his play: “When I speak, people twist what I say. When I say nothing, people reproach me for silence. The first would like me to lend them my voice and the second would like me to echo them. France forgets that I am Algerian and the Arabs forget that I’m pied noir” (32).

September 11 and After

On September 25, 2001, French president Jacques Chirac took a provocative step by organizing the “Journée nationale d’hommage aux harkis.” This public honoring of the Algerian harkis—those Algerians who fought with the French military against Algerian nationalists and who number approximately thirty thousand in France today, not counting their families and descendants—outraged many Algerians. In honoring the very people whom most Algerians considered traitors, many of whom were massacred in Algeria after the war concluded, Chirac stated that France owed these Algerians a special “moral debt” because of their “sacrifice and dignity.”⁴⁰ Then a year later, on November 6, 2002, Dominique de Villepin—the former French minister of foreign affairs who became the nemesis of the Bush administration during the Second Gulf War and now prime minister—gave a speech in Paris announcing the opening of “Algerian Year” in France. As he explained it, “ ‘Djazaïr: An Algerian Year in France’ ” would be “no ordinary encounter.”⁴¹

With the looming discussions of the possibility of an impending war in Iraq in mind, de Villepin celebrated this sudden need for France and Algeria to reconnect and seek reconciliation. This is a “courageous move. Courageous because our world is living in a time of every possible danger.” Rather than fall into “aggressive or warlike identities,” de Villepin suggested that Algeria Year would “fly in the face of these temptations.” It would establish a “dialogue” between “peoples.” This dialogue would not be easy, he warned, because of the “memories of trials and sorrows. I am thinking of the Algerians, of those who returned to France after the war of independence, and of the harkis, Algerians who fought with the French in that war. Of all those who suffered.” De Villepin went on to celebrate the rich cultural links between Algeria and France and called for a newfound openness and tolerance in France that would now, he hoped, embrace diversity. Following on this speech, in December 2002, de Villepin flew to Algeria and conducted diplomatic talks with the Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in preparation for Chirac’s historic visit to Algeria.

Chirac’s visit was even more interesting. Perhaps realizing that his and de Villepin’s comments on the harkis (which drew universal condemnation in the Algerian press) were offensive to Algerians, he made an equally provocative move in Algeria by laying a wreath on the monument for Algerian soldiers who died during the French-Algerian War. At the same time, he received an oddly warm welcome by thousands of Algerians calling for more visas to France, and whom the New York Times correspondent covering the visit recorded as chanting “Visa à la France,” a play on the wartime motto “Vive la France.”⁴² Chirac arrived with an entourage of French business leaders, including representatives of oil firms, who were preparing to invest in Algerian oil production contracts. When Chirac addressed the Algerian Parliament, he made no further references to the harkis but rather to the need for an alternative solution to the Iraq crisis.

Before the visit, the Algerians (and other North Africans) were unwilling to support France’s position in the un Security Council regarding the war on Iraq. As the International Herald Tribune reported, part of the reason Algeria and other North African states were reluctant to take France’s side was that Algeria was becoming more dependent on U.S. assistance to fight against terrorism at home.⁴³ Meanwhile France had continued to observe the strict arms embargo placed on Algeria, even after the 1995 bombings on the French Metro and elsewhere in Paris and despite the Islamists’ claims to the contrary. Hence, knowing that the North African countries were not eager to side with France in the struggles at the United Nations for fear of a negative American reaction, Chirac made his own appeal for the Algerians and French to unite in the war against international terrorism. “Algeria and France are determined to pool their efforts to fight international terrorism.” By 2003, on the eve of the Iraq conflict, France looked for a formal association with the Algerian government. As he put it in his address to the Algerian Parliament, “We must unite too in order to prepare our future. France and Algeria are part of the same Mediterranean area. We want the Mediterranean once again to become a link between peoples.”

What was the reaction to this state visit by Chirac? President Bouteflika declared that President Chirac should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize if he could prevent the planned U.S. attack on Iraq. Meanwhile, while Bouteflika praised Chirac for rethinking the need for war in Iraq and for his decision to visit Algeria as the first sitting French president since independence, human rights groups took a different approach to Chirac’s visit. In a February 21, 2003, open letter to President Chirac, Human Rights Watch called on Chirac to bring up the issue of the forced “disappearances” of over seven thousand persons during the 1990s by the Algerian government. Human Rights Watch specifically urged Chirac to demand the identity of persons found in mass graves in Algeria and to insist that the Algerian government account for the thousands of abductions. Echoing calls from the era of decolonization, the letter also asked the French to put pressure on Algeria to “establish a commission to investigate ‘disappearances’ that has independence, authority, and integrity to obtain information in the possession of state agencies.”

Set against the strange and surreal backdrop of contemporary France and Algeria, the theatrical absurdities of events like the “Second Coming” of Sartre and de Beauvoir seem almost as believable as history itself. Almost. Nevertheless, set against the bizarre history of Franco-Algerian relations, Toumi’s imagination becomes as poignant as it is useful. His artistic representation and re-situation of historical actors within the hellish conditions of one of the most complicated civil wars of the contemporary era allow for the highlighting of the all-too-real perils within Algeria today. Toumi’s writing is thus perfectly balanced between the make-believe world of artistic license and Algeria’s real-life terrors during and after its war of independence. Toumi’s plays afford unique insights into the connections between the phantoms of an Algeria past and the identity crisis of an Algeria present. This is so because, in many ways, the essence of Toumi’s theatrical work corresponds to the essence of Algeria’s Hamlet-like dilemma: to be or not to be… a militarized, Arabo-Islamic, or secular-pluralistic society. And for Toumi, who is by no means shy to attack both sides, it comes down to a simple question: Will the moral and cultural bankruptcy of Le Pouvoir (the military clans who have ruled the Algerian state with an iron fist after the suspension of the democratic process in 1992) or the jihad of religious extremists be enough to impose a Taliban-like silence on the Algerian populous, especially on Algerian intellectuals? As we shall see, the story of and behind Toumi’s representation of the conflict begins well before the first act of his first play, Madah-Sartre.

As for France, it is not likely fully to overcome the legacy of the war. This would be, perhaps, too much to ask; however, the fact that Jean-Marie Le Pen—who most observers believed had disappeared from the political spectrum—could win 18 percent of the national vote in the 2002 election run-off against Jacques Chirac, campaigning on an extremely vitriolic antiimmigration platform (targeting Muslim North Africans in particular) is itself telling of the problems remaining just under the surface in France. France has a long way to go in overcoming the trauma of decolonization, but the recent spate of publications regarding the use of torture and the debates they sparked indicate that there have been significant developments. The dialogue with the past had continued for many years, but somehow September 11 changed the course of the conversation in unpredictable ways. And there has been a growing realization that we need to better understand decolonization’s relationship to our own time, but this understanding has become at once more complex and more apt.

One salient example of the legacy’s complexity is represented in the August 2004 kidnapping of the two French journalists, Christian Chesnot (Radio France Internationale) and Georges Malbrunot (of Le Figaro), by the Islamic Army of Iraq. According to the Arabic news network Al Jazeera, Chesnot and Malbrunot were taken hostage by these radical Islamists out of protest against the parliamentary law passed in March 2004, banning the wearing of headscarves (by Muslim girls) that was scheduled to take effect in France at the beginning of the 2004 academic year. (They were eventually released in December 2004.) President Chirac, no doubt hoping to immunize France’s domestic Muslims regarding this ban, which was already in the form of proposed legislation, claimed during his trip to Algeria in March 2003 that he indeed understood how the war in Iraq might change things. He stated to a group of Algerian students that “war would simply ‘reinforce the camp of hatred.’ ”⁴⁴ The kidnapping illustrates that the French government had not immunized the French public by its anti–Iraq War stance and the domestic discrimination in public schools had not gone unnoticed among Muslims outside of France. As Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s interim prime minister, stated: “Neutrality doesn’t exist, as the kidnapping of the French journalists has shown. … The French are deluding themselves if they think that they can remain out of this.”⁴⁵

But in France there was universal public outrage against the kidnapping, and in an unusual turn of events, even those Muslim leaders most vociferous in their criticism of the French headscarf ban united behind Chirac’s government, condemned the kidnapping, and stated publicly that efforts to remove the ban would have to be done through domestic legal channels.

In concluding, it is important to bear in mind that today’s urgency in understanding history requires even more vigilance in order not to repeat yesterday’s lessons. Or, in borrowing a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, what should be avoided is a situation in which “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” We must remain on guard against the effects that confessions of torture and the temptation to misuse these confessions may have on events today. This is why, I believe, ghost walking in Algiers can be good exercise for us all. We need not go to a cauldron, as did Macbeth, to conjure up phantoms. Contemporary writers such as Toumi have helped us a great deal in confronting that necessity. Yet the question remains. Are societies, in France and Algeria, and now elsewhere throughout the world, able to hear these new voices of dissent, or will they succumb to the temptation to make foulness fair by forming heroes out of the clay of yesterday’s villains?