The State of Algeria: The Politics of a Post-Colonial Legacy 9780755609154, 9781784533700

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To all those who battled and are battling for Algeria to survive

‘Ma voix sera la liberte´ de celles qui s’affaissent au cachot du de´sespoir.’ Aime´ Ce´saire

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project, which was undertaken under the aegis of the 2011 –12 Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Program on Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa launched by the Centre of African Studies of the University of Cambridge, introduced me to the ‘very best society’ (Herman Melville). My debts, both academic and personal, are many and heartfelt. It is a pleasure to thank the various people and institutions for their assistance during my research and its transformation into a publishable form. This book would have never reached its final state without the fellowship the Centre of African studies of the University of Cambridge granted me from October 2011 to March 2012. My greatest debt is therefore in the first place to the CAS where most of the book had been researched. I must single out Professor Megan Vaughan, then Director of the Centre, for special praise. Her support had been unwavering and had taken countless forms. I should also like to thank Christopher Clapham, then Editor of the Journal of Modern African Studies at the University of Cambridge and John Birchall, Centre of African Studies, whose scholarly guidance helped me clarify my thinking. But my strength may have faltered if not for the faith of a number of friends and colleagues. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Lowe, Middle East Research Centre Manager at London School of Economics and Political Science who not only offered me a desk and a computer during my numerous visits to LSE, but also the necessary home and inspiring ambiance without which the intellectual ferment

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underlying this book would have been impossible. I wish also to extend my sincere thanks to John King of The Society for Algerian Studies in London. Both scholars devoted much of their precious time to discuss my project and made numerous contacts to help me. Without their continued efforts and support, I would have been unable to bring my work to a successful completion. Jonathan Hill, expert on the Maghreb, also deserves huge thanks for his extraordinary kindness and generosity of time. I should like to extend my warmest thanks to the staff of both the Centre of African studies and LSE Middle East Research Centre for their patience in handling my numerous requests with the most helpful and warming good cheer, namely Dorian Addison, Judith Weik and Victoria Jones (CAS), Sarah Masry and Ribale Sleiman-Haida (LSE). Last but not least, I would like to thank the I.B.Tauris entire Editorial Board for their kind appreciation of my manuscript and Pat FitzGerald for copy-editing it. Thanks are also due to my institution which offered me, these two last years, grants allowing me to pay for my travel expenses to the UK and finalise my book.

ABBREVIATIONS

ACB ADPF AEF AFEEC AIS AOF AML APN APC APEL APW AUMA BBR BDPA CADC CAOM CEDAW CFCM CMA CNRA CORIF

Association culturelle Berbe`re Association pour la de´fense et promotion des femmes Association pour l’e´mancipation des femmes Association des femmes pour l’e´galite´ et l’exercice de la citoyennete´ Arme´e Islamique du Salut Afrique Occidentale Franc
aise Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberte´ Assemble´e populaire nationale Assemble´e populaire communale Association pour l’e´galite´ devant la loi Assemble´e populaire de wilaya Association des oule´mas musulmans Alge´riens Bleu Blanc Rouge Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action Coordination of the Aarch, Dairas and Communes Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women Conseil franc
ais du culte musulman Algerian Muslim Congress Conseil national de la re´volution Alge´rienne Conseil de re´flexion sur l’Islam en France

ABBREVIATIONS

CPRW CRAPE CSW ENA FACAF FFS FIS FLN GIA GSPC HCA HCE ICCPR IMF INALCO JOANP JORDPA MAK MCB MENA MIA MRN MSP MTLD NBBR OAU PCA PPA PSL RAP RCD UDMA UNJA ZEP ZUP

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Convention on the Political Rights of Women Centre de recherche en anthropologie pre´historique et ethnographique Commission on the Status of Women E´toile Nord-Africaine Fe´de´ration des Associations Culturelles Amazigh en France Front des Forces Socialistes Front de Salvation Islamique Front de Libe´ration Nationale Groupe Islamique Arme´ Groupe Salafiste pour la Pre´dication et le Combat Haut Comite´ pour l’Amazighite´ Haut Comite´ d’Etat International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights International Monetary Fund Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales Journal officiel de l’assemble´e nationale et populaire Journal officiel de la re´publique de´mocratique et populaire d’Alge´rie Mouvement pour l’autonomie de la Kabylie Mouvement culturel Berbe`re Middle East and North Africa Mouvement islamique arme´ Mouvement du renouveau national Mouvement de la socie´te´ pour la paix Mouvement pour le triomphe des liberte´s de´mocratiques Non Bleu Blanc Rouge Organisation of African Unity Parti communiste Alge´rien Parti populaire Alge´rien Personal Status Law Rock Against Police Rallie pour la culture et la de´mocratie Union De´mocratique du Manifeste Alge´rien Union Nationale de la Jeunesse Alge´rienne Zone d’e´ducation prioritaire Zone urbaine prioritaire

INTRODUCTION

‘Citizen’ and ‘Citizenship’ are powerful words. They speak of respect, rights, of dignity . . . [Citizenship] is a weighty, monumental word.1 Globalisation has given rise to diverse ideas regarding notions of citizenship and national identity. Historically, citizenship emerged as a way of defining the status of the individual in sharp distinction to definitions based on ascribed social status. It was meant to replace the arbitrariness of claims with the idea of the individual’s rights guaranteed by law and upheld by the State. This gave rise to a universal notion of citizenship, regardless of the individual’s place in the social hierarchy. However this model of citizenship has rarely translated into practice because a set of constraints has undermined the exercise of the freedoms upheld by these rights. Changing political boundaries, the affirmation of cultural difference, the resurgence of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, ethnic hostilities and increased migrations have destabilised citizenship and have been instrumental in stimulating interest in this issue, not only in Europe but also in the African continent. Most talk about citizenship revolves around three main questions: who is entitled to enjoy citizenship; what does citizenship entail for its holders; and who belongs to the nation? In many instances, inclusion simply comes to mean seeking legitimacy, both from the State and society, to carve out a course of action in a game that is essentially between the powerful and the

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powerless. A critical look beneath the rhetoric of rights appears to point to the fact that being an individual in the liberal democratic sense of the word is both a process and a luxury that few can afford in reality. Indeed, while the liberal perspective pretends to recognise equality of status, it permits different kinds of social inequalities within the citizenry. This ambivalence has resulted in both the erosion of diverse citizenship rights and resurgent attempts to radically reconstruct the meaning of citizenship. Before explaining why such identities have become so politically explosive in recent years, I consider it necessary to look at questions such as how citizenship is to be conceptualised, how it did evolve and what are its elements?

Evolving meanings of citizenship Citizenship is multilayered. It operates on the regional, national and supranational levels. It is experienced differently given the context in which people are located and its meaning and very definition is changing with time. Today, even its core is changing. The evolution of different Western definitions of citizenship has led to a conception of citizenship that includes three main dimensions. The first is citizenship as legal status, defined by civil, political and social rights. The second views citizens specifically as political agents, actively participating in a society’s political institutions. The third refers to citizenship as membership in a political community that provides a distinct source of identity. Today there is greater recognition of the significant variations in what actually existing citizenship entails in terms of either the rights it confers on citizens or the meaning it has for those it inscribes. Citizenship has become a key nexus of equality and inequality. It draws the demarcation line between who is a citizen and who is not. Noncitizens are of two groups: those living in and those living outside a particular state. Amongst those living in a state, we distinguish four distinct groups of people: first, stateless residents or those who hold nationality neither in the state in which they live nor in any other state. Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon are one such example. The second group comprises individuals who are nationals of the country in which they are living but who formally lack full standing in the society. These ‘second-class citizens’ deserve equal respect along with other members of

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the polity but share the rights of citizens only in theory because they are marginalised by their societies, as is the case of women. The third group consists of residents who lack citizenship where they are currently living but who hold it elsewhere. This group is composed mostly of immigrants. The fourth group is what might be referred to as ‘stunted’ citizens. As settlement became citizenship, unprecedented numbers of legal permanent residents made their way into and through the naturalisation process. However, much remains at issue in this struggle over the boundaries and terms of citizenship. In its narrowest sense, citizenship thus boils down to nationality, i.e. the possession of formal legal membership in a specific nation state, recognised under both international and domestic law. Strictly speaking, citizenship entails inclusion while nationality involves exclusion: citizenship defines the internal relationship of the individual to the State and nationality defines the external relationship between states with respect to their citizens: one is, for instance, a British national as opposed to a French national but one is a British citizen because one has certain rights within the British polity. But there is more to citizenship than rights. The study of citizenship, which began as the study of political rights and democratic governance within Western politics and philosophy, now subsumes a broader sociological perspective. Citizenship affirms and legitimates social standing within a society: struggles over its meaning and membership are consequently also struggles for social recognition. The focus on this society-centred approach is a way to reflect on a general vision of humanity. Its main concern is with the institutions of citizenship, social identity, the nature of inequality and access to socio-economic and cultural resources. These resources include not only economic resources such as social security, healthcare entitlements, housing, employment, income and retirement, but also cultural resources such as education, knowledge, the right to speak one’s own language and rights relating to religious freedom. The rights to cultural resources can be conceptualised within the paradigm of cultural capital via Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theories.2 From a sociological perspective, citizenship moreover provides modern society with a crucial element of solidarity. All human societies are divided or organised along two contradictory tenets: solidarity and scarcity.3 Scarcity is manifest in social inequality, a problem that modern

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societies face. However scarcity also follows the contours of gender, ethnicity and age. This clash between scarcity and the need for social solidarity in a pluralistic context is the core point of citizenship. In order to survive, human societies have therefore to find a common ground to cope with the problems of difference, diversity and conflict. And citizenship provides this sort of cement which holds together societies divided by social class, gender, ethnicity and age groups. From a political perspective, however, models of citizenship have a sharper focus on political rights, the State and the individual and rights to expression through political means such as parliaments. The notion of citizenship moreover contains a notion of the civic virtues regarded as indispensable to the functioning of democracy. Citizens are related to institutions of authority by virtue of the rights and duties conferred on them through constitutions, laws and policies and citizenship relates to people’s aspirations for justice, their attempts to challenge exclusionary practices and bring about change. The agency to claim rights and discharge duties is clearly central to citizenship in practice. It is critical to the transformation of citizenship when it is mobilised by disenfranchised groups for the goal of recognition and inclusion. The institution of citizenship thus finds its primary expression in the dictum ‘all citizens are equal before the law’, which entails the progressive inclusion of all individuals making up the people into a formally equal relationship to the State itself. In the liberal sense, citizenship is defined in relation to belonging and inclusion in the nation state. When individuals become citizens, they not only have access to a range of institutions, which confers on them rights and obligations, but they also acquire an identity and become members of a political community. In this connection, Liah Greenfield believes that while people’s essence has been defined by different identities in history and in different societies such as religion, estate or caste, it is, however, the national identity that defines the people’s essence in the modern world; hence, it is ‘the most powerful’4 in the sense that it is an important connective element in the history of nationalism, which can be defined as a collective action aimed at making the boundaries of the nation coterminous with those of its governance unit. The belief that nation and state are one and the same entity has led multicultural states to undertake the construction of a single nation by

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trying to integrate minority cultures into the culture of the politically dominant group. Conversely, it has led minority cultures to defend their separate identity and seek political control over their own affairs. In other words, some groups wield the political power they have in order to construct a national identity, whereas others seek political power in order to protect and even reconstruct a national identity that they believe already exists. I am, of course, cognizant of the empirical difficulties posed by this definition of nationalism. Claims of identity of any kind are difficult to document. This is why many analysts have instead defined nationalism as a set of endeavours to forge formal cohesion, evident in collective action. Liah Greenfield’s recent work demonstrates that the explanation of nationalism based on prior cohesion continues to be advocated. She argues that the ‘collective solidarity’ of nationalism emerges when a population is ‘perceived as essentially homogeneous’,5 thereby with any identity crisis resolved. In Africa, however, the forging of such nationalism proved a real dilemma. In the absence of more cohering objective factors, popular allegiance to centralised authority could not be taken for granted. In many cases, there has been no state action that could encourage the process of community cohesion and loyalty. Even the dreams of liberation did not translate into a political reality.

The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion in Africa Nowadays, the exclusion of social groups within the same society defines the new nationalism in Africa. And the new national question seems to be, ‘who has citizenship but should not have it, and who should have it but does not have it’.6 In the African context, as the nation state, with a few exceptions, derives a great deal of its territorial integrity from colonial boundaries carved out in the nineteenth century, the challenge of fashioning modern nation states from the resultant artificial territorial entities became extremely difficult after independence. Post-independent governments had been faced with the challenge of cementing a national identity by welding their multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious countries into one nation to promote political and economic stability. In order to achieve this goal of nation-building, these governments embarked on programmes of vigorous economic and social modernisation that, it was

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hoped, could weaken ethnic consciousness and foster a new sense of nationhood. But instead of promoting national citizenship, as implied by nation building, Africa has been the theatre of some of the most tragic manifestations of the crisis of the nation state project as, for instance, the tragic collapse of the nation state in Somalia and Liberia, the state of paralysis in Zaire, Cameroon and Togo, the genocides in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing in Kenya, the crisis in Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria and the vast number of murders carried out by Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria, to name but a few. Political pressures contributed to the emergence of discourses of inclusion and exclusion, the ‘us’ and ‘them’, which form the basis of a strategic exclusionary nationalism in most African states, and Algeria is no exception. While the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion has been a central concern in African political discourse and has been at the core of heated debates in the context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Algeria has been sorely neglected, as research demonstrates. Strangely enough, the perceptions of the African State and all available evidence about the African experience converge towards Sub-Saharan Africa. We hear a lot about the advent of citizenship in Rwanda, Zaire and Nigeria, for instance, but very few writers have considered the questions of nationalism and nation-building, identity, ethnicity, gender, autochthony and the politics of belonging in North Africa. I am therefore ultimately sympathetic to the view that citizenship need not be conceived of in a way that confines it to Sub-Saharan Africa. The history and experiences of North African countries thus make a compelling and urgent case for study. In Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, for instance, the issues of ethnic identity and the extent to which they determine inclusion or exclusion from citizenship are quite different from those of Sub-Saharan Africa. Given the large number of groups in African countries outside North Africa that can stake a legitimate claim to some space of their own and given the many internal divisions that afflict those groups, it is clear that the approach for tackling the countries’ crises would differ. In addition, the notion of nation state, both in practice and in theory, is treated differently in the sense that it is a sphere of political power and not a means of power as it is in Sub-Saharan Africa. North African countries have other peculiarities. First, if language is an index of ethnicity, then Sub-Saharan Africa is multi-lingual, with the presence of hundreds of

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different indigenous languages, which is not the case in North Africa. North African countries are generally bilingual. Also, although anti-colonial nationalism had been driven by historical grievances over the expropriation of land, unlike many SubSaharan African societies, where the twin concepts of people and place are used as interlinked means through which to define citizenship, in North African countries such as Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco the ultimate proof of belonging is not the ability to possess land. Another conspicuous difference is that most Sub-Saharan African countries suffer from the weight of pluralistic legal and constitutional systems. Ethnic discrimination in citizenship law may exclude those affected not only from the right to vote and hold public office, but also from the right to access education, health and other goods and services, as well as from the right to freedom of movement. Statistics show, for instance, that an estimated 30 per cent of the Ivory Coast’s people had been denationalised following the amendments of Coˆte d’Ivoire’s citizenship laws between 1995 and 2000. Similarly, at the time of writing, the citizenship of more than 1.5 million Banyamulenge people of Eastern Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is still being disputed; another 1.5 million Zimbabwean workers born of parents originating from Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia saw their nationality arbitrarily cancelled by the government of Zimbabwe in 2001. The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia also involved cancellation of nationality and forced population transfers. The list is endless. These examples easily demonstrate that statelessness and citizenship are together the most serious human security and human rights problems in Sub-Saharan Africa today. But such issues do not affect North African countries. Other factors undermine the integrity of governments and their institutions, dislocate families, destroy the livelihoods of those affected, render the victims open to further abuses of their rights and lead to war. Also to date, the literature has usually approached the subject of democratic consolidation from a Sub-Saharan African perspective, with whole countries as the units of analysis and comparison. Yet we can only do justice to the topic by also posing a similar set of questions at a North African level: are North African people any more or less attached to democracy than East, West or South African people? Are they any more or less likely to act as democratic citizens? If democracy consists of

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‘rule by the people’, then the values, attitudes and behaviours of ordinary folk are central to considerations of the fate of democracy. This project, which was undertaken under the aegis of the Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme on Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa launched by the Centre of African Studies of the University of Cambridge from October 2011 to March 2012, represents a pioneering attempt to approach the question of citizenship in Algeria. It aims to contribute to the development of a research agenda on the topic of inclusive citizenship, particularly the challenges it presents in the Algerian context. Trying to understand recent political experiences in Algeria should move us away from the earlier approaches towards interpreting politics and the State in Algeria. Conflicts that have arisen over the resources of the post-colonial State are increasingly legitimated through recourse to claims of nationhood and citizenship. Most studies of identity in Algerian history focus on the colonial period. This book, however, proposes another line of inquiry. It argues that historical processes in French Algeria deeply impacted on the construction of nationhood in independent Algeria. Algeria’s postcolonial history can therefore be seen a series of attempts to come to terms with the dire consequences of the colonial past. Nowhere is this truer than in the cultural realm. And no discussion of contemporary Algerian politics would be complete without close attention to the national question. The exploration of the wide range of issues posed by social and political integration will help to understand the challenges facing Algerians as they try to define national identity and struggle to overcome their difficulties. This new theoretical framework, I hope, will contribute to a deeper understanding of Algeria and its place not only in the African continent but also in the modern era. This book therefore highlights the importance of substantive as well as formal equality of rights as the basis of democratic citizenship and the role of the State in blocking equality of citizenship and suggests the need for grassroots collective action by marginalised groups as a key route to building citizenship identity and practices from the bottom up. Through the exploration of these themes within a rights-based approach, I hope to deepen the reader’s understanding of the meaning and application of concepts such as citizenship, participation and accountability in the context of Algeria.

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This work is thus part of the rediscovery of citizenship within sociology and political science that characterised research agendas in the 1980s. My approach, however, goes beyond the Marshallian theoretical framework. While the language that dominates British sociologist, T.H. Marshall’s work on citizenship7 constantly refers to social class, welfare and citizenship, most debates about citizenship in contemporary political theory are about the question of contested collective identity in a context of radical pluralisation. Marshall’s notion of citizenship thus proves to be too restricted for the study of current developments in the sense that it overlooks the cultural dimension of citizenship that is now an essential element in citizenship studies, especially in the context of globalisation. It is evident that the majority of societies nowadays are multicultural and highly diverse and one crucial issue for these societies is the political management of difference and diversity. Marshall’s ‘British’ view of citizenship says nothing about ethnic diversity. Also, for Marshall, identity is taken for granted. Many people over the world have dual citizenship; therefore they have a dual identity. Marshall does not provide any clue for understanding citizenship in a multicultural context. Citizenship struggles in late twentieth-century society are often about claims to cultural identity and cultural history. A good illustration of the expansion of cultural citizenship in terms of rights to education would be the mushrooming of universities in the middle of the twentieth century. The numerous educational changes in Africa – and in Algeria in particular – are indicative of a more general democratisation of culture. Marshall also dismisses the rights of women as full human beings. His theory has been challenged by feminist political theorists who reject the assumptions that women are ‘domestic’ labourers and reproducers of society. Another critical issue in Marshall’s theory is that it assumes that the rights of citizenship are cumulative and that once legal rights are acquired they cannot be eroded by subsequent social struggles. This statement is invalid with regard to some African countries. If we consider full employment as an entitlement, it may be the case that social rights are obliterated or weakened as a result of economic rationalism. This book thus offers an alternative reading of the concept of citizenship, nationhood and political space and is a modest attempt to remedy Marshall’s lacuna in the study of citizenship.

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The analysis in this manuscript is structured around three main discourses: French colonial discourse; Algerian nationalist discourse; and post-colonial discourse, as stated in the seven chapters, which are organised into two broad parts. While much of the literature on the construction of democratic citizenship focuses on the formal mechanisms for the protection of legal, political and civil rights, often through the rule of law and State institutions, the chapters that follow point to the importance of a more multidimensional approach through the examination of how the civil and political intersect with other rights, including social, economic and ‘knowledge’ rights. In the construction of discourses of national identity, history invariably plays a fundamental role. The past, its representations and misrepresentations are of foundational importance in eradicating collective identities. In the case of Algeria, the period of French colonisation decisively shaped the interpretation of the historical course of the nation. It is thus through the lens of an extended analysis of citizenship under colonial rule that the cultural battle for the soul of the nation begins. French colonial influence and its enduring effects both on identity construction and on interpretations of these identities are thus addressed in the first part of the book. Chapter 1 describes the pacification of Algeria. Because colonialism has had a powerful and lasting impact on Africa, Algeria can neither be explained nor understood without first unravelling some of the country’s colonial experience. The establishment of formal French administrations and implantation of settlement meant the complete transformation of both the physical and cultural landscapes of Algeria. In accordance with the doctrines of the civilising mission, assimilation and association, France set about to transform Algeria and its native people by initiating a complete overhaul of its political, economic, social and cultural institutions, disregarding the culture and history of the indigenous peoples. The French colonisers destructured then restructured the colonised people and in the process depersonalised them. Accordingly, colonialism created two brands of people in the colonies: subjects and citizens. Chapter 2 focuses on citizenship under French colonial rule. The history of the colonial period in Algeria has been the subject of substantial comment and analysis in French literature; however, the issue of identity and citizenship relating to Algeria has been sorely neglected

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in Africanist scholarship. The time is thus ripe to reconsider the problematic of identity in Franco – Algerian relations. Drawing on insights from the field of colonial studies along with archival sources,8 I shall study those political rights that had been granted to the noncitizen natives from 1865 onwards. I shall also delve into how French settlement in Algeria contributed to the creation of diverse colonial political identities, then attempt to explain those patterns of political identification that emerged at the onset and during the Algerian War of the 1950s. This will lead to an account of why the two categories, ‘French’ and ‘Algerian’, came to predominate the political discourse surrounding the conflict; why such a deep and oppositional divide developed between the two modes of identification; and why such confusion about those terms prevailed in the early years of the Algerian War of Independence. Not surprisingly, because of the ambivalent identities created by French colonialism in Algeria, much of the post-colonial era has been characterised by battles to extend, defend or give substance to political, civil and social rights of citizenship and more recently, to forge new claims to cultural rights. Following this contextualisation, in the second part of the book I turn to a consideration of the reframing of citizenship. Researchers from the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability have reshaped our understanding of citizens and drawn attention to the many approaches to development and democracy that consign different roles to citizens. According to them, a neoliberal approach would define citizens as ‘consumers who exercise voice by deciding where to spend or invest their money’.9 A narrow state reform approach on the other hand, sees citizens ‘as users and choosers of state services who may exercise voice by holding the state accountable but do not help shape policies themselves’.10An electoral democracy approach ‘constructs citizens as electors, who participate through elections and yet are more passive in between elections’.11 A legalistic human rights approach frames citizens ‘as holders of legal rights, but focuses on the delivery of rights by the duty-bearers, not through the action of the citizens themselves’.12 It is pertinent to try and see which approach would fit the Algerian context and how Algerian citizens interact with and view the institutions that serve them. One salient question that dominates Algerian social policy discourse today is the question of social inclusion/exclusion. In the political

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sphere, this discourse has been deployed in such a way as to mask the continuation of colonial policies. It is clear from this that the socially inclusive society is not easy to conceptualise. Since independence, Algeria’s growing integration into the global economy and various political and cultural tensions contributed to the struggle for an autonomous civil society. This second part of the book thus analyses what Anna Yeatman depicts as ‘exclusions from within’, those that derive from the relationships between individuals or groups and the nation state and ‘exclusions from without’, which occur when people move beyond their nation state.13 It provides an insight into the dynamic and contested character of contemporary Algerian-ness. I shall therefore analyse the interface between citizenship and the nation state and seek to answer these questions: what does it mean to be an Algerian citizen in the postindependent era; what is the nexus between the State and citizenship; and finally, does the latter seek to create a common national identity for the members of apolitical community i.e. the State? Answering these questions leads to a number of subsidiary questions such as: what determines the values that constitute citizenship; what does citizenship mean for the wider Algerian society and the effectiveness of the political system; and what are the main factors that bar progress towards greater inclusion? Algerian nationalists fought the struggle for independence under the banner of civic identity, yet the various identity claims that appeared in the post-colonial period contradict the aims of the nationalist struggle. Chapter 3 highlights the impasse that continues to characterise the politics of nationhood in Algeria. It examines some examples of struggles for citizenship and reflects on what these examples might imply for expanded notions of democratic citizenship. The analysis will reveal that national integration, once the holy grail of national policy, was displaced if not replaced by newer concepts which conflict with democracy. Rather than place a premium on the individual, as is the case in democracies, the tendency has been to de-individualise. This chapter therefore attempts to capture not only the factors that help to explain continuities in the experience of exclusion but also, and more importantly, the factors that lead to change. It concludes by considering some institutional barriers to collective action that have had the paradoxical effect of inhibiting democracy in Algeria. In the 1980s, for

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instance, although the Algerian democratic transition was one of the first processes of political liberalisation in the Muslim world to embody the principles of the ‘Third Wave’ of democratisation,14 the process of democratic transition drove the country towards the brink of disaster. During this period, three types of identity contestation manifested themselves almost simultaneously in the Algerian political scene for the first time since independence in 1962: the fundamentalists’ demands for the total Islamisation of Algeria; the feminist claims for full enforcement of women’s constitutional citizenship rights, threatened by the then Personal Status legislation; and the ethnic Berber calls for official recognition of the Berber Amazigh language and culture. In the same period, the Berber/Amazigh Culture Movement cut across national boundaries and became a transnational phenomenon of ethno-cultural assertion in France. Chapter 4 addresses the need for a reassessment of issues relating to identity in the light of current transformations in society as a whole, and religion in particular. It explores the causes of religious violence and addresses such questions as: does globalisation unite or divide religions; does it have a direct nexus with fundamentalism and religion-linked terrorism; what elements of religion contribute to violence and protracted conflict; and how does religious identity motivate groups engaged in aggressive behaviour? In attempting to answer these questions, I shall throw light on the Algerian Islamist Movement and its political activists to show that they are theocrats whose main concern was basically to challenge the nation state. I shall also refer to the Islamists’ stand on issues such as democracy and how they reconciled it with the concept of Al Hakimia or Divine Sovereignty, the concept of citizenship, individual as well as collective freedoms, including freedom of thought, freedom of belief and freedom of expression, basic human rights, rights of women and the right of minorities. Additionally, I shall discuss the issue of Islam and Algeria’s bid for democratisation between 1989 and 1992 and explore the relationship between democracy and the political dimension of Islam by emphasising that the Islamist movement is a contradictory product of modernity and that it meets ideological limits impeding the construction of a modern state. In this connection, I shall attempt to identify and analyse some of the concerns that have arisen about the nation state in Algeria following the

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cancellation of the elections in the 1990s, and attempt to assess the State’s response to the challenges it has had to contend with since the annulment of the election results. Here, I shall focus on the effects that the Islamists’ participation in elections had for the political importance of religious identity, specifically, the religious exclusivity of their political goals. Two major themes emerged in the Islamophobic discourse: its alleged inclination towards jihad-intoxicated fanaticism and its apparently misogynistic gender relations. To discuss citizenship and belonging meaningfully, it is thus important to document how women relate to the identity markers, with male-engineered structures of ‘unity’. Chapter 5 is therefore a contribution to current efforts to re-energise and re-politicise the gender equality agenda. One of the great inconsistencies of modernity has been that the moment of ‘universal’ emancipation was also the moment of female subservience and exclusion. The debate about the legal status of women, which dates back to the colonial period, became more acute when Algeria gained independence from France. If citizenship means equality vis-a`-vis the law and the entitlements that come with it and if the term ‘nation’ means ‘to be born’, why are Algerian women not part of the motherland? Why are they homeless at home? Given that citizenship is mandatory in the modern nation state, why is it that this same modern nation state has decreed a masculine citizen? Have gender discourses changed in Algeria in the new millennium? How equal is women’s participation in politics across the country today? Do Algerian women enjoy full citizenship in the political sphere today? Are their claims to social citizenship rights best couched in the language of equality with men or in the language of difference? Alternatively, is it possible to develop policies and practices that draw on both approaches? Such are the questions I shall attempt to answer to shed light on the role of citizenship in relation to the protection of Algerian women’s rights. Chapter 5 will clarify how the category of citizenship for women in Algeria has been created and re-created in three distinct periods: colonial, nationalist and the State-run regime of the current president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. I shall thus consider the colonial/post-colonial categorisation by tracking the legal position of women through the crucial transition from the period of French domination to the newly independent Algerian regime. I shall, moreover, consider the ambivalent nature of

INTRODUCTION

15

Algerian women’s relationship to the State, which simultaneously offers a route to independence and yet too often constructs women as men’s dependents. A discussion of recent reforms of family codes will elucidate the complicated relations between State and feminists in the country. This could help to carve out a role for public action not only in terms of the policies undertaken by decision makers but also in terms of the actions taken by those social actors who attempt to build more inclusive models of citizenship. In doing so, I shall analyse some key laws, social practices and institutions through which citizenship has privileged a masculine citizen to show that the notion of woman as a full autonomous individual separable from man and family has little credence in the Algerian context. But before embarking on a discussion of Algerian women’s condition, I deem it important to attempt a comparison between the status of women in some other countries of the Maghreb, namely Tunisia and Morocco, in order to show that although these countries share some affinities with Algeria, citizenship takes on different forms. Finally, I shall discuss the importance of affirmative action, embedded in the gender equality and development policy, in relation to women’s representation in civic and parliamentary elections in Algeria using the 2012 legislative elections. The subaltern status of Algerian women today points to other inequalities. Citizenship as a powerful tool of protest in the hands of social groups, such as the Berbers, opened up a new era of inquiry into the many dimensions of citizenship and their culturally specific expressions as well. Embodied within the Berber agenda was the securitisation of an exclusive Berber identity. The quest for cultural authenticity, perceived as the basis of collective dignity and hence freedom, is a worldwide contemporary phenomenon in which Berber intellectuals and activists actively participate. However if Algerian-ness is itself a questionable concept, then how can an Algerian person speak of authenticity? What models will serve as reference to the Algerians in their desire to recover a national identity? In considering the question of language use, can Algerian people say that they still have a national story that meets Ernest Renan’s requirements: ‘A nation as a soul, a spiritual principle.’15 One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories and the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form; the other is present-day consent, the

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desire of a people to live together, which he summarised by a famous phrase, ‘having done great things together and wishing to do more?’16 Chapter 6 fuses securitisation theory with social identity theory. It focuses on the significance of the Berber identity in terms of a complex nexus of society, politics and identity. The analysis develops a genealogy of ‘Berber’ and traces how the Arab/Berber divide was first constructed. As a model for identity formation, the securitisation theory will help us examine how the French colonisers structured the categories Arab/ Berber to achieve political aims in particular contexts. Additionally, I shall attempt to describe how the securitisation of a particular identity within a larger community may serve as a contributing factor to conflict. As education and language constituted the major foci of legislation, this chapter thus looks at the role of language as an ethnic element in conflict and discusses why it has had a special place in Algeria’s political conflicts. I shall analyse the language policies as the outcome of endogenous developments and attempt to sketch a synthetic view of the complex nature of the relationship between Berber, Arabic and Islam in Algeria. This chapter thus assesses the relevance language has for the politics of recognition and discusses recent initiatives which aim at anchoring the protection of Berber linguistic identity in a catalogue of civil rights. The wave of Berberism, which began in Algeria, took on transnational dimensions. The Acade´mie Berbe`re played a prominent role for the emigrant Kabyle community in France. The distinct, yet overlapping diasporic identities that emerged there before and more specifically after independence in 1962 bear witness to the salience of Algeria as a contentious and shifting marker of belonging. One key question that research for the construction of inclusive forms of citizenship might address is that of the processes by which migrant groups define themselves and are defined by others and the extent to which these definitions are significant in their subordinate status. The last chapter thus examines displacement in light of differing theoretical meanings of citizenship. If citizenship connotes inclusion and belonging in a political community, i.e. the possession of political, social and economic rights and the promise of equality between fellow citizens and social groups, the flipside of citizenship is that noncitizens are excluded from membership in the community and often denied the right to equal

INTRODUCTION

17

treatment. This reverse side of citizenship is particularly relevant in the context of migrants. In the final chapter, I shall primarily be concerned with what might be referred to as ‘stunted’ citizens who, in contrast to ‘second-class’ citizens, possess both nationality and formal legal equality in their country of residence. This chapter therefore focuses on the immigrants’ political claims and highlights how the struggle over the boundaries and terms of citizenship in France, not only for Algerian immigrants but also more generally in the public life, has given rise to several sorts of transnational citizenry. In negotiating a hybrid identity that positions them between the local, national and global, what place do Algerians hold in France today and what are the consequences for France of their participation in transnational activities? In rejecting the process of assimilation and, in their rejection of the French national identity, what type of belonging do Franco-Algerians seek? To answer these questions I shall examine different kinds of sources. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s analyses, I shall examine the configurations of the French nation state to determine the degree and form of inclusiveness/exclusiveness of the French national regime in relation to ethnic difference: first, the criteria for formal access to citizenship; second, the cultural obligations that this access to citizenship entails. The first dimension relates to the distinction between an ethno-cultural (jus sanguinis) and a civic territorial (jus soli) basis of criteria for attributing full citizenship, with the ethno-cultural being the more ‘closed’ and civic territorial the more ‘open’ version. The second dimension relates to the distinction between assimilationism and cultural pluralism as the condition that a State places on attributing citizenship. By combining these dimensions one arrives at three ideal-type citizenship regimes that can be related to specific examples of European countries: the ethnocultural exclusionist, civic assimilationist and the multicultural pluralist. By studying the tensions and contradictions that arise within debates on social inclusion, I shall explore strategies through which Algerians experience exclusion in France. To understand the place racism takes in French society, I shall attempt to flesh out the position of the Algerians in France to determine what kind of content is in accordance with the human rights perspective provided by French laws. I shall focus on the mythical discourse of dominantly French cultural unity and distinctiveness which has spilt over into cultural exclusionism. With this

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thread in mind, I shall examine the paradoxical French republican philosophy of integration, laden with a thick conception of citizenship (citoyennete´) and the actually poorly articulated French philosophy of multiculturalism and race relations, then probe the barriers and pathways to participatory citizenship and social cohesion. Although an important body of contemporary theory deals with the subject of the duties of citizenship, my focus here is more on the rights such as civil rights, political rights and social rights, according to Marshall’s classical definition of citizenship. One of the main questions to be explored is: who fits the definition of French national identity? To tackle this question, I shall consider the role of France’s mode of political citizenship, republicanism, hence the subject of integration. Theoretically, my approach is inspired from Patrick Ireland’s 1994 institutional channelling theory in so far as he stresses the impact of the institutional context on immigrant mobilisation and, at the same time, looks at dimensions of political opportunities which are specific to the field of immigration and ethnic relations. The relevance of this theory in comparison to the class and race/ethnicity theories is that it highlights the importance of the dominant political and legal institutions shaping and limiting the migrants’ choice possibilities. My analysis also draws on the work of the French-Algerian sociologist, Abdelmalek Sayad, who, like Socrates, shows us that the immigrant, in particular the Algerian, is atopos, a quaint hybrid devoid of place and trapped betwixt and between social being and non-being; neither citizen nor foreigner in the host country. This out-of-place condition forces us to rethink the question of the legitimate foundations of citizenship and the relationship between citizen, State and nation. Each of the cases for inclusion/exclusion discussed in the various chapters of this book will show how deeply the obsession with belonging is rooted in Algerian society. These issues are thus too crucial to be left out. Each of these chapters on Algerian perspectives on citizenship, moreover, highlights the gaps in knowledge and proposes areas for new research, hence my incentive to write this book that, I hope, will contribute new empirically grounded perspectives to current debates related to deepening democracy, realising rights-based development and making institutions more responsive to the needs and voices of oppressed people.

PART I ALGERIA UNDER COLONIAL EYES

Joint circumstances turned France’s eyes towards Africa rather than any other part of the globe. First, because of the series of colonial conflicts1 between France and Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, together with the lack of expansion that the French Empire saw under the reigns of Louis XVIII (1814–24) and Charles X (1824– 30). Second, the signature of the Treaty of Paris by which France’s defeat in the War of the Sixth Coalition on 30 May 1814 was made absolute, as a result of which France was stripped of some of the territories it had gained under Napoleon I: in Italy, the Low Countries and the strategically important colonies of Malta, the Island of Mauritius, the Seychelles, Tobago and St Lucia. This decline, coupled with France’s expulsion from India and North America and the demoralising defeat that France suffered at the hands of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870– 71, which resulted in the loss of the prized territories of Alsace-Lorraine, left the French Empire shaking. After so many defeats, the French saw colonisation in Africa as a chance to regain some of their lost dignity and prestige in their traditional competition against the British. From the mid-1800s, committed imperialists known as the Parti Colonial set themselves the task of raising again France’s international standing in order to restore equilibrium to the French order. Determined to gain access to raw material and markets and to spread the Catholic faith, this group of conservative politicians, industrialists, capitalists and missionaries

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sought to conquer unknown lands. The Parti managed to win support for the steady expansion in the number and size of France’s overseas possessions. As part of this initiative of rehabilitation of its empire, France then took possession of several territories in both Africa and Asia and established a new empire there. In 1895, Coˆte d’Ivoire, Dahomey, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sudan and Upper Volta were organised as the federation of French West Africa, Afrique Occidentale Franc
aise (AOF), which unified a vast, culturally and linguistically diverse region under one administrative body. This was followed by the establishment of French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Franc
aise), comprising the colonies of Chad, Gabon, Middle Congo and Oubangui-Chari, which combined under one central administrative body a large number of disparate ethnic and linguistic groups. The French holdings in Africa also included the Maghreb. Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia made up the French colonies in North Africa. Although often known as French North Africa, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were never placed under a similar structure. While Algeria became part and parcel of France, Morocco and Tunisia were established as protectorates.2 Following the annexation of different territories in Berlin in 1884, citizenship was ascribed by each imperial power to Africans. Colonialism created two brands of people in the colonies: the subjects, not entitled to citizenship rights or benefits, and the citizens with rights and privileges associated with citizenship. More importantly, by fragmenting the local people into ‘native authorities’, with different sets of customary or tribal laws, the colonial regime constructed and fermented ethnic identities which were later to plague the State and polity in most African states during the nationalist struggle and in the post-colonial era. Because colonialism has had a powerful and lasting impact on Algeria, this country can be neither explained nor understood without first unravelling some of its colonial experience. The first part of this book thus focuses on the colonial period and highlights how, prior to the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, citizenship was carefully edged in tradition and jealously guarded against tyrannies. French colonialism thwarted the natural development of statehood and citizenship in Algeria. The different structure of the colonial state brought about a different type of conflict over the issue of belonging.

CHAPTER 1 THE PACIFICATION OF ALGERIA

Algeria experienced millennia of migrations and invasions bearing diverse cultural outlooks from the Carthaginians and Romans to the French.1 The French conquest of Algeria, which began on 14 June 1830, had been initiated in the last days of the Bourbon Restoration2 by King Charles X who, in a last desperate bid for public and electoral support, sought to enhance his prestige. Algeria thus became a French colony.

Invasion and conquest of Algeria France’s conquest of Algeria was dressed up as a moral crusade and was underpinned by an unwavering belief in the racial superiority of the French over the Algerian people. Three fundamental intellectual strands emerged out of the cultural politics of French colonialism, all of which shared the basic assumption that the cultural identity of Algerians should rightly become a site for political intervention by France. This belief found expression in the doctrines of the civilising mission, assimilation and association.

Civilisation, assimilation and association In the eighteenth century, ‘progressive’ thinkers such as French political scientist Nicolas de Condorcet assumed that it was their holy duty to help those peoples mired in barbarism and savagery, hence ill-equipped to govern themselves.3 Based on this logic, colonial governance took on a sacred air. The expansion of the French Empire appeared thus not as a

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quest for land, but as a noble mission aimed at helping ‘the wretched of the earth’. This, however, implied the ultimate abandonment of Algerian traditional culture in favour of assimilation4 into the French model, which is to say the eventual adoption of French culture, politics, social mores and beliefs. This project of tutelage was in its essence an ideology of cultural annihilation. It was after the foundation of the Third Republic in September 1870 that the assimilation policy became the heart of French colonial rule. As assimilation-style colonisation in the 1870s and 1880s reshuffled land, rights and a sense of place in colonial Algeria, it created a range of categories and lines of demarcation between the French on the one hand and the Algerians, Jews and neo-French/foreigners on the other. But the policy of assimilation cut both ways: while it certainly accorded to them freedom to design and implement programmes favouring their goals in the country, it also permitted an alarming metropolitan meddling in their affairs. During the 1890s, the settlers therefore backed away from assimilation in favour of association, which consisted in infusing French pride and love of the mother country into the Algerians without forcing them to throw away their native ideas and culture. Theoretically, associationist policies centred on a type of colonial governance in which African bureaucrats educated in colonial schools worked in close collaboration with new colonial elites to reinforce the colonial order through nominally consultative assemblies and other such superficially participatory institutions. However, association was in no way less racist than assimilationist thought. While assimilation reinforced a belief in the absolute inability of non-Europeans to accommodate change, association implied a teleology that valorised French norms and denigrated any non-European ways of life. And the civilising mission altered the very identities of the peoples whose lands France had colonised. It deprived them of their cultural heritage in order to produce a population easy to manipulate. Inspired by the industrial and democratic revolutions, France saw itself as endowed with the capacity to remake nature and reshape societies at will. Through the application of new social and political prophylactics such as education, medicine and secular belief in progress, the French colonial state would educate and remould native societies along the path of progress away from superstition and backwardness. At the same time, guided and encouraged by the colonial state, the opening of the local economy to the

THE PACIFICATION OF ALGERIA

23

market would reveal latent resources. What kind of colonial history of Algeria did this yield in practice?

Exterminate all the brutes5 The empire has done in Algeria what it would never dare do in France. It has committed against the Arabs a crime against humanity and against the army, that of offering the elite of its officers to the monstrous appetite of the leaders.6 Transgressing settled notions of right, breaking promises and engaging in murderous terror were the hallmarks of the French colonising enterprise in Algeria. Inspired by the German Reich, the French blotted out the clan structure of Algerian rule, destroying almost all indigenous political institutions. In their endeavours to civilise the natives, the French colonisers created for them a state of perpetual Otherness. They destructured then restructured the colonised people, and in the process depersonalised them. The French war of pacification unleashed uncontrolled human destructiveness. It inflicted both physical and moral torture on the colonised and involved not only the dismantlement of the existing social structures and economic system but also massive expropriation of land, which deprived most Algerians of their basic means of subsistence. When French colonists poured into the country in their thousands, they had to acquire legal title to territory in areas where they had established political control. To do so, they engaged in repellent forms of pseudolegality, using not only violent but also iniquitous measures. They seized the fertile land, displaced the peasantry and razed the city. The French army violated norms of international law recognised in Europe. Command was given to General Thomas Bugeaud, whose appointment brought reforms that ‘pacified’ Algeria, but generated tenets that characterised and influenced colonial warfare in Africa at large ever after. Following the lines of the ancient Roman strategy to conquer the province of Africa, Bugeaud took as his main aim not so much to defeat the indigenous population as to subdue them. In 1837, the General believed that the Tafna Treaty, which acknowledged Emir Abdelkader’s authority over almost two-thirds of Algeria, reinforced his

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THE STATE OF ALGERIA

pre-eminence among the tribes. So when he took full charge of the Algerian campaign, he discarded this policy of limited control and launched his own campaign to occupy the entire territory. The French then manipulated the provisions of the treaty itself. The pretext for renewed war on both sides was the other side’s breach of the treaty and there were bitter disputes over its various provisions. Bugeaud’s main strategy was to weaken the enemy by internal discord and division, exploiting the antagonisms between the two Algerian groups, Arabs and Berbers. Contrary to some observers in both France and Algeria, who recognised that there was no good argument for the original conquest of Algeria and that the French methods transgressed the boundaries of common morality, Bugeaud believed that the military policies in Algeria, though ‘brutal’, were ‘logical’.7 And now that it was done, they had ‘to do it grandement’,8 for national pride precluded withdrawal. The changes Bugeaud introduced in Algeria were largely the fruit of his own experiences in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars and tested on the ground in Algeria. The General defined victory in terms of e´lan. In his methods of warfare, he always endeavoured to maintain a line between efficient and excessive force. His obedience to orders was swift and second to none. He did not seriously believe that the natives had any right to self-determination and, more importantly, he did not even express much outrage at their suffering. In six years, the French Cromwell managed to pacify the country. He increased the mobility of the French colonial army and converted it into a force proficient in counter-guerrilla war. French troops systematically organised pitiless raids, also known as ‘seas of fire’, to instil terror and destroy tribal cohesion. General Duvivier took the long view, reminding the French of the benefits for posterity. If France left Algeria, it would justly be accused of having, almost casually, massacred a people who were defending their faith, their liberty and their country. According to Duvivier, future generations would, however, convict the French of having used their superior power to destroy a people without any real purpose, merely as a pure pastime. Only persistence and eventual success in founding a colony could retrospectively blot out such a stigma.9 Arguments about why France’s honour was at stake in Algeria dominated the debate in both the government and the army in the early 1840s. What drives these arguments for colonisation is not expansive nationalism to gain markets

THE PACIFICATION OF ALGERIA

25

or power but a particular understanding of the requirements of patriotism: the notion that honour requires avoidance of cowardly second thoughts once the die is cast. Alexis de Tocqueville also saw the pacification of Algeria as a means of avoiding humiliation. Despite his attachment to political freedom and the rule of law, he supported not only colonisation itself but also Bugeaud’s army’s means of achieving it: As for me, I often heard in France men, whom I respect but do not agree with, who found it bad that we burned crops, emptied stock silos, and took unarmed men, women, and children. For me, these are unfortunate necessities which any people that want to wage war against the Arabs is obliged to do.10 Even as he praised citizenship in America, de Tocqueville thus upheld subjection in Algeria. France, according to him, would lose face by admitting its own impotence and lack of courage. If France abandoned the Algerian colony, it would be disgraced, weakened beyond repair in Europe and utterly ruined. If it remained, it would have to pursue the war of massacres.

Tales of torture The French army thus turned Algeria into a huge concentration camp, with miles of barbed wire cutting the country’s borders with Morocco and Tunisia to limit infiltration from these countries. The mass executions practised on civilians suspected of aiding the rebels evoked invidious comparisons with totalitarian regimes, more particularly National Socialism. For instance, in June 1845, General Pe´lissier trapped hundreds of people of the Ouled Riah tribe who took refuge in the caves of Nacmaria in the vicinity of Cherchell. Refusing their terms of surrender, Governor Bugeaud ordered Pe´lissier to ‘smoke them out mercifully like foxes’.11 As a good soldier, the latter obeyed and set fire at the cave’s mouth, smothering to death 1,500 rebellious Algerian men, women and children. Hundreds of people were burned alive or asphyxiated in the caves. The spectacle in the grottos was so macabre that words are too poor to translate it, but French officers such as Joseph Bosquet relished that horrifying spectacle and found in it ‘toute la poe´sie possible . . . On respire dans toute la ville une de´licieuse odeur de grillades

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. . .’,12 he wrote to his mother. Other commanders imitated his actions on the grounds that these acts of terror would hasten the pacification of the country. In the administrative report that can be found at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence (France), Pe´lissier revealed a macabre respect for detail. He explained how he hunted down the natives, butchered them and burnt their villages, reserving some of the girls, and how every centime he earned cost a rape, a mutilation or a life. But once the exhilarating moment had passed, Pe´lissier sorrowfully looked up and prayed to God. He had been the monster of crime, the butcher of Algeria. Christendom would rise with horror at the news, he acknowledged. A feeling of remorse pervaded him. He signed off his report with a personal comment on the harshness of such military raids that one undertakes only under compulsion, he wrote, pleading with God not to be entrusted with such horrible mission in the future. The hideous acts committed at that time against the natives, and which today would constitute internationally recognised crimes, were recorded in several witness accounts and reports such as the one issued by a Royal Commission in 1883: We tormented, at the slightest suspicion and without due process . . . We massacred people who carried passes, cut the throats, on a simple suspicion, of entire populations which proved later to be innocent . . . [Many innocent people were tried just because] they exposed themselves to our furore. Judges were available to condemn them and civilized people to have them executed . . . In a word, our barbarism was worse than that of the barbarians we came to civilize, and we complain that we have not succeeded with them! A French captain also admitted to the massacre in the letters he wrote home: ‘Grass no longer grows where the French army has set foot . . . we scour the country, we kill, we burn, we carve up, we chop down, all for the best in this best of all worlds.’13 On the issue of the reversal of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’, de Tocqueville was to observe: ‘I returned from Africa with the distressing notion that we are now fighting far more barbarously than the Arabs themselves. For the present, it is on their side that one meets with civilization.’14 The French destroyed

THE PACIFICATION OF ALGERIA

27

Muslim charitable establishments, usurped their revenue and let their schools decay, making them more miserable than they had been before, he remarked. Violence against Algerians was not limited to Algeria proper. Immigrant workers in France were also castigated for supporting their embattled compatriots in the homeland. In 1959, chief of police Maurice Papon created a concentration camp in Vincennes, Paris, where he jailed hundreds of Algerians and subjected them to hideous treatment. The horrific violence used by France against Algerians did not limit itself to physical brutality and cruelty. It also came in the form of economic dispossession and social dislocation.

The socio-economic disaster The Decree of 1 October 1854 signalled the disappearance of the Second Republic ushered in by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’e´tat of 2 December 1851. The new Emperor came back to a military control in Algeria. To Napoleon, a man deeply impregnated with Saint Simonian philosophy,15 the colonies were vital for France and not only provided the metropolis with the necessary resources but also gave the colonies a chance for self-improvement. Policy and reason alike required that every opportunity had to be taken not to offend Muslim susceptibilities without, however, whittling away France’s hold on the population. In the Imperial Decree of 1857, the Emperor declared that Algeria was not ‘strictly speaking a colony, but an Arab kingdom. The natives and the colonists [had] an equal right to [his] protection and [he was] no less the Emperor of the Arabs than the Emperor of the French.’16 He thus set up an Arab Kingdom and declared himself King of the Arabs. To further his plans for the Arab Kingdom, Napoleon III issued two decrees known as the Senatus-Consulte in 1863 and 1865. The principles underlying the Napoleon Code were first and foremost principles of unity, i.e. one law, one judge and one jurisdiction. However lofty the Code, it aimed at keeping a race of ‘backward’ subjects legally separate from more ‘civilised’ rulers. Accordingly, the French lived under one law and the indigenous population under at least two others – Muslim law in their capacity as civil persons and a wholly special French law in their capacity as criminals and delinquents. Ironically, the Arabophile rhetoric of the Emperor’s policy reinforced settler colonialism in Algeria. Napoleon’s Senatus-Consulte law of

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22 April 1863, which aimed at putting an end to the political abuses in the cantonnement and protecting what remained of the native tribes’ properties, actually hastened the disintegration of the tribes and left them all the more vulnerable to European exploitation. When France lost Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871, thousands of residents of that region were resettled in Algeria and were offered lands confiscated from the Algerians. Attempts to implement even the most modest reform were thwarted or put off by the local administration in Algeria, monopolised by the colonists and colonial representatives in the National Assembly alike. Auguste Warnier, the representative of the colonists, succeeded during the 1870s and the 1880s in amending or introducing laws that promoted the private transfer of land to settlers, recalling Cromwell’s expropriation of Irish lands. And the Warnier Law of 1873 ‘Frenchified’ what remained of the landed property. It stipulated that all land transactions had to be submitted to French law, that land could not be held communally and that all unproductive and uncultivated lands had to be handed over to the Commissairesenqueˆteurs, the French office of colonisation. The latter thus acquired over than 300,000 hectares of arable land. By the end of the twentieth century, the wealth of Algeria had passed into the hands of the colonists. The Warnier Law thus worsened the impoverishment of the indigenous population and destroyed the tribal system. With increasing numbers of Algerian Muslims displaced from traditional lands and employed as wage labourers on colonially-owned farms, native society was completely dismantled. The systematic expropriation of land together with heavy taxation was compounded by that of famines. Families found themselves penniless and the wives of the dispossessed tribesmen emerged as the most victimised. Many of these mothers kept their babies alive by feeding them with blood drawn from incisions made in their veins. The children left behind by the women who succumbed to hunger were taken over by Monseigneur Lavigerie, an advocate of forced conversion to Christianity. This religious man claimed that he saved these children from Islam, a fanatical religion responsible for so many ills. The nineteenth century also ushered in an era of social stability. The few Algerians who retained their lands were so heavily taxed and victimised by so many natural and bureaucratic hurdles that they could barely subsist. General Bugeaud summed up France’s interest in the

THE PACIFICATION OF ALGERIA

29

land: ‘What is to take in [Algeria] is only one interest, the agricultural interest . . . Oh, yes, I could not find another way to subdue the country other than take that interest.’17 But Camille Sabatier, a former judge in the city of Tizi Ouzou, in the Kabylias, found another way of subduing the natives. While he prohibited women from this region to tattoo their faces because this was repugnant to French men, he sought to make them more attractive by proposing to the Governor the Gallicisation of Kabyle women’s first names. This would facilitate skilfully arranged marriages between the colonists’ sons and native women. Sabatier’s choice of the Kabyle women to perpetuate the French race is based on the belief that the inhabitants of the region were pure Berbers and not Arabs and could therefore be more suitable for ‘Frenchification’. Not being an Arab also meant, for him, not being committed to Islam. This change of identity had first taken place with the change of the villages’ names. The changes brought about by the disintegration of the tribes and the whole policy of pacification which not only compelled Algerians to live and work within socio-political units implemented by the French but also the system of differential rights prevailing in France itself under the July Monarchy, were then given a new lease of life in Algeria.

CHAPTER 2 CITIZENSHIP UNDER COLONIAL RULE

Although Algeria became an integral part of France, laws and practices governing citizenship during the colonial period effectively left the natives with minimal rights. From the political perspective, the extension of the French State and metropolitan culture in Algeria, in the form of economic development, European settlement and naturalisation policies, marked what was ‘French’ and ‘Algerian’ in Algeria, thus heightening political identities in the country.

Ambivalent identities1 A systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask constantly themselves the question: In reality, who am I?2 Peter Ekeh used the concept of the two publics to describe how colonialism created a split in the personality of the average African elite under colonial rule. This personality disorder is typified by a set of dual identities, which Ekeh refers to as the amoral or civic public and the moral or primordial public.3 I am using Ekeh’s concept here in a slightly different way. New colonial studies focus on the culture of colonial situations, hierarchies, identities and epistemologies that have made modern empires and their disintegration possible. Scholarship in this newer vein

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31

suggests that the modern and multifaceted processes of European expansion actually created the categories of coloniser and colonised. Edward Said’s prominent study of the binary opposition between the Orient and the West has put identities of all sorts that are associated with modern imperialism at the forefront of analysis. In line with this general cultural turn in colonial studies, scholars of French-ruled Algeria concentrated on the basic categories and identities so crucial in establishing and then dismantling that regime. They charted the construction of Arab and Berbers, Europeans and indigenes, Jews, genders and French and natives. These insights opened the way for thinking about the broad processes of political identity formation in French-ruled Algeria. It is in the light of some post-colonial works such as those of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha that Algeria’s ambivalent relationship with France is most clearly seen. French settlement in Algeria contributed to the creation of diverse colonial political identities, the citizens and the subjects.4 When France colonised Algeria it was not merely economic exploitation or political domination it sought but an extensive annexation aimed at eradicating its culture. As discussed earlier, the rhetoric of assimilation was used as a pretext for the deliberate destructuration of Muslim society or, in Pierre Bourdieu’s more brutal words, a ‘social vivisection’,5 especially through the introduction of French law in Algeria. The provisions of the 1842 Ordinance were reiterated by the Decree of 1 October 1854, which stated that ‘a remarkable unity has been realised. All the inhabitants of Algeria whatever their nationality or religion, French, foreigners, Israelite or Muslim indigenous, all are submitted to the same penal laws, to the same Courts.’6 However, after almost 30 years of French rule, this nationality had not been defined in European terms of nationality: native Algerians, Muslim and Jewish alike still lacked formal status. Kamel Kateb writes that because Algerian natives were juridically placed under a Muslim statute, which was posited as incompatible with French citizenship, a distinction between nationality and citizenship was in fact introduced in unusual legislation. In Kateb’s words: ‘The Muslim native is a Frenchman who is forced to ask for his naturalization.’7 In order to foster an integrative community, far-reaching educational reform in Algeria was implemented. Several laws including those related

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to education were specific to indigenous Algerians and offered fewer guarantees than French legislation. The French introduced their language and social mores and implemented a systematic policy of cultural integration of the local people with France, ousting, as it were, local languages, Arabic and Berber. During the colonial period, the imposition of the French language not only displaced native speech, but also became the very means of ideological domination.8 The French also viewed their conquest as a crusade against Islam, which they believed constituted a hindrance to their policy of acculturation or, as they termed it, assimilation of the Algerian people. This triggered a whole new orientation in education, i.e. a restructuring of Algerian schools along French lines and the eradication of the Arabic and Islamic roots of the conquered land in order to produce someone free from culture, easy to manipulate. Jules Ferry’s9 creation of a free, secular and compulsory education proved extremely pernicious to overall education for Algerians, who had previously relied on medersas or Qur’anic schools to learn reading and writing. The separation between mosque and school, as redefined by the French, reflected a radical division. Severe restrictions were placed on education opportunities for Algerian children. Not only did the State confiscate the habus lands, the religious foundations and the main source of income for religious institutions including schools, but the French colonial officials also refused to allocate sufficient funds to finance schools and mosques while more than five times as much was spent on the education of Europeans. Land spoliation left the Qur’anic schools with no source of income. Consequently many closed in the first decades of the colonial era. Mosques were turned into churches or else the imams – religious men – were appointed by the French administration to make sure that they would not spread the seeds of an Islamic revival. As a result of the dismantling of Muslim schools, less than 5 per cent of Algerian children attended any school in 1870, a percentage that worsened with time as one generation disabled the next. On this issue, Albert Camus noted the wide gap between the official discourse of assimilation and the lack of education the children were actually receiving in the villages he visited: ‘The number of children deprived of education in the region is reportedly 80%.’10 He also deplored the lack of schools for girls and the uneven distribution of funds resulting in a smaller number of classrooms. Benjamin Stora’s figures for the period of

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1945–54 also indicate a great discrepancy between cities and the country. And literacy for girls was even more limited. Illiteracy sought to prevent the awakening of a national consciousness among the natives. Attempts at educating a small portion of the Algerian population along with the Europeans truly started in the French school system in the 1890s as part of France’s so-called civilising mission in Algeria. To further his plans for the creation of an Arab Kingdom, Napoleon created the mixed school, which he believed could work as a preparatory institution leading to a peaceful co-existence of French and Arabic, though it was not clearly stated in terms of a bilingual education. This resulted in the creation of imperial colleges that produced the first generation of the Algerian bilingual elite, including Muslim administrators, interpreters, bilingual teachers and qadis11 whose main task was to deal with Muslim jurisdiction and matters. This constituted the first step in the French policy of assimilation, making of the traditional medersas Arab-French schools. These first schools were meant to train a bilingual elite that would act as buffer between the French and the natives. Further methods of training Algerian natives to become teachers in Ecoles Normales,12 as well as teaching material and syllabuses were at the heart of social reforms. This type of bilingual education, along with some e´coles indige`nes and e´coles gourbis,13 paved the way for the final stage of the fusion of the two educational systems. However, instead of promoting equality with the French settlers as propounded by Napoleon III, the French government went so far as to pass a law in the 1930s that classified Arabic as a foreign language14 and prohibited its use in schools and official documents. And despite all efforts to make room for Arabic, French remained the dominant language and as such weakened the status and prestige of the Arabic language. Colonial-era education policy thus reinforced social divisions and claims for citizenship.

True Algerians, true French Ironically, the attempts to assimilate Algeria into France rendered a sense of difference between settlers and metropolitan France more acute. While the French Revolution made substantial headway in providing rights to a larger portion of the population, France did not establish fundamental rights for ‘all the members of the social Body’,15 as stipulated by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Indeed,

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it curtailed the rights of certain groups of citizens. Settlers, natives and others therefore fought over the criteria of belonging to the ‘true Algerians’ and the ‘true French’. However, it was not clear which criteria would define the terms of which groups belonged in which category.

Colonial politics of citizenship France’s impulse for granting citizenship to certain individuals manifested itself, among other ways, in the Senatus-Consulte Law of 1865, the Cre´mieux Decree of October 1870 and was reinforced by the Indigenat Code. These laws offered citizenship to colonial subjects under certain circumstances. The Senatus-Consulte Law of 14 July 1865, which remained in force down to the end of World War II, reinforced the legal distinction between colonial citizens and subjects and provided a legal foundation for the various forms of political and administrative discrimination practised by the French against the natives. Article 1 stipulated that although Algerian Muslims were allowed to serve in the French army and civil bureaucracy, they could not become French citizens until they renounced their faith. For the French ruler, the fact that most Algerians were Muslims betrayed them as barbarians, thus as an obstacle to their policy of assimilation. It is worth pointing out that the use of religion for the purpose of government and administration had been established in France in the seventeenth century by the Edict of Nantes, issued on 13 April 1598 by Henry IV of France. It granted the Huguenots, the Calvinist Protestants of France, important rights in a nation that was still essentially Catholic. The edict separated civil from religious unity and opened a path for secularism and tolerance. In the edict, King Henry aimed primarily at fostering civil unity. While the edict offered many specific concessions to the Protestants and reinstated their civil rights, the 1865 Senatus Law did quite the opposite. In the nineteenth century, the comparison was rather with the millet or confessional system of the Ottoman Empire whereby Muslims were separated from Christians and Jews, who traditionally lived under their own laws and under their own leaders. The question is how a principle so foreign to contemporary French ideas came to be accepted into French law, along with what this wholesale acceptance implied. The various naturalisation laws passed in the 1880s and early 1920s made a renunciation of the Sharia, Islamic Law, a sine qua non for becoming a French citizen.

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Because naturalisation implied relinquishing their personal status, neither native Jews nor native Muslims showed any enthusiasm for asking for French citizenship. And those who chose to make the great leap were not assured of a warm welcome on the other side. As a result, the acquisition of French citizenship by Muslims was not broadly requested. The native Muslims who applied for French citizenship were confronted with both the contempt of their own people who called them m’tournis, meaning turncoats, and the hatred and discrimination of French society and administration. Moreover, applications for citizenship had to be filed through various administrative channels, beginning with the Justice of the Peace. Since the documents needed – such as a birth certificate, for instance – were obtainable only from the administration or from the Muslim Municipal Councils, which were hostile to any naturalisation, between 1889 and 1909 only 551 Algerians applied for citizenship and only 337 received it. Many of the 214 rejected were turned down on the ground of ‘unworthiness’. The total number of naturalisations granted up to 1934 was 1,359. The Muslim masses’ reluctance to commit apostasy was taken by the Parti Colonial, staunchly opposed to any increase in the political and civil rights granted to Muslim Algerians, as a major obstacle to their being assimilated and being civilised, hence as evidence of the futility of pursuing assimilation. Through this kind of legislation, the French authorities established a direct link between ethnicity and culture and political and civil rights. Thus instead of promoting equality with the French settlers, as propounded by Napoleon III, the Senatus-Consulte Laws worked against the Algerians: they affected tribal structure, land tenure and reinforced the differences in cultural background between the French and the Muslims.16 It was in this spirit that the Emperor grasped the nettle of nationality. Because ‘nationality’ marked the jurisdictional divide between French and native courts, conflicts about where to draw the lines were directly connected to debates about cultural distinctions between Algerians and the French and whether the differences could ever be bridged. The Cre´mieux17 Decree No. 136 of 24 October 1870 of the republican Government of National Defence, which succeeded Napoleon III’s Second Empire after the Franco-Prussian War, modified the 1865 Decree. It declared those Jews natives to Algeria to be French citizens. This decree sealed the future course of Algerian Jewry, a community that had

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existed for centuries as part of the Algerian fabric. The French government thus gave citizenship rights to the 30,000 Jews in Algeria in 1870 and, in 1899, to the European settlers from other countries, most of whom were migrants from southern European countries. By the end of the nineteenth century, out of a population of about 4.5 million, 85 per cent were Muslim natives, 7 per cent European with French citizenship, 1 per cent Jewish and the rest foreigners from Europe and North Africa. Most of the Europeans and Jews by that time had French citizenship and almost none of the Arab-Berber population had citizenship. The naturalisation of Algerian Jewry was prompted by three events: the defeat of France in the Franco-German War, which seriously impaired French rule in North Africa; second, the decree was passed at a moment of national crisis when the Emperor had abdicated and part of the government had abandoned Paris. The Jews were then regarded as the most fervent partisans of l’Alge´rie Francaise. The French government appreciated having about 38,000 loyal people in the colony at a time when trouble obviously lay ahead. Last but not least, Cre´mieux and his republican allies were convinced of the fundamental difference between the native Jews and Arabs, the former being commonly viewed ‘as the only ones in Africa accessible to European civilisation’.18 As a matter of fact, by excluding the Muslim Arabs and Berbers, the Cre´mieux Decree confined them to a second-grade citizenship. The gap between the two communities could never again be bridged. The French also created a distinction between Arab and Berber Algerians and promoted Berber over the Arabic language because the latter was a unifying medium for Algerian nationalism. As France consolidated its rule over Algeria, it indeed developed what had been identified as the ‘Kabyle myth’, according to which the Kabyles, the largest ethnic group within the Berber community, were the descendents of the territory’s original Christian inhabitants.19 From its promulgation, the Cre´mieux Decree caused resentment among the Algerian Muslims as well as the European community in Algeria, which did not welcome these new fellow-citizens, leading to open hostilities. The most alarming native uprising broke out in 1871 in the Kabyle regions and spread throughout the eastern part of Algeria.20 The insurrection, led by Hadj Mohamed Mokrani and Aziz ben Cheikh El Haddad, was prompted by Adolphe Cre´mieux’s extension of colonial

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authority to formerly self-governing tribal reserves, and the abrogation of commitments made by the military government, but it is likely that the rebellion had its basis in more long-standing grievances. Hadj Mokrani attacked the local garrison with the aim of reclaiming the rights, privileges and freedom of action the Algerian population had enjoyed before the French tightened their grip in the countryside. 60,000 Kabyle peasants rallied to the cause, transforming the then small-scale revolt into a major uprising. But the French forces managed to gain the upper hand. In the aftermath of the 1871 upheavals the French imposed more drastic measures to punish and control the whole Muslim population. Not only did France impose a payment for reparations, but it also expropriated tribal lands and placed the Kabylie under a coercive regime dubbed the re´gime d’exception or exceptional regime, and the Governor General was given a free hand to jail suspects for up to five years without trial, hence tightening his control of the Muslims. Following the Kabyle uprisings, a special native code known as the Code Alge´rien de l’Indige´nat was instituted and remained legally in force until 1946. The first Code de l’Indige´nat was actually implemented by the Senatus-Consulte of 14 July 1865. Its first article stipulated that: The Muslim indigenous is French; however, he will continue to be subjected to Muslim law. He may be admitted to serve in the terrestrial and marine army. He may be called to functions and civil employment in Algeria. He may, on his demand, be admitted to enjoy the rights of a French citizen; in this case, he is subjected to the political and civil laws of France. In practical terms, the French created a two-track legal system – one for French citizens and one for French subjects – which allowed them to maintain a form of government anchored in disparity and coercion while maintaining a public rhetoric of eventual assimilation. The Code thus classified Muslims as subjects rather than citizens and imposed severe restrictions on them. They could be arrested by the French authorities without probable cause and impose punishment without trial. The commandant de cercle21 – or any white man, in practice – was free to impose summary punishment for any of 34, later 12, headings of infractions of the Code: from murder down to disrespectful behaviour

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towards France, its symbols or functionaries. These could range from fines to 15 days imprisonment. While the statute stated that all punishments had to be signed by the colonial governor, this was almost always done after the fact. Thus by creating specific sanctions for the indige`nes and organising the seizure of their lands, the Code actually legalised discrimination. To borrow Sidi Mohammed Barkat’s words, this legal limbo was ‘[n]ot truly inclusion nor in fact exclusion, but the indefinite hanging on for some future inclusion’.22 The Algerian philosopher argued that this ostracism enabled the French to treat the colonised as a mass less than human, but still a subject to a humanising mission; only able to become fully human when they cast off all the features that the French used to define them as part of the indigenous mass. According to the law of 1884, Loi sur l’organisation municipale, natives only had the right to vote and be elected to the Municipal Councils of the communities. Each of the three Algerian departments was represented by a conseil ge´ne´ral, only one-quarter of whose members were natives, the remainder being French citizens. The three conseils ge´ne´raux together formed a kind of local parliament. The third important political body was the so-called de´le´gations financie`res, which decided on the budget and taxes. This body was composed of 24 representatives. Over time, some elements of the Indige´nat were reformed. Legally, it was dismantled in three steps: the ordinance of 7 May 1944 suppressed the summary punishment statutes and offered citizenship to those who met certain criteria and would give up their rights to native or Muslim courts. This citizenship was labelled a` titre personnel. Secondly, the Lamine Gueye Law of 7 April 1946 formally extended citizenship across the Empire, indigenes included. Thirdly, the law of 20 September 1947 removed the two-tier court system and mandated equal access to public employment. Applied in fact very slowly, the abrogation of the Indigenat Code only became real in 1962. At that time, nearly all the colonies became independent and French law adopted the notion of double jus soli. Thus, any children of colonial parents born on Frenchruled territory became French citizens. All others were by then full citizens of their respective nations. New laws passed in the 1890s not only organised the inhabitants of Algeria into groups but also highlighted the boundaries around them. This cluster of political identities shaped the way they responded to a

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growing sense of insecurity in Algeria caused by the economic depression, drought, famine in the rural areas, a downturn of the industry, pressures from Paris to implement reforms and, above all, the tumult of the Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s in which a Jewish captain named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of betraying French secrets to the Germans.23 But these diverse identities did more than shape the mood in Algeria. People began to organise politically according to the lines of difference around them. The rise in anti-Semitism that followed the Dreyfus Affair in 1890s Algiers helped popularise and politicise existing ‘French’ and ‘Algerian’ identities. Campaigning against the Jews became the dominant mode for European settlers to express their French identity, to demonstrate their place in the larger family of the French in Algeria, regardless of national background, language and culture. Though this movement helped to forge a strong link between different groups of French, many became anti-Jewish activists as they became ‘Algerians’. In the legislative electoral campaigns of spring 1898, cries of ‘Algeria for the French’ were accompanied by the slogan ‘Algeria for the Algerians’. Although the Dreyfus Affair offered the ideal opportunity for anti-Jewish political discourse and collective action, it was the National Anti-Semitic League, founded by Edouard Drumont and others in 1898, which took advantage of that occasion and created a qualified and politically sophisticated movement out of it. The reaction of other groups in Algiers reinforced this varied collection of settler political identities. Things changed in mid-1898 when Governor General Laferrie`re was sent to Algiers to reaffirm metropolitan control and offset the antiJewish movement. The new government worked hard to redefine who the ‘true French’ were in Algeria. As anti-Jewish settlers split into camps of moderates and radicals in 1898, they also split into camps of ‘French’ and ‘Algerian’. ‘French’ became associated with the administration and moderation, metropolitan France, French culture and republicanism, while ‘Algerian’ referred to anti-Semitism in Algeria and local Algerian culture. In April 1901, the riot that broke out in an Algiers cafe´, sparked by Max Re´gis, president of the National anti-Semitic League, created instability and anarchy in and around Algiers and helped bring the antiJewish crisis to a close. The end of the crisis helped centre ‘French’ as a

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first-order political identity. In other words, it helped connect Algeria to France. Despite this shift, however, cultural sensibility, class, ethnic community attachments and political alliances often confused the official lines of citizenship in determining who was French. Instead, the definition of French identity remained dependent on who was not French. Even if the dilemma did not draw a clear line around the group of French, it helped consolidate a boundary between the French and other groups. Algerian and Muslim identities became second-order political identities. ‘Algerian’ became the main way to identify broadly, in political contexts, with local autonomy, Algeria and Algerian culture, and against the French and France. Politics in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic crisis kept ‘French’ and ‘Algerian’ as primary bases of identification and brought native Muslim identity to the forefront, pushing Jewish identity to the background. Varying criteria for belonging to either group were projected. Some advocated a community of French that included Europeans all over the French Empire. Others considered the French to be all Europeans with French citizenship status, regardless of cultural background. Still others viewed the French as of metropolitan origin regardless of citizenship. Some Muslim politicians in Algeria and intellectuals in mainland France offered a picture of the ‘French’ that included the larger Muslim population in Algeria. The Young Algerians, la Jeunesse Alge´rienne, an integrationist group whose members were drawn from the small, liberal elite of well-educated, middle-class e´volue´s,24 demanded an opportunity to prove that they were French as well as Muslim. The development of Algerian nationalism from 1912 through the war of liberation underlined the stimulation of Algerians’ sense of nationhood.

The rise of Algerian nationalism Colonialism’s weakening of the national culture provided the incentive for the rise of the Algerian nationalist movement. By the end of the 1920s, Algerian nationalism expressed itself through three main currents: a populist tendency with vague Islamic overtones identified with Messali Hadj; a Francophile-liberal tendency led by Ferhat Abbas; and an Islamictraditionalist tendency under Abdelhamid Ben Badis’s leadership. Despite the ideological diversity, Messali Hadj and his party, the Parti populaire

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Alge´rien and the Mouvement pour le triomphe des liberte´s de´mocratiques, would dominate Algerian nationalism until 1954.25 The early leaders of Algerian nationalism saw a solution in integration rather than separation. Muslim Algerians, they argued, should enjoy equal status with the settlers as French citizens. In 1931, Ferhat Abbas noted that Algeria having become a French soil, they were French Muslims. In 1936, the French socialist government of Le´on Blum saw the force of this argument. In his critique, ‘L’Alge´rie vivra-t-elle?’, Blum questioned the policy of categorisation in which the Muslim Algerian was subordinated to the French. He argued that Muslim Algerians should be granted the same rights as the colonials without having to renounce their civic and personal status. Many native elites and their supporters thus rallied together in the Muslim Congress and made their case in favour of the Bill as ‘Muslims’ and thus representatives of a special Islamic-Arabic cultural heritage whose contribution to French civilisation in Algeria deserved political reward. In June 1936, at its first meeting in Algiers, the newly-formed Algerian Muslim Congress (CMA) issued a number of demands. The charter presented to Blum by a CMA delegation on 24 July 1936 called for the suppression of all discriminatory laws, the complete administrative integration of Algeria with France, universal suffrage, Muslim representation in the French National Assembly, the separation of Church and State, the promotion of Arabic and the expansion of education for Muslims as well as the improvement of health conditions. The Blum government set about drafting new legislation, the so-called Blum– Violette plan, which proposed that 21,000 Muslims should immediately have the vote on the same terms as European settlers. He also sought to limit the size of colonists’ properties. While the law raised hope in the Federation, it provoked a violent reaction from all corners of Algeria. Marcel Re´gnier reacted by extending the Code de l’Indige´nat, which inflamed the Algerians’ sense of injustice and reinforced the Federation’s resolve to bring about change. The proposed reforms were also met with great hostility from the pieds noirs26 and their disciples, who were determined to prevent the introduction of reforms granting Muslim Algerians political and legal equality. Such reforms, the pieds noirs believed, would inexorably lead to their becoming politically, economically and culturally subsumed. In early 1938, Algeria’s mayors and National Assembly threatened to resign en masse if

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the law was enacted. In an attempt to contain the political storm whipped up by the law, the Popular Front decided not to pass it by decree. In the face of such setbacks and overpowered by the strength of the opposition, the government dropped the law. The sense of victory for settlers and disappointment for native elites served to rebuild the walls between Muslim and French identities and aggravated the already existing tensions between Muslim and French political communities, sounding the death knell for the assimilitionist movement. The Algerians began to turn their backs on groups preaching assimilation. They lent their support instead to organisations and individuals calling for independence from French rule and the creation of a sovereign Algerian State. In addition, Algeria’s role in the liberation of France raised Algerian Muslims’ expectations for reforms following the Allied victory. The Provisional Government of the French Republic, an alternative to the Vichy regime for the Allies, anticipated the Muslim population’s demands for greater political rights by implementing the Ordinance of 7 March 1944. This law granted citizenship to approximately 65,000 Algerian Muslim men whom the Jonnart Law had previously deemed ineligible.27 This concession, however, was not without restrictions. In order to preserve the privileged status of the European settler lobby in the Algerian colonial system, the Ordinance put in place a mechanism known as the dual-college system, in which the Algerian Assembly representatives elected by the European community formed one college and Muslim representatives the other. This system protected the interests of the European community in Algeria. The Assembly’s structure was such that no measure would become a law without the approval of the European delegates, who represented only one-tenth of the Algerian population. Colonial officials ensured that only the Muslim delegates whom they knew they could control won seats in the Algerian Assembly. The Ordinance infuriated the Muslim community and further crushed the hopes of those Muslims who had their hearts set on for France to make substantive changes to Algeria’s political infrastructure. After the expansion of the French electorate, French policy makers restructured the political framework of Algeria. As a result, violence erupted in 1944– 5 in many regions, including Algiers and Oran, much of which was fuelled by the existing tensions between Muslim and colonial communities and the social unrest caused by a poor wheat

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harvest. The conflict reached its apex when nationalist leaders determined to mark the end of World War II with a demonstration calling for their own liberation. The latter was organised by the Algerian National Movement and authorised by the French authorities. But the French Police warned the marchers not to exhibit the national flag or any placards. The Algerian nationalists ignored their admonition. On 8 May 1945, one of the greatest catastrophes in Algeria’s history occurred in one of the country’s eastern regions, Se´tif. The massacres in Se´tif, followed by others in Guelma also in the east of the country, in May 1945 marked the onset of a new and decisive stage in the history of Algerian nationalism.28 Those bloody events hardened the resolve of the nationalists, who became even more radical. The nationalist movement therefore gained momentum. The Algerian question was reopened in the aftermath of World War II. Many parties debated over the official status of Algeria and the rights of native Muslims. French legislators passed the Lamine Gue`ye Law in 1946, granting citizenship to all residents of the newly-founded French Union, the community of France’s African and Asian territories. In the wake of this expansion of French citizenry, Muslim women, however, were left out.29 Much of the discourse in the early years of the war ended up in a few changes immediately after the war: a new status, le statut d’Alge´rie, the institution of a separate governing body for the territory, the Assemble´e Alge´rienne and rights to vote in it for Muslim inhabitants. However, the high level of corruption undermined them. The battle lines were drawn. Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj reconstituted their respective political organisations, the Union de´mocratique du manifeste Alge´rien (UDMA) and the Mouvement pour le triomphe des liberte´s de´mocratiques (MTLD). While the former attempted to keep close ties with France in the hope that its members’ affections might be returned, the latter declared, in response to Ferhat Abbas’s article denying the existence of the Algerian nation, that ‘the Muslim population is not France, it does not want to be France . . . it possesses its fatherland whose frontiers are fixed’.30 Ben Badis believed Algeria to be a people and a nation quite distinct from France and its culture. The cold-blooded response of the settlers only intensified the Algerians’ resolve to destroy the colonial system. It was only the escalation and subsequent end of the war in 1962 that resolved exactly

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who was French and who was Algerian. The struggle for freedom from French colonisation was to imbue the Algerians with consciousness and a new identity and role. The long-term impact of these changes was apparent in the development of Algerian nationalism and helped promote the re-creation of Algerian culture and identity. This expression was inscribed in the political paradigm of independent Algeria.

PART II REFRAMING CITIZENSHIP

Since independence in the 1960s, national identity issues have been at the forefront of the State’s political agenda and served as the main legitimating factor of regimes in Africa. Many African states thus experimented with very inclusive nation-building strategies that sought to create new broad-based loyalties and overcome divisions. Like many other entries in the lexicon of politics, ‘nation-building’ has a wide variety of meanings. It implies constructing a lasting edifice and creating an enduring democracy that withstands the test of time. It is also the process of building a widely shared national identity among a country’s people. Culture is an integral part of this process of national reconstruction for those who are trying, as a tool of resistance, to develop a national culture distinct from the colonial. Yet culture alone does not mould the national identity of any country. Nation-building also requires members of a polity to develop a collective sense of nationhood that bridges their various differences. It further requires them to develop a constitutive nationalism by figuring out the main objectives they want to achieve as a nation and organising a central government and other state institutions in order to achieve these common goals. Likewise, the quality and success of the nation-building process depend greatly on whether a state is a democracy or a dictatorship. As the modern world illustrates, dictatorships tend to keep the processes of defining the nation’s goals and organising the means to achieve them in the hands of a small elite while the masses are left out of the decision making process. As a result, the development of a broad-based, truly popular national identity is stunted.

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On gaining power, many African leaders sought to cement their states through coercive and homogenising policies towards the nation’s constituent groups. This has resulted in serious limitations to post-colonial nation-building. Algeria provides an interesting case. This second part of the book concentres on the Algerian post-colonial dilemmas and attempts to define the institutional nature of what Basil Davidson called ‘the curse of the nation state’.1 This part thus provides insight into the dynamic and contested character of contemporary Algerian-ness. It analyses the legacies of colonialism and places the ‘two Algerias’2 in productive tension with each other, through the twin lenses of equilibrium and disjuncture. My analysis in the subsequent chapters dwells on the construction of identity and citizenship and explores the fractured relationship of Algerian citizens with the notion of belonging to a nation state, epitomised by their persistent disillusion with institutions in which bureaucrats failed to deliver the adequate services. Political pressures contributed to the emergence of discourses of inclusion and exclusion, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ that form the basis of a strategic exclusionary nationalism. In the early 1980s, three types of identity contestation manifested themselves almost simultaneously on the Algerian political scene for the first time since independence in 1962: the fundamentalists’ demands for the total Islamisation of Algeria; the ethnic Berber calls for official recognition of the Berber Amazigh language and culture; and the feminist claims for full enforcement of women’s constitutional citizenship rights, threatened by the then Personal Status legislation. These various movements of civil disobedience heralded the October 1988 riots, putting an end to the one-party system. In the 1980s, Algerian immigrant communities in France had also been subjected to many different influences that shaped their identities. The question of when an ‘immigrant’ becomes a ‘native’, raised by Mahmood Mamdani in his book Citizen and Subject,3 is therefore very relevant here. What all these social movements have in common, whether based on gender, ethnicity, language or religion, is that they demanded full and equal inclusion in society, while claiming the recognition of their particularistic identities in the public sphere. Each of these types of identity claims posed its own dilemma.

CHAPTER 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE POST-COLONIAL NATION

Algeria has been hailed as a model revolutionary post-colonial state and the vanguard of ‘Third Worldism’. Its social and economic policies demonstrate a commitment to development with social justice. Enormous efforts have been made at rapid industrialisation, building up infrastructure and educating the population, yet a profound contradiction lies at the heart of the country’s political development. A consideration of the dimensions of how a State also presents a range of barriers to shaping new spaces of citizenship will highlight the deeper problems that Algerian people, excluded by the French, have experienced in trying to develop a sense of their own participation as binding in contexts where the State has retreated and where the public sphere is highly fragmented.

New spaces for citizenship: the paradox of belonging Scholars of Algeria have explained the origins of the post-colonial crises in a variety of ways: as the result of a growing sense of economic deprivation of a weary population; as a consequence of drastic policy measures with onerous social costs, resulting in the collapse of the ‘social contract’ between the State and its population, when the former can no longer distribute resources and, hence, loses its legitimacy; and on the grounds of a crisis of identity of a society that has failed to ‘assume its origins’ or ‘be itself’.1 While I do not discount economic variables in

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political outcomes, I offer an explanation that builds on the last thesis. In order to explain Algeria’s political breakdown, we need to explore the construction of the nation/State and consider the deep cleavages within Algerian society and the national question. The different structure of the colonial state in Algeria brought about a different type of conflict over the issue of ‘who belongs’. French colonialism produced acute manifestations of uneven development that made it difficult to build a sense of sharing in a common citizenship. The national question, as it was posed around the time of independence, turned on the problems of ensuring the perception of equal treatment. With the achievement of independence, the primary task of the nationalists was to try and reintegrate the State with society and this challenge was made all the more difficult by the legacies of colonial rule. In its attempts to fashion the Algerian nation state, and as part of the developmental agenda, the leadership espoused an ideology and rhetoric of popular incorporation and implemented policies, such as heavy industrialisation and Arabisation, which it insisted were inclusive in nature. However, not only did those policies fail to achieve their stated goals, but they were, in fact, highly exclusionary. Indeed, since independence the inclusion of some has been achieved at the expense of the exclusion of others, which resulted in the intensification of social conflicts and instability and ultimately a civil war. It is these variables and causal relationships that are elucidated in the analysis that follows, so as to give substance to the arguments presented.

Citizenship in the absence of good governance Everyday experience of citizenship in post-colonial Algeria has revolved around a sense of what is lacking – the absence of entitlements, respect and dignity shattered by the French colonisers, a sense of longing for recognition, of being allowed to live with dignity, of being treated as fully human. Integral to this process is the development of a national identity out of the debris of colonialism. The FLN (Front de Libe´ration Nationale, National Liberation Front)led government thus started to work for the construction of a new, united national identity among its citizens, crucial for effective democratic governance and civil stability. This was reflected in a twopronged approach, coupling political and socio-economic transformation with the social-psychological aspect of forging a more inclusive

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national consciousness. However, 52 years later, the notion of a broad united Algerian identity shared by the majority of citizens remains elusive. Rather than a singular national identity, labels of Arabs, Berbers and Islamists continue to define, at least in part, the identity of many. While civic nationalism played an important role in fostering the growth of a broad national identity, Algerian social cohesion failed to emerge without a massive and sustained commitment to wide-ranging socio-economic transformations. What accounts for these apparent failures of social cohesion? How has the FLN-led programme of nationbuilding addressed the question of national unity in the post-colonial context? What are the limitations of this programme of national unity and nation-building in the new Algeria? In its process of nation-building after independence, Algeria initiated an economic policy with the adoption of the First Five-Year Plan (1961 – 6) and programmes to emphasise the social, cultural and spiritual aspects of life and to make the youth participate in activities conducive to national development at the rural level. Three extremely important ideological documents emerged in the period: the 1962 Tripoli Programme, which summarised the position of the radicals who seized power and laid the theoretical foundations for a secular, socialist state; the 1964 Charter of Algiers, which toned down the secularism and elaborated the role of the party within the State; and the 1963 Constitution of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, which outlined a political system that attempted to integrate the party, the economy and the government. Central to the desired sense of national consciousness, the Constitution espoused a spirit of equality and inclusion. A unitary democratic state was established, based on a broad bill of rights, including the rights to equality, human dignity, property, education, social welfare, language and culture as well as freedom of religion and expression. The Constitution also provided for the creation of special institutions to safeguard democracy. The State’s main objectives also included the organisation and promotion of social, cultural and educational activities to foster and strengthen a feeling of national community transcending regional loyalties as well as the adoption of plans to develop the sense of national identity. Moreover, Algeria’s leaders believed that a pluralistic system would weaken the State and foster internal conflicts, as in many newly

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emerging countries. They therefore opted for a one-party state, the Front de Libe´ration Nationale. A strong state required unity around the ideology of nationalism. Thus the FLN’s nationalist outlook was closely interwoven with anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, and this would remain a lasting characteristic of Algerian foreign policy. The party drew its political self-legitimisation not only from nationalism and the revolutionary war against France but also from other sources such as socialism and above all Islam, defined as the main foundation for the national consciousness and a crucial factor in solidifying Algerian identity as separate from that of French Algerians or pied noirs. The result however ‘was both a stifling lack of democracy within the FLN institutional framework and a near-total absence of independent political and social organisations within Algerian society’.2

The seeds of the Algerian crisis Algeria’s crisis is primarily political with heavy social and cultural overtones. It is in part the consequence of the way in which the Algerian State began its independent existence. As in many African countries, since independence the Algerian military have exercised great power behind the scenes, openly intervening in politics on several occasions. Also, once in power nationalist elites turned out to be no less corrupt and brutal than the colonial officials they replaced. The problem of cultural dislocation was compounded by difficulties with socio-economic adjustment. The post-independence Algerian state has encountered many difficulties at the economic level and these predicaments have been replicated at the political and social levels. These negative indices have deflated the early optimism and sense of common destiny with which Algeria entered the post-colonial era. Independence has indeed not provided the stability Algerian society badly needed; on the contrary, it has brought into the open the conflicting aspirations of different groups. The Algerian bourgeois was happy to have replaced the French and was against any radical social or economic reforms. The left-wing intellectuals and the urban workers regarded independence as only the first step towards the complete liberation of Algeria, which will not be achieved until a socialist revolution has taken place, while the conservative and religious elements sought a renaissance of Islam that could counter Western culture and atheistic socialism. These divisions within the Algerian society have not

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in themselves been the cause of instability. It is the country’s first leaders who were primarily responsible because, in their struggle for power, they exploited the latent social tensions to further their personal aims. In so doing they exacerbated the conflicts and perpetuated instability. More importantly, although the first generation of post-colonial leaders embraced ‘modernisation theory’, they failed to develop adequate alternative development frameworks. The modernisation paradigm suggested that, to develop, Algeria and Africa at large would have to espouse the modern principles of a basically Eurocentric framework. However, by the 1970s it had become obvious that Algeria was not developing in the Western sense.

Ben Bella State Socialism (1962 –5) By September 1962, the supreme body was de facto the Political Bureau, a five-man committee that had seized power, backed up by the army, and elections for the National Assembly were organised. The latter chose Ben Bella3 to form a government and thus Algeria gained its very first institutions, but ones riddled with rivalry, a power struggle among Ben Bella, Ferhat Abbas and Mohamed Khider. Each of the leaders took advantage of the confusion that prevailed to impose a political system that would enhance his own power. Khider, Secretary-General of the FLN, and Ben Bella favoured a single-party system but with one main difference. For the former, both assembly and government would play subordinate roles, while the latter opted for a party in the service of the government. Abbas, President of the Assembly, however, sought to create a multi-party system, thus making the Assembly the most important body of the parliamentary regime. Contrary to the intent of the Tripoli Programme, Ben Bella saw the FLN as an elite vanguard party that would mobilise popular support for government policies and reinforce his increasingly personal leadership of the country. Under the new constitution, Ben Bella combined the functions of chief of state and head of government. He formed a cabinet that linked the leadership of the three power bases – the army, the party and the government. In 1962, a special developmental policy framework was adopted to guide the socio-economic transformation of Algerian society and promote its economic growth. Great positive impetus was given to

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education, particularly the re-education of the nation in its AraboIslamic heritage as the primary means by which to instil a sense of nationhood in the hearts and minds of the citizens. The Arabic language was thus revived in the schools and the media.

Arabisation as an expression of belonging One of the main forms of opposition to cultural imperialism has been the quest of the self for its moorings and the restoration of cultural identity. But the recovery of the ‘real’ self, as Trinh T. Min-Ha explained, ‘requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, not I, the Other’.4 This implies an ‘ablution of language’5 because a language is not merely a medium of communication but also the repository of a cultural tradition, the expression of a nation’s spirit and conscience and a way of living which helps to convey a sense of identity upon its native speakers. Algerian society, whose true identity had been denied for 130 years, could therefore not begin to reconstruct itself without restoring the bedrock of that identity: the Arabic language. After independence, educational reform was high on the agenda of the Algerian government. As a reaction to French cultural and linguistic imperialism, policy makers strongly defended the school as a means to free the so-called benighted Algerians from French assimilation. Their goal was to turn the clock back and reverse the impact of years of enforced French language by reviving Islamic cultural values and establishing Arabic as the national language. The group most actively promoting Arabisation after independence in 1962 consisted of Algerian cadres educated in medersas and intellectuals from Arab universities, often with a religious or literary training, anxious to find their own place in an overwhelmingly Frenchspeaking setting. It was Ahmed Ben Bella who, immediately after his release from French custody in the spring of 1962, proclaimed his adherence to Arab nationalism – ‘We are Arabs’6 – and so initiated the policy of linguistic Arabisation in the country. Arabic was to elbow out the French language that had pervaded all walks of life. Arabisation was not only presented as a conflict with France but also those Algerians who used French in their working or private lives were denounced as members of the hizb fransa or party of France. The result was a controversy that opposed Francophones to Arabophones. The former

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viewed French as the language of modernity, science and technology. For the latter, however, French was the language of the enemy, hence the negation of Algerian identity while Arabic is the language of the Qur’an and Islam. Ben Bella’s second objective was to destroy the colonial economic order and make Algeria a socialist country to counter the spontaneous development of a new bourgeoisie. The form of socialism adopted was undoubtedly that of the coterie of foreign intellectuals who acted as Ben Bella’s ‘brains trust’ during his first two years in power. Algeria thus became the first testing ground for the revolutionary theories of the Trotskyites.7 The socialist theme was developed into the concept of self-management. But self-management proved a sham, mainly because its instigators were oblivious of economic problems. Even the president himself, more concerned with politics than economic matters, saw the institution of self-management as a booster to his own position and as a way to gain an advantage over his political rivals. Ben Bella also put his personal stamp on Algeria’s foreign policy, an area where he had a free hand and which became an escape from the political difficulties he could not solve at home. The goals he set for his foreign policy were both individually difficult to attain and blatantly contradictory. In practice, ‘real democracy’ for Ben Bella meant that he made decisions on his own. During his 33 months in power, Ben Bella had thus been constantly accused of drifting the country towards chaos and diverting it from the very goals of the revolution while reducing the political life of the Algerian nation into one of clans and chiefs. The nine historic leaders8 saw him as the usurper of the power that belonged to all of them by virtue of their prominent role in the revolution and thus the incarnation of Algeria’s sovereignty. By 1965, there was not a single plan for economic development. Projects for an agrarian reform languished in offices of the Ministry of Agriculture. Few of the programmes undertaken by the president had been carried out. After three years of unfulfilled promises and halfapplied measures, Algerians became sceptical about their leader’s rule. The president’s ambitions to make the country a model of inspiration to the Third World led him to forget his primary mission, the well-being of his people. Contestation concerned the character of revolutionary government, but for Algerian people, it also concerned citizenship and identity. These factors combined with his radical agenda led to the

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military coup of June 1965 and the takeover of the leadership by Houari Boume´die`ne.

Boume´die`ne presidency (1965– 78) On 19 June 1965 a new cycle started in the political life of Algeria. The coup d’e´tat in Algiers represented what the radical African leaders feared most, the interference of the military in politics. As the National Popular Army’s (ANP) commanding officer and the Minister of Defence, Boume´die`ne had unparalleled power. And just like his predecessor, he took a systematic and authoritarian approach to state building, arguing that Algeria needed stability and an economic base before any political institutions. The background and ideology of the new Algerian president was not so different from his predecessor’s. Both embraced a one-party system, an anti-imperialist foreign policy and social modernisation. However, the most significant change in Algerian foreign policy was the shift in emphasis from Africa to the Arab world. Boume´die`ne accused Ben Bella of having tried to suppress Algeria’s identity as an Arab nation. Also, unlike his predecessor, Boume´die`ne was more consensus-oriented, which gained him the sympathy of both the FLN and the military. With the political situation under control, the new Algerian leader managed to launch several economic plans to break the grip of poverty and free the country from Western economic domination. On the model elaborated by the French economist Destane de Bernis and widely adopted by the newly independent Third World countries, the first plan emphasising industrialisation was inaugurated in 1968. The key element in Algeria’s industrialisation programme was the hydrocarbon industry. The country’s huge reserves of natural gas and oil were expected not only to provide the capital necessary to boost the economy of the country but also to generate new technologies to modernise the agricultural sector. During the era of centralised economic planning of the 1960s and 1970s, Algeria had one of the highest rates of capital accumulation of the developing world. About 40 per cent of the output was re-invested to expand capital, mainly in the industrial sector. Yet despite these huge efforts, gains were few. The nationalisation of Algeria’s hydrocarbon industry as well as the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973– 4, though enhancing the importance of the industry, failed to realise the economic planner’s goals. Algeria’s industry remained highly inefficient and its

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agricultural sector lagging behind. Boume´die`ne’s emphasis on developing heavy industry left the countryside in a severely depressed state and cities overcrowded, well beyond their capacity to provide adequate working and living conditions. The gross domestic product rose by barely 2 per cent annually and the explosive population growth aggravated the situation. The government’s bureaucratic agenda, as well as the all-powerful control of state technocrats, to my mind, proved the greatest hindrance to the country’s development. Despite his promise to set up democracy in the country, Boume´die`ne retained an iron grip on the country’s political system. He abolished the parliament, the institution through which the people were supposed to exercise sovereignty and replaced it with local and regional assemblies such as the Assemble´es populaires communales (APC) and the Assemble´es populaires de wilaya (APW). These bodies, which according to the Constitution were to provide ‘the framework through which the popular will was expressed and democracy realised’,9 had very restricted power and authority as they were tightly controlled by the central government. And although elected, their membership was drawn from lists of candidates prepared by the FLN. Although there was much to boast of in the progress made in several important indices of social development – such as the decrease in the level of illiteracy which was cut by half and the mortality rate – to better assert his control over Algeria’s social space, Boume´die`ne redesigned the country’s educational system just as his predecessor had. Part of the new plan was the promotion of the Arabisation policy, but his approach was more radical. In 1968, the president imposed Arabisation on the civil service, ordering bureaucrats to learn enough Arabic to work in the language within three years. Much the same happened in education where Arabisation intensified after 1970 under the influence of Abdelhamid Mehri, Head of Primary and Secondary Education. Higher education resisted for a while longer before it too was drawn into the reform. But the regime’s use of education as a means to promote its definition of the nation did not stop at Arabisation. On 16 April 1976, Ordinance 76– 35, which outlined the objectives and organisation of the country’s education and training systems, was passed. Article 2 of the ordinance underlined the education system’s responsibility to develop the citizens’ characters and reinforce their patriotism.

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Like Ben Bella, Boume´die`ne also exploited the existing frictions between Algeria and other countries to promote his nation-building process. During his presidency, Franco-Algerian relations became increasingly strained over the treatment of both Algerians in France and French in Algeria. The president’s stance on foreign policy issues furthered his nation-building process in two distinct ways: first, it created international incidents that could be used to stir up nationalist sentiments, thus uniting the Algerians; second, he underlined what Algeria was and what values guided it. Rather than integrate the constituent dimensions of the national culture, an indispensable task for post-colonial states, Boume´die`ne thus, like his predecessor, only helped to nourish adversarial relationships among them. His discourse of egalitarianism, social justice and inclusion increasingly came up against a reality of nepotism, exclusion and growing inequalities. A fractured and fragmented national identity thus persisted, while frustrations and social conflicts intensified. After his sudden death from a blood disease in December 1978, Chadli Bendjedid succeeded him.

Bendjedid and the political impasse (1978 –92) As a loyal defender of the former president, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid’s accession to the presidency in 1979 connoted continuity rather than abrupt change. Bendjedid centralised power around himself as his predecessors had. His nation-building process took place in two phases. During the first stage, which lasted until the mid-1980s, the regime promoted a definition of the nation quite similar to that of his predecessors, one that rested on Islam, Arabism and socialism. During the second phase, which lasted until 1991, when he was forced to resign, the definition of the nation was significantly altered. Bendjedid introduced a cluster of political, economic and social reforms that gave the population far more opportunity to debate what it meant to be Algerian. By declaring the country irreversibly committed to Arab socialism, as outlined in the National Charter,10 as well as accelerating the path of Arabisation, he too, created tensions within society. Besides the dismantling of superministries and large companies such as Sonatrach, the national oil and gas company, the government launched an anti-corruption and anti-bureaucratic campaign. But the president’s

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efforts sparked further unrest. Soon the country slid into social upheavals: nepotism, low salaries, poor living conditions and uncertain futures for the youth. But identity concerns also figured among the grievances. The first crisis emerged at the University of Algiers over the issue of the language. Since independence, the government had virtually ignored the problems inherent in the cultural and linguistic duality, viewing it as a national asset. While Arabisation is the logical development of Algerian nationalism, an attempt to unify a dualistic culture, the process of Arabisation policy actually represented a much deeper shift in the political and social scene. It was accelerated in the winter of 1979 when Arab-speaking students launched a two-month strike to protest against the favouritism towards Francophone students and better opportunities accorded to them. No sooner had the Bendjedid administration conceded to Arab-speaking students’ demands than an immediate Kabyle reaction took place in Tizi Ouzou, the heartland of the Berber population. A general strike was called in mid-April 1980 at the university of this Kabyle province and quickly spread to nearby schools.11 Algeria’s ‘Arab Spring’ actually occurred at that particular time, long before the revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in 2011. The government adopted a fierce and unbending attitude. The gendarmerie, the national police, was sent there to restore order but this gave rise to the worst rebellion to arise in post-independent Algerian history, recalling the Prague Spring rioting 12 years earlier when the Soviet tanks crushed the Czechoslovak uprising. While some minor concessions were made to help crush the revolt, the government stuck to its Arabisation scheme. The so-called Berber Spring was a notable turning point in the long struggle for Berber cultural recognition. But Berber nationalists and Arab speakers were not the only ones to pressure the regime to introduce political, social and cultural reforms and to re-evaluate the post-independent definition of the nation. So, too did the Islamist groups.12 Although the regime came down heavily on Islamists, Islam will always provide a unifying identity for Algerians and it is in this spirit that a national identity was resurrected through a mosque and medersa building programme. In 1982, Bendjedid increased the state funding of Islamic schools and imam training. He also reinforced the Islamist movement’s credentials, much as his predecessor

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had. However, while Boume´die`ne tolerated radical preachers in local mosques, Bendjedid invited a leading Egyptian scholar and preacher, AlGhazali, to preside over a new Islamic educational institution, Emir Abdelkader University Islamic Sciences in 1982. Al-Ghazali helped to legitimise the positions taken by radical imams by issuing a number of fatwas, judicial rulings, favourable to their positions. In the late 1980s, the rate of unemployment among younger people, most of them under 35 years old, reached huge figures and the wide gap between wealthy leaders/beneficiaries of the military-controlled regime and the majority of Algerians was aggravated by austerity measures imposed on Algeria by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Added to this, the overwhelming dependence of the economy on oil and gas for its export earnings made it vulnerable to even the slightest downturns in the global markets. As a result, the oil crash of 1986, during which the price per barrel dropped from $30 to $10, forced deep governmental budget cuts. This situation was compounded by mounting debts to foreign creditors, which forced shifts in social spending and the rocketing birth rate. The 1986 oil crisis effectively resulted in the government’s incapacity to draw on its funds to placate the country’s growing social and political discontent. The emergence of a black market further stifled the economy. Algeria’s foreign debt swelled. Hopelessness about the economy and the country’s political future consumed the Algerian population. Social pathologies were mostly prevalent among the young. Living conditions deteriorated and the housing crisis exacerbated the situation. With the removal of subsidies for basic commodities, the State confronted its first citizens’ protests against the regime. The collapsing economy and hardships of the mid1980s brought the Algerians onto the streets. The movement of revolt started on 5 October 1988 in a few eastern cities then reached Algiers, the capital city. Thousands of students, youth, unemployed and others expressed their rage against the regime, targeting in the first place the FLN. The government introduced sweeping political liberalisation to resurrect its flagging fortunes and once more buff up its tarnished image. The Army was forced to withdraw from politics and the President attempted to implement a democratic system via a new constitution which guaranteed above all a multi-party democracy and basic freedoms of association and expression. Constitutional reform thus led to the

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emergence of political parties and freedom of the press. For three years (1989– 91) Algeria lived what could be called a ‘democratic parenthesis’. Its people experienced freedom of expression the first time and practised their civil rights. Dozens of newspapers were launched and several political parties were set up representing the wide Algerian political spectrum. The parties began to claim national leadership, including the FLN, the Berber-dominated Front of Socialist Forces (FFS) and the Islamist group (FIS). Besides these groups, some independent civic organisations emerged such as those representing women, intellectuals and human rights activists. But Bendjedid was unable to contain and manage that democratic outburst. His vison of a powerful presidency thus turned out to be a mirage. By legitimatising parties based on rival Islamist and Berber conceptions of identity, the regime disabled public opinion and provided the army commanders with the pretext for finally intervening in January 1992 to abort the electoral process and suppress the FIS in the name of democracy.

Constituting the nation as a political actor Since the late 1980s, political scientists have devoted much time and many resources to the question of ‘democratisation’ in Africa. Yet it is not clear how this concept of ‘democratisation’ has helped us to understand African politics. The questions that arise are: why is it that some countries succeed in establishing democracies and sustaining them for long periods of time? What must countries do in order to make a successful transition from a nondemocratic regime to an enduring democracy? As a prelude to addressing these questions, it is first necessary to examine the concept of democratic citizenship. This theoretical aspect of democracy will help understand the notion of democratic citizenship in the Algerian context.

The dimensions of democratic citizenship Any view of democracy also implies a view on citizenship and the rights and duties associated with it. The language of democracy is nowadays widely used by a great range of actors; yet the term ‘democracy’ has radically different meanings, with radically different consequences for practice. Its definitions range from an exclusive focus on institutional frameworks to complex and integrated measures that include political

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and civil rights, democratic practices, values and finally a diverse set of institutional arrangements in society, including welfare, education, industrial relations and the legal system. Such diversity of forms, however, does not preclude its intrinsic importance in human life, its instrumental role in generating political incentives and its constructive function in the formation of values.13 Certainly, democracy means more than the right to vote. In Seidman’s words, it ‘includes an understanding that citizens are entitled to demand a living wage, a reasonable standard of living, and basic services like education, health and housing’.14 Such a model of democracy repositions it as a human rights issue. True democracy cannot therefore be established without addressing inequalities. And in the Habermasian sense, democracy must be grounded on principles of open discourse and rational decision making. Democracy of this kind could be regarded as a revitalised public sphere, a realm of debate involving informed and concerned citizens. But what does this actually mean for people who in everyday life are bound up with the internal politics of nation states? The foundations of democracy lie in the inherent structures of society. Accordingly, a new politics following the lines of the points made above which takes into consideration the re-empowerment of human sovereignty needs to be a politics of identity and identification between all peoples. In his 2000 essay, Robert Dahl distinguishes two dimensions of democracy. The first being characterised by an enforceable set of rights and opportunities on which citizens choose to act and which includes the rights of association, belief, freedom of expression and so forth. Therefore, as Dahl notes, ‘a country without these necessary rights and opportunities would as a consequence also lack fundamental political institutions required for democracy’.15 The second dimension refers to actual participation in political life ‘by exercising these rights and act on the opportunities guaranteed by the state’.16 In this view, the rights associated with democracy include not only political and civil rights but also social rights as well as the right to participation. Participatory action can enliven and strengthen work on rights and work on rights can strengthen the claims to fuller citizenship and participation. Yet participation also involves processes of representation often through claims to legitimacy other than elections such as experience, common identity and so forth.

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In his seminal study Making Democracy Work (1993), Robert Putnam adds that social capital is critically linked to political participation and effective governance. Drawing on ideas from Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, Putnam claims that civic participation in voluntary associations, especially horizontal or non-hierarchical associations, inculcates the norms of reciprocity and promotes the building of mutual trust and cooperation. These factors then make a contribution to the process of democratisation. In socialist thought, the concept of democracy extends beyond the precept of accountability to the idea of social justice. From that perspective, democracy implies the effective pursuit of an egalitarian social order in addition to a government that is accountable to the people. As Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan have pointed out in their study of democratisation, ‘stateness’ is a sine qua non for democratic development. For ‘without a state, there can be no citizenship; without citizenship, there can be no democracy’.17 Although democracy stands or falls on state institutions and procedures, inclusive democracy depends mainly on changes in the dynamics and structures of interaction between state and society actors. In this sense, neither civil society nor the state is an isolated entity capable of promoting democracy on its own. Actors from both fields shape and re-shape the state – society relationship. They stimulate and reinforce each other’s activities. In a similar vein, Yves Me´ny and Yves Surel draw a distinction between popular democracy and constitutional democracy.18 The former encompasses the role of the demos, that is the free association of citizens, the maintenance of free elections, the freedom of political expression and government by the people, while the constitutional pillar involves such requirements as the guarantee of individual and collective rights among others. This government for the people, an ideal democracy, needs to reflect equilibrium between the two pillars. Among these newly emerging democracies, a new categorisation has been suggested, one in which an acceptance of popular democracy and of government by the people is combined with the persistence of restrictions and limits on individual freedoms and rights. This new category of democracy has been defined as electoral or illiberal democracy. For de Tocqueville, however, democracy is more than a political system. It is, above all, a social system whose success rests on ‘good customs’ and ‘good laws’. His notion of ‘custom’ or what he called the ‘habits of the

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heart’, refers to the mores and manners of daily life as well as to the notions, opinions and ideas which make up the character of peoples’ minds.19 Enacting the right laws would amount to very little if the ‘habits of the heart’ that had evolved in the context of feudal or caste-ridden societies remained unchanged. This sociologically grounded understanding of democratic practice has particular resonance for African and MENA societies. While their constitutions generally guarantee the formal rights of citizenship, the incapacity or unwillingness of the State to provide basic security of life and livelihoods to its citizens and its vulnerability to capture by powerful elites have meant that democracy has very shallow roots in many of these societies. Despite its universal value, democracy works differently in different contexts.20 Certain models of democracy based on liberal representation often remain hegemonic. While Freedom House deemed the twentieth century to be the ‘Democratic Century’,21 other sources draw attention to the crisis in democracy in both North and South. In the United Kingdom, for instance, despite the endeavours of the Labour Party to call for new forms of ‘active citizenship’ to revive democracy, a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research argues that people remain interested in political matters, they feel that Britain is becoming less democratic. Similarly, Theda Skocpol draws attention to the rise of ‘diminished democracy’22 among early twenty-first century Americans. Putnam and others write of the decline of social capital as people ‘bowl alone’ rather than take part in community and public affairs. If the quality and substance of democracy are downsizing in the North, in the South the concerns are different. The main questions are whether Western democratic institutions could serve as models for the South and whether democracy could deliver on problems of extreme poverty, growing inequality and social justice.

Democracy and the MENA political tradition The question for a democratic politics is not how to eliminate power, but how to constitute forms of power compatible with democratic values. Such a conception of democracy changes the way in which we view civil society and the public sphere. The main task for democracy and citizenship in the MENA region is to convert antagonism into agonism, enemies into adversaries, fighting into critical engagement.23 This requires a rethinking of the idea of public sphere as an arena of

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general values and overarching spaces for citizenship and a space for multiple contestations of democratic identities. Traditional rule in the Islamic MENA region has been depicted as ‘Oriental despotism’24 in which, to use Karl Wittfogel’s blunt characterisation of this regime, the State is stronger than society and personal freedoms are curtailed. This maintains perforce a great distance, not to say an outright separation, between concerns of the ruler and those of the ruled. Some experts explained the prevalence of autocratic governance in the MENA region by putting the blame on Islam. However, it is clear that the near-absence of democracy in this region cannot be imputed to its dominant religion and that the democracy gap can largely be accounted for by weaknesses or absences in maintaining political liberalism. The evidence provided here demonstrates that during and since the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a growing interest in the rhetoric of civil society and democracy. There is also further evidence that the appreciation of democratic forms of rule and civil forms of civic engagement is particularly strong in the region. In the Arab world, and in Africa in general, the issue of democracy has gained unprecedented prominence and has been at the top of political debates during the past decade. The World Values Survey, in international studies conducted between 1995– 6 and 2000– 2, provides enough data to compare the Arab region – based on surveys in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan and Morocco – to eight other country clusters: nonIslamic countries, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia and Western Europe among others.25 Although the survey indicates that Arab countries place high value on democratic governance, doubts have been expressed as to the compatibility of the ‘modern’ concept of democracy to African/Arab societies. As was the case in the wake of national independence, a key reason for such scepticism was the feasibility of Western-style multi-party democracy in Africa. Whatever form democracy among the Arabs might eventually take, it will most certainly be non-Western in outlook. Secularism being the pivot of Western democracy and the major issue in the Arab world, therefore, one would ask whether it is possible for the Arabs26 to modernise, ipso facto, to democratise without secularising an Islamic society. The MENA region, and the Arab world in particular, is grappling today with a wide range of conflicting ideological trends whose respective definitions of nationalism are mutually exclusive, and it is also

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beset by the emergence of minority groups such as the Berbers in the Maghreb, the Copts in Egypt and the Maronites and the Shi’as in Lebanon. Political enfranchisement in the absence of an acceptable common denominator is likely to aggravate the already existing political divisions and cause systemic regression into oppressive measures. Political liberalisation in such a situation is also likely to result in weakening the central authority of the State without achieving a democratic breakthrough. In Algeria, for instance, while the issue of democracy has come to the centre stage, many factors constitute a hindrance to democracy. Algerian people are increasingly frustrated with the way their State is attempting to democratise. In this sense, the role of citizens is somewhat passive. Drawing on the above-mentioned scholars’ definitions of democracy, I shall highlight the separation between the two pillars of democracy in Algeria, not only in theory but also in practice and reveal how the country has moved towards heightened illiberalism.

Elitist democracy Democracy is only worth having if it can address everyone’s basic social and economic needs, but the Algerian view of democracy is one especially grounded in democratic elitism, which Avritzer sees as based on two main postulates: first that in order to be preserved, democracy must narrow the scope of political participation; and second that the only way to make democratic decision-making rational is to elites and to restrict the role of the masses to that of choosing between elites.27 As such, politics ‘is stripped of its horizontal elements, which are replaced by the political authorisation of elites through elections’.28 In so doing, this approach reduces the scope of political participation and ‘leaves behind the idea of a search for consensus of the public good’.29 To make this analysis of democracy more explicit, we need to return to the classical debate within democratic thought and ask such fundamental questions as: what has happened to the stock of ‘social capital’ in the course of democratisation in Algeria; and what are the barriers to collective action that have had the paradoxical effect of inhibiting democracy in Algeria?

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Those familiar with the literature on Algeria will have become used to the idea of its exceptionalities. Politically, Algeria is known to be a democratic republic even though it is yet to experience a break in its functioning. It is also one of the rare Arab countries to escape the turmoil of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011. Ethnic differences and overt conflicts have been largely masked as the State sought to negotiate good relationships by emphasising consensus and unity. Economically, Algeria has sustained one of the fastest growing economies in Africa; yet mismanagement and corruption have undermined its efforts. The country has tried to widen the boundaries of participatory politics and more accountable forms of governance; yet at the legislative elections of 10 May 2012, power remained in the hands of the 52-year-old ruling party, the FLN, a party that has maintained advantages and privileges inherited from the colonial era or greatly magnified in the post-colonial politics of nation-building while others are yet to enjoy the recognition and representation they deserve in a democracy. Today, Algeria is witnessing substantial political changes among many of its regional neighbours and, indeed, within countries throughout the world as societal calls for democratisation appear to be spreading. Objectively considered, however, the record of participatory democracy in the country has fallen far short of the people’s expectations. Democratic dreams gleamed brightly in the sunlight of the country’s liberation, only to fade beneath the lengthening shadow of grim economic realities. Looking back at the evolution of Algerian democracy from the early days of the democratic transition in 1988 to the current situation in the twenty-first century, it is legitimate to have serious doubts about the prospects for genuine democratic progress in the country. Actually, instead of witnessing a gradual process of democratisation what we observe is a merry-go-round of liberal and non-liberal reforms at the periphery of state power. The Constitution of Algeria, promulgated in 1963 and amended several times largely to accommodate shifting political realities, reflects the ideals of its liberation struggle and embodies the principles of democracy, nationalism and secularism. It spells out the fundamental human rights of the individual, including equality between the sexes, equality in the field of work, freedom of movement, expression, thought and conscience. It also imposes a positive duty upon the State to take

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action to improve citizens’ livelihood. Although the Constitution declared these rights as inalienable, the reality bears very little relation to these constitutional provisions. Instead it is characterised by various forms of inclusion and exclusion in relation to these rights. The nation state has lost its centrality in the way people live, partly because of its inability to fully protect its citizens and partly due to its inadequacy as a total frame for their aspirations. As a result, there is still much for the nation state to do.

The democratic deficit Before explaining the factors that have plagued the road to Algerian democracy, it is important to pause for a while and ask what conditions make democracy possible and what conditions make it thrive. Recent American sociologists’ and political scientists’ works advance three sorts of explanation. Seymour Martin Lipset and Phillips Cutright, for instance, link stable democracy with certain economic and social background conditions such as high per capita income, widespread literacy and prevalent urban residence. A number of authors from Walter Bagehot to Ernest Barker underline the need for consensus as the basis of democracy. In contrast to the widespread consensus theory, writers such as Carl J. Friedrich, E.E. Schattschneider, Bernard Crick, Ralf Dahrendorf and Arend Lijphart regard conflict and reconciliation are essential to democracy.30 I would also posit that democratic stability requires that politicians be committed to democratic values or rules, each of these linked to the other through effective ties of political organisation.31 These explanations provide at best a clue to the so-called democratic deficit in Algeria where political, ideological, social and economic conflicts have jeopardised the democratic process. If we go back to the need for consensus underscored by Friedrich et al., in order to face the multifaceted problems following the end of colonial rule most states in the Middle East and North Africa opted for a strong focus on national consensus. However, since there were few democratic institutions developed at the time, the ‘consensus’ was likely to be imposed from above rather than emerge from public discussion and debate. In Algeria, it is not simply the presence or absence of multi-party democracy that constitutes the problem of citizenship but the

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pervasiveness of deep-seated bad governance, in all aspects of life, which imprisons Algerian citizens within relationships of dependence from which there are few avenues of escape. If democracy requires a fundamental ‘civility of manners’ in everyday life – that is, the possibility of dialogue across divergent, if not oppressed, ideas and interests – a ‘certain inner acceptance of equality’32 should have been the basis of social interchange. However, the country’s resources have been allocated through pervasive patron-client networks, allowing the FLN to monopolise public sector distribution. Not only does this disadvantage those sections of the population who do not have access to influential social networks or occupy an inferior status within them, such as women or the poor, for instance, but it has also undermined the likelihood that public institutions will produce equitable outcomes on the basis of transparent and impersonal criteria. Also, for many years the National Assembly remained overwhelmingly dominated by the FLN. The latter, originally founded to transform Algeria first by ousting the French and then by rejuvenating its political and economic structures, culture and society, has shown little concern for problems of democracy, good governance or basic human rights for much of its involvement in the post-independence history of Algeria. This type of regime, which is neither fully autocratic nor fully democratic, exists in a grey zone, one in which basic human rights are widely abused. This has been a major factor in slowing down progress on development goals. Survival within this system dictates that social actors have little choice but to follow the dysfunctional forms of behaviour generated by these institutional forces. Wood’s metaphor of the prison conveys well the idea of Algeria as a ‘total institution’ that prescribes all aspects of the citizens’ lives. This perspective has given rise to inequalities that are very deeply rooted in the Algerian society. Fifty-two years after independence, these inequalities translate into ‘natural’ deference-authority dyads, making it almost impossible for the inmates of this prison to either reform its institutions or free themselves. The legal system is also part of this larger problem of governance. The flawed functioning of the government and legal system can be traced to a wider social system which breeds inequalities and promotes transgressions of the rule of law. Certain individuals enjoy far more rights and privileges than others and indeed often at the expense of these others. These problems of inequality and exclusion can in turn be traced to the

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workings of the key institutions of society. In some cases, this reflects apathy and indifference on the part of the State and its judiciary; in others, the inadequacies in the apparatus of enforcement; in yet others, the deliberate machinations of powerful vested interests in the society. These inequalities are then compounded by the existence of various laws which are either outmoded or in conflict with constitutional rights. Some laws discriminate, others are simply not enforced. More importantly, the manipulation of the laws has emerged as a powerful tool to harass and intimidate the weak and vulnerable. Powerful individuals frequently resort to the use of false litigation to secure their own interests. The chances of getting justice are random for the great majority, but they are particularly remote for those without position and social networks. Along with flaws in the legal definition of rights, the legal system offers uncertain recourse to justice. More troubling than the delays, inefficiency and cumbersome procedures that contribute to this uncertainty is the fact that justice can be bought or sold, resulting in the dismissal of cases or delays. The widespread reliance on personal favours and influential connections undermines the likelihood that justice and other public institutions will operate on the basis of transparent criteria and weakens the most fundamental principles of citizenship and accountability. The precarious status of citizenship rights in Algeria has been compounded by the failure of successive governments to redress the situation. As was often the experience in Africa and Asia, the first Algerian post-independent governments proved to be ‘experimental, inefficient, corrupt, and incapable of creating any kind of national political culture’.33 Even the installation of multi-party democracy in the late 1980s could not ensure progress. State actors thus not only failed to protect the rights of citizens, but they also actively contributed to their violation. Another recurrent dilemma that constrained democratisation in Algeria from independence time – a dilemma that is by no means unique to the country – is the lack of an inclusive political community that can agree on the rules of the political game through institutionalised means. This lack of inclusiveness at the top has its roots in the power struggle that followed the war of decolonisation and it was revived in the late 1980s, continuing through the 1990s with the conflict that opposed the Islamists to the republican-nationalist ruling coalition.

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Politically speaking, non-democratic and non-liberal actors and practices have set the rules of the political game. The Algerian political scene has been carved up among nationalist, Islamist and democratic currents. Each of them has attempted to introduce democratic reforms that did not challenge their leadership thereby creating an ebb and flow of political liberalisation and de-liberalisation that effectively maintained the status quo in the country. This has made it difficult for the regime to maintain its control over the polity. Furthermore, the end of FLN rule over Algeria opened a period of uncertain transition. In such a situation, it is not easy to build a good democracy and to open up and develop the country. The democratic process is a long-term process and cannot be achieved in a single year, let alone when a country is experiencing more downs than ups. In the late 1980s, although the Algerian democratic transition was one of the first processes of political liberalisation in the Muslim world to embody the principles of the ‘Third Wave’ of democratisation, the process of democratic transition drove the country towards the brink of disaster. It is difficult to conceive a viable democratic order in a country wrestling with social and economic problems. In addition, without an educational system fully committed to rigorous inculcation of citizenship and civic obligation, the democratic way of life will not take root. Democracy also requires a free media system. More important for the sake of democracy is the incidence of a high level of mass mobilisation into politics and a capacity for collective action. All of the above democratic prerequisites were nonexistent during the first years of Algeria’s post-colonial era. With the rise of the FIS and the return of the army onto the political scene, it could be said that this was the beginning of the end of Algeria’s democratic experiment. It could then be argued that in the course of such events, Algeria only flirted with democracy. Under the current president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, there is, to some degree, a new political reality, albeit not enough to justify calling Algeria a democratic state. While the Algerian State does provide certain democratic foundations in the form of the constitution, policies and institutions, it is evident that Algeria has democratised only in terms of elections and has neglected the building of corresponding constitutional guarantees and liberties. Thus I would argue that in Algeria, state –society interaction points towards both progressive and regressive democratisation. The nature of

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representation at both levels is problematic, as this exposes the true nature of the lack of participatory democracy in action. The so-called democratic state that was formed after freedom from French colonial rule was expected to remain an autonomous actor that would reform society, create opportunities for the poor and promote development, but as the years have revealed, the unity and coherence the Algerian state has tried to achieve since independence has had the effect of emphasising its separateness with respect to the larger society. From independence, state – society relations have been characterised by paternalism. In addition, the Algerian government has always ‘talk[ed] left’ but ‘act[ed] right’.34 Moreover, the centralised economy and State control over production stimulated the concentration of wealth and an extreme rise in social inequality. Such a situation potentially undermined the development agenda and it has become increasingly clear that the State has not been able to live up to its democratic promises. Social unrest over service delivery is commonplace but to date it has not been sufficiently organised into an articulated strategy of resistance to specific policies. As a result, social rights have decreased to vanishing point and participatory democracy has failed the citizens, thus forcing them to recourse to street protests for the delivery of basic services such as housing, for instance. In view of all the problems discussed so far, one is compelled to ask here how to build a sustainable democracy in Algeria. A democracy is a community whose members govern themselves and a republic is a community of citizens or free people who are all equal and all potentially active in the running of their common affairs and, as such a republic is the sphere of freedom. In Aristotelian terms, people are free to the extent that they neither exclusively rules themselves nor are they exclusively ruled by others. Since both freedom and equality are necessary in order for people to reach their full potential, the public realm is the only place where a truly human life could be lived. These examples do demonstrate the need for congruence between the way in which individuals and communities are represented. How we rerepresent our community also determines who can represent it in the sense of ‘standing for it’, ‘speaking in its name’. A representative is legitimate when s/he fits with the representations made of a community and the community is legitimate when it fits with the representations made of individual human beings. In the modern democratic state, the

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basis of citizenship is the capacity to participate in the exercise of political power through the electoral process.

10 May 2012 legislative elections: a cornerstone of democracy building Democratic elections constitute a major element in any country’s consolidation of democracy. The aim of elections is not only to change the political order but also to remake society in the image of the civil association. Elections are thus the main mechanism through which citizens can express their views about how a country should be governed. They determine what kind of choices people can make when they turn out to the polls. The idea that only elections are a source of legitimacy is largely accepted in the Arab world and this in itself is revolutionary. However, the leaders can appropriate the electorate, as is the case of Algeria. The Algerian Ordinance 62-010 of 16 July 1962 stipulated universal, direct and secret suffrage for the elections to the National Constitutional Assembly. So did the Constitutions of 1963 and 1976, in particular in their Articles 27 and 128 respectively, for the election to the National People’s Assembly. In fact, people’s sovereignty was supposed to be ‘exerted by [the people’s] representatives in a National Assembly on proposal by the National Liberation front. . .’35 and ‘on proposal by the Party’s leadership’.36 Additionally, Articles 5, 13, 27 and 58 from both constitutions mentioned the right to vote among citizens’ fundamental rights and explicitly located national sovereignty with the people. The 1976 Constitution also stipulated that in their composition the elected Popular Assemblies on national, departmental and municipal level must be ‘representative of the social forces of the Revolution and the majority in the elected Popular Assemblies is composed of workers and peasants’.37 Additionally, Articles 23 –6 of the 1963 Constitution and Articles 94 –7 of the 1976 Constitution defined the FLN as the single party embodying revolutionary tenets. As such, until 1989 the principle of free election was severely restricted by the FLN’s exclusive right to nominate candidates for legislative as well as presidential elections. Like its predecessors, the Constitution of 23 February 1989, in its 47th article, granted the active and passive right to vote to ‘every Algerian fulfilling legal conditions’, and declared that the National People’s Assembly was to be elected by universal, direct and secret ballot in Article 95. Unlike the preceding texts, the new constitution reflected a

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more liberal notion of popular sovereignty by declaring explicitly that ‘the people chooses its representatives freely’ and that ‘the State’s legitimacy and its raison d’eˆtre derive from the people’s will’.38 Constitutional amendments made in the late 1980s paved the way for a multi-party regime replacing the single-party system dominated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) since Algeria’s independence in 1962. Another constitutional amendment adopted in 1996 made significant changes to electoral procedures. Among its stipulations, it provided for parliamentary representation for Algerian nationals living abroad and amended electoral, voting and campaigning procedures. In addition, the amendment prohibits political parties based solely on religious or regional base. Following the new constitution, the Algerian parliament became bicameral, and now consists of the Majlis Achaabi Al Watani, the National People’s Assembly, and the Majlis Al Umma or National Council. Together, they exercise legislative power. The wave of democratic enthusiasm in 2012 evoked in Algeria a process of competitive and multi-party elections. This provided a platform for civil society to make political claims on the State. In a speech on local TV on 15 April 2012 President Bouteflika pledged to ‘reinforce representative democracy’. He thus announced a ‘thorough overhaul’ of the electoral law, sweeping reforms including changes to the Constitution and electoral law as well as initiatives that would enhance the role of political parties. Likewise in a message to mark the Shaheed or National Martyrs Day on 18 February 2012, the president explained that ‘the next general elections [10 May 2012] should not be a simple cyclical event, but a cornerstone for the democracy building process that we have initiated’. The president added: ‘We will decide on the issue of the Constitution in light of the results of the process.’ He therefore called on citizens to go to the polls, hailing the elections as a critical stage in Algeria’s history. ‘I’m addressing the young people who must take over the baton because my generation has had its time. The country is in your hands’, he added. The balloting raised high expectations among voters, who hoped that younger leaders would emerge with strengthened legitimacy. What lessons can we learn from the country’s evolution following the results of the 2012 polls? Despite the multitude of separate and overlapping domestic pressures and external incentives for substantive democratic change, power remains, as it has always been, in the hands of

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the unaccountable few governing over the unrepresented many. All in all the legislative elections of 2012 neither improved the political participation of the population nor democratised the regime. It is clear that the regime does not consider the elections as a modality of electoral alternation, but rather as a way of re-legitimising itself. Algerians have the right to vote, but not the right to choose leaders other than the ones designated by the administration. Although held amid conditions of pluralism and relative probity, the most recent legislative elections could not guarantee the basic liberties that are constitutive of democracy. Power has totally abandoned the people, leaving them, as it were, to their own devices, with no say in the construction of the future of the country. As Mohamed Talbi noted, democracy does not allow for more than the bare ‘freedom to shut up’.39 Algerians have clearly lost faith that democracy can solve the country’s deep-seated problems of development and governance. Furthermore, following four months of complete political lethargy after the elections, a ‘new’ government was formed, leading to national disenchantment that killed the spirit of nationalism and human communicativeness. Most of the previous ministers were reappointed, even those dismissed by the president himself and those subjected to media exposure for either corruption or professional incompetence. But the most disappointing fact is that, if there were 146 women in parliament at the legislative elections of 2012, there were only two female ministers, the previous Minister of Culture and the newlyappointed Minister of Solidarity and Family. After his re-election for a fourth term, the president nominated more women as ministers but the number of women who occupy a political position remains insignificant compared to the number of educated women capable of holding office. In brief, the political history of Algeria indicates that the leaders have not yet come to envision the transition from national to popular sovereignty. The system of parties has been fashioned in such a way that it is integrated into the regime and not the society whose various currents it is supposed to represent. The Algerian political system is indeed in contradiction to a multi-party system that presupposes that the source of power is the sovereign electorate because in Algeria, the military leaders, who identify with the nation, would not renounce their sovereign power for the benefit of civil elected officials, lest the nation should disappear.

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Concurrently, the parties are mere apparatuses in the service of the regime, which they seek to perpetuate while giving it a democratic appearance. The nominally ruling party has in reality been little more than a facade for the executive branch of the State dominated by the officer corps of the armed forces. Democracy in this sense becomes a pretence for consolidating military might. Since democracy itself suffers from the politics of exclusion and inclusion, Algerian citizens cannot escape this duality of experiences. Electoral democracy merely gave a different form to the bargaining process. Reduced to electoral competition for the control of the country’s resources, it simply reinforced opportunism. The Algerian people are clearly dissatisfied with the quality of governance provided by national leaders. Rather than a transition to democracy occurring, as many have hoped, an even stronger State grip has been maintained. At the same time, no vibrant civil society is emerging that could potentially serve as a natural challenge to the State and thereby facilitate the evolution of a political society within which democracy can be nurtured. As a result, the regime indirectly encouraged the emergence of non-institutionalised forms of the polity, such as the protest movement in Kabylia and the Islamist violence.

CHAPTER 4 CHALLENGES TO THE NATION STATE: VIOLENCE AND BELONGING

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again . . . Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.1 Most of the scholarship on citizenship claims a necessary connection to the national state. The transformations afoot today are destabilising this particular juxtaposition. Perhaps the most evolved type of site for these transformations is the global city. Admittedly, specific alterations inside the national state have directly and indirectly changed particular features of the institution of citizenship, stimulating new interest in the issue. Underlying many of the global social changes that gave birth to this renewed interest in citizenship is the issue of religion. Religion may be viewed as a cement of social solidarity, usefully underpinning the nationalist notion and forming a salient ingredient in the national characteristic. However, the emphatic elevation of religion as a collective identity could also achieve the exact opposite: it may become an exclusionary factor. Given the antithetical assertions about the relation between religion and nationalism, it is no surprise that the

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role of religion has been integral and even a determinative factor in the construction of nations. As one of the oldest sources of collective identity and belonging, religion has come to acquire a broader cultural significance. The social dimension of religion explains why religious values, myths and symbols help shape and define ethnic, national and even civilisational identities. Drawing together case studies from many different expressions of faith and belief, leading scholars ask how religion might respond to the challenge of forming individual and collective identities in the context of a nation. As stated earlier, the colonial conquest and imposition of European rule shattered the old political and religious orders. The defamation of traditional African cultures and religions and the collapse of indigenous political orders laid the foundation for the decline of traditional religious institutions and religious communities. Newly independent countries searching for national identity thus turned to ideas of civil society and citizenship to overcome the problem of social order. For some, citizenship had to be reconsidered because it had lost its foundational base, the nation state. After independence, political leaders in predominantly Muslim countries became more aware of their country’s Islamic identity and expanded ties with the broader Muslim world. Those influenced by Wahabi and Salafi currents called on Muslims to return to the purity of the early period of Islam and to construct theocratic states based on the shar’ia or Islamic law. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs to power, and the Muslim Brotherhood, which originated in Egypt, presented alternative models of radical Islam. The Algerian situation offers a good example to aid comprehension of much of what is taking place in the broader Arab Islamic world as well as the wider Mediterranean context.

Citizenship in the political and religious orders Religion influences social and political values at the foundational level. Some parallels in governance structures and norms can be discerned in the way in which individuals become members of religious and nation state political orders. Moreover, religion enhances the legitimacy of political orders when religious authorities declare them in conformity

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with divine law. But religious authorities can also undermine political orders by challenging their legitimacy. As David Lehmann has it: ‘Religion breaks through frontiers and in the same process throws up new [ones] as ancient and modern religions with their apparatus of ritual practices and internal, self-sufficient codes are demarcators, markers. When religion crosses frontiers or breaks through barriers, it does so sometimes in the most violent manner.’2 Empirical research indeed reveals that the bulk of contemporary wars turn on issues of religious, ethnic or national identity. Today, more than in the past, there seems to be a greater awareness of and commitment to one’s religious identity in a number of societies. This process has been linked, in different ways, with the desire to belong, which invokes the desire to be located but, as Henrietta Moore reminds us, all ‘locations are provisional, held in abeyance. One is never truly anywhere and if locations or positions are to be specified, they will always be in the plural.’3 The crisis of location at the heart of the yearning to belong is a productive one because it propels the process of identity formation, a project in which a certain modality of violence plays a necessary part. In the process, it unleashes forces that challenge the State. The secular revolution has provoked a religious reaction, a desire to re-establish religious identity and hence to reconnect with the sacred. Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims in particular have become torchbearers of religious movements. We might ask ourselves what causes conflict between religious groups and why does the preservation of religious identity lead to violent conflict? What is the reason for the seeming propensity towards fundamentalism in all religions, not merely Islam? One possible explanation could be that religious fundamentalism is sought as a response to globalisation and to related trends. Foreign influences via globalisation’s new technologies are deemed responsible for the disequilibrium of the social system. Another explanation could be that the economic and political systems jointly generate a series of traumas that society as a whole must absorb and deal with. A third reason is that justice, freedom and equality have remained platitudes in some of these societies and the basic principles of good governance have been transgressed with impunity. These factors tend to isolate the people from their government leaders and cause them to seek inclusion elsewhere. Hence, to countervail these harrowing forces, fundamentalist

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religion acts as an agent to assuage the effects of the traumas. Protecting pristine religious values has become part and parcel of the political agenda of a number of political parties. It is only too apparent that such agendas buttress a religious community’s fidelity to its identity. Such calls are heard in many Muslim countries.

Religious identity in an era of globalisation French sociologist Emile Durkheim postulated that ‘the main role (or function) of religion [is] to celebrate and sustain the norms upon which the integration of society depends’.4 Secularisation theory, on the other hand, argues that modernisation has undermined religion. As one of the most profound revolutions the world has ever known, globalisation has brought about unprecedented developments in the lives of the people across the globe, but it has also proved a destabilising force. By disrupting peoples’ traditions and customs, it threatened their very security, safety, sense of identity and belonging. And religion, as an ‘identity-signifier’, is more likely than other identity construction to arise during crises of ontological insecurity, hence the upsurge in religious nationalism and an increasing focus on the role of religion as a legitimising force in democratic secular states. Religion does indeed deeply impact on our identity and yet religion’s effects on identity are highly disparate. For some, religion makes them a better person: altruistic, generous and more concerned with the needs of others. Yet these same ideas may inspire hate and can provide an impetus for violence. As is internationally acknowledged, violence is amongst the root causes of the destruction of identity. Violence is sanctioned through a process of ‘othering’ whereby a group is labelled as dangerous, not belonging, such as through the use of ethnic and religious stereotypes. The insecurity and mistrust that ensue from violence shape people’s perception of their political community and have dire consequences on the quality of democratic governance. Predictably, perpetrators deploy violence as a political weapon to force through their own desire to belong by destroying similar claims of belonging by the victims. This raises the question: how is it possible that something initially attempting to exist as spiritual and positive is as capable of having the opposite effect? Ancient communities recognised that religion, when coupled with secular authority, was a powerful asset. Contemporary states, too, seek to harness religion to promote legitimacy or at least to co-opt religious

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identities that might undermine the loyalties of citizens. Increasingly however, religious identity competes with state citizenship for people’s loyalties. Religious sentiment and identity can challenge a citizen’s state identity for primacy. A global perspective on religious changes and adaptations in the contemporary world requires an examination of different case studies as not all religions are subjected to the same forces and engaged with similar processes of changes.

Globalisation’s challenge to Islamic identity Social scientists have discussed identity as a basic human need, the fulfilment of which comes through affiliation with a group and which functions as a defence mechanism for the individuals involved. The threat to religious identity, therefore, is potentially a source of high levels of violence and conflict that are often extremely difficult to resolve. In some cases, the exploitation of religion to promote a political cause effectively encourages radical behaviour. Drawing on Sigmund Freud, the first to advance the idea of the death instinct and its fulfilment through aggressive behaviour,5 Vamik Volkan asserts that aggressiveness is a necessary defence against psychotic anxiety and that people need enemies, and when they lose one they will, by implication, need another. He also maintains that there are human needs that define a group’s friends and enemies. Thus, human beings possess an inherent need to have both enemies and allies.6 How does this need for foes converge with religious identity? Volkan argues that collective history, shared memory of grievances and trauma often feed into or are consciously infused in collective identity in groups. This repertoire of the past is transmitted from one generation to another through story-telling and other rituals.7 In his investigation of collective violence, Scott Appleby, for his part, underscores religion’s capacity to engender fundamentalism, religious nationalism and liberation theology.8 He also refers to the predisposition of religious leadership to look for scapegoats, ‘a sacrificial victim who serve[s] as a surrogate for the enemy’.9 We can substantiate his argument by citing the targeting of Muslims by the West. One of the most pernicious myths on identity that one should try to root out is that of religious exclusivity and purity. While it is true that every religion has its own history and heritage and, even if religious rituals and practices differ, all religions share some fundamental tenets,

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all of them have the same claim to Truth and share the Oneness of God or Tawhid. Essentially, all religions celebrate the precious bond between the human being and nature. They also share certain basic universal values such as love, compassion, justice, freedom, honesty, humility, responsibility, restraint, peace, harmony and equality. In addition, all religions cherish the family as the foundation of society just as all religions seek to foster a sense of community. In other words, the source of religion is not to divide but to unite to bring about justice and equality in this world, whatever the challenges and adversaries may be. These intertwined principles are the very essence of globalisation. This teaching becomes painfully ironic when seen through the light of religion’s negative impacts, as it is often a sense of superiority that leads groups, nations and civilisations to use violence for purely selfish ends. Although Muslim people share a sense of being part of a global village, an examination of the evolution of Islam in recent decades shows that this universal community has been under attack. This may explain why Muslims as a whole seem to be more concerned about and attached to their Islamic identity.

‘Christianus’ versus ‘Barbarus’ Centuries of interaction between the Islamic world and the Christian have left a bitter legacy. Since the Middle Ages, religious animosity provided the casus belli of crusade and jihad and restricted cultural and intellectual contact between Christians and Muslims. In many early medieval sources, ‘barbarus’ was opposed to ‘Christianus’ and the religious character of their struggle was emphasised. The term ‘barbaria’ came to signify both the realm of the Muslim Berbers of North Africa and the eastern lands inhabited by ferocious barbarians. The barbarian then was the non-Catholic Christian. This stereotype of the Muslim became enshrined in books and has remained ever since, widening the gap between Christians and Muslims. This Orientalist picture of Muslims and Islam strengthened in the United States in the 1990s, especially in April 1995, when the media blamed Islam for the attack of a federal building in Oklahoma City in the aftermath of which around 200 attacks against Muslims were reported. The picture of a violent Islam continued to be nurtured even more after the terrorist attacks against US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. The attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 were the final proof needed.

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The Bin Laden effect What Jocelyne Cesari calls the ‘Bin Laden effect’10 continues the reservoir of negative images associated with Islam as a religion spread by the sword and characterised by Holy War, and that of the Muslims as cutters of throats. No doubt there is justification for that propaganda. At first, it was based mainly on the anti-American expressions of the Iranian Islamic revolution and then it was vastly exacerbated by the image of the jihad-crazed enemy of the post-9/11 era. In a deeply prejudiced manner, commentator Samuel Huntington referred to the attacks of 11 September as being a ‘clash of civilisations’, in a book that bears the same title.11 He also argued that Islam is suffering a crisis of identity. Huntington equates political, economic and cultural differences with confrontation, assuming that terrorism is a genuine expression of the fundamental values of Islam. We need to rethink this basic framework. Although a ‘clash of civilisations’ might be used to justify aggression, Huntington’s articulation of a clash between Islamic civilisation and the West is actually founded on misconceptions about Islam and the Islamic world, distorting, as it were, the truth and transforming Islam into a mastermind of terrorism. As a result, Muslim communities more than any other continue to be targeted and Islam continues to be viewed through films and caricatures as a particularly hateful and dangerous corruption of the true faith, a pernicious heresy and its Prophet Muhammad as the reprobate. Cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were published in a Danish newspaper in September 2005 and were reproduced elsewhere, mainly in Europe. A year later, Pope Benedict hit out at Islam arousing the anger of the whole Islamic world. In a lecture given at the University of Regensburg, Germany, which focused on the defence of the centrality of reason for faith and called for intercultural dialogue, the pontiff claimed that Islam was a religion of violence and criticised the Islamic concept of jihad or holy war, attacking Muslims’ very identity. And in September 2012, once again, Islam came under harsh criticism with the film Innocence of Muslims and with caricatures of the Prophet published by the satirist French paper Charlie Hebdo. These pictures of Islam are misleading with respect to the model of globalisation itself. While it is true that Islamist extremism is implicated in potent and terrifying forms of violence in our modern world, bombing, hijacking and the massacre of innocent civilians are not endorsed by the Qur’an,

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but rather violate Islam’s most sacred principles. Because the Qur’an was revealed in the context of an all-out war, this has led some Westerners to interpret Islam as a religion of wars. We might argue that conflict is a natural human phenomenon and it will remain part and parcel of the human reality because humans are fighting animals. Wars are as much part of the history of Islam as they are part of the history of other religions. As Karen Armstrong rightly observes, ‘terror has no religion and crimes are committed in the name of all religions’.12 In order to explain such narrow thinking on Muslim identity, one needs to trace the origins of this Islamophobia. It is especially instructive to review its evolution in North Africa over the past half century and the mutation of some of its elements into ‘al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb’.

Political Islam in North Africa Since the end of World War II, terrorism has become a major component of contemporary conflict. One of the indicators of contemporary crises is the pervasive recourse to religion, not primarily in its function as faith but as an ideology. The result is the political ideology of fundamentalism. Islamic political thought underwent a dramatic revival in the nineteenth century mainly because of the unprecedented incursion into the Muslim homeland by infidels. To try and cope with this invasion, fundamentalists resorted to a return to the origins of Islam. And with the decolonisation of the Muslim world in the twentieth century, Islamic political thinkers went a step further. As a reaction to the nationalist, secularist or socialist policies of native Muslim rulers, they began to ask for an Islamicisation of the political system. As the most intensively colonised region of the Muslim world for the longest periods of time and the geographically closest to the European imperial powers, North Africa offers an interesting laboratory for a study of political Islam. In Middle Eastern and North African countries, conflicts caused by failure of local elites to deliver on their promises to improve the standard of living have often been the fuel that drove fundamentalism.

The dialectics of political Islam In James Ciment’s words, ‘discussions of political Islam [should] begin with a discussion of terms’.13 A clarification of certain terms is therefore necessary, as nuances may be lost in cultural translations and

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interpretations. A firm foundation for reasoning and judgement about Islam is to consider the historical usage of the term ‘Islam’. Islam is a religion that has existed for over 14 centuries and in many different countries. This religion has been hard to understand because it is deemed complex and contradictory. Not surprisingly, it has led to much disagreement and contention between different interpretations, particularly between conservative Islamists and liberal movements within Islam. It is therefore important to clarify the true nature of Islam and distinguish the terms ‘Islamist’ and ‘Islamism’ from ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’.

Islam and Islamism: faith and ideology Etymologically, the word Islam comes from istislam which means ‘surrender’, that is surrender to God’s precepts. The word is also derived from the word salam or ‘peace’. Like other scriptures, the Qur’an is the fountainhead of all knowledge dealing with human life. Islam, moreover, propounds the idea of the entire human race as one big family of God. The tenets of Islam are those written down in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights,14 which stipulates that all men and women are equal, without any distinction of colour, language, race or nationality. To a world torn by rivalry and wars, Islam presents a message of life and hope and of a heavenly future. The spirit of tolerance and understanding is also at the heart of the Qur’an. More importantly, the Qur’an never claimed to teach a new religion. It consistently contextualised the Prophet Mohamed as being the last messenger in a long line of messengers from Allah, confirming the truth of all earlier scriptures, and that His mission was to fulfil the spirit of the Old and New Testaments. This continuity is clear in the respect the Prophet showed to people of other religions. Likewise, Islam underscores the importance of consensus and harmony as well as the avoidance of social divisions. Those who would choose to revolt against a Muslim ruler can only do so if that ruler transgresses the Law of God and violates that faith. But the Qur’an’s message has been distorted by those so-called experts who confused Islam with Islamism. Nilufer Gole identifies two different phases in the rise of Islamism in Muslim societies. He locates the first phase towards the end of the 1970s, culminating with the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979 and characterised ‘by mass mobilizations, Islamic militancy, a quest for an

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Islamic collective identity, and the implementation of a political and religious rule’.15 The second phase is marked by a waning in revolutionary ardour and a move away from ‘a radical political stance to a more social and cultural orientation’16 that is nonetheless political. Nation states that experienced colonialism might thus be more prone to religious nationalism, but also to a revival of culture. Political Islam shaped the nationalist movements against the French presence in all three of its North African possessions. But the contexts of anti-colonial struggle varied according to the extent and length of colonial rule. They were greatest in Algeria and greater in Tunisia than Morocco. Reformist Salafi currents associated with Mohammed Abduh and Rashid Rida found fertile ground in Tunisia. Qur’anic schools, first founded in 1906, mushroomed in the interwar period and were to become a significant method of dissemination for Tunisia’s third generation of nationalists. In the late 1970s, Rachid Ghannouchi and Abdelatif Mourou created the Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique in Tunisia. Shortly after independence, Zitouna University, Islam’s traditional centre of learning, became the Faculty of Theology of the University of Tunis, an institution of higher learning inherited from the French colonial authorities. The Tunisian single-party regime, a by-product of the colonial dialectic that had successfully mobilised Islam for the purposes of nation-building, went further in reforms. Although by 1970 President Bourguiba had made peace with the Zitouna scholars and even tolerated the formation of an Association for the Safeguard of the Qur’an, the underprivileged and less French-influenced middle classes felt marginalised by the post-colonial elite. The same Salafi movement eventually reached Morocco and encouraged the formation of modern Qur’anic schools, but these enjoyed fewer links with Morocco’s less developed nationalist parties than with Tunisia’s Neo-Destour party. Istiqlal, the largest of them, comprising both traditionalists and modernists, was relatively weak compared to its Tunisia counterpart. These would split soon after independence, setting the stage for political pluralism orchestrated by a monarch who, as the ultimate commander of the faithful, could also dominate the religious field and act as arbiter among different religious currents. By exiling Sultan Mohammed V to Madagascar (1953–5), the

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French enabled the palace to encourage and control multi-party politics after independence. As a result, the system could incorporate and count various political Islamist factions, whether Salafi or Sufi, tied to religious orders that had flourished in pre-colonial North Africa. After independence, Mohammed V, the much-revered Moroccan king, took centre stage and served as the supreme authority for the various secular and religious reformist currents of the nationalist movement. Despite the king’s predominance in religious discourse, by the mid-1970s Islamist opposition movements had started to displace Marxist-inspired associations in the universities. As in Tunisia, these movements were largely conciliatory and ready to work within existing constitutional structures to reach their objectives. Islamism, however, developed more slowly than in Tunisia, where the colonial dialectic had progressed further, but the new cultures of political Islam rested on firm precedents. Paradoxically, the Salafi religious reform movement had the most political impact on colonial Algeria, the society it penetrated the least. As explained earlier, the French virtually destroyed Algeria’s Muslim social infrastructures, such as schools, courts, tribes and religious orders. In North Africa, each post-colonial regime triggered off new Islamist oppositions and tried a range of strategies to contain them. While Libya succeeded best with a repressive strategy, Morocco was able to contain its post-colonial oppositions by judicious use of pre-colonial institutions and a multi-party system inherited from colonial times. Algeria and Tunisia polarised the political community into fearful Westernised elites and resentful counter-elites. Militant Islam thus became an influential religious and social force in many post-colonial states. This political current, whose objective was to resolve the social fractures introduced by modernity, sought to install the Islamic State as a politico-administrative organisation working for the well-being of all and used the Qur’anic text in order to legitimate itself. But the line between national liberation and terrorism has often been blurred and what was to be a wave of national liberation became in some states a war of terror, leaving little room to distinguish moderates from revolutionary extremists. In Algeria, postcolonial conflict took violent forms. The geopolitical concept of the Algerian fundamentalists was the Islamic greater Maghreb, a concept that strongly rejects the nation state.

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The Islamist challenge to the nation state Islamists in Middle Eastern and North African countries, like revolutionaries elsewhere, derive their strength from championing the cause of the poor against rich elites. Radical Islamist movements not only threaten some existing governments, in particular those tied to the West, but also undermine traditional norms of state sovereignty. They reject Western-oriented secular states in favour of government oriented to Islamic values. Religion thus becomes a means to express opposition to the status quo in politics and culture. In Algeria, religion has always been invoked in the interpretation of the national identity and the construction of belonging. Declaring Islam as central to national identity eventually gave rise to growing radical Islamist movements. The Islamist challenge tended to accentuate the National Question and simply turned the question of belonging into a burning issue.

Islamic politics in Algeria As explained earlier, the essential blueprint of Islamic politics in Algeria initially evolved under the shadow of French imperial rule. It was unquestionably the legendary Cheik Abdelhamid Ben Badis who clearly defined the basic architecture of Algerian identity: ‘Islam my religion, Arabic my language, Algeria my homeland.’ It was from this national-theo-idiomatism that arose all the impulses concerning a feeling of identity and the appropriation of a sense of a glorious self. The religious character that marked Algerian independence reflected a Muslim conception of belonging, a thinking that permeated the fabric of society and encouraged the exclusion and marginalisation of some individuals. Islamic politics in Algeria can therefore only be properly understood within the context of the country’s evolution as a state and its inability to fully reconcile its multiplicity of identities. The normative foundation of the nation state is the idea of popular sovereignty, which is a political expression of the person-centred view of the world, a crucial component of cultural modernity. The fundamentalist politicisation of Islam, however, dismisses the concept of man as a free subject on his own. In their view, the nation state ought to be replaced by the Islamic system in which the government of God as expressed in Shar’ia is the hallmark.

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For them, Islam has no boundaries – God’s sovereignty is universal – and yet they draw boundaries. For the fundamentalists, the government of the people and by the people is heretical in as much as it is an expression of ta’til or a suspension of the rule of God over the universe. In employing this medieval concept in a modern context, the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and the existing nation state assumes, ideologically, the character of a conflict between politicised, theocentric universalism and national sovereignty. The major contradiction of Algerian democratisation resides in the fact that the Islamists violated the golden democratic rule by advocating some sort of revolutionary democracy. Islamist leaders rejected the accusation of fitna, that is, division, and justified their struggle by asserting that their opponents were impious and therefore had to be exterminated in the name of God. Their version of Islam utilised a doctrine that claims there is no sovereignty outside God’s in order to irrevocably fuse religion and the State and endow unelected religious officials with ultimate political authority. The crisis of the nation state is, however, not so much related to the threat from an Islamic system of government, but rather to the potential breakdown of the existing nation state regime induced through mobilisation on religious grounds. The term jihad, a major tenet in Islamic theology, which connotes a strong and material work ethic in Islam, was used in this context to denote such a process by which fundamentalist groups attempted to enforce themselves against the State order while employing religious formulae. Needless to say, this fragmentation is not the goal of Islam. The Qur’an endorses the military option only within some conditions. Jihad simply means to strive hard or struggle in pursuit of a just cause. Both the Qur’an and the Sunna do mention that all Muslims should think of themselves as a single people belonging to one nation but neither says that Muslims should be in a perpetual state of war with non-Muslims. But fundamentalist Muslims turned Islam into the equivalent of a political ideology, comparable in its totality to fascism.

The growth of Algerian Islamism The relationship between Islam and the State in Algeria is highly complex and is crucial to an understanding of the country’s political and social identities. Islamist Sociologist Francois Burgat argues that the

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growth of Islamism in Algeria corresponds to a ‘third stage’ in decolonisation. Islam, according to him, reflects the desire of a formerly colonised country to recapture its cultural past devastated by the French colonisers. Burgat’s first stage is political independence and his second is economic independence. This is clearly true. In Algeria where the question of identity is crucial, the Islamists viewed themselves as the purveyors of national authenticity. Political Islam in Algeria can be traced to the early post-independent activities of an Islamic association dubbed Al-Qiyam, ‘The Values’, created by Hachemi Tidjani, Mohamed Khider and Malek Benabi. The organisation advocated the elimination of all non-Islamic influences from Algeria. Ironically, strong influence with French culture tended to convince the association’s leaders that they were best qualified to criticise non-Islamic thought. Al-Qiyam promulgated the ideas of the Egyptian Islamists and called for a reinforcement of Islamic customs. It posed a potential threat to Ben Bella when it articulated its opposition to the authoritarian nature of his regime. When these extremists attempted to destroy the Roman ruins near Guelma, in the eastern part of the country, President Houari Boume´die`ne banned the group in 1966. Paradoxically, the Islamist movement enjoyed something of a revival during the second president’s regime, as he advocated the restoration of the Algerian Muslim heritage. But the gap between the Islamist movement and the State widened between 1971 and 1978 when it nationalised large estates and replaced them with collective farms. Rather than break up large landholdings and redistribute plots in an egalitarian manner, the peasantry was forced into cooperatives where incentives to produce were lacking. The Oule´mas then allied with the victims of the government’s measures. By the early 1970s, educational reform reflected not only the contradictions that lay at the heart of Algeria’s political development but also the question about identity that had arisen in the 1940s: where should Algerians look – toward the West or toward the East? This question was treated in a thoroughly paradoxical way. Faced with massive illiteracy – over 90 per cent in 1962 – the regime was compelled to recruit Arabophone teachers from abroad. Egypt’s Abd alNasr sent members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood to teach in Algeria. Schools thus nurtured Islamism at the same time as they sought to provide Algerians with the tools for building a modern nation. The

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publication of the most redoubtable Oule´ma reformist Abdelatif Soltani’s book Le Socialisme, c’est le Mazdakisme, in which he denounced Boume´die`ne’s regime for allowing foreign customs introduced by the French coloniser to persist in Algeria, exacerbated the situation. What began as protests against agrarian reform quickly took on the aura of a full-scale challenge to the regime. This opposition, coupled with the Iranian Revolution, which advocated a radical Islamist solution for the salvation of the people, sowed the seeds for the growth of Algerian Islamism. Algeria became thus a hotbed of religious activism. Algerian political Islamists, emboldened by the Islamist regime’s changes in Iran, saw Ayatollah Khomeini as an inspiring Muslim figure for proving that Islam could triumph over political systems. As Sunni Muslims, Algerian fundamentalists naturally rejected the influence of Shi’i Iran. Yet the fervour that spirited Khomeini to power in the wake of the 1979 revolution and the fall of the Shah inevitably gave hope to Muslim fundamentalists all over the world, and nowhere more so than in Algeria. Islamism was more specifically associated with political groups such as the Taliban, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), the Armed Islamic Movement (MIA) and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), as well as with repression of free expression and individual rights, and above all with highly publicised acts of violence to threaten the stability of many regimes. In Algeria, the Islamist movement became a major force in the 1980s after the death of its second president in 1978. The accession of Chadli Bendjedid to power occasioned a radical change in politics. After nearly three decades of a single-party system, Algeria opened itself up to a multi-party system in the late 1980s in order to assure a large participation of the population in the State’s institutions. The government decided on constitutional reform, allowing the emergence of political parties and freeing the press. Several parties therefore began to claim national leadership, including the FLN, the Berber-dominated FFS and the FIS. Whereas more than 50 independent parties – including those representing women,17 intellectuals and human rights activists – and more than one Islamist organisation emerged in the months following the legalisation of parties, the FIS appeared to be the only national contender to the hegemony of the ruling party, the FLN. Bendjedid, like his predecessors, however, failed to bring about the expected unity. His regime created a policy vacuum of which the

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Islamists took advantage. Islamicised spaces began to sprout up and became centres of radical indoctrination. The expansion of the higher education system and its peculiar division between fields taught in French and those taught in Arabic provided the Islamists with a rich source of recruits. In order to gain a full understanding of the deepening crisis that the annulment of the 1991 presidential elections brought to head, it is necessary to have a proper appreciation of the background context that shaped political attitudes in the country.

Background to guerrilla war The introduction of a multi-party system in Algeria raised significant problems regarding the criteria for electoral entitlement and eligibility. In the 1990s, Algeria faced a potentially lethal challenge, as its socioeconomic performance remained modest at best, and its political opening tepid and uneven. The socially disruptive ramifications of the State’s policy of liberalisation were exacerbated by high inflation and the emergence of an underground economy. This course of events, coupled with an economy that went into a tailspin in the 1980s, shattered the government’s popularity. Algeria’s liberal interregnum was short-lived as the forces of radicalism soon plotted against the State to reclaim the political landscape. Islamism was to confront the Algerian regime with the most formidable of challenges. An Iranian-like theocracy was established and the reign of terror and assassinations continued unabated for a whole decade. Immured in their revolutionary vision where a return to Islamic values would liberate the country, the FIS stepped into this explosive arena determined to compete for political power and challenge the nationalistic patrimony of the FLN. The ideology of the FIS Al-Qiyam, the 1964 militant Islamic movement, was the precursor of the FIS. Founded in 1982, the FIS was a deeply reactionary, theocratic organisation that brought together a number of diverse political currents. It stressed the formula ‘Islam is the solution’. The party thus eschewed a platform whose main objectives were the establishment of an Islamic Republic and the strengthening of the religious features of the Algerian State. However, the FIS’s unity had always been precarious. The two main factions within the party were the Salafis, allied to the Islamist extremist

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tendency, and the Algerianists, Djezar’ara, an acronym for the Islamic Association for the Edification of Civilisation, attracted the more moderate. Abbassi Madani is considered to have supported Djezar’ara. Under the shadow of modernisation, Madani seemed to accommodate democratic norms, while Ali Belhadj’s Salafi wing condemned pluralism and democracy as heretical thoughts that would subvert the divine order. They condemned democratic rule as a contrived Western instrument that would undermine the cohesion of the nation. This clearly means that for Belhadj, the FIS would establish a bloody dictatorship under which all democratic rights would be suppressed. Tapping into the population’s feelings of betrayal by the government’s liberal policies of the 1980s –90s and promising to improve socio-economic conditions, the FIS managed to draw in the younger population. The FIS saw Algerian Islamicisation as a national rather than pan-Islamic project. It thus focused more closely on national problems and called for political participation as a means of addressing these issues. The highest ideals of Islamic society are the formation of a nation and its corollary, ijma or consensus of the people. Paradoxically, it is these varying terms that have been the most suspected by Islamic elites. Obviously, much of the Islamist resistance to the State has been couched in these terms. However, the FIS political proclamations seemed absolutely contradictory. In the events of 5 October 1980, their agenda was not really concerned with economic issues but rather with the breakdown of Islamic values, hence their striving for a return to an Islamic society guided by the Qur’an and the Shari’a. It should be noted that the FLN regime has never been anti-Islamic. The Algerian Revolution against France was essentially conducted in the name of Islam and since independence the government has encouraged a kind of socialist Islam. Of course, the fundamentalists opposed this socialist ideology and argued for a thorough Islamicisation of the State and society. The two trends in Algerian political Islam – the techno-Islamists led by Abassi Madani and the neo-fundamentalists under the leadership of Ali Belhadj – envisioned an Algerian society in full conformity with the Shari’a, and hence underscored ethical behaviour as the criterion for political leadership. The fundamentalists claimed that under the rule of a secularist and pro-Western FLN, the country had been gharbzadih or ‘west-intoxicated’, a term the FIS borrowed from Iranian Islamists.

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Accordingly, the role of the State is to create an environment in which morality and virtue prevail.

The dissolution of the FIS The elections of the early 1990s shifted the bedrock of Algerian politics, revealing the fault-lines of its national identity. When given the opportunity to express themselves politically for the first time in the 1990 and 1991 municipal and parliamentary elections, the vast majority voted for the radical Islamist party. In the first round of national legislative elections in late 1991, although the FIS received 1 million fewer votes than in the municipal elections, it still garnered twice as many as the ruling FLN. The Front of Socialist Forces, the secularly oriented party with particular strength in Berber areas, came in a distant third. The FIS managed to secure 188 of 430 seats, though not an absolute majority. The FLN suffered a disastrous setback at the polls. The FIS’s crushing victory shocked the ruling elite. Neither the Algerian military nor the extant regime was ready to accept this verdict in favour of changes in State and society. The architects of the Algerian revolution viewed religion from a utilitarian perspective, sufficient for mass mobilisation, but inappropriate as a template for governance. The overwhelming victory of the FIS thus pushed the government to alter its strategies. On 4 January 1992, a presidential decree suspended the National People’s Assembly and a week later, under pressure from the military high command, the army forced President Bendjedid, who seemed willing to cohabit with the Islamists, to resign and a temporary five-member High State Committee was formed. The Committee recalled Mohamed Boudiaf, a historic figure and founder of the FLN, from his 28-year exile in Morocco, at the head of the country. The HSC cancelled the results of the December elections, banned the FIS and arrested the remainder of its leaders. As a full-scale securitisation of State/regime, the HSC decreed a state of emergency for one year. Boudiaf then launched a serious campaign against the Islamists with a charge that they aimed to hijack democracy and destabilise society and also against corruption in the higher echelons of the State and army hierarchies, but he was assassinated by one of his security guards on 29 June 1992.18 At this juncture, it seems worth pausing to ask why the Algerian military called the very legitimacy of that party into question. A number

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of explanations were offered by both the government and its opponents: for the latter, the rise of an Islamic fundamentalist State would represent enormous regression in political, moral and cultural terms and thus would destabilise the country. Another rationale for the elections’ cancellation was that the FIS resorted to fraud, using Chicago-style practices such as listing dead people on the voter rolls. Third, the military and those behind the coup did not want to relinquish power. Fourth, fundamentalism was deemed incompatible with democracy. Also, the discourse of the FIS seemed provocative, obscurantist and antiwomen. For the FLN hardliners, the FIS was anti-democratic and used so-called democratic means to achieve theocratic ends. But Islamist Ali Belhadj pointed out that the FIS represented ‘a victory for Islam and not for democracy’.19 Accusing the government of encouraging social division, small groups of armed revolutionists thus started to challenge the establishment in the name of Islam. For them, healing the soul of the nation was the first step in creating a viable umma. But in total contradiction with the teachings of the Qur’an, the very means to achieve this transformation was the sword. Algeria was plunged into chaos as some factions of the Islamists took to arms while the military inaugurated its counter-terrorism war to save the Republic. The crisis escalated to full-scale civil war.

The 1990s genocide: the greatest slap to Islam20 Probably no issue has so mobilised State and society in the Arab world, after the Palestinian question, than the black decade of terrorism in Algeria. Following the first round of the parliamentary elections of 26 December 1991 the FIS threatened the very stability of the State and the country was embroiled in a bitter and destructive civil war for a decade, as a result of which the State moved rapidly, through loss of legitimacy, to the edge of failure. The civil strife that ensued not only pitted security forces against armed groups but also spilled over to ravage the civilian population. Political oppression, social marginalisation, economic deprivation and cultural alienation all contributed to create a wide-ranging landscape of disaffected young people ready to engage in militant activity, often catalysed by religious invocation and inspired by the appeal of the Islamists. With nothing to do and no hope for the future, the angry

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youth seemed to find salvation in the cathartic appeals of a puritanical Islam communicated in the militant language of the mosque and the charismatic imam. Vulnerable to Islamist propaganda, many joined their squads. This frustrated and discontented youth were recruited to militant activities and then transformed into human explosives prepared to commit suicide in the name of some primordial interpretation of Islam that guarantees instant salvation through martyrdom. At the heart of the insurgency were four groups: the Armed Islamic Movement (MIA), led by Moustafa Bouyali whose militant members dismissed democratic rule as an alien device for Muslim submission and believed that rigid theocracy was the best means of achieving God’s vision; the Islamic Salvation Army (Arme´e Islamique du Salut, AIS), the armed wing of the FIS; the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Arme´, GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafiste pour la Pre´dication et le Combat, GSPC). By mid-1997, Algeria passed the test of ‘gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity’ or the ‘conscience-shocking’21threshold. The most notorious massacres were those of Blida and Ain Defla, with 100 slaughtered on 31 July and another 111 on 3 August, Rais on 29 August with 300 victims; Algiers on 25 August with 117 victims; Beni Messous on 6 September with about 200 victims; and Bentalha on 22 September, which also claimed around 200 victims. Following the Rais massacre of 28– 9 August 1997, an official within the Algerian Medical Union reported that ‘even the foetuses [had] been taken from their disembowelled mothers to be mutilated and massacred’.22 A survivor of the Be´ni Messous massacre saw armed men take his aunt and ‘slit her throat, after slashing open her stomach’.23 Another witness recalled that ‘a baby was beheaded and as its mother run away, her breast was slashed with a sword’.24 Francois d’Alancon spoke to a survivor of the Bentalha massacre who had watched attackers hack his wife and daughter to death with axes and then saw his son butchered.25 Following one of the massacres in Relizane, a city in the west, the Algerian daily Liberte´ also reported that infants’ heads had been smashed against walls to kill them. This is only half the story of the horrors that occurred in Algeria during the civil war. Seen in terms of its intensity and the scale of destruction that accompanied it, the conflict appears to be unmatched by previous incidences of political violence in the country.

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The terror regime to which the Algerian population was subjected recalled the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in the death camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau and elsewhere. However, if Auschwitz stood as the greatest challenge for contemporary Christian theology, the fundamentalists’ challenge in Algeria and in other Muslim countries was the greatest blow to Islam, a religion deemed to be peaceful and tolerant. For a ten-year period, the Islamists acted with impunity, causing the murder of thousands people and the abuse of women and children and their being hunted like animals, and being responsible for car bomb explosions in open markets and schools.26 The repression of Islamist oppositions sparked more violence and weakened moderate reformists, thereby further strengthening the hand of hardliners in the government. The army named Liamine Zeroual, the Defence Minister, to take over as president. His aim was to pursue political dialogue with the FIS, but the latter remained deaf to this. For months, there was no sign of a breakthrough. Secularist squads assassinated fundamentalists. The most prominent FIS leaders were jailed. The government responded by imposing drastic measures. But in 1993, civilians, particularly intellectuals and journalists, were caught in the crossfire. The subsequent human losses were enormous. Although the Algerian authorities attributed the massacres to the shadowy GIA, an alleged radical offshoot of the then-banned FIS, most Algerians believed that factions within the security forces, named the ‘eradicators’, averse to any political compromise, had been behind some if not most of the violence and that the GIA was at least partially controlled and manipulated by security elements. But how much of these allegations are true is hard to say. Who was behind the assassination of Tahar Djaout in June 1993, the first journalist to fall victim to the violence and that of Abdelhak Benhamouda on 28 January 1997, a labour leader; the assassination of Kasdi Merbah, former Prime Minister in August 1993; the slaughter of the seven Italian sailors on 7 July 1994; the hijacking of the Air France flight in December 1994; and the Paris bombings of July 1995? Who carried out the kidnapping and assassination of seven French monks in Algeria in May 1996? And who was behind the assassination of the popular Berber singer, Loune`s Matoub, on 25 June 1998? To this day, these questions remain unanswered. No satisfactory justification has been provided by the authorities to explain how hundreds of people could be massacred a few yards away from military barracks.

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After the collapse of negotiations between the government and the FIS in the autumn of 1994, the intensity of the conflict forced the government to adopt a new strategy by calling for new elections to put an end to the transitional period and legitimise the government. The opposition called for a boycott and the armed fundamentalists threatened to kill anyone who voted. However, the election went ahead in November 1995 without violence and was seen as a real victory for the regime and a significant setback to the FIS and its secular allies. Sixty-one per cent voted for Liamine Zeroual, which was more than expected. This quite large election participation could be explained by the fact that the Algerians, exhausted by the bloody conflict, were striving for a return to peace and stability more than as an endorsement of Zeroual. And peace required a consensus between the Zeroual government and the opposition, including the Islamists. A week after his ascension to the presidency, in a televised speech, Zeroual addressed the country in these terms: ‘We are convinced that the political crisis can be solved only through dialogue and with the participation of all the political forces of the nation without exception.’ But a huge and complex task was awaiting Zeroual. He had first to alleviate his people’s problems, eradicate the social and economic conditions that contributed to the rise of the Islamist challenge and quell political violence. The early signs of the elections seemed to be encouraging. On the whole, the mainstream was ready to engage in a political dialogue with the regime and the FLN called for a party congress to debate policy, deciding to hold parliamentary elections during 1996. In May 1996, Zeroual announced a referendum on a new constitution. Meanwhile the leader of the FFS announced his decision to return to exile. Yet despite these positive signs, Zeroual proceeded with great caution so as not to further destabilise the situation and face the wrath of the military. He announced the State’s decision to pursue its fight against terrorism. Violence decreased and some members of the armed opposition accepted the government’s offer of amnesty. In early May Zeroual nominated new and younger officers to major leadership posts. He also appointed a National Council of Transition, made up of 200 representatives of parties, trade unions, managers’ associations, professional organisations and other civil associations, to serve as a temporary legislative body.27 His next step was to revive the economy and address the most urgent social grievances. The new government also

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committed itself to a stabilisation programme and a debt-rescheduling plan, to which the IMF responded positively. After the signature of the agreement with the IMF on 27 May 1994, and later with European lenders, the IMF promised a $1.04 billion aid package. To show its commitment to serious economic adjustment, Algiers further devalued the currency by 40 per cent and drastically cut the remaining subsidies on primary consumption items weeks before the agreement was signed. Likewise, the Rome Accords signed by the FIS leadership were a significant entente between the secular and religious forces. The main opposing parties gathered on 13 January 1995 in the community of Sant Egidio in Rome. A covenant titled ‘The Platform for a Political and Peaceful Solution to the Algerian Crisis’ was signed by the representatives of the FIS, the FLN, the FFS and several smaller parties. It stressed the renunciation of violence, respect for human rights, gender equality and free elections. It also listed a number of conditions that would have to precede negotiations with the government. These included the freedom of all imprisoned FIS leaders, the end of the ban on the FIS, the cancellation of the state of emergency and the creation of a commission to investigate acts of violence and human rights transgressions committed on both sides. Of course, there were many loopholes in the document, and many remained sceptical about the sincerity of the signatories. The FIS, for instance, did not reiterate its demand for respect for the 1991 elections results. The regime’s main grievance was that the document was agreed on outside the country and they viewed it as nothing more than blackmail. Paradoxically, among the consequences of radical Islam in Algeria were a clamp down on freedoms, increased violations of human rights and a general deterioration of political and civil rights. It was only after the resignation of President Zeroual in September 1998, which resolved the factional conflict within the Algerian army, and the accession of Abdelaziz Bouteflika to power the following April that the Algerian people breathed a sigh of relief.

Compounding the crisis: Bouteflika’s new political architecture In the 1990s, Abdelaziz Bouteflika inherited an Algeria shattered in all the fields: political, economic and social. He then started to pick up the

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pieces and make new lives in the enormous vacuum created by the death of thousands of people and the flight of others. Following his investiture in 1999, the new president announced his commitment to the building of a democratic society and underlined the main steps that would help Algeria realise these goals. These included strengthening the liberal democracy tenets throughout government and society, creating social cohesion, stimulating economic growth, developing the nation’s human potential through social welfare and human development initiatives and, above all, reinforcing the overall safety and security of the citizens. He therefore set as a key objective the promotion of national reconciliation in Algeria’s profoundly divided society.

National reconciliation as a process of transition Reconciliation is indeed a crucial criterion in building sustainable peace and avoiding a relapse into conflict in countries damaged by violence and coercion. Beneath the surface of these healing processes and acts of contrition lies a common theme, the need for social reconstruction. Reconciliation opens the way for forgiveness and ultimately the restoration of a moral community,28 and politics is sustained by the recognition of community as depending on citizens’ common action. What animates political reconciliation is citizens’ will to share a polity with their historical enemy or oppressor, to transform their relation to their neighbour into one of civic friendship. It also offers an escape from the self-perpetuating cycle of revenge by encompassing a broader and different interpretation of justice as reconciliation that restores individual rights rather than simply punishing those perceived to be members of a group of perpetrators. Political reconciliation, moreover, is both retrospective, in coming to terms with the past, and prospective in bringing about social harmony. In Algeria, one of the first attempts at reconciliation after the tragedies of the 1990s was the President’s Civil Harmony Law,29 which aimed at granting conditional amnesty to insurgents willing to lay down their arms and reintegrate into civil society. Though much criticised by various human rights organisations and meeting with considerable animosity from genocide survivors and family victims, this civil concord policy was widely approved in a nationwide referendum in September 2000. But one might ask how the perpetrators of such massacres could

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be forgiven. How can ethics and politics be reconstructed in the aftermath of such violence, through forgiveness? Political forgiveness as a new realm of ethical thought is growing exponentially with the need to end social conflicts and heal wounds. Donald Shriver sees forgiveness as a practical necessity in the political arena,30 while Jacques Derrida argues that forgiveness plays an essential yet paradoxical role in the fraught politics of reconciliation. Although Derrida admits that forgiveness leaves him torn with reference to postcolonial violence in Algeria, he opposes the symmetry between punishing and forgiving. For him, it is possible ‘to forgive the unforgivable’. 31 Building on Shiver’s and Derrida’s profound insights into the nature of forgiveness in the political arena, and on the idea that reconciliation comes at the end of a process that forgiveness begins, Bouteflika claimed that the impossible was possible. He believes that forgiveness is a virtue and sees reconciliation not as a demagogic slogan, but as a precisely defined stage in the peace process, one that obeys well-grounded principles established on the basis of conflict resolution experiences. The president thus adopted an ethico-political approach to political violence and forgiveness. However, while Desmond Tutu linked the hope for an ethical reconstruction of South Africa to a religious position on forgiveness, Bouteflika, very much like Jacques Derrida, tried to develop an ‘ethics beyond ethics’,32 and certainly an ethics beyond religion, a politico-theological conceptualisation of forgiveness to sustain what Hannah Arendt terms ‘the web of relationships’.33 The president’s conflict-resolution initiative affirmed his commitment to a more peaceful and harmonious future for the sake of achieving a political community after its fracture. By promoting national reconciliation, fostering mutual trust and confidence, the Head of the Algerian State sought to remove the vestiges of political vendetta and victimisation. He advocated forgiveness as a vital process of human interchange and a strategy for the social recovery of the victim with the purpose of reconstituting the national whole. It is only when the various sectors of society affected are brought back together that the country would be able to advance towards national reconciliation. The president understood that not forgiving those who violated human rights would allow the history of trauma to dominate the political arena in ways that would perpetuate those internal divisions rather than minimise them, thus undermining the move towards development.

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The president’s gift for reconciling marked him as a politician of great skill who knew how to keep his people focused on a goal to soften their animosities towards each other. Of course, given past violence as well as present rage and distrust, many Algerians still remain sceptical about the possibility for citizens to learn to relate in healthier ways. Although the president’s plan sparked controversy and left many to speculate on the future of Algeria and its reconciliation policy, his nation-building programme has highlighted the importance placed on a broad and inclusive sense of united national identity. And although the practical implementation of Algeria’s amnesty project remains the most problematic for some families inextricably caught in the web of their tragic history, the desire to put an end to violence and build a new and better future encouraged the Algerians to move forward with a sense of common purpose, accusing but forgiving, in the words of Le´opold Se´dar Senghor.34 All in all, the rise of Islamism in Algeria complicated the political situation in myriad ways. Not only did it drive the country into an open, all-out civil war that left the Algerian State on its knees, but it also disrupted the protracted transition to democracy. While the fundamentalists were forced into a tactical retreat by the late 1990s, they still constitute a major threat not only to Berber populations, but also to women. The Islamist movement’s concern with religious and cultural identity inevitably translated into a focus on gender and the position of women.

CHAPTER 5 ALGERIAN WOMEN'S STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION

To be a woman is a natural infirmity to which everyone accommodates. To be a man is an illusion and a violence that everything justifies and privileges.1 Since the 1980s feminist discourse has been shaped by an intense controversial debate surrounding the conceptual dichotomy of ‘equality’ and ‘difference’. What is to be gained from their juxtaposition? How can their analysis contribute to our understanding of gender relations? What kind of citizenship are women battling for: gender-neutral or genderdifferentiated? Are these necessarily compatible? In the field of constitutional law and equality theory, two approaches to equality have been clearly identifiable in political and legal discourse: a formal and a substantive approach. In the former, equality is equated with sameness, that is all those who are the same must be treated the same. Formal citizenship is also about rights and obligations between State and citizen. Ideally, it would entail having one’s personhood recognised fully through the according of rights on an equal basis with other citizens. By contrast, the focus of a substantive equality approach is the elimination of the inequality of disadvantaged groups in society. Substantive citizenship goes beyond the confines of formal politics and law. It entails the absence of constraints imposed by lack of action on the part of State institutions or constraints imposed by norms, relationships and institutions at the subnational level that mediate one’s experience of

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formal citizenship, regardless of gender. And the way in which gender difference is understood has a profound effect on the entitlements and rights that women are accorded. Regarding the question of gender difference, three approaches can be identified: protectionist, sameness and compensatory. The first approach assumes that women are different from men in the sense that they are seen as weaker, subordinate and in need of protection. In the second approach, women are regarded by the law as being the same as men and thus must be treated equally. Any legislation or practice that treats women differently from men is seen as transgressing the equality law. This sameness approach has been used to overrule provisions that treat women and men differently. In the third approach, women are understood as an historically disadvantaged group and as such in need of compensatory or corrective treatment. Within this approach, gender difference is often seen as relevant and as requiring recognition in law. In the liberal political tradition, from the time of social contract theories until today equality and difference have been understood to be concepts on the same level. In this respect, difference has become the reverse side of equality, with the latter having acquired a positive connotation. In the liberal framework, equal rights are conferred on the individual irrespective of race, class, caste or gender. However, feminists have challenged these dominant, universal conceptions of citizenship, arguing that women across cultures have been denied the political, constitutional and legal rights guaranteed to men, despite the fact that these rights have been broadly characterised as human rights. Indeed, when men were first recognised as citizens by the liberal state, they received not only the right to represent themselves as individuals politically, but also the right to exercise their will in their own homes. Equal under state law, men could make their own laws in private. Generally speaking, this meant that men were able to exploit the ‘nature’ argument in order to reinforce their pre-eminence in domestic and societal matters. Married life further marginalised women. Men utilised the family codes to validate their domination over women. As a result, women were denied full and equal membership in the community and deprived of the most basic freedoms available to male citizens. When women gained citizenship, this division between public and private spheres was called into question. Typically, women were faced with a choice between a universalistic claim based on the principle of

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their equality with men and a particularistic claim based on their difference from men. On the one hand, these represent an ostensibly gender-neutral and on the other hand an explicitly gender-differentiated model of citizenship. Underpinning both these theoretical dichotomies and women’s exclusion from citizenship was the rigid gendered demarcation of public and private spheres. In recent decades, gender justice has been argued from the point of view of women’s rights and has focused on issues that directly affect all women irrespective of their caste, class, ethnic and religious differences. These issues include, for example, advocating for an end to sexual violence and promoting reproductive and legal rights. This rights focus has shifted the meaning of citizenship for women. If citizenship describes the terms and conditions and benefits of membership of a political community, for women, membership of such a community – even on the basis of the idealised and rarely realised liberal notions of citizenship rooted in equal individual rights – does not guarantee gender justice. The starting point of feminist critiques of the liberal view of citizenship is that it does not accommodate difference. From at least 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman2 was published, women have thus demanded both equal civil and political rights and that their difference from men be acknowledged in their citizenship. Feminists argue that states need to facilitate women’s agency and create adequate conditions for the expansion of their freedom. But as Marnia Lazreg puts it: ‘to have rights as a citizen is insufficient for the exercise of individual agency; what is needed is the practical exercise of and participation in the concretisation of the status of being a citizen with a bundle of rights’.3 From this perspective, what is at stake is the issue of what women are able to do and to be, not the types of rights that one can claim by virtue of membership of a political community, nor the level of resources anyone or their governments can use to build human welfare. In recent years, debates over women’s rights have become more intensely regionalised, demanding closer scrutiny of the particular context within which they are framed and fought for. The feminist argument is that if the subjugation of women takes on a universal face, gender disparities are even more marked in the Third World. While women’s issues in Western culture have evolved with questions of

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universal suffrage, the development of women’s concerns in Eastern cultures has followed a different historical path. Third World women as a group, are defined as more family-oriented, non-progressive, unaware of their rights, illiterate and more backward than the Western woman. This, noted Chandrea Mohanty et al., is how the Third World difference is produced.4 In her work on subaltern identity, Gayatri Spivak also discusses the impossibility for women to have agency, particularly those in the Third World. She argues that the figure of the Third World woman disappears into a ‘pristine nothingness’ since her displaced figure is ‘caught between tradition and modernisation’,5 a point I fully agree with. Likewise, developmental theories of emancipation such as Shirin M. Rai’s contend that in general, women are more likely to gain rights through the long-term effects of modernisation, including economic change, urbanisation, improved education and training, better health care and increased access to employment,6 but in the Middle Eastern and North African cases, the potential for such advancement is radically hindered by women’s confinement.

Gender and citizenship in the MENA region Marshall’s formulation of citizenship, as being a homogeneous, undifferentiated, universal category, does indeed not apply to the MENA countries, where the gender divide is sharply articulated. Women’s citizenship status in this region fits the concept of ‘fragility’, in Charles Tilly’s words, as opposed to that of males. Their experience of citizenship has been mirrored through the lens of multiple subject positionalities.7 Women’s supposed biological and psychological differences with men have been used against them through patriarchal history. Concurrently, they have been constructed as men’s serviceable Others. The stereotypes of woman, to a large extent, define her role as submissive, nurturing and emotional. In public as well as private lives, it has been the woman who has followed along behind the man, playing a secondary role in all spheres of social life. Moreover, to remain ‘feminine’, a ‘good’ woman is supposed to have no voice, no brain, simply a body and is expected to desire nothing more than attending to her family’s males while she remains at home. As it was assumed that women were less intelligent than men so they were not expected to aspire as high as men. As a result, despite their achievements women in most MENA societies remain

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among the most politically, socially and economically marginalised members of society. Historically, women’s citizenship has been determined by a male family member such as a father or husband because women were deemed incapable of exercising rights to self-determination or engaging the public democratic or political process by virtue of their inferiority to men. This, in turn, has tended to essentialise gender identities: women are cast primarily as caretakers, mothers and wives in need of protection. These voices of difference have never been completely stilled because MENA societies, in general, are still characterised by intense machismo, which inhibits women’s progress and seeks to keep them submissive. Representations of power persist and the notion of the male as ‘his/story’ continues to dictate and dominate. One of the most relevant forms of oppression is tradition that mostly empowers men and disempowers women. Within traditions, marriage remains the most oppressive for women in general. Therefore, the contemporary patriarchal organisation, with its new structures of male empowerment in education and politics, has given males added prominence and power and has exacerbated women’s difficulties by pushing them further down the valley of subordination. As a result, citizenship has become masculinised and formulated according to male norms that construct women as inferior inhabitants of the private sphere, while men are associated with the rule of law and justice of the public sphere. Gender disparities, however, vary from one country to another as each has its own peculiar customs and cultural practices. The constraints facing women have been addressed globally through various legal frameworks including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) of 1979, a most comprehensive treaty that established the International Bill of Rights for Women and asserts equality for women and civil and political rights in the representation and participation of women in governance. This protocol also specifically includes a right to participate both in peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BDPA) of 1995 also puts gender equality as its priority on its global agenda. Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), in recognition of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, provides that every citizen, regardless of sex, shall have the same rights and the same opportunities to take part in the conduct of public affairs.

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Finally, the African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, which supplements the African Charter’s limited provisions on gender equality and women’s rights, acknowledges the role of women in development and the need for affirmative action, one of the strategies identified for ensuring gender equality in the political sphere. Most significant is the comprehensive mandate for governments to take appropriate measures to ensure gender equality and women’s empowerment by modifying social and cultural patterns of conduct between men and women that uphold harmful cultural practices and ideas of inferiority or superiority between the sexes. However, although most countries have ratified these various global conventions, some have still been reluctant to adopt them, in particular in the Arab world.

Feminism and Arab women The woman question occupies a special place in the history of ideas in the Arab world but as Nawar Al-Hassan Golley rightly asks: ‘Is feminism relevant to Arab women?’8 Orientalist discourses have influenced the way that Arab feminism, in particular, has been received and understood in the West. Too often, both subjectivity and identity are understood in retrograde, ahistorical and essentialising ways in relation to MENA people and movements. According to Orientalist discourses, the movement for women’s liberation is a mere imitation of similar movements in Europe and the United States. As a result of Westernisation, Western ideals, values and ways of life have been adopted and adapted to Arabic culture. Also, because feminist consciousness in the Arab world emerged at the same time as the reaction to Western imperialism, it has often been argued that feminism, being an import to the Arab world, is irrelevant to Arab culture and as such ‘it either alienates women from their culture, religion and family responsibilities on the one hand, or from the revolutionary struggle for national liberation and Socialism on the other’.9 Western feminists even see Arab women’s lives as being so different from theirs that they cannot possibly develop any kind of feminism. Such an approach ignores some important factors: first that the call for women’s rights was part and parcel of the greater movement to reform Islamic practices and hence the whole social order of Islamic societies. Second, educated men and women of the national bourgeoisie were the first mouthpieces of women’s liberation. The petite bourgeoisie joined the

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movement for emancipation and democratic rights much later. Third, Arab feminism suffered from the plight occasioned by the double struggle: internally against the old religious, social and economic order and externally against European colonisation. Thus, asserting a new national identity meant necessarily drawing on the very model they were resisting: the European’s. I would also argue that Arab women’s needs for positive change in their lives are similar to other women around the world. The various political roles they played and are playing in national liberation struggles should at least undermine allegations about their seclusion, passivity and domestication. It should also be noted that the image of exoticism, which has been fabricated in the West over the centuries, still dominates the way in which the Arab world is perceived. Arab women’s status has been symbolised most dramatically by the veil as a marker of cultural inferiority or superiority in relation to Europe. For most Westerners, even today, the phrase ‘Arab woman’ conjures up images of veiled, secluded and ignorant women living in a harem, a word that has come to acquire a pejorative sense because of a long history of representing the ‘harem’ through the eyes of the coloniser. Looking at such data from a woman’s vantage point and reevaluating the notion of the power of seclusion, I would contend that the image of the harem as known to the West has been greatly affected by ethnographic writing about the Middle East, most of which was done by men. It is therefore only fair to provide an explanation of the term. ‘Harem’ in Arabic is hareem, which can be used to mean simply women. This word is derived from the word haraam meaning ‘prohibited’, ‘inviolable’ but also ‘sacred’. Hence the house is figuratively referred to as the ‘harem’. Thus, ethnographers’ portrayal of the harem cannot be authentic. Arab culture is such that as alien men, they could not have had any possible access to any true harem or female quarter. Some Western women travellers who visited some harems offered more realistic accounts of them, thus casting doubt on the presumption that they oppress women. Interestingly, instead of regarding the harem as an enclosed space in which women are cloistered and domesticated, Leila Ahmed sees it as a source of women’s strength and mobilisation for the national cause. Women have indeed been integral to the nationalist struggles in all Arab countries, including Algeria.

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Wassyla Tamzali, president of the Algerian Forum of Mediterranean Women and former director of Women’s Rights at UNESCO, speaks of the unique Algerian experience that situates women at a crossroads between the West, notably France and the Arab world. Before embarking on a discussion of the condition of women in Algeria, I deem it important to say a few words about the status of women in some Maghrebi countries, namely Tunisia and Morocco, because these countries share some affinities. Citizenship has been constituted through membership in religious communities and, as a central force in politics, religion directly contributed to the gendering of citizenship. But citizenship took on different forms and became gendered in different ways partly as a result of the different place of kin-based formations in the development of the sovereign nation state.

The institution of the pater familias in Maghrebi societies Maghrebi society, in general, is organised around a patrilineal family and gender hierarchy whereby the father is the absolute head of the family and his authority over his wife (wives) and children is culturally established. Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria share a common socio-cultural, colonial and linguistic heritage. These countries’ current criminal and civil laws largely draw on French legislation and matters of citizenship, nationality and the Family Code are based on Islamic law; yet despite these similarities, citizenship rights for women in these countries have taken different paths. In societies where lineages and kin-based social formations remained central elements in the social structure and anchors for political power, such as Morocco and Algeria in the aftermath of colonial rule, the individual rights of women suffered. Conversely, women gained greater legal autonomy where extended patrilineages were weakened, as in Tunisia. Also, in the post-independence era, Tunisian and Moroccan women, unlike women in other MENA countries, benefited from an oftamended Family Code that awarded them numerous rights. Freedom House’s study of women’s rights in the MENA states that Tunisian women enjoy the greatest freedom in the MENA region. Morocco ranks second in the Arab world in regard to gender equality in family law and Algeria comes in third place.10 In her comparative study of state formation in the three aforementioned countries, Mounira Charrad argues that the very different outcomes in family legislation between the progressive Tunisian code of

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1956, the conservative Moroccan code of 1958 and the peculiarly ‘stalled’ situation in Algeria can be explained by the relative ability of central governments to exert political domination over traditional kin or clan-like bases of power that defended the most conservative readings of Maliki law.11 Moreover, in the mid-1980s, women’s roles in development came up more forcibly in these countries of the Maghreb because of four major factors: literacy, employment, democratic political values and international pressure. Prominent activist associations such as the Democratic Association of Moroccan Women (l’Association De´mocratique des Femmes Marocaines De´mocrates), the Association for the Triumph of Algerian Women’s Rights (l’Association pour le Triomphe des Droits des Femmes Alge´riennes) and the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (l’Association Tunisienne des Femmes De´mocrates) were part of an overall social movement sustained by demands for more human rights. These organisations also denounced the sexist practices of their heavily patriarchal societies. Their demands crystallised around political and legal rights and capitalised on education as a means to women’s empowerment. Revisions in family law remained at the centre of women’s demands both in political parties and among civil society, in contexts where Islamism resisted any amendments to the Family Law. In Morocco, however, women went a step further. Activists such as Farida Bennani, Zainab Maadi and Latifa Jbabdi advocated for a reinterpretation of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s Sayings from a feminist perspective. Their efforts partly led to the recent revision of the Moroccan Family Law. All in all, their accomplishments are considerable in a social order based on strong and pervasive patriarchy. In the post-colonial era, the overall status of these Maghrebi women has drastically improved: access to school has increased, which allowed them to pioneer feminist and gender graduate centres and units; equal pay for work has been generalised and more and more women are now participating in the political arena. Although these significant breakthroughs broadened women’s horizons beyond the private sphere, their social status remains largely defined by gender hierarchies. The public sphere of power is still male-dominated. As a result, their rights have remained extremely fragile and equivocal in periods of crisis such as the economic recession and Islamic extremism, as in the case of Algeria.

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Women’s status in Algeria Algeria is hailed as the first country in the Arab world to provide for gender equality, yet its women are still treated as the possessions of their husbands or community. It is not only marriage that has made women asymmetrically vulnerable, but mostly the ‘kin contract’ that has been built on a patriarchy subsided by and codified in religious law. The tendency has been to render women invisible by rejecting their experiences as evidence. Algerian women are frequently categorised as North African, Maghrebi, Muslim, Arab or Berber. This plethora of labels complicates the task of defining authentic Algerian gender relations and a sense of national identity. Straddling differing identities, post-independence Algerian women have at times seen remarkable progress followed by setbacks, starts and turns. As the nation emerged from a long struggle for independence, the role of women remained intertwined in the process of defining a post-colonial identity, political direction and a path for economic development. At independence in 1962, Algerian women expected the new Republic would liberate them simultaneously from the shackles of colonialism and patriarchy. Despite the claims of the first Algerian president that ‘[t]he Algerian women, who played an important role in the revolution, must play the same role in the construction of our country. We oppose those who, in the name of religion wish to leave our women outside of this construction’,12 their emancipation had been ephemeral. Neither their heroic sacrifice nor the demonstration of their ability to act on a par with men earned them recognition of their moral right to full post-independence equality. There existed a wide gap between statements of high principle and the failure of the FLN singleparty state to develop a coherent programme of reform that would translate basic rights into reality. Although many Arab feminists emphasise religion as sanctioning a gendered discourse of inequality, it is important to note that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, in Islam men and women are partners in life, complementing each other rather than living as separate entities or a pair of polar opposites with man as Self and woman as Other.13 To my mind, negative judgements towards women stem from a renewed sense of gender roles – men’s sense. And if women’s rights have been

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restricted, it is not because of the Qur’an or the Prophet or the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite,14 as Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi explains. She asserts that the existing inequality between men and women is the outcome of specific social institutions designed to restrain women’s power. This has led to a complete distortion of the implications of some of Islam’s tenets regarding women, in particular in Algeria. While the masculine universe corresponds to the public sphere, the Umma or nation, the principles that regulate this masculine domain are equality, reciprocity, confidence and unity in the group of individuals. In clear opposition, one finds the private, feminine sphere in which the main social rules correspond to an inverted model of the Umma. The private sphere is regulated by quite opposite tenets: inequality, segregation, subordination and mistrust. The sexes are therefore separated by a rigid frontier that can be traversed only in abidance with accepted rules. As men dominate in all the fields, they are regarded as natural leaders, superior to women and born to rule over them. Hence women in traditional Algerian society had to remain invisible because publicity in women was abhorred. In the past, these women were not only silenced and silent, but they were also allowed to go in the streets only veiled to escape the male gaze. At this juncture, it is worth examining the shift of the veil from a traditional symbol to a symbol of difference in Western discourse. The fallacious and imperialistic depiction of the East as a realm of the exotic, the seductive and the mystical is indeed nowhere more clearly seen than in the trope of the veil. Such an indigenous practice as that of veiling has been regarded as further evidence of the backwardness and barbarity of Eastern cultures and contrasted with the progressiveness of Western cultures. The colonial period in Algeria offers a good example for understanding the issues and implications of veiling and the tensions between the East and the West formulated in the discourse of Orientalism.

Veiling as a pretext for exclusion from the ranks of French citizenship Many scholars have examined how the French attacked the veil as the symbol of women’s supposedly inferior status in Muslim society in the midst of the Algerian War of Independence. Others have analysed how

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women working for the FLN both took up and discarded the veil to accomplish various missions in the pursuit of Algerian Independence. Yet a larger crisis surrounding the redefinition of French citizenry at the end of World War II and France’s reputation as a modern imperial power prompted French officials and propagandists to alter the meaning they attached to the veil long before the battle began to determine the fate of French Algeria. Before the end of World War II, colonial propagandists used the stereotype of the lascivious, ignorant Muslim woman to give European viewers a sense of cultural superiority. They also used the oldest cliche´s that represented them simultaneously as sexual objects and easily exploitable. In nearly all of these contrived representations, the woman was wearing the veil, for without the veil she would not have proved as enticing to Western observers. However, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the veil ceased to be a humorous symbol of Muslim women’s sexuality and became an icon wrought with serious political implications. French political agents bound the veil to the question of who should be granted citizenship. While the French granted full citizenship to women in their Asian and African territories, they were not ready to do the same for Algerian women. Granting full political rights to these Muslim women after they had emancipated Muslim men would amount to admitting that the two populations were on a par in terms of their advancement. Therefore Muslim women’s exclusion from French citizenry helped to keep the Muslim community as distinct as possible from the metropolitan French and Algerian European settler communities. But in the aftermath of World War II, the issue of women’s citizenship was brought before the United Nations, which had already started the gradual dismantling of colonial Empires. As the early organisers of the UN used the condition of women to measure development in non-autonomous areas, the French worried about how the image of Algerian Muslim women could impact on their reputation as a modernising power. French officials reacted accordingly. Using the failure of Soviet officials to force Muslim women in Tajikistan to abandon their head covering, the parandja, they insisted on the difficulty of assuring women’s equality in a Muslim society. In the wake of the expansion of the French citizenry that followed the Ordinance of 7 March 1944, delegates from Algeria met in 1947 to

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compose the Organic Statute, the law that would determine Algeria’s legislative structure under the Fourth Republic, and they raised the issue of whether Muslim women should receive full political rights. Some representatives of the Muslim community, most notably Ferhat Abbas, the head of the Democratic Union of Algerian Manifesto (UDMA), then one of the major Muslim Algerian political organisations, were favourable to their emancipation.15 Representatives of the European community almost unanimously rejected it, fearing that inclusion in the Muslim body politic would increase the proportion of the population that the Muslim delegates could claim to represent, thus providing an opportunity to Muslim leaders to power bargain during legislative debates. It would have also made the inherent inequality of the doublecollege system more obvious to outsiders. Given the colonials’ greater influence in the Algerian Assembly, the issue of Muslim women’s voting rights was postponed. It was not until late summer 1947 that the question of women’s citizenship resurfaced. Proponents of Muslim women’s suffrage brought the issue before the French National Assembly, but the colonial opponents to this measure tried to dissuade French policy makers. Paradoxically, when the question of women’s rights was raised, the veil proved more helpful than harmful to French politicians. The opposition used the veil to insist on the resistance of the native society in order to convince members of the National Assembly not to grant Muslim women the right to vote. Thus while the veil was the very trope used to explicate the difficulty of modernising Algeria, astute French political actors succeeded in distorting the veil’s meaning to argue for rather against any actual change in veiling practices in Algeria. While the French placed the veil in direct contradiction to their civilising task, if Muslim women unveiled they would not appear quite different from the French women, who were supposed to epitomise the modernity of the nation. France thus relied on this myth of the contrast it drew with its colonies in order to make itself appear more modern and advanced. The colonial authorities’ policy of ‘divide and rule’ also found expression in their intervention in Muslim law. The most significant attempt at rationalising Islamic law by codifying it had already been made in 1926 by Marcel Morand, Dean of Algiers Law School, who tried to formulate clearly the true principles of Muslim law. Code Morand became a document used selectively by both Muslim and French judges.

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It did away with the provisions of Shari’a deemed inimical to the spirit of French law, especially with regard to women’s marriages. For instance, it overturned the prohibition on a Muslim woman from marrying a nonMuslim. This may be viewed as an achievement for women, but the French strategy was more aimed at allowing Berber marriage with French colonials rather than at emancipating women. Many mixed marriages were registered after the document was enacted. The National Assembly passed the Organic Statute in September 1947 and, by officially granting Algerian Muslim women citizenship, it seemed to offer reform without altering the status quo. Article 4 of the statute stipulated that the Algerian Assembly was free to decide how and when they could exercise this right. Predictably, those colonials who controlled the legislative body refused to actualise the measure. Hiding behind the veneer of tolerance for religious difference and the myth of Muslim resistance to women’s advancement, they made it clear that they believed Muslim women should not attain citizenship. Frustrated by the Algerian Assembly’s decision on this issue, two European members of the PCA, Rene´ Justrabo and Alice Sportisse, launched campaigns throughout 1948 and 1949 for the extension of full political rights to Muslim women. In response, Marcel Edmond Naegelen, the then Governor General of Algeria, in tandem with the Ministry of the Interior, pushed forth the Justrabo Proposal to the Algerian Assembly in 1949. The motion called for citizenship to be granted to a limited number of educated Muslim women. Although the extension of political rights to so few women could have hardly undermined the colonials’ legislative authority in the Algerian Assembly, the European delegates were staunchly opposed to Justrabo’s scheme, just as had happened during the previous debates over the 1947 Organic Statute. However, to ensure universal advancement, the UN’s Economic and Social Council set up a Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in 1947. In the early 1950s, the CSW issued a Convention on the Political Rights of Women, one of which was women’s suffrage. Marie-He´le`ne Lefaucheux, a French delegate to the UN and one of the founding members of the CSW, took a special interest in France’s North African territories. She pressured the Commission to investigate the condition of women in occupied territories such as Algeria. Her hope of seeing the French government concede equal political rights to women in its North

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African territories was, however, frustrated. For one thing, French officials refused to grant civic equality to Muslim women in Algeria, pointing to the failed Justrabo proposition. In his letter to the Minister of Interior, Governor General Le´onard explained that the enfranchisement of women ‘is not befitting the current state of morals, as notably characterised by the separation of sexes and women’s veiling’.16 Strangely enough, the French did not call attention to traditions or customs, such as polygamy or the practice of djebr, prepubescent girls’ marriage, when they allowed Algerian Muslim men to vote or become French citizens. It was only on 20 December 1952 that the General Assembly finally adopted the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, which gave women the same political rights as men.17 Although Lefaucheux signed the convention on 31 March 1953, the French did not officially ratify it. Instead, French delegates added an appendage as an excuse for not abiding by the convention: ‘The French government, given the customs and religious traditions in existence in its territories, reserves the right to suspend the execution of the present Convention in relation to women residing in these territories.’18 Interestingly, although French officials were particularly concerned about the damage veiling practices could inflict on their imperial prestige, they omitted any mention of the veil as the ‘custom’ or ‘religious tradition’ that ruled out the possibility of granting rights to native women. French officials thus manipulated the veil to advance their political agendas during this period both on the international arena and within Algeria. This was to have dire implications for the bloody War of Independence that followed. From 1958 onwards, one of the key strands of the French government’s pacification policy in Algeria was a direct appeal to ‘French Muslim’ women of all social strata, with the message that becoming ‘more French’ would emancipate them from the weight of tradition and religious law. The French thus introduced some measures to extend legal rights and ‘liberate’ these women from ignorance and the crushing weight of patriarchal domination. Their initiatives included mobile female medical teams in the rural zones, improved access to schooling, youth training, joint European-Muslim women’s circles, extension of the vote and unveiling campaigns. But the most important and contentious aspect of reform was the establishment of a new family law that tampered with the

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sacred area of religion, the single most crucial issue around which both the Algerian women’s movement continues to campaign. Indeed, in April 1957, Governor General Robert Lacoste ordered the establishment of a legal commission to draft a new Family Code, but this was delayed. So successful were the propaganda impacts of the mass demonstrations of May 1958, during which Algerian women marched into the central Algiers Forum and ‘spontaneously’ unveiled and joined hands with ecstatic European crowds in acts of inter-racial solidarity after the final Personal Status Law (PSL) was issued by the new Gaullist government. This new code offered a radical change in Muslim family law. Ordinance No. 59-274 of 4 February 1959 prohibited early marriage and made consent of spouses the sole requirement of marriages, reducing thus the role of the family. Also, a woman no longer required a guardian in order to marry and, most importantly, the djebr by which young women were tied to men that they did not know and often much older was replaced by the free consent of both spouses. The law also made it more difficult for men to repudiate their wives at a whim, thus undermining an important foundation of their domestic power. The law further spelled out that ‘unilateral promise of marriage or the exchange of promises does not constitute marriage or the obligation to contract marriage’. And to give legitimacy to their intervention in family affairs, French lawmakers insisted on the fact that they were only trying to give Algerians a chance to benefit from similar legal changes taking place in neighbouring Muslim countries. But the family law generated intense controversies often fought on moral grounds and precluding compromise. Mass resistance to the new code, however, did not take shape as a distinctive armed revolt but through a more silent passive resistance or refusal by Algerian society to abide by the new legislation. For instance, the decree of 17 September 1959, which implemented the ordinance of 4 February 1959, remained on the statute books of the newly independent republic until 1975 but was widely ignored by both the population and the courts. The Personal Status Code thus served as an essential tool for the French to legitimate their continuing domination and denial of political rights to Algerians as French citizens.

The veil as an icon of nationalism If the French used veiling as a pretext for excluding Algerian women from the ranks of French citizenship, the veil became a symbol of

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emerging nationhood. Many women who had previously given up their veils donned them once again as a sign of resistance to the French, as a camouflage for carrying grenades, manifestos, revolvers and mines that fidaı¨s, revolutionary men, would plant in a European outpost in the city.19 For the revolutionary cause, moreover, some traditionally veiled and cloistered women dared shatter the conventions of their society and unveiled to gain access to the European parts of cities. Their historically placid, submissive image in the eyes of the French allowed them to move relatively freely among the French. During the period of French colonisation in Algeria, the veil thus shifted from a traditional symbol to a political metaphor. While these women’s actions were clearly exceptional, a consideration of how this group of female political activists struggled to maintain their identity reveals deep contradictions of the two republics: the French Republic and the Algerian Republic. Given Algerian women’s political activism during the independence war, it is interesting to see how the new national discourse dealt with them as part of the ‘Algerian people’.

Nation, state and gendered citizenship The symbolic association of ‘woman’ with ‘nation’ and the use of women as symbols of nations by nationalist and liberationist movements was crucial to the gendering of women’s membership in their national communities. It served to demarcate national boundaries and impose some forms of behavioural control on women in the name of the nation, in the name of liberation, in the name of progress and in the name of God. Algerian nationalist reformers and leaders, though arguing in favour of women’s education and symbolically integrating them into the political process as emblems of modernity, often locate the roots of that modernity within indigenous cultures. In so doing, these reformers have paradoxically domesticated women, upholding the sacred family as the authentic heart of the nation. Embedded in these constructs of the nation are implicit and explicit constructs of patriarchy, which reinforce the production of gendered hierarchy and facilitate the institutionalisation of gendered citizenship in the state-building project. And no actor is more critical to the gendering of citizenship than the State. States set the rules by which one becomes a citizen, by which citizens pass citizenship on to their children and spouses and by which

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citizens can lose citizenship. States, moreover, have the power to codify discrimination based on unequal membership. For this reason, women have looked to the State to defend them against the oppression of their families, often in vain since, throughout the MENA region, the States continue to regard women and their rights within patriarchal structures. Indeed, ‘Mother [Algeria] may have been declared free, but mothers of [Algeria] have remained manifestly oppressed.’20

The pitfalls of the nationalist discourse In times of crisis and extreme necessity, Algerian men claimed that armed conflict was not a man’s war, but a people’s war. The argument of FLN freedom fighters was that because they participated in the war, women’s contribution was needed to build the proclaimed socialist state. They would thus be emancipated once the country was liberated from the French. Such statements were couched in the FLN newspaper, El Moudjahid, which stated: ‘It is in an independent Algeria that Algerian women will achieve in human dignity . . . the full and complete development of their rights.’21 But soon after colonial power was thrown out, the nationalist ideology turned more extremist and reactionary, defining women’s place in Algerian society in a more restrictive way. Women suddenly disappeared from public view. Their previous militancy dissipated, leaving way to an upsurge of ‘womanism’,22 to borrow Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s term. The nationalists claimed masculine identity as the norm and the woman as just the bearer of the nation’s sons with a valuable place in the construction of the nation. A consideration of how the moujahidates, women fighters, attempted to construct their identity is highly revealing of the contradictions. The moudjahidates Native women suffered from military action as much as men did, but women were subjected to more indignities. As soon as war broke out, about 2,000 Algerian women became active in the maquis, not merely as sympathisers or militants on a short-term basis, but as proper fighters. They joined the National Liberation Army or the Civil Organisation of the National Liberation Front. Through their active support for the FLN, rural and urban women of all social classes entered into the public space en masse, taking on new roles and responsibilities.23 Totally breaking away from a traditional way of life, they fought and lived side

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by side with male soldiers. In the cities, these moudjahidates played crucial roles because they could easily be mistaken for civilians. In this way, they had more freedom of movement than men. They gave refuge to the militants. They would collect money, medicine and other objects, establish contacts, be vigilant, act as guides, transport arms and even take part in attacks. And it was during the ‘Battle of Algiers’24 that their role became decisive. These women fighters had been subjected to terrible repressive measures. Those fighting in urban guerrilla warfare were practically all arrested and were subjected to the same interrogation methods as men and, like them, some women also died.25 The history of the captures of Algiers, Constantine, Mostaganem and Laghouat, among others, is one of massacres of women, and French Ge´ne´ral du Barail, who took part to the capture of Laghouat in 1852, participated in these massacres. Some women were disembowelled. Others, as in colonial Congo, had their hands and ears lopped off not only to steal their jewels but also as proof that General Barail’s execution orders had been carried out. A collection of these trophies is kept in the French city of Bordeaux by Carayon Latour’s family, a lieutenant of General Yusuf. When the colonial era ended, the moudjahidates believed that the proclamation of the nation’s freedom was the proclamation of their human rights, that the change in gender relations was inevitable and that they would also be integral to the new government. In the words of one militant: ‘We thought we would earn our rights. We thought we would naturally be recognized later.’26 ‘We knew that Algerian women would take part in the rebuilding of our country’,27 said another. If the immediate postwar era seemed like a real opportunity for women to push their own agenda, however, the intense politicisation that began to develop shortly after independence affected their ability to work towards these goals. Algerian independence would automatically lead to women’s freedom, but it became clear that Algerian women needed first to be liberated from Algerian men, who could not come to terms with the idea of accepting them as equals. Although the moudjahidates made a fundamental political contribution during the war, their political rights and activities were suppressed and their place declared to be that of republican mothers. As such, though excluded from citizenship, women had a crucial political part to play in bearing and rearing sons who embodied

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republican virtues. But should the republican mother not be a citizen? The FLN’s answer would be a resounding ‘No!’ On returning home, men set about asserting their domination over women with a new energy, reminding them that their first and highest duties were as wives and mothers and thus repatriated them to their primary arena, the home. It seems that women threatened the existing sex power structure in such a way that trying to force women back into their homes was apparently seen as the only option. The new leaders thus failed to produce a plan of action or a rationale for women’s advancement. An early signal that the new republic did not include women in its definition of the nation came on the eve of Independence Day, when men and women were out celebrating their hard-won independence. Glimpsing the dangers of a reactive female agenda that would undermine traditional practices and might carry ‘negative’ consequences for society, the streets suddenly resounded with men’s shouts: ‘Women go home!’ Testimonies of female war veterans related this directly to the betrayal of women’s citizenship rights. One illustration of men’s reluctance to free women was the case of Zhor Zerari, a member of the Algiers bomb network arrested, tortured and imprisoned in 1957. On the eve of the official declaration of Independence, a soldier threatened to shoot her if she did not leave the meeting and ‘go back with the women’.28 Many women returned to a domestic role and withdrew from political activism. The dejection at the reassertion of male domination and seclusion was well voiced by Fatma Baichi: After independence, I no longer worked and I could not engage in activism. My husband prevented me from going out: I could not even go and see my sisters-in- combat. . . And then even my brothers, even the youngest whom I had fought alongside during the war, encouraged my husband to stop me from going out: It’s finished now . . . Things are different now.29 Baya Hocine, too, expressed her disillusionment: ‘we broke through the barriers and it was very difficult for us to go back to how things were. In 1962, the barriers were rebuilt in a way that was terrible for us.’30 This seemingly abrupt change in attitude towards women clearly illustrates the permanence of the chasm in Algerian society in attitudes

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on the correct roles of the sexes. The examples used so far demonstrate that there tends to be a dichotomy between the two dominant images conveyed: the courageous, feisty woman fighter during the war becomes the silent victim of patriarchal oppression, in her family and within the State after independence.

Post-independence patriarchal chauvinism Thus while the political project of nation-building has benefited from notions of the Umma, namely mother/nation, it has not seriously engaged with identity construction constituted through difference. Sadly, if equality means sameness and the eradication of difference, not much has been achieved to eliminate power relations on which domination is based. Two key elements explain why post-independent Algeria has failed to establish a culture of individual rights for women. There is, first, the deep discord between a minority political current committed to a secular and socialist model of society and its more powerful rival dedicated to a religious Arabo-Islamic vision and, most crucial of all, the prevarication of post-independence governments over the reform of the Family Code because they recognised the enormous and apparently almost immovable weight of patriarchal family structures and ideology. Many Algerian women believed that democracy and women’s equality were intertwined, given that the Republic of Algeria granted women suffrage and access to education and employment. Yet such equality remains elusive. The government that took charge of the liberated Algeria feigned a progressive orientation with regard to inequalities, but in reality it was governed by reactionary elements that hindered every positive effort. It promised its citizens a new beginning. The bright future that the National Front hoped to offer rested on a new kind of equality. The new leaders loudly declared that women’s equality was a fundamental part of the people’s democracy. This turned out to be just a temporary reprieve, as byelaws and regulations were soon cast aside in the name of political expediency. The FLN leaders helped to create a long-term, post-independence mental association between almost any form of progressive agenda on women or ‘emancipation’ and the idea of an alien, Western invasion and the subversion of Algerian culture and society. President Ben Bella’s rhetoric reflected this new approach. Although he declared that: ‘women

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have already assumed their full and entire responsibilities. It would be a dishonour to forget [them] today. We will block the path of false doctrines and destroy the false preachers of Islam and Arabism’,31 his speech of March 1963 seemed outright contradictory, ‘the way of life of European women is incompatible with our traditions and our culture . . . we can only live by the Islamic morality’. And in another deeply ambiguous speech given on International Women’s Day, 8 March 1965, the president noted that there could never be socialism without the participation of women, and that a socialist society is the only avenue that can provide the objective conditions to liberate women but, he stressed again, this emancipation must be achieved ‘within the framework of our Arabo-Islamic values’.32 Ben Bella’s successor made an almost identical speech on a similar occasion. While he saw women as essential for the development of the country, progress, for him, does not mean ‘imitation of Western feminism. We say no to this kind of evolution, since our society is an Islamic and socialist society. . . this evolution must not be the cause of the corruption of our society.’33 Marnia Lazreg, an eyewitness to the event, reported that women who tried to leave in protest were sent back to their seats by armed guards.34 Likewise, the paragraph dedicated to women in the Tripoli Programme is hardly noticeable. Under the title ‘Women’s Liberation’, the passage mentions in passing that ‘in our society there is a negative attitude towards the role of women’ and adds ‘[a]s far as women are concerned, the Party cannot go on merely mentioning women, but should record in writing the facts as they are, giving women responsibilities within the Party’.35 Although the desire to act positively towards women was made clear, it remained only ink on paper. Similarly, the 1963 Algerian Constitution, which offered legal and political views of gender, class, ethnicity and religion as internal idiosyncrasies of the nation, gave a particular role to women outside the domestic sphere. Article 12 guaranteed ‘the same rights and same duties’, Article 13 ‘the right to vote to every citizen’ and Article 18 made education compulsory for all. On the whole, the Constitution forbade discrimination on the basis of gender or class, therefore giving a concrete content of the model of women’s equality that many found unsettling. Despite these initial promises to enshrine gender equality and an egalitarian notion of citizenship in the 1963 Constitution, the FLN

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disavowed its egalitarian positions. After independence, they tried to refashion democracy in order to neutralise the ‘danger’ that women’s equality would pose to established patterns of family life and even to national stability. The explosion in the birth rate further locked women into the domestic role of mothers. The FLN discourse on women led to a few more concrete measures and contradictions. In 1963 the nationality law, which targeted marriages between an Algerian woman and a foreigner, prevented women from automatically transmitting their Algerian nationality to their children. In a like manner, the 1964 Charte d’Alger did address the question of gender equality, stating that ‘retrograde concepts and erroneous interpretations of Islam’36 had for centuries kept women in an inferior position. Recalling women’s historic role, the drafters of the charter argued that women should be able to ‘participate effectively in politics and the building of socialism by joining the ranks of the party and national organisations and acceding to positions of responsibility’.37 But this kind of rhetoric remained at a highly abstract level. Nowhere did the charter mention how the State would guarantee women’s rights or how it would address these social prejudices and erroneous interpretations of Islam, thus leaving the question of woman’s rights in abeyance. The new charter of 1976 also severely condemned ‘mental attitudes and legal structures that sometimes prejudice her [woman’s] acknowledged rights as wife and mother and her material and moral security’.38 In addition, it decried, exorbitant and ruinous dowries, unscrupulous fathers who abandon their children to destitute mothers or unjustifiably wrench their children from their mothers’ affection; unmotivated divorces that leave women without alimony or health care; violence against women perpetrated with impunity; and the exploitation of women by anti-social individuals.39 Nevertheless, one black spot in the text was that the charter leaves women to struggle alone to snatch their rights from their maledominated society. It stated that: It is woman herself who must ultimately remain the best defender of her own rights and dignity through her deportment and

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qualities as well as a relentless struggle against prejudice, injustice, and humiliation . . . As for the State, it has already recognised woman’s political rights and is committed to her education and inevitable social advancement.40 The 1976 Algerian Constitution, largely modelled after the charter, reaffirmed the main tenets guiding Algeria. It exalted women’s emancipation, making it clear that equality of the sexes and freedom of movement were guaranteed by law. It also recognised the substantial role women played in the Algerian Revolution and promised to change the justice system in their favour and to grant them political rights, stressing that Islam considers women as men’s equals. However, although citizens are equal in rights and obligations, equality of rights was mitigated. Constitutionally, women were guaranteed full electoral suffrage and the right to serve in parliament and governmental office as well as equality in the workplace but the Constitution could not transcend the problem of sex/gender and citizenship rights. In 1980, a ministerial circular put more restrictions on women’s citizenship by stipulating that women could travel only if accompanied by a male relative. This decision was enforced when a group of women who had enrolled in universities abroad were stopped by the immigration services at the airport. As a result, a considerable number of women, including many university students, signed a long petition and asked to meet the Minister of the Interior. On the celebration of International Women’s Day, 8 March 1980, women demonstrated and rebelled against the infringement of their civil rights. The order curtailing women’s freedom of movement was finally cancelled. But Bendjedid’s government retreated only to prepare a pilot study of a Family Code41 that jeopardised women’s rights and privileges as fully enfranchised citizens. What should Algerian women do now that they had ‘nationality without citizenship?’,42 as Marie-Blanche Tahon rightly observed. While the official process around the new code was carried out in an atmosphere of secrecy and silence, the public reaction was loud and vociferous. Feminist activists demonstrated in the streets on 28 October 1981, expressing their outrage at the government’s decision to debate the Family Code in secret. Two weeks later, on 16 November 1981, 500 women gathered in front of the National Assembly, which was meeting

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for a plenary session. The Assembly’s vague commitment to consider women’s demands, along with the divergences of opinion within the movement, led its leaders to skilfully exploit the situation and the text remained unchanged. The sense of frustration with what the FLN had become was, of course, something felt by many Algerian male and female war veterans alike. These men and women regarded themselves as the guardians of a certain image of Algeria abroad, in favour of a democratic and tolerant society in which men and women could live and work together. This was perhaps particularly the case for many of the moujahidates of the bomb network who had broken down taboos to join the FLN only to be rewarded with the Family Code. On 23 December 1981, women war veterans thus joined young feminist activists in their repudiation of the government’s introduction of the Family Code.43 These moudjahidates regarded the code as a betrayal of the ideals of 1 November 1954 and a codified rejection of their equal status as combatants. Khalida Toumi was at the forefront of the movement. She founded le Collectif Feminin (Women’s Grouping), in 1981 in reaction to the proposed government ban on Algerian women travelling without a mahram or male escort and the early and secret drafts of the Family Code. Toumi went on to lead the Association for Equality between Men and Women (l’Association pour l’e´galite´ devant la loi, APEL), a Trotskyite– Marxist group, and co-founded the Algerian League of Human Rights.44 These feminists were referred to as coldblooded and uncontrollably ambitious and conceited, primarily concerned with their personal advancement. They were further openly portrayed as perverted specimens of womanhood. Some men even commented that their maternal instincts had been consumed by their search for democracy and their failure to embody ideal feminine values. With the new Family Code, the feminist hope for liberation via democracy was decisively silenced and inequities became fixed.

The 1984 Family Code: a systematic negation of the Other’s rights The family is the basis of human society. Its perfection and sanctity is a condition of the physical and mental health of individuals, of nations, of humanity. If an individual, a social class, a nation loses its respect for the sanctity of family life, it is condemned to extinction.45

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This quotation pinpoints a paradox that continues to trouble feminist theorists. These words might seem insignificant, merely banal sentiments, but in the MENA case they graphically illustrate the difficulties feminists face in achieving civil rights for women. The ideal family requires a wife/mother willing to sacrifice herself for the good of the other members of the family. Ideally, she has no personal desires except to wait on her family. In sum, she is the family’s heart – without her the whole institution might crumble, and with it the nation itself. Since most MENA state constitutions claim the family as the basic unit of membership in the political arena, the family has been valued over and above the person.46 Identity thus has been defined in familial terms, and equality for women was acceptable only to the extent that it did not disrupt their vital role within the family. For most Maghrebis, the family is a gendered structure: a grouping of wife, husband and children where the husband has the role of provider and the wife that of homemaker and caregiver. Protecting this institution, then, is taken by most to mean upholding the traditionally gendered roles and rights of individual members of the family. The goal of protecting the family was well worth the loss of the wife’s personal freedom. Perhaps the most glaring example of this failure to reconcile beliefs about the family with a concern for equality was the case of the Family Laws. In Maghrebi countries such as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, the Family Codes present a different construct of Self. The Moroccan Mudawana (1957– 8) and the Algerian Kanun el ousra (1984) offer a construct of Self as rooted in lineages. They differentiate personal rights by gender and give men more power over women. By contrast, the Tunisian Majalla (1956) presents a construct of Self as largely independent from kin-based formations and affords women more basic personal rights. Since their inception, family laws in the three Maghrebi countries have undergone several amendments in several instalments. Women’s gains have, however, been more substantial in Tunisia than in Morocco and Algeria, both of which preserved the status quo by reiterating the principle of Shari’a. In Algeria, selective applications of the 1959 French law, where Shari’a was deemed unclear or inconsistent with the law, provided Algerian legislators with grounds to argue the need for a unified

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family law. Their efforts resulted in what Algerian feminists called the Code of Infamy, with laws that reinforced inequalities between men and women in family matters in absolute transgression of the existing Constitution. In 1984, Chadli Bendjedid’s government put in place a highly conservative Family Code47 that jealously guarded men’s privileges by shoring up male authority in matters of marriage, divorce and child custody, hence restoring an essence that had been rigidly defined in the past. The argument was that the new Algerian Code would purify the structure of the family from all its Westernised elements. In reality, it was meant above all to placate Arabo-Islamist defenders of tradition who shared a populist and messianic religious nationalism shaped by the Oule´mas, and their leading ideologue, Tawfiq Al Madani, Minister of Culture and Religious Affairs in the first provisional government and later under Ben Bella. To avoid conflict, the authors of the Code claimed that it was entirely based on Islamic law. Women were thus expected to approve their second-class citizen status by accepting their exclusion from major decision making processes, especially those regarding personal status and family legislation. The concept of citizenship in the Family Code, supposed to aim at delineating the conditions for membership in the community of citizens within the Algerian nation state, simply hid the notion that women were just subjects, lacking agency, who had to be in the custody of males in the name of God. The bill also limited women’s participation in the public arena, submitting their right to work to their husbands’ will, a provision nonexistent in Shari’a. In what follows I offer some illustrations of this infringement of women’s civic rights. For example, while the Tunisian Majalla outlawed polygamy and the Moroccan Mudawana tightened its law over its practice, unsurprisingly, Article 8 of the 1984 Algerian Code institutionalised it. It generously stated that: It is permitted to contract marriage with more than one wife within the limits of Shari’a if the motive is justified, the conditions and intentions of equity provided and after consultation of the preceding and future wife. Either wife may take judicial action against the husband or request divorce should he ignore her refusal to consent.

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This law is in blatant contradiction to the more permissive original Qur’anic verse, in chapter 4, verse 2, which reads as follows: If you fear that you cannot treat orphans with fairness, then you may marry other women who seem good to you: two, three or four of them. But if you fear that you cannot maintain equality among them, marry one only or any slave girl you may own. This will make it easier for you to avoid injustice. This passage from the Qur’an clearly states that a man can have more than one wife only if he can treat each woman equally. A true interpretation of religious teachings would thus render polygamy impossible. But the most contentious argument about polygamy is found in The Official Journal of the National Popular Assembly: Polygamy is not to be disputed, whatever the case, for a Muslim State is one based on Jihad and this calls for the involvement of men alone. To whom will women be left in the case of Jihad and how will society be protected from subsequent depravity, if widows cannot find parties to marry, polygamy is therefore a must.48 To legitimate his discourse, the chair of the assembly tried to demonstrate this ‘must’ statistically, arguing that with Algeria’s population comprising 52 per cent females, four girls out of this number would remain unmarried otherwise. Ever since, Algeria’s women have been living as legal minors and have been denied their basic civil rights. This devaluation and disparagement by men leads to self-devaluation and self-denigration and has deprived women of agency. Other provisions in the law work to constrain women’s conduct and to preserve the ‘cohesiveness’ of society as ‘one unity’. Article 39 of the Algerian Code emphasises the issues of gender difference, treating the difference between men and women as natural. It explicitly stated that women are weaker than men and thus must obey their husbands and serve them, their parents and their relatives. A man’s parents’ and siblings’ rights over his children at his death supersede those of the children’s mother. By contrast, by making mothers a source of jus sanguinis, the Tunisian and Moroccan reform laws of 1993 and 2004

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respectively led to the abolition of women’s legal requirement to be obedient to their husbands. In matrimonial matters too, whereas both Tunisia and Morocco abolished the matrimonial guardian’s prerogative, Article 11 of the Algerian Code stipulated that women could never conclude a marriage by themselves, but always needed the intercession of a male marriage guardian. This provision for a Wali – father, husband or brother – highlights the discriminatory concept of woman as less equal intellectually and economically. Embedded in the gendered construction of citizenship is the assumption that women are not individuals in their own right but family members whose rights and duties are defined in relation to their kinsmen. The Wali thus stands as the mediator between the woman and the State in issues relating to her private life. It was precisely this system that the French 1959 law attempted to end by insisting that women had to be present at the ceremony before a state official, who would verify her assent as well as her legal age.49 Moreover, although the work obligation is one that unites all citizens in a contribution to the common good, the Wali can forbid his daughters, wives or sisters work outside the home and there is absolutely nothing that women can do under these circumstances to exercise their constitutional right to employment. Those who dare defy male privilege risk family censure, punishment and humiliation. For instance, if a woman conducts an activity against her husband’s will or refuses to give up her job at her husband’s request, she could be sued for divorce for not fulfilling her responsibilities, even though the Constitution grants every citizen the right to work. Ironically, the right of husbands unilaterally to end a marriage, even without cause, was argued to be in the national interest, reinforcing the conservative topos of the family as a bastion of identity. A parallel argument relates to women’s right to apply for divorce. Whereas Tunisian and Moroccan women can file for divorce, in Algeria only the husband is granted the right to end the marriage. Although the Algerian women’s movement lobbied vigorously to improve women’s social status, it has made little headway in bringing about law reform in the case of divorce. Legislators enumerate many social reasons for their stance, especially the problems that would be faced by the children of divorced parents, but they have overlooked the disastrous effects of unhappy marriages on children. It should be pointed out here that Islam

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recognises divorce as being legal, though hateful, but humane in that it could end the suffering of those whose marriages have disintegrated, instead of keeping such people trapped forever in their unhappiness. The only way to save the children, to make them into good citizens, is to get them away from the pernicious influence of what has become a dysfunctional family. But even in such a situation, the writers of the Algerian Family Code believed that divorce not only threatens the stability of the family but also causes great harm to the nation. Therefore Article 54 added that women may obtain divorce only by submitting to the practice of khol’a, the money they have to pay to their husbands to be free. Article 52 of the Code states that the husband could allow his wife and children to remain in the family home if he possesses more than one house, which is close to impossible given Algeria’s housing crisis. A divorced woman’s fate thus depends on the whims of the husband. As in Tunisia, the mother could get the ‘right’ to raise her child, but the father remains the custodian in all legal matters on behalf of the child. Moreover, a mother can never become her children’s tutor. Only a man can claim his spouse and children as dependents. Actually, the father’s consent is sought for the most basic needs of the child, including registration at school and even approving the child’s participation in school activities or travelling abroad with his mother.50 Paradoxically, many women provide for their unemployed husbands and, in some cases, not to say many, some wives are forced by their husbands to hand over the entirety of their salaries. Algerian law does not say anything about the father who does not provide for his children and wife, though this is a right provided for in Islam.51 Indeed, in Islam it is the husband who must provide for his wife. The Qur’an also specifies that a woman disposes of her own money and shares her salary with her husband only if she wants to. But it seems that in the Family Code, the husband’s responsibility for ‘maintenance’ of his wife is exchanged for female ‘obedience’ in the exercise of her marital and childraising duties at home. This notion of the male’s legal obligation for family support as inscribed in the Code and Shari’a and the assumption of women’s economic dependence on men have proved more dangerous for illiterate women. They have deprived them of a voice and closed off their exit. These women can all too easily become trapped in violent and abusive relationships.

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An Algerian woman’s position thus remains complex. She helps the man in his difficult tasks in addition to her housework and maternal duties. She shoulders a great burden and has much greater pressure on her than a man does. The rural woman shares with her husband the agricultural work: harvesting, weeding the land, collecting olives and figs; she gets up at dawn to milk the cows and feed the cattle; she collects wood, carrying her baby on the back. When back home, she prepares food for her husband. In addition, it is she who gets up at night to feed the baby. In the city, many women provide for their lazy husbands by selling bread, cakes and other types of home-made food. With all that, when the husband gets upset for anything, he may insult his wife, beat her mercilessly or even repudiate her. Many Algerian men extrapolate from the Shari’a concept of nashiz or insubordinate wife to assume that it is their right to discipline their wives because they are the legal protectors and financial providers. Certain acts, such as physical abuse by men, continue to be constructed as private family issues and beyond the purview of law. Legal interventions in these areas have frequently resulted in reinforcing the moral regulation of women in and through familial ideology. As a result, many women’s centres designed to provide women with legal assistance and counselling were set up in the early 2000s. On issues of domestic violence, there is some vagueness in the Algerian Penal Code. It also provides insufficient protection in cases of rape and sexual assault, which are often unreported or, when reported, prosecutions are not pursued. Moreover, a woman’s own evidence is not admissible in court in a charge of any kind of violence. A conviction may be obtained only on the evidence of reputable witnesses or on the confession of the transgressor. If a woman complains of violence and the charge is not proved her case is dropped. It leaves the victims without justice or, in some cases, it puts the victims themselves in jail. Whether discrimination is biologically or gender based, it leads to the same conclusion – that there is discrimination in the way the law applies to men and women. In sum, the provisions of the Algerian Family Code reflect a patriarchal model of family life in which the husband provides maintenance and protection, in exchange for his wife’s obedience, sexual availability and reproductive capacities. This notion of a dependence/ superiority dichotomy in law contributes to the marginalisation and subordination of women’s status and equality. Marriage is no longer a

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union of two independent individuals, a working partnership in which both spouses make equal contributions and where both have a say in making decisions; but it rather appears as a place for domination and subjection. These perspectives on women’s rightful subordination are legitimated not by appeals to justice but by socially embedded convictions about honour and propriety, convictions felt to be beyond the realm of justice. It is not surprising, therefore, that concepts of gender justice that seek to enhance women’s autonomy or rights in relation to men are controversial and arouse intense debate. Compounding this situation is the fact that adoption and abortion are illegal in Algeria. Islamic law does not recognise adoption. Even if practised, adoption has no validity before the law in that it does not allow the adopted child the rights of blood children. And abortion is absolutely prohibited except where necessary to save the mother’s life or where her physical health is threatened; the provision says nothing about incidents of rape or incest or any risk of abnormality for the baby. Adoption and abortion provide excellent examples of how equality rights can be used in a way that can undermine gender justice. The secondary role played by a mother is also emphasised in the Constitution in regard to the conferral of nationality. The Nationality Code discriminates on gender lines. Political and religious actors consider that giving women the right to pass on their nationality to their children will clash with principles enshrined in Shari’a. It would then threaten civil peace and lead to internal political crisis. Within the MENA region, the acquisition of citizenship is heavily defined by jus sanguinis as opposed to jus soli, thus descent not residence gives the right to be a citizen. Because ‘blood’ is defined as blood of the father, the law makes it difficult or simply impossible for a woman to confer citizenship on her non-Muslim foreign spouse and her children. This is an issue taken up by women’s rights advocates in most of the region. The Algerian Constitution, for instance, precludes women from passing their nationality on to their children or to a spouse of foreign nationality on the grounds that they are incapable of assuming a nationality independent from that of her husband. Article 6 of the 1970 Nationality Code stipulates that a citizen is a person whose father is Algerian. The mother confers citizenship onto her child only in cases where the husband has no nationality or is unknown.

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Conversely, since 2010, children born of a Tunisian mother automatically have Tunisian nationality and citizenship. Similarly, Moroccan nationality law allows a Moroccan mother to pass her nationality to her children at birth automatically, whether they are born in Morocco or elsewhere. Morocco joined Tunisia as one of the only Muslim countries of the Maghreb to protect the equality of women in family and marriage. King Mohammed VI made the promotion of women’s status one of his priorities. In October 2003, he announced reforms of family law in favour of women with regard to marriage and divorce, which were approved in parliament in January 2004. In presenting these reforms, he invoked Islam and cited excerpts from the Qur’an to justify every innovation, thus making it clear that Islam and human rights go hand in hand. And the 2004 Mudawana backed the other changes made in Moroccan family law by underlining women’s equality in rights and duties with men. Through its laws, the Algerian State has therefore tried to reformulate the concept of citizenship by establishing the moral supremacy of the family and has reproduced the patriarchal structure within the family. Paradoxically, while the different constitutions affirm women as completely equal citizens politically, socially and culturally, at the same time the Family Code, based on the Constitution, works to perpetuate their status as the legal subjects of their husbands and fathers. The reason for such ambiguity is that the writers of the PSL, because of their different interpretations of Shari’a, were divided about how the law should deal with gender and especially how it should treat the family. Although the legislators were openly committed to the idea of a democratic, egalitarian, civil society as the proper form for a modern Algerian nation and accepted the idea that society could not be democratic if it excluded women from the rights of citizenship, equality seemed more difficult to justify when it involved changing the legal status of women within the family. On the whole, the idea of spousal equality was considered inconceivable and to represent a wanton attack on the family itself. This tension naturally rose to the surface in the debates the committee held over the draft of the PSL of 1984. The potential exclusion of women from the category of the ‘Algerian people’, as stipulated by the Family Code, ironically described as an integral part of a larger state-building

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programme aimed at developing a modern centralised state, provided a potential basis for an oppositional agenda that women used to defend their rights of citizenship in the following years. Within the framework of state-building of citizenship and identity, the Islamists attempted to re-invent cultural identities to conform to State ideology. Gender and citizenship had been renegotiated.

Disenchantment and incivility In the 1990s, family code and gender issues became a battleground where Islamists fought their political struggle against the incumbents either to contest or to rebuild a lost national identity. Emancipation, being synonymous with modernity, and modern people being regarded as unbelievers attempting to undermine Islamic principles, the fundamentalists therefore strove to maintain or re-establish a patriarchal order. In their tracts, FIS members made it clear that personal status law is exclusively the province of religion. Their speeches crystallised the notion of the weak sex in need of tutelage and helped to foster a climate of depreciation of women and their defamation. Ali Belhadj, one of the leaders of the FIS, suggested that women stay at home and lead a ‘virtuous’ life and produce ‘lions’ (sons) who would fight for the Islamic noble cause, instead of working and competing with men. For the Islamists, moreover, equality was defined in terms of dignity and became couched in a rights discourse through which men’s virility could be endangered. They thus called for more drastic measures concerning the treatment of women, arguing that the inclusion of women in male norms of equality runs counter Islamic teachings, but most importantly that it would devalue femininity. FIS ideology has so permeated society that Algerian society nowadays is witnessing an outpouring of religious fervour together with an obsessive attention to ‘moral’ issues, many of which revolve around women’s rights and female behaviour. Angry that a group of ‘legal experts’ could so boldly ignore the Constitution, women’s organisations went on the offensive. The publication of the restrictive Family Code in 1984 served as a springboard for the first post-independence feminist movement, culminating in the formation of women’s associations. Most notable among these movements were the Women’s Association for Equality and the Exercise in Citizenship (l’Association des femmes pour l’e´galite´ et

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l’exercice de la citoyennete´), the Association for the Emancipation of Women (l’Association pour l’e´mancipation des femmes) and the Association for the Defence and Promotion of Women (l’Association pour la de´fense et promotion des femmes). Their activities aimed at instructing less educated women in family law and providing basic understanding of their rights. They also aimed to equip women to confront widespread domestic violence, issues of abuse and child custody. Feminists like Salima Ghezali, Louisa Hanoune and Khalida Messaoudi came to the forefront of politics and campaigned with other feminists against the Family Code, which they believed codified their second-class citizenship. These feminists accepted the prevalent view that the institution of the family was the foundation of society and state, but they pointed out that both State and society were supposed to be governed by democratic principles. They also insisted that Algeria could only produce future generations of good democrats if equality was the defining characteristic of domestic as well as public life, and that marriage had to be transformed from a dictatorship into a partnership where spouses shared decision making authority to maintain democracy. They thus pressed the case for the recasting of citizenship’s premises so as to accommodate women’s particular interests and acknowledge them as gender-neutral citizens. But in the late 1980s neither feminist organisations nor popular protest could change the Family Code. The debate over family law continued unabated for nearly two decades. Ever since the codification of family law in 1984, there had been debates about its possible reform. But it was only on 8 March 2003, after the mobilisation of the Collectif 95 Maghreb Egalite´,52 ‘20 ans, Barakat!’ (20 years is enough), that they launched a campaign for the abrogation of the Family Code. The leaders of women’s rights groups explained that the march was a protest against the threat to the identity of women, underlining that they too were striving for the prosperity of the nation and seeking to preserve their own identity, based on Islam as well as on Algerian history. On 26 October 2003, President Bouteflika’s reaction to the Family Code, which differed from his predecessor’s as befits the democratic image he was trying to project, declared that the reform of the Code was an ‘imperative’ issue and that millions of women suffer injustice because of it. He also recalled that Islam, as embodied in the Qur’an and the Sunna, is a religion of justice and stressed that, contrary to some

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misogynist views, equality is not a foreign idea. The concept was put forward by Islam long before it became fashionable in the West. The PSL, not being a sacred text and a product of a despotic past, therefore required a thorough revision. In addition to justice and equality, the president also referred to human rights. He thus appointed a national commission to re-examine the 1984 Family Code. After nine months of arduous work, the commission presented a reform proposal to the Minister of Justice. Opposition to the measure was immediate. As expected, this revised version inflamed the social climate and provoked an Islamist counter-reaction. The Islamists considered the defenders of the proposal to be Westernised unbelievers led astray by Western ideologies and estranged from their Islamic identity. Their party repeatedly stated that they were in favour of family law reform and development, but that they were opposed to the plan because it had been inspired by Western sources and sought to destroy one of the last strongholds of Islam: the family. The proposed amendments were also regarded as an ‘encouragement to civil disobedience’53 and a concession to Western culture against Islamic principles and values. Abou Djerra Soltani, the leader of the Islamist party, le Mouvement de la socie´te´ pour la paix (MSP), thus stepped up his offensive against the plan. According to the Islamists’ leader, it would be unwise to prohibit divinely sanctioned institutions such as polygamy, which offers valuable solutions to many social problems. In his view, by legitimising a woman’s position as a second, third or fourth wife, polygamy protects her from prostitution and concubinage. Also, the division of property upon divorce might be unjust and could lead to serious social disruption. The promotion of judicial divorce could have grave consequences for the children of these marriages as well. Finally, he stressed that the abolition of marriage guardianship was completely contrary to Algerian values. All in all, the Islamist party considered these amendments to be defying the faith and subverting matrimonial obligations, thus dismantling familial unity. As a result, they launched a petition for ‘one and a half million’ signatures.54 Its manifesto contained a radical condemnation of the proposed family law reforms and called on the people to join the party in its struggle against this unholy scheme. The Mouvement du renouveau national (MRN),55 a new Islamist party, too, underlined the anti-constitutionality of the project and regarded it as government

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provocation and a conspiracy against Islam.56 In response to this chorus of disapproval from The Mouvement de la Socie´te´ pour la Paix (MSP); Le Rassemblement national de´mocratique (RND) and Front de libe´ration nationale (FLN), Mohammed Zaghloul Botarn, the commission’s president, opined that the proposed amendments were not attacks on Shari’a, but rather on the social customs that had been codified.57 In such a political context, the project’s obstruction within parliament was inevitable. Although Bouteflika did not want to see the Code politically exploited by the Islamists by their taking advantage of the issue to gain further visibility, in particular after the brutal civil war, the uncooperative relationships between MSP, MRN and FLN58 left the president no other choice than to accede to Islamist pressure, as the MSP participated in the ruling coalition and the president was confronted with the risk of this coalition breaking up. He therefore showed no inclination to amend the PSL, which might have altered the balance of power within the family and, in this political game, women’s rights were thus sacrificed. The State’s reservations indicate that the direct relationship between the citizen and the State is based on the type of citizen – a male – rather than on a citizen per se. Accordingly that citizen is the one entitled to all rights and this was clearly demonstrated in the various laws of the Family Code. The call for a radical reform of family law, an important step towards the creation of a civil society, thus failed. Only minor amendments to the 1984 Family Code were introduced in Ordinance 15-2 and most of the old law remained behind the new words. In the area of the family, the commission did not tamper with the unequal distribution of power between the spouses and still awarded husbands legal authority over their wives and children. The commission made it clear that it was necessary for the husband to represent the family, thus indicating that if husband and wife have the same position in the family, that is the same rights and the same duties, it would result in chaos. Therefore, the subjection of one spouse, ideally the woman, is a necessary sacrifice for domestic tranquillity. Women’s citizenship thus became a ruling class strategy whereby rights are given from above to promote social integration in the polity. Algerian Islamists and male politicians simply twisted the Holy text to claim, just as James Mill said, that ‘women did not need to have [their rights] because their interests were subsumed in the interest of their fathers and husbands’.59 The male figure of the master is not yet quite

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eliminated at the level of family law and still persists in various ways as the patir potesta` or ‘head of the household’. In this construct, women are viewed merely as consumers while men are praised as producers. Whatever the intentions that lie behind the recent reforms of family law, including its apparent egalitarian formulations, it definitely lacked the strength to break down the cultural model of the home. By precluding any progressive amendments to the existing laws, based on in-built inequality, the status of women remained marginalised within the family and by extension within society. As mentioned earlier, given the conflicting views on family law within Algerian society, the Algerian president had little room to manoeuvre. With the 2005 reform of the PSL, however, he made a symbolic gesture, showing his willingness to modernise the law, while at the same time trying not to antagonise the conservative and Islamist segments of the population. On 14 March 2005, parliament approved the reformed version of the Family Code.60 For example, the status of divorced women with children was reinforced by giving them the right to stay in their former conjugal homes; forced arranged marriages were proscribed and polygamy constrained by requiring the consent of the first or second wife and validation by a local court. Also, women were no longer legally required to be obedient to their husbands. Nevertheless, most male prerogatives were preserved, out of respect for traditional values and customs, in order to avoid social upheaval. If repudiation was outlawed, the number of men who abandon their families and disappear to circumvent the law, instead of ‘properly’ repudiating their wives according to the new rules, has also grown considerably. The politics of religion is thus an issue that is emerging as a critical site of tension for women’s rights advocates and the project of gender justice. Women’s organisations considered the government bill a further prevarication perpetrated against them, and unanimously condemned the provisions that curtailed women’s rights. Islamist women activists, in tandem with other feminists throughout the country, do acknowledge that the current Family Code was not based on a proper understanding of Islam and that laws are implemented on a system of favouritism and personal connection, yet there is no consensus among Islamist women about the very characteristics of a possible new family code. This legal ambiguity remains a crucial factor in the debate about the status of women in Algeria.

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Although the visibility of women in the public sphere has improved markedly in recent years, the consequences of the reforms have by no means been conducive to democratic gender relations. Algeria is still a man’s world. If political citizenship is to promote women’s equality as well as their difference, women will have also to engage with the formal political system.

Women and politics Carol C. Gould et al. suggest that the properties that women bring to politics constitute a key element in the ‘democratic personality’.61 As such, if transposed into the public sphere, they could lead to more participatory and cooperative forms of politics. More broadly, the experiences that women bring to politics are different from those that men bring; thereby help to change the political agenda. Carole Pateman, on the other hand, underlines that the political sphere exists ‘whenever citizens gather together to make political decisions’.62 Nevertheless, the narrow conceptions of the ‘political’ and the ‘citizen’ have been built on a rigid separation of public and private spheres. The Athenian model of city state does not translate easily in modern societies. To the question ‘what is man?’, where the term ‘man’, anthropos, claims to stand for humankind, Aristotle replied by focusing on the free adult male, stating that ‘man is a rational animal and ipso facto, a political animal’.63 Once man, the quintessence of human being, was held to be the free adult male, other beings that differ from him were regarded as deficient and inferior. Thus women, by virtue of their sexual difference, were deemed deficient, irrational, inferior and so grossly unsuited to political activity, the preserve of free adult males only. The Aristotlean demarcation line between the realm of the polis, politika and that of the household, oikonomika, which derives from oikos or house, corresponds to a clear-cut delineation between the public sphere, where the rational completeness of those who are fully human, i.e. men, can be realised, and a private sphere marked by lack of humanness, which corresponds to the Greek idiota and has acquired a negative connotation in modern vocabulary. In so far as public political life is seen as male and is defined in opposition to the private sphere of women, women lack full membership of the political order and are not full citizens. And within Aristotle’s theoretical framework, female sexual difference marks a role of

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dependence on the adult male whose rational nature gives him the right to issue orders. Therefore as well as occupying the domestic sphere, the male inhabits the political sphere. Master of the house and citizen in the polis, he positions himself as a human being par excellence. Woman, by comparison is a being of inferior status. The term ‘human’ seems inappropriate in her case, for were she viewed as human then, she would have been entitled to certain natural rights. It is this condition of masculinity that helped keep the distinction between politika and oikonomika unchanged until the pre-modern era and ensured its continued survival. In the new millennium, gender inequality continues to pervade many aspects of society and politics is still the arena in which it remains perhaps most sharply pronounced. Although women in virtually all countries around the world have voting rights, statistics reveal a substantial gender representation gap. Women’s share of seats in the main national legislative bodies remains less than 30 per cent, which is commonly considered the critical threshold necessary for women to exert a substantial influence on politics in many nations.64 Among the affluent industrialised nations, Sweden has the highest share of female legislators at 40 per cent, while in Japan the figure is a mere 5 per cent. In a number of less developed nations the percentage is even lower. How can we explain this gender political inequality?

Political factors Research suggests that the structure of the electoral system is an important parameter in accounting for variations in the share of female legislators across affluent democratic nations as well as in less developed countries. A larger quota of seats is accorded to women in nations where voters choose among party lists in multi-member districts rather than among individual candidates in single-member districts. Parties are more likely to recommend women for office and voters are more likely to vote for them if women represent only part of a larger group of candidates.65 Another political factor that might affect the proportion of women in national parliaments is women’s voting rights. By the mid-1990s, women nearly all over the world had acquired suffrage, but the timing of suffrage extension to women varied markedly, even among the wealthiest democracies. For instance, women in New Zealand gained voting rights

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in 1893. Despite their long histories as democracies, Britain granted women the right to vote only in 1918, the United States in 1920, France did not extend its female citizens the right to vote until 1944 and Switzerland until 1971. A number of less developed nations did not extend voting rights to women until the 1950s or 1960s or even later. Ever since the 1960s and 1970s, feminist movements around the globe have vigorously promoted public awareness of the subaltern status of women in various spheres of life. In some cases, governments have responded; in others, government action has not been effective. Even though politics is a male-dominated enterprise in virtually every country in the world, the number of women who have succeeded in gaining positions in the executive, legislative or judicial branches of government has risen considerably since the 1970s.

Socio-economic factors Economic development can also have indirect effects. Thus women’s progress in attaining political power surely depends, at least in part, on the degree of progress they have made outside politics. The level of education has long been a key feature distinguishing political elites from ordinary citizens, which in part, is important in expanding the pool of women at work. As elected political officials are frequently drawn from professional occupations, women who work outside the home are more likely to stand for office. The greater the share of women in professional occupations, the larger we should expect their share to be among those elected to parliament. It is expected that, as women in many nations make further inroads in education, in the labour force and in political representation itself, acceptance of women in politics will increase. This has been the case in Western Europe and North America over the past several decades but also, to a limited extent, in MENA countries. In this region, women’s effective representation and participation in politics is hindered by socio-economic factors, such as women’s educational attainment and labour force participation, the rigidity of the legal frameworks, political factors such as the structure of the electoral system and the partisan composition of parliament together, with obdurate mentalities across all sectors of society. Unfavourable attitudes towards women as politicians on the part of party leaders and/ or voters are likely to play a more influential role in determining who gets elected. The size and strength of the women’s movement is another

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crucial societal factor that may impact on gender inequality in political representation.66 Nations whose associations are active in pressing for social, economic and political equality tend to make more breakthroughs in these areas. As a result, women are more likely to run for office and voters are more likely to elect them. Cultural factors can also hinder women’s participation in politics.

Cultural determinants The degree of political democracy in a country may also affect women’s chances of winning electoral office. Evidently, more liberal attitudes towards the role of women in politics account considerably for greater female political representation. Therefore, an egalitarian culture renders the environment more favourable for women’s political representation in Scandinavia, for instance, than is the case in MENA countries. On the political front, women all over the world have become an integral part of the political set up of their communities and play active roles in the administration of their states but one must realise that the statutory provisions still do not favour MENA women in many respects. The absence of voice and participation in the processes by which agendas for local development and governance are defined effectively serves to reproduce the social inequalities that led to their dependent status in the first place. An additional set of constraints on the ability of women to exercise citizenship rights arises from the fact that the practice of citizenship for MENA women is encumbered by private considerations, which significantly limits their ability to act as agents, thereby creating differentiated terms of entitlement to citizenship. Women’s Self is intimately connected to patriarchy, predisposing the privileging of males and creating a kind of taken-for-granted behaviour through which males enjoy more privileges than women. Concurrently, women define their identities in terms of their relations within marriage and are entrusted with the affective, caring role within the family, while envisaging themselves as individual actors. Asymmetries in social relationships, both between and within social groups, translate into inequalities in access to resources and opportunities including those provided by the State. Access to the resources critical to their survival is generally mediated by male members of the family on whom women are dependent for their well-

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being and security. Their dependent state curtails their capacity to exercise voice within the context of intra-household relations and even more so in the public domain, where their interests are represented by the household head. Senior men in the household exercise socially sanctioned authority over women, penalising non-compliant behaviour to pre-empt any possibility of a hostile reaction from more powerful male members. Such behaviour renders formal rights ineffective and draws attention to the crucial difference between legality and legitimacy in the exercise of rights. Religious doctrine also plays an important role in shaping attitudes towards women’s place in politics in MENA countries. In some ways, it hampers their political participation. Statistics show that the number of women in Arab parliaments is the lowest among all the other regions of the world, except for Algerian women who, at the 2012 legislative elections, won 145 seats, that is, 30 per cent of the total number of seats, which was an unprecedented event in the Arab and Muslim world, as shown in Tables 5.1 and 5.2. Table 5.2 reveals that women have been gaining greater acceptance in the political sphere over the past generation. Despite these high achievements, however, they are still under-represented in the governmental structures of most democracies in the world. Among the most affluent longstanding democracies, the United States and the United Kingdom, have the smallest proportion of female legislators. It seems reasonable to suppose that the disjuncture arises from the fact that the upper echelons of the government’s own decision making structures remain male-dominated. The constraints on women’s political activity, combined with obstacles in the political system itself, still serve Table 5.1

Some facts and figures

Women heads of state Women heads of governments Women in at ministerial level Women presidents of parliaments Women in parliament (lower or single house)

World average %

Arab region %

4.7 4.2 16.9 11.7 18.5

0 0 7.8 0 9.7

Country

Rwanda Andorra Cuba Sweden Seychelles Finland South Africa 1 Netherlands Nicaragua Iceland Norway Mozambique Denmark Costa Rica Angola Belgium Argentina

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

9,2008 4,2011 1,2008 9,2010 9,2011 4,2011 4,2009 6,2010 11,2011 4,2009 9,2009 10,2009 9,2011 2,2010 9,2008 6,2010 10,2011

80 28 586 349 32 200 400 150 92 63 169 250 179 57 220 150 257

Seats* 45 14 265 156 14 85 169 61 37 25 67 98 70 22 84 57 96

Women 56.3% 50.0% 45.2% 44.7% 43.8% 42.5% 42.3% 40.7% 40.2% 39.7% 39.6% 39.2% 39.1% 38.6% 38.2% 38.0% 37.4%

%W

World classification Lower or single house Elections

Women in national parliaments

Rank

Table 5.2

9,2011 – – – – – 4,2009 5,2011 – – – – – – – 6,2010 10,2011

Elections 26 – – – – – 53 75 – – – – – – – 71 72

Seats*

10 – – – – – 17 27 – – – – – – – 29 28

Women

Upper house or senate

38.5% – – – – – 32.1% 36.0% – – – – – – – 40.8% 38.9%

%W

29 30 31 32 33 34

19 20 21 22 23 “ 24 “ 25 26 27 28

18 “

Spain United Republic of Tanzania Uganda Nepal Germany Serbia Ecuador Timor-Leste New Zealand Slovenia Belarus Algeria Guyana The F.Y.R. of Macedonia Burundi Portugal Trinidad and Tobago Switzerland Austria Ethiopia 7,2010 6,2011 5,2010 10,2011 9,2008 5,2010

2,2011 4,2008 9,2009 5,2012 4,2009 6,2007 11,2011 12,2011 9,2008 5,2012 11,2011 6,2011

11,2011 10,2010

105 230 42 200 183 547

386 594 620 250 124 65 121 90 110 462 67 123

350 350

32 66 12 57 51 152

135 197 204 81 40 21 39 29 35 146 21 38

126 126

30.5% 28.7% 28.6% 28.5% 27.9% 27.8%

35.0% 33.2% 32.9% 32.4% 32.3% 32.3% 32.2% 32.2% 31.8% 31.6% 31.3% 30.9%

36.0% 36.0%

7,2010 – 6,2010 10,2011 NA 5,2010

– – – – 11,2007 7,2008 12,2009 – –

NA

– –

11,2011 –

41 – 31 46 61 135

– – 69 – – – – 40 58 136 – –

263 –

19 – 8 9 19 22

– – 19 – – – – 1 19 7 – –

88 –

46.3% – 25.8% 19.6% 31.1% 16.3%

– – 27.5% – – – – 2.5% 32.8% 5.1% – –

33.5% –

Afghanistan France Tunisia South Sudan El Salvador Mexico Bolivia Iraq Lao People’s Democratic Republic Lesotho Luxembourg Australia Canada Sudan Namibia

35 36 37 38 39 “ 40 41 42

“ “ 43 “ 44 45

Country

Rank

Table 5.2 continued

5,2012 6,2009 8,2010 5,2011 4,2010 11,2009

9,2010 6,2012 10,2011 8,2011 3,2012 7,2009 12,2009 3,2010 4,2011

Elections

120 60 150 308 354 78

249 577 217 332 84 500 130 325 132

Seats*

30 15 37 76 87 19

69 155 58 88 22 131 33 82 33

Women

Lower or single house

25.0% 25.0% 24.7% 24.7% 24.6% 24.4%

27.7% 26.9% 26.7% 26.5% 26.2% 26.2% 25.4% 25.2% 25.0%

%W

World classification

3,2007 – 8,2010 NA 5,2010 11,2010

1,2011 9,2011 – 8,2011 – 7,2006 12,2009 – –

Elections

33 – 76 103 28 26

102 347 – 50 – 128 36 – –

Seats*

7 – 29 39 5 7

28 77 – 5 – 29 17 – –

Women

Upper house or senate

21.2% – 38.2% 37.9% 17.9% 26.9%

27.5% 22.2% – 10.0% – 22.7% 47.2% – –

%W

62

“ 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 “ 57 58 “ “ 59 60 61

Vietnam Kazakhstan Liechtenstein Croatia Poland Singapore Kyrgyzstan Latvia Philippines Senegal Pakistan Malawi United Kingdom Mauritania Czech Republic Eritrea Uzbekistan Italy Peru Bosnia and Herzegovina China 3,2008

5,2011 1,2012 2,2009 12,2011 10,2011 5,2011 10,2010 9,2011 5,2010 6,2007 2,2008 5,2009 5,2010 11,2006 5,2010 2,1994 12,2009 4,2008 4,2011 10,2010 2978

500 107 25 151 460 98 120 100 284 150 342 193 650 95 200 150 150 630 130 42 635

122 26 6 36 109 23 28 23 65 34 77 43 145 21 44 33 33 136 28 9 21.3%

24.4% 24.3% 24.0% 23.8% 23.7% 23.5% 23.3% 23.0% 22.9% 22.7% 22.5% 22.3% 22.3% 22.1% 22.0% 22.0% 22.0% 21.6% 21.5% 21.4% –

– 8,2011 – – 10,2011 – – – 5,2010 8,2007 3,2012 – NA 11,2009 10,2010 – 1,2010 4,2008 – 6,2011 –

– 47 – – 100 – – – 23 100 104 – 827 56 81 – 100 321 – 15 –

– 2 – – 13 – – – 3 40 17 – 181 8 15 – 15 61 – 2 –

– 4.3% – – 13.0% – – – 13.0% 40.0% 16.3% – 21.9% 14.3% 18.5% – 15.0% 19.0% – 13.3%

Country

Greece Bulgaria Cape Verde Dominican Republic Cambodia Israel Estonia Republic of Moldova Bangladesh Honduras Lithuania Monaco Tajikistan Mauritius San Marino Indonesia

Rank

63 64 “ “ 65 66 67 “ 68 69 70 71 “ 72 73 74

Table 5.2 continued

6,2012 7,2009 2,2011 5,2010 7,2008 2,2009 3,2011 11,2010 12,2008 11,2009 10,2008 2,2008 2,2010 5,2010 11,2008 4,2009

Elections 300 240 72 183 123 120 101 101 350 128 141 21 63 69 60 560

Seats* 63 50 15 38 25 24 20 20 69 25 27 4 12 13 11 102

Women

Lower or single house

21.0% 20.8% 20.8% 20.8% 20.3% 20.0% 19.8% 19.8% 19.7% 19.5% 19.1% 19.0% 19.0% 18.8% 18.3% 18.2%

%W

World classification

– – – 5,2010 1,2012 – – – – – – – 3,2010 – – –

Elections – – – 32 59 – – – – – – – 34 – – –

Seats*

– – – 3 8 – – – – – – – 5 – – –

Women

Upper house or senate

– – – 9.4% 13.6% – – – – – – – 14.7% – – –

%W

86 87 88

80 81 82 83 “ 84 “ 85

77 78 “ 79

“ 75 “ 76

Sao Tome and Principe Madagascar United Arab Emirates Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Slovakia Morocco Venezuela United States of America 2 Turkmenistan Saint Lucia Azerbaijan Gabon Thailand Albania Republic of Korea Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Burkina Faso Ireland Zimbabwe 5,2007 2,2011 3,2008

12,2008 11,2011 11,2010 12,2011 7,2011 6,2009 4,2012 3,2009

3,2012 11,2011 9,2010 11,2010

8,2010 10,2010 9,2011 12,2010

111 166 214

125 18 125 114 500 140 300 687

150 395 165 433

55 365 40 23

17 25 32

21 3 20 18 79 22 47 107

26 67 28 73

10 64 7 4

15.3% 15.1% 15.0%

16.8% 16.7% 16.0% 15.8% 15.8% 15.7% 15.7% 15.6%

17.3% 17.0% 17.0% 16.9%

18.2% 17.5% 17.5% 17.4%

– 4,2011 3,2008

– 1,2012 – 1,2009 4,2011 – – –

– 10,2009 – 11,2010

– 10,2010 – –

– 60 99

– 11 – 102 149 – – –

– 270 – 100

– 164 – –

– 18 24

– 2 – 18 23 – – –

– 6 – 17

– 20 – –

– 30.0% 24.2%

– 18.2% – 17.6% 15.4% – – –

– 2.2% – 17.0%

– 12.2% – –

Chile Turkey Cameroon Djibouti Russian Federation Swaziland Grenada Guatemala Niger Bahamas Sierra Leone Chad Jamaica Central African Republic Dominica

89 “ 90 91 92 “ 93 “ “ 94 95 96 97 98

“

Country

Rank

Table 5.2 continued

12,2009

12,2009 6,2011 7,2007 2,2008 12,2011 9,2008 7,2008 9,2011 1,2011 5,2012 8,2007 2,2011 12,2011 1,2011

Elections

32

120 550 180 65 450 66 15 158 113 38 124 188 63 104

Seats*

4

17 78 25 9 61 9 2 21 15 5 16 24 8 13

Women

Lower or single house

12.5%

14.2% 14.2% 13.9% 13.8% 13.6% 13.6% 13.3% 13.3% 13.3% 13.2% 12.9% 12.8% 12.7% 12.5%

%W

World classification

–

12,2009 – – – NA 10,2008 8,2008 – – 5,2012 – – 9,2007 –

Elections

–

38 – – – 169 30 13 – – 16 – – 21 –

Seats*

–

5 – – – 8 12 3 – – 4 – – 5 –

Women

Upper house or senate

–

13.2% – – – 4.7% 40.0% 23.1% – – 25.0% – – 23.8% –

%W

“ 99 100 “ 101 102 103 104 105 106 “ “ 107 “ 108 “ 109 110 111 112 “ “

Paraguay Montenegro Colombia Uruguay Syrian Arab Republic Suriname Zambia Romania Togo Coˆte d’Ivoire India Liberia Japan Jordan Armenia Cyprus Antigua and Barbuda Malaysia Mali Bahrain Barbados Equatorial Guinea

4,2008 3,2009 3,2010 10,2009 5,2012 5,2010 9,2011 11,2008 10,2007 12,2011 4,2009 10,2011 8,2009 11,2010 5,2012 5,2011 3,2009 3,2008 7,2007 10,2010 1,2008 5,2008

80 81 165 99 250 51 157 330 81 254 545 73 480 120 131 56 19 221 147 40 30 100

10 10 20 12 30 6 18 37 9 28 60 8 52 13 14 6 2 23 15 4 3 10

12.5% 12.3% 12.1% 12.1% 12.0% 11.8% 11.5% 11.2% 11.1% 11.0% 11.0% 11.0% 10.8% 10.8% 10.7% 10.7% 10.5% 10.4% 10.2% 10.0% 10.0% 10.0%

4,2008 – 3,2010 10,2009 – – – 11,2008 – – 1,2012 10,2011 7,2010 10,2011 – – 4,2009 NA – 11,2010 2,2008 –

45 – 100 31 – – – 136 – – 238 30 242 60 – – 17 66 – 40 21 –

7 – 16 4 – – – 8 – – 24 4 45 7 – – 5 15 – 11 7 –

15.6% – 16.0% 12.9% – – – 5.9% – – 10.1% 13.3% 18.6% 11.7% – – 29.4% 22.7% – 27.5% 33.3% –

Guinea-Bissau Kenya Democratic Republic of the Congo Hungary Kiribati Malta Brazil Bhutan Panama Benin Ghana Ukraine Botswana Gambia Congo

“ 113 114

115 116 “ 117 118 “ 119 120 121 122 123 124

Country

Rank

Table 5.2 continued

4,2010 10,2011 3,2008 10,2010 3,2008 5,2009 4,2011 12,2008 9,2007 10,2009 3,2012 6,2007

11,2008 12,2007 11,2011

Elections

386 46 69 513 47 71 83 230 450 63 53 137

100 224 492

Seats*

34 4 6 44 4 6 7 19 36 5 4 10

10 22 44

Women

Lower or single house

8.8% 8.7% 8.7% 8.6% 8.5% 8.5% 8.4% 8.3% 8.0% 7.9% 7.5% 7.3%

10.0% 9.8% 8.9%

%W

World classification

– – – 10,2010 12,2007 – – – – – – 10,2011

– – 1,2007

Elections

– – – 81 25 – – – – – – 72

– – 108

Seats*

– – – 13 6 – – – – – – 10

– – 5

Women

Upper house or senate

– – – 16.0% 24.0% – – – – – – 13.9%

– – 4.6%

%W

“ 134 “ 135 136 137 138 139

125 “ 126 “ 127 128 129 “ 130 131 132 133 “

Nigeria Somalia Saint Kitts and Nevis Tuvalu Georgia Maldives Myanmar Sri Lanka Haiti Samoa Tonga Belize Iran (Islamic Republic of) Lebanon Comoros Marshall Islands Egypt Vanuatu Oman Yemen Kuwait 6,2009 12,2009 11,2011 11,2011 9,2008 10,2011 4,2003 2,2012

4,2011 8,2004 1,2010 9,2010 5,2008 5,2009 11,2010 4,2010 11,2010 3,2011 11,2010 3,2012 5,2012 128 33 33 508 52 84 301 65

352 546 15 15 137 77 428 225 95 49 28 32 290 4 1 1 10 1 1 1 0

24 37 1 1 9 5 25 13 4 2 1 1 9 3.1% 3.0% 3.0% 2.0% 1.9% 1.2% 0.3% 0.0%

6.8% 6.8% 6.7% 6.7% 6.6% 6.5% 5.8% 5.8% 4.2% 4.1% 3.6% 3.1% 3.1% – – – 1,2012 – 10,2011 4,2001 –

4,2011 – – – – – 11,2010 – 11,2010 – – 3,2012 – – – – 180 – 83 111 –

109 – – – – – 224 – 30 – – 13 – – – – 5 – 15 2 –

7 – – – – – 4 – 1 – – 5 – – – – 2.8% – 18.1% 1.8% –

6.4% – – – – – 1.8% – 3.3% – – 38.5% –

Micronesia (Federated States of) Nauru Palau Qatar Saudi Arabia Solomon Islands Mongolia Papua New Guinea

“ 6,2010 11,2008 7,2010 2,2009 8,2010 6,2012 6,2012

3,2011

Elections

18 16 35 150 50 76 109

14

Seats*

? ?

0 0 0 0 0

0

Women

Lower or single house

0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% ? ?

0.0%

%W

World classification

– 11,2008 – – – – –

–

Elections

– 13 – – – – –

–

Seats*

– 2 – – – – –

–

Women

Upper house or senate

– 15.4% – – – – –

–

%W

* Figures correspond to the number of seats currently filled in Parliament

Source: Data compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the basis of information provided by national parliaments by 30 June 2012.

“ “ “ “ “ ? ?

Country

Rank

Table 5.2 continued

ALGERIAN WOMEN'S STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION

155

to depress their political potential so that much of what they do is marginalised, in particular in MENA countries. In Algeria, although the country is a signatory to key Human Rights protocols, including the Protocol on Women’s Rights on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, the rate of change has been less rapid than in Western countries. The trend has been increasing steadily from 3.4 per cent of the total number of members of the Assembly at the parliamentary elections of June 1997 to 31.6 per cent at the elections of 10 May 2012. It was indeed only after 50 years of independence that Algerian women reached the required threshold for affirmative action. Education certainly brought significant changes for them. It helped them gain a sense of self-worth and allowed them to acquire knowledge about their status and rights. It also gave them the capacity to reflect on their situation, to question it and act accordingly and, hence to speak up for themselves and forge an identity of their own. Above all, it invested them with a sense of entitlement to equal treatment in the field of work for example. In Algeria, unlike many other developed and developing countries, men and women receive the same salary for the same job. Many women have succeeded at traditionally male-dominated jobs. They hold managerial positions in both the private and public sectors and some have set up their own businesses. Such involvement has made them more assertive and independent. Also, many women avoid marriage, with its traditional obligations. However, women’s empowerment and political role cannot be judged merely from their numerical entry into the institutions of local governance. The enhancement of women’s opportunities for election may have well improved the quality of policy making by increasing competition for seats and by heightening the diversity of views and experiences among representation but would it have any substantive impact on politics and policies? Would female legislators help to steer political debate within parties and within parliament towards issues significant to women?

Gendered politics Inherent in the liberal democratic theory of citizenship is the acceptance of all people as ungendered individuals who can lay claim to certain natural rights, premised on the separation of the public and the private spheres and their gender ascriptions. However, sexual difference has

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THE STATE OF ALGERIA

translated into political difference. Dramatic as the changes were for Algerian women, they did not significantly alter the pattern of life of either rural or urban women. Though their entry into political decision making helped them break some barriers and gave them some visibility, the experiences of inclusion remain limited and are often insufficient to counter the multidimensional exclusion women face. Algerian women’s experience shows that formal equal opportunities alone do not automatically result in either equal treatment or proper representation of women at decision making levels. Algerian female MPs do play a marginal political role and their influence over national policy is virtually nil. In spite of having the greatest voting quota, and although Algerian women make up 70 per cent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 per cent of its judges, they have failed to enjoy the benefits flowing from a representation that allows effective redress of development challenges. One could attribute women’s poor representation to the socio-cultural ideology – to their engagement in the private domain. Motherhood therefore becomes a political status and a vehicle through which women are incorporated into the political order. Due to their association with the traditional roles of wife and mother, women must counter stereotypes held against them, withstand gender-driven intimidation and make extra efforts. Apart from the socio-cultural patriarchal drawbacks, in comparison with men most women lack the required resources for pursuing networks and running efficient campaigns. In addition, while operating within the political arena, women’s wings of political parties have had limited success in pushing a gender-specific agenda outside the interests of their own parties. This has contributed to women’s inactivity in political processes. Exclusion in many different forms is used to hinder women from extending their participation into the public arena. For one thing, political parties are the gatekeepers of women in parliament. In line with this notion, one would argue that affirmative action invokes a hierarchy in parliament where those with elected seats dominate and are given a higher regard than those brought under the provision. Since the electoral success of a candidate is to a large extent linked to the candidate’s political party affiliation and proximity to the party leaders, the selection of women is dependent on party ideology. As women owe allegiance to the nominating political party and its head rather than a women’s rights constituency, this subjects them to the whims of political parties. This is

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best reflected in the fact that privileges are accorded to elite women whose loyalty lies more with the FLN. This exposes women to manipulation by men from the dominant party. As a result, these women in power are politically ineffective and unlikely to effect any change. It is from this weaker end of the spectrum that has stemmed a kind of maternalist politics based on a false difference– equality dichotomy. The examination of Algerian women’s status has revealed that despite the giant emancipatory strides of the past 52 years, women are still denied full citizenship. Taken in context, their condition is relative to the condition of society. Citizenship remains an abstraction and carries no obligation for the State to protect it or for women to exercise it, as has been demonstrated through the discussion of the Family Code. It is this disjunction between political and civil/social citizenship that has been the source of women’s exclusion from full participation in the public sphere. The very structure of government, including the Constitution and the judiciary, provides for an environment of systematic violation of women’s human rights. Women’s personal rights are very explicitly subordinated to the assumed needs of the family. Even in their attempts to ‘modernise’ citizenship laws, Algerian lawmakers endorsed this ideal of family unity over the democratic principle of equal rights. Therefore the ability of a woman to choose is given the form of a privilege rather than a right. Although the State showed willingness to change and a marked tendency to support women’s rights, it did not implement truly egalitarian policies. If civic republicanism is the coming together of the various actors of society, then the question to be addressed here is how to increase women’s participation in public life.

What strategies for women’s inclusive citizenship? Clearly, in order to have a right and to act to claim a right, the first step is the appreciation of the ‘right to have rights’,67 as Hannah Arendt has put it. Even if we take into account that Algerian women express outrage about unjust social practices that discriminate against them, such a protest cannot be interpreted as proof that they consider their subordinate status unacceptable. A trend that has been observable over at least the last century is that some women see the men of their families as their safe haven. As a result, they view themselves as appendages to their husband and accept their inferior status in various forms of behaviour,

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THE STATE OF ALGERIA

such as their willingness to bear children, sometimes to the detriment of their health, to satisfy their husbands’ wish or their acquiescence to violence at their husbands’ hands. The force of custom is strongly stressed in this case. Because that subordination has come to define community culture and values, these women refuse to renegotiate the social arrangements in which they find themselves. Their complacency has not only put other women in an impossible position but has also limited membership rights and capabilities for women, constrained citizenship rights in the State and rendered the phenomenon of patriarchal ‘capture’ of authoritative roles more significant. This reifying of community boundaries has had another insidious effect: it has severely limited the province of formal law in many contexts and cast doubts on the effectiveness of feminist movements as the medium through which to enforce changed rules and norms in gender relations. On this basis, I would argue that these impediments deny women physical integrity and the capacity to make choices about how to live their lives, and tend to discourage those who seek to advance their rights. It has also led to male impunity in perpetrating gross violations of women’s rights. Therefore it is not enough to free oneself from the master in order to be free.68 Freedom should be founded on the capacity of the female subject to speak for herself, think for herself and protect herself. Women must thus strengthen their solidarity and unify their efforts within a democratic association. Beyond these broad statements it has to be recognised that in the construction of a nation the roles for men and women cannot be separated. If we base our argument on the doctrine of natural rights and the idea of progress then, in tandem with Qasim Amin,69 we can assert that the progress of a nation depends on improving women’s status. And this can be realised within the context of Islam because Islam recognises the equality of both sexes before God. Although the rules of Islam are unchanging in terms of social conventions, some modifications are necessary. We should bear in mind that the Qur’an refers to Shari’a as a path, not as a ready-made system of law. Therefore Islamic law should be reinterpreted according to the needs of the day, as the Moroccan Kingdom did. In addition, true interdependence between men and women will not be possible as long as the economic and power relationships

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underpinning their interdependence are so unequal. As I see it, the challenge that has to be addressed is the dilemma posed by women’s demands for equality and identity. The challenge is to avoid stalling at the point of the substitution of one subordinated category for another. It is possible to be both different and equal, if each of the two different beings is free. The dimension of sexual difference requires new ways of coexisting and of liberty in a humanity made of men and women. This revolutionary argument draws strength from a particular interpretation of liberal theory as built around a set of complementary dichotomies. Equality and difference should better be understood as complementary rather than antagonistic. The problem, therefore, does not lie in either equality or difference as such, but in their misrepresentation as opposites. So, how can we use notions of sexual difference and yet make arguments for equality? Joan Scott’s explication of the history of the equality– difference debate is that there are certain political situations and historical moments when it makes sense to emphasise women’s citizenship claims with reference to arguments associated with difference, but avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism; there are others when arguments associated with equality are likely to have more ground but avoiding the denial of women’s specificity.70 Once it is recognised that men and women are both similar and different, the key test in any situation is which strategy will better address women’s political, social and economic disadvantage. While I agree with Scott’s views, to my mind we should first think of a social prototype that includes women in the human standard. While Algerian women do not deny that gender differences exist, they hope to incorporate those differences within the context of an egalitarian society, one in which being a female does not preclude being a free person. This is the path to woman’s humanity. Women deserve the same legal and civic rights as men because they share a common humanity, not because of their special qualities or social significance as women. My argument is that equal citizenship has to embrace difference and difference cannot afford to be divorced from equality. What is needed is thus a policy framework that could incorporate care as an expression of difference into the citizenship standard itself, but in a way that does not undermine progress towards gender equality. In this way, difference is incorporated into strategies for gender equity without reference to potentially essentialist notions of women’s qualities and nature. Indeed,

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THE STATE OF ALGERIA

women’s various interests and identities qua women cannot be subsumed under the one interest and identity of motherhood. Giving birth is not the ultimate goal of women’s existence or their primary contribution to their community. Nor is the family the sole province of women. Fathers and husbands should also be considered vital to a healthy family life. I believe that what many Algerian families are really missing is not omnipresent mothers, but good fathers and good husbands. To help the nation, men need to involve themselves in raising and caring for their children and not just spend their leisure time in cafe´s, playing cards, beating and insulting their wives when they return home. I also believe that those men who do not support women’s rights are in effect betraying their national democratic heritage and standing in the way of the national imperative. A reconceptualisation of citizenship is therefore necessary for women to become genuine members of society. This will require the consideration of two essential elements: women are individuals possessed by reason rather than representatives of a particular gender. As such they are entitled to full human rights and should not be exiled from society. As free individuals, they should also be able to choose their role in life and explore their full potential in equal competition with men. To develop and flourish as citizens, they must redefine their status as protected, dependent and subordinate beings. A citizen by definition cannot be a mere recipient. To be an eternal receiver is morally degrading, and to emancipate oneself from this condition one has to be a giver as well. And building an inclusive citizenship would entail first and foremost an ethic of justice.

An ethic of justice In the Algerian context, the conception of gender justice has greatly affected the ways in which claims to citizenship and entitlement are pursued. The extension of civil and political rights to excluded groups did not produce equal levels of political participation. Therefore, the first step to improving women’s lives is a change in the laws. If the leaders of the Algerian Republic really want a true democracy, they cannot and they should not be allowed to want a family law that would lie outside the democratic spirit of equality between spouses. It is that spirit of democracy that should inform the laws. In the government’s draft for a new set of citizenship laws it is possible to balance each of these

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priorities – the needs of democracy and women’s rights, the family and the nation – and to create some sort of compromise between them. In broad terms, the patriarchal family model, in which the husband provides maintenance and guidance while the wife obeys and procreates, has become obsolete. In the interests of the whole nation, a new set of family values for a democratic age, where family members are first and foremost equal citizens is a necessity. Far from wanting to undermine the State, I believe that a strong nation needs strong families and a strong family cannot exist when the sacred institution of marriage becomes nothing but concubinage. The Algerian family of the future cannot be strong if its women are weak. While acknowledging the fact that power relations affect the outcome of policies and that a state of law and basic accountability are needed to advance human development, a precondition for gender justice, in my view, is to find ways in which women and men can construct their interests as part of a social collectivity, through interdependence rather than independence.71 This is the very meaning of citizenship as a ‘social contract’. Seen from this angle, the State assumes the double role of protector and provider of rights. Algeria therefore needs to develop a practical working definition of gender justice. Ideally, the issue of the meaning of gender justice would be established as a practical project, through democratic debate. Algerian feminists believe that tradition should not stand in the way of democratic progress and that limiting the reach of the democratic ethic of equality simply curtails women’s freedom, leaving them marooned in a private sphere that was supposed to exist outside the realm of the State. Feminists also argue for the democratisation of the private sphere. Many women believe that their role cannot be reduced to the family exclusively. Their social duty and responsibility to the nation should not be overlooked. Algerian laws thus need to endorse that role, by making distinctions between different kinds of rights in different situations. Tackling gender injustice has therefore to contend with deeply entrenched ideas of masculinity and femininity, the former associated with dominance and the latter with passivity. We should therefore degender the ethic of care and move towards a more dynamic notion of justice to counter the domination that characterises gender relations. In other words, we should develop an ethic of justice derived from universal individual rights.72 This is precisely what is missing in a

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THE STATE OF ALGERIA

construction of citizenship that is indifferent to the dependency of women. The emphasis placed on justice does not override the fact that care and justice are not mutually exclusive ethics but, rather, potentially complementary. They reinforce each other, thereby transforming and strengthening each other. Each acts on the other to create a more powerful dual ethic that promotes women’s citizenship in the private and public spheres. We should apply the principles of distributive justice to the family, as developed by liberal political philosopher John Rawls.73 Justice in the private sphere of the family is necessary for women’s equality in the public sphere, and to afford them the same opportunities as men to develop their own capacities. A just family can help instil in children a commitment to the principles of justice necessary to their socialisation into citizenship in a just society. This suggests that the citizen-mother would be validated in her role, but would not be confined to it. She should be a citizen in her own right, both politically and economically independent. A sound basis for the political achievement of a good society is thus to enrich the theory and practice of citizenship by ensuring everyone receives the entitlements necessary to the exercise of liberty. Therefore, in the name of civil society, women should have the opportunity to present some suggestions and hold personal negotiations with representatives. Such a request is only just, since no woman has been allowed to participate in the revisionary work of the commission and the result is a document completely in conflict with the constitution. The plan for a new PSL should not be the prerogative of the Oule´mas but the right of every Algerian. Women should therefore have the right to participate in discussions about the contents of family law and to voice their own opinions about it. Another factor that has jeopardised women’s status as effective actors on the public stage is the absence of laws regarding sexual and moral harassment, which serve to silence and subordinate them. To address violence, both domestic and in the workplace, laws should be developed and passed to protect the victims and ensure the punishment of their assailants and persecutors. Setting up special family courts with specialised judges, men and women, to adjudicate such issues would reduce inequalities. Likewise, equal nationality rights would acknowledge women’s relation to the State as full citizens. Discriminatory laws with respect to

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citizenship and nationality have imposed much misfortune on Algerian women and their families, particularly their children. Given the fact that mothers are agents for the transmission of Islamic culture, it seems ironic that women cannot pass their citizenship to their children. Because Muslim marriage is a contractual relationship, marriage contracts that stipulate conditions that put women in a stronger legal position within the marriage could be another step in securing women’s rights. Ultimately, in order to achieve change, the expression of individual agency could be translated into collective action.

Activism for the construction of political citizenship It is necessary to distinguish between two formulations: being a citizen and acting as a citizen. In my view, the two are intertwined. Inclusive citizenship cannot be built without active citizenship. As Maxine Molyneux explains, active citizenship means seeing citizenship not as something that confers formal rights on passive subjects but rather as a relationship that promotes participation and agency.74 Looking at citizenship from the vantage point of active citizenship, that is from the point of view of the agents themselves, would entail commitment by claimants. While it is undeniable that conventional social attitudes obscured the benefits of an active citizenry and complicated the process of turning passive women into vigorous civic participants, Algerian women should try to reverse the apolitical character of their lives. Much of their engagement up to now has been routine, without any direct or indirect wider political consequences. Women should begin to see themselves as potential agents of change, responsible for making choices as well as claiming their rights, rather than helpless victims. The Swedish example underlines the important role played by women themselves in opening up formal politics to women in Scandinavia and more widely. For Algerian women, then, involvement in community organisations or social movements would be more fruitful than political engagement, which has proved more alienating than empowering for women. This ‘social capital’ is a prerequisite for effective public policy and as an expression of healthy citizenship. Local activism is important for citizenship from the viewpoint of both its impact on the wider community and on the individuals involved. Women’s activism is also a way of raising consciousness and self-confidence and opening new spaces in which women’s voices can be heard.

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Paid employment, I believe, can be an important route to both social citizenship rights and active political citizenship. It is the key to financial independence both directly through the wage and indirectly through the social citizenship rights linked to employment status, which still tends to reflect male employment patterns. It also represents a source of self-esteem, and is important for the fulfilment of women’s potential as citizens. An independent income of one’s own is a prerequisite for participation in and enjoyment of life, privately as well as publicly. It leads to attitudinal changes in perceptions of the appropriate roles for women, thus strengthening women’s voice and their opportunities for exit. Paid work outside the home can also encourage politisation and open up political processes and the wider public sphere. Such forms of activity can be seen as contributing to the building of civil society and hence of firmer foundations for democracy. It is the two-way action of democratising the State and democratising the social sphere that participatory citizenship emphasises. This has been expressed as ‘democracy in government: democracy in the family’.75 These varied forms of engagement with promoting women’s citizenship are an integral part of efforts to extend rights in the new democratic contexts. From this perspective, I would argue that the expansion of rights, opportunities and entitlements for women are the key to an effective Algerian population policy. Such a policy, which could be concretised with the establishment of Gender Units along with the appointment of women in managerial posts, in particular at the ministerial level, could have positive effects on government developmental policies. As outlined in this chapter, the binary perceptions of a radical colonial/post-colonial hiatus, together with a focus on the reform of marriage and family law, have shown that both colonial and postindependence states proved ineffective in addressing the ‘woman question’. Although the post-colonial Algerian State has interpreted the relationship between men and women on Shari’a principles in order to repudiate Western values, it has retained many elements of colonial gender ideologies. Women’s ambivalent positioning is expressed in the fact that the moment of the country’s liberation was also the moment of their resubordination and exclusion. During the freedom struggle, it was clear that rights served a progressive end because the freedom fighters invoked civil and political rights in order to acquire independence. Yet

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the struggle itself speaks to the contradictory nature of law and rights and how it is a contested terrain. This tendency has had a significant impact on the position of women as post-colonial citizens. Most saliently, in the face of extreme nationalism and later of religious movement, women have had to challenge their symbolic function as guardians of their culture. The discourse of citizenship in the case of Algerian women constitutes thus an egalitarian mirage. To borrow Adriana Cavarero’s words, I would say that being a woman in the Algerian world ‘is everything and a nothing or better a nothing that has to adapt to being everything’.76 What Algerian women perhaps best represent is a lifetime of negotiation within their society. The status of being a female citizen is completely divorced from the practice of being a citizen. In a substantive sense, women are consigned to second-class citizenship because of the absence of protection of their rights in crucial areas. The Algerian Republic promised men and women equal rights and responsibilities of citizenship based on a liberal contract, but it failed to deliver them in practice. The biases and differences that exist in the legal framework have been exacerbated by the patriarchal context of the country. Ironically, although Algerian liberals advocate the integration of women and acknowledge their civic and political rights, they cannot conceive a female identity dissociated from the traditional roles of women as mothers, wives and daughters. They draw the line at female emancipation at the threshold of the home. From the above discussion, it is clear that the exclusion of women from the broader sense of citizenship, particularly as it relates to socioeconomic entitlements and male– female relationships, has contributed to enforcing man’s supremacy as head of the family. Men’s privileges as citizens in the public political sphere derive from their status in the private domestic sphere, where male privilege is reinforced by social policy and laws. As elsewhere in the MENA, the family, as an important institution, is central to the social, political and economic sphere of Algerian life. As such it affects women’s choices in life and their perception of themselves. Citizenship as the expression of agency also contributes to the recasting of women as actors on the political stage. At the same time, by linking agency and structure, as mediated by culture, the frame of citizenship keeps in view the ways in which that political is still

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structured both materially and symbolically to disadvantage women. The target of gender parity in political decision making positions by the year 2012 fell far short of being realised. Political liberalisation and some notable successes in the field of economic growth in themselves have not resolved the problems of gender inequality. Women were, however, not the only ones to lay claim to full recognition of their rights in Algeria’s self-definition of its identity. The third development of the 1980s – which served to perpetuate and, if anything, aggravate the problem of factionalism after independence – was the onset of identity conflicts and ideological divisions. The Berber question led directly to further shocks for the State. Against this challenging landscape, culture returned to the political frontlines.

CHAPTER 6 THE IMAZIGHEN 'S QUEST FOR INCLUSION

The sense of ethnic belonging [is] an ethnic identification generated by a specific system of cultural production, cemented by a common language among the members of an ethnic group.1 Discussions of ‘nation’ are endless because the term has lent to different interpretations. Eric Hobsbawm identifies the two main meanings of ‘nation’ in modern times as a relation known as citizenship,2 in which the nation consists of collective sovereignty based in common political participation, and a relation known as ethnicity, in which the nation comprises all those of supposedly common language, history or broader cultural identity. Whereas the concept of citizenship draws attention to principles of sameness such as equal rights and equal treatment for all, ethnicity emphasises differences between groups. While ethnicity is the key to uniting a group of people via the vehicle of culture and also to providing a way in which to distinguish one culture from the next, the link between ethnic yearnings and nationalism based on culture is most often antagonistic, especially when the culture of the dominant group is imposed on the subordinate ethnic culture. Indeed, if a society uses ethnie as the unifying variant of culture, then not sharing in the dominant ethnie means exclusion from society. According to the central hypothesis of Tajfel’s and Turner’s social identity theory, there are three mental processes involved in evaluating others as ‘us’ or ‘them’, that is

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‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’: categorisation, social identification and social comparison.3 Once we have categorised ourselves as part of a group and have identified with that group we then tend to compare that group with others. Groups give us a sense of social identity – a sense of belonging to the social world. Individuals inevitably tend to intensify their connections to the respective identity group that they perceive can ensure their safety. As a result, competing groups may increasingly come to view one another as obstacles to a desired stability and threats to an object of value or as impediments to a particular national goal. In order to increase our self-image we tend to elevate the status of the group to which we belong. This may result in discriminating and holding prejudiced views against the group to which we do not belong. This social categorisation is one explanation for this ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, which leads to in-groups and out-groups and hence to competing identities. Rivalry between groups constitutes a threat to society. This is where it becomes necessary to examine the notion of securitisation.

The securitisation of the concept of nation The theoretical process of securitisation, as conceptualised by the Copenhagen School, is very much associated with the onset and protraction of sustained identity-conflict.4 The security of identity is thus framed as an existential situation in which identity can become nonnegotiable. The loss, alteration or imposition of outside influences on one’s identity is portrayed as that which securitisation poses to protect. In other words, the compromising of group identity is tantamount to the destruction of both the communal integrity and the national aspirations of the identity group as a whole. Under a veil of securitisation, we are witnessing a fundamental reassessment of state-minority relations and national identity. The greatest influence on the notion of ‘other’ has been made by the modern concept of national identity. It is supposed that national identity is being constructed on a basis of the ‘internal’ belonging of people to the community and a practice of citizenship in solidary communicative society with a democratic constitution. This understanding of citizenship, derived from the Aristotelian doctrine of a State, draws attention to a political community founded on the principle of active

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citizenship, that is inclusion of every citizen in the political life of the community. As societal security is closely related to the identity notion, we may refer to it as ‘identity security’ – security of not just a State or a group of people but of the community, a ‘we’-identity.5 To shed light on the question of identity, I shall turn to the account that the Copenhagen School gives on this question: ‘Societal security is about situations when societies perceive a threat in identity terms.’6 In other words, because of this threat to the Self, insecure political communities are continuously coming up with measures to increase their safety.

The securitisation issue in Africa Under the call of securitisation, there has been a re-evaluation of fundamental notions of national identity in some states. In Africa, the question is whether it is possible to speak about an African democratic identity with its ‘universal’ equality, freedom and solidarity while the securitisation envisages the exclusion of some groups of people. At the same time, the most important issue for Africa in the context of contemporary security is whether its internal identity is being constructed as identity ‘on the inside’, that is on belonging to the community and application of the practices of political inclusion or as a contradiction to external identities fulfilled by the securitisation practices of exclusion. In North Africa, the phenomenon of accelerated globalisation and its homogenising effects, along with the prevalent monocultural order based on Islam and Arabism, have been seen as threats to indigenous peoples’ cultural identities, including the Berbers. These twin processes greatly affected the Berber/Amazigh dimension of social and political life and prompted a specific Berber/Amazigh ethno-political identity. Concerning this, it is evident that contemporary securitisation in Algeria is a strategy of constructing identity ‘by rejection’. The securitisation of ‘rejected’ identities can enhance insecurity in society. In order to narrow the analytical scope of this chapter and accurately depict its implications, I shall discuss these ideas in relation to the unresolved situation in Algeria. In my analysis of identity-conflicts, a primary factor in the perpetuation of insecurity and the continuing lack of resolution lies in the interplay of opposing negative perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other’. The series of events that perpetuated this dynamic can

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be interpreted as beginning with the mutual securitisation of identity between Arab and Berber communities. Securitisation theory posits several relationships to explain how the categories ‘Berber’ and ‘Arab’ have been politically structured. But before embarking on that task, it would be interesting to explain the how and why of this delocalisation of the Berbers by situating them in history.

A genealogy of ‘Berber’ Despite some allegations that the Berbers were a purely French invention,7 the Berbers did not develop in a vacuum. If, as Gabriel Camps noted, ‘There is today neither a Berber language in the sense of it reflecting a Berber society conscious of its unity, nor a Berber people and even less a Berber race . . . yet the Berbers exist.’8 Their civilisation is considered among the oldest in the world. Berber history must be put into its North African context: the Punic settlers, the Romans and the Arabs were all integrated into North African society and in large parts controlled it. This has caused dangerous distortions: first that the history of North Africa tends to be exclusively that of the events that involved the conquerors; second that the Berbers themselves have been treated as more or less a people without history. As such, Algeria’s Berberity has been consigned to Algeria’s distant past or simply ignored. But the foundation of the population in North Africa is of Berber origin. Commonly called Imazighen or ‘free people’, the Berbers were indeed the autochthonous inhabitants of North Africa present long before the arrival of Arabs in the seventh century. They are the descendants of the original inhabitants of North Africa, going back at least to the fifth century BC . Punic settlement was the first challenge to Berber culture. Roman, Vandal, Byzantine and Arab rule followed. Moreover, Berber history was traditionally written from the perspective of others. In the Greek and Roman annals, the Berbers are referred to as Africans, Numidians, Moors and barbarians. As a Berber collectivity, they were first written into the historical record by the chroniclers of the conquering Arab Muslim armies in the seventh century. The Arabic word barbar, which is related to barbaroi, was applied to the people whose language seemed odd, hence the name

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‘Berber’, which is primarily a linguistic category. Because the number of Arabs who came to Algeria in the seventh and eleventh centuries was relatively small, ethnically speaking, nearly all Algerians for many previous generations were descended from, among others, Berber ancestors, whatever the language they have since come to speak. As a result, in recent times the term ‘Berber’ has had a clear meaning, in opposition to ‘Arab’, only in respect of that element of the Algerian population which has continued to speak one or another dialect of the Berber language as its mother tongue. Berberophones in Algeria are made up of four groups: the Tuaregs, desert nomads living around the Hoggar mountains near the southeast and southwest borders of Algeria; the Mozabites, centred in Ghardaia and the Mzab region in the Sahara; the Chaouias, who occupy the Aure`s mountains further east; and the largest group, the Kabyles, who are concentrated along the Mediterranean coast, east of Algiers, the capital city. Kabylia is today separated into what is known as the lesser and greater Kabylias. Greater Kabylia stretches between the Mediterranean and the Djurdjura mountains and Tizi Ouzou and has the highest number of Berberophones. This collection of tribal groupings was branded with a derogatory term: ‘Berbers’, from the Greek and Roman appellations for ‘barbarians’. Subsequent ArabMuslim conquerors quickly adopted the term and it has been in use ever since. Not surprisingly, modern-day Berber militants reject such stigmatisation. Today, the word ‘Berber’ is increasingly being supplanted by ‘Imazighen’. In Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity,9 Le Page and Tabouret-Keller argue that a number of factors generally contribute to ethnicity and a sense of ethnic identity. Among these are: a common language and culture; a common sense of origin and selfidentification within the group and ascription to it by others; and/or a sense of kinship and common inheritances. In Algeria, the idea of a common culture and language seems to be problematic. A first possible explanation for Berber identity stems from colonial policies that separated Kabyles into an elite group. To address this argument of categorisation, it is important to trace how the Arab/Berber divide was first constructed and how the difference between the Kabyles and Arabs expanded during the early days of conquest and then came sharply into focus.

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The differentiation syndrome Throughout the history of psychology, few questions have been so persistent or as resistant to resolution as that of group differences. Among the factors contributing to the longstanding lack of resolution of this important and controversial issue are the political issues associated with it. As a result, over the last few decades, social psychologists have been extensively exploring the dynamics of social categorisation, the process by which individuals are classified into various social categories. Categories serve particular functions and can be manipulated from one moment to the next. As a process that defines state membership, categories serve to include or exclude groups. Robert Gurr uses the term ‘communal groups’ or ‘identity groups’ when he refers to ethnic groups. He sees these as ‘psychological communities whose members share a distinctive and enduring collective identity based on cultural traits and life ways that matter to them and to others with whom they interact’.10 He concludes that the salience or importance of communal identifications varies over time and is dependent on cultural, economic and political differentials between the group and others. Categorisation groups populations on the grounds of a number of dimensions. In national discourse, categories function to determine how certain populations are related to the State. Brubaker explains this process of inclusion and exclusion as ‘the politics of belonging’.11 The ‘everyday practices of identification and categorization’,12 he adds, might be at odds with formal forms of membership, such as citizenship. If categories are instrumental in defining the relation of certain populations to the State, the practical use of categories is thus not to define ‘Berber’ as against ‘Arab’, but to determine degrees of inclusiveness in a national discourse. This leads to an alternative understanding of how categorisations of ‘Berber’ and ‘Arab’ have been reproduced despite changing functions in particular contexts. Frequently, the imperial powers favoured one ethnic group over another. And so it was with the Berbers in Algeria. In so doing, they fostered divisions among the groups with the aim of keeping them competing among themselves rather than challenging the imperial status quo.

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The Kabyle myth Prior to French rule, the cultural and ethnic diversity of Algeria did not pose any problem as the Arabs and Berbers had coexisted symbiotically. Therefore there had been no need to resort to linguistic, ethnic or religious definitions of identity. And Islam was a locus of shared values not the site of power struggle. Its precepts enjoined protection and tolerance. Diglossia ensured that the language of the Qur’an was equally accessible to all Muslims. However, during colonial rule, more than the social distinction between the colonial and the indigene, the French resorted to Arab/Berber ethnic classifications to make Algerian society governable in the wake of conquest. The question of the formation of a social hierarchy in the colony therefore merits some attention in order to shed light on the ethnology of the two sectors of the indigenous population. Origins of the myth History reveals that the Kabyle myth actually dates back to well before the French invasion of Algeria in 1830. As early as 1826, Abbe Raynal stressed Kabyle exceptionalism, depicting mountain people as fierce lovers of freedom, Nordic in origin and only superficially Muslim.13 The Berbers were thus seen as akin to Europeans in their nature and as such ‘part of the rational Occident in formal opposition to the Arabs, who . . . will easily assimilate to [European] ideas’.14 Reading across French literature offers opportunities to explore the complexities, incongruities and paradoxes of colonial categorisation. The comparison of the Kabyles to the Germanic tribes was the first step in the creation of the Kabyle myth. Lape`ne’s Vingt-six mois a` Bougie,15 which draws on Tacitus’s ethnographical study of the Germans, noted the similarities between the Numids, the Vandals from Germany and the Kabyles, whose customs he found quite similar to those of the Germanic tribes. He thus claimed Aryan origins for the Berbers. Lape`ne further separated the Berbers into two classes: the Bedouins or nomadic tribes of the plains and the Kabaı¨les, the sedentary mountain-dwellers of the Atlas.16 To substantiate these categories, Lape`ne drew attention to their qualities as warriors, which marked them out from the Arabs. His statements were tentative but nonetheless reflected the mood of the time. In the Revue des deux mondes,17 Francois Ducuing drew attention to the two wars of Navarre (1833– 5) and Kabylia (1841–7), stating that these

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were complementary military experiences and highlighting the striking similarities between the Navarrais’ character, morals and practices and those of the Kabyles.18 Also, unlike the Arabs, the Kabyles developed both their agriculture and industry. The rudiments on which to construct a society along French lines were thus present. Likewise, Emile Gautier, a well-known geographer and professor at the University of Algiers, wrote: ‘Today, Kabyles and Arabs are not just sedentary and nomadic, they have also the notion of belonging to two different races, to two different human species.’19 Negative interpretations of the ‘races’ were seen in terms of civilisation. French historians used the sedentary-nomadic division to explain that the tribal nomadic character of Arab society prevented it from attaining the level of civilisation acquired by the sedentary societies. This provided an easy handle for the analysis of the so-called Kabyle/Arab differences. French colonial ethnographers and administrators fostered an idealised vision of Kabyle society and of its people as ‘noble savages’, racially distinct from and innately superior to Arab populations. Accordingly, the French colonisers exploited the idea of Kabyle superiority, using sociological, religious and linguistic differences between the Arabs and Berbers. By regarding the two as incompatible races, the French introduced racial configurations of thought into the colony and thus opened the way to the more dogmatic racial attitude adopted by the settlers. Since the Kabyles had been in contact with Roman civilisation, they were thus thought to be more predisposed to Western rationality, which would facilitate their assimilation into the French nation and perhaps even their conversion to Christianity.20 The French vision of Islam as potentially subversive led them to conclude that the Kabyles were sharply different from the Arabs. This misinterpretation had far-reaching consequences. In the first place, it allowed for the emergence of the categories of fanatical Arab and impious Kabyle. This conclusion, in turn, led to a false analysis of the significance of Islam to the indigenous population. In 1839, the Ministry of War constituted the Scientific Commission, whose mission was to carry out scientific exploration for colonial exploitation and chart the population and territory. With the annexation of Algeria in 1841, the Arab Bureau was set up as the main administrative body for the new territory, whose aim was to find out the ‘truth’ about the Algerian population and decide on the best way to rule

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it.21 A year later, the population was divided into three categories: the Moors or Maures and the Arabs, Israelites and the Negros and by the end of the nineteenth century, the term ‘Maures’ gradually disappeared from the census and other records and was replaced with ‘Berber’. But the terms were used very differently: ‘Moor’ designated the city dweller of Andalusian origin, while ‘Berber’ referred to a particular ethnic group by culture and geography and later physical appearance, to set them apart from the others, the Arabs.22 Pascal Duprat’s essay on old and modern races also detailed the physical differences between Arabs and Berbers and concluded that the latter constituted a superior and noble race.23 In the 1850s, Officer Pe´llissier de Reynaud followed a markedly different trajectory in his approach to culture and explicitly challenged the emerging conception of the ‘fanatic Arab’, hailing the ‘Arab’ as intelligent, moral and with little opposition to Kabyles.24 His view was eclipsed, however, by Colonel Daumas’s and Captain Fabar’s dominant version of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Berbers’ espoused in the greater Kabylia, one which became the authoritative account and official discourse of the Arab Bureau.25 Daumas and Fabar drew a picture of the Kabyles as having ‘accepted the Qur’an but they have not embraced it’, asserting that the ‘Kabyle detests the Arab and the Arab detests the Kabyle’.26 These early categorisations of Algerians made by French observers came to be set in stone and structured the early military work. As the work of physicians was very much valued in colonial times, so their number increased. They, too, worked on the indigenous population in Algeria. An early contribution to the evolution of the propagation of racist ideas and of the consequent Berber Myth was that of Dr Baudens, a surgeon in the army. The physician observed that the Arabs were more inclined to be full of guile, cruel, avaricious and extremely lazy whereas the Kabyles were proud, perseverant, courageous and had an assured gait. His observations were the precursors of the more pointed contrasts between the Arabs and the Berbers. In 1845, Dr Euge`ne Bodichon, a civilian doctor and a member of the colonial society, published his views in his Conside´rations sur l’Alge´rie,27 in which he dwelt at length on the anatomical model of the Kabyle type and concluded that the Kabyles were a pure race. They were honest and honourable, and he stressed their integrity. On the other hand, he insisted on the hereditary nature of particular vices in the Arab character, such as brute instincts and

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tendency towards theft and rape. It is evident from the traits he ascribed to both the Arabs and the Kabyles and his linking of physical and moral features that he championed the latter. The way these ideas were put forward was in itself symbolic of the wider relationship between the military and social sciences. Linguistic variations between Arabs and Berbers further served to inculcate the notion of their quintessential difference. The Berber language received much attention and was used as a confirmation of the two categories: Kabyle as ‘good’ and Arab as ‘bad’. In his study of the Kabyle region, Ernest Carette devoted a whole chapter to the characteristics and origins of the Berber language. In another chapter, he dwelt on the linguistic differences between Arabs and Berbers, namely that of the differences in France between Northerners and Southerners resulting from their origins as speakers of the langue d’oil and langue d’oc. Both langues had their spirits (genies). Carette went on to discuss the forces that eventually befell the connective ‘spirit’ of the community, what Herder calls Volksgeit, of the North and South and subordinated them to French nationhood. For Carette, Algeria was at the same level France had been in the Middle Ages before this unification had taken place. It was divided into two languages that corresponded to the langue d’oil and langue d’oc and thus the two Volksgeits they represented.28 It was this that separated the Kabyles from the Arabs. Carette’s overall argument was that in Algeria there existed two different communities whose essence derived from their language. The desire to categorise the Kabyles in this way was just another facet of the evolving tendency to view the Kabyles in a more favourable light than the Arabs and create divisions between the native peoples. Having established these categories in the public sphere, the French went on to consider the domestic situation. They noted two features of the indigenous population: polygamy and the condition of women. While they believed that neither the Kabyles nor the Arabs came up to French standards, the Kabyles were well ahead of the Arabs at least when it comes to women. In the first place, the French were struck by the involvement of Kabyle women in warfare but viewed the position of the Arab woman as deplorable. These views are completely subjective and must be considered in a nineteenth century context. Such images had been used as a moral stick with which to hit both at Islam and the Arabs. While polygamy is used by both Berbers and Arabs, Berber males are

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less permissive than Arab males, as many Berber women would attest. The degree of respect for women varies from one family to another, but in both Arab and Berber cases, as men dominate in all the fields, they are regarded as natural leaders, superior to women and born to rule over them.29 The discovery that the Kabyles had a different customary law from the Arabs was yet another opportunity to praise them at the expense of the Arabs. Lape`ne picked up this notion adding that analogies to French law could be found among the Kabyles, and contended that because of that the Kabyles would make admirable allies of the French. Such legal compatibility seemed to give rise to a potential harmony between the French and the Kabyles. In 1865, Auguste Warnier claimed that, Berber institutions emerging from Roman law like the French ones, the Kabyles were thus in many respects in a better position to aid France’s progress in its colony. But it was the period of Napoleon III’s Royaume Arabe (1860–70) that further fuelled the stereotypical images that were to crystallise into the Berber Myth. The denigration of the Arabs occurred on two levels: first there was a direct attack by means of polemical literature in the context of Arabophile/Arabophobe conflict. The second was related to the work of the Bureaux Arabes, a corollary of the Arab kingdom policy. These military administrative units, born out of the apparent need for a channel of communication between the French military administration and Muslim Algeria, were especially reviled for their perceived Arabophilia. ‘Arabes, bureaux arabes, affaires arabes, royaume arabe, rien qu’arabe, encore et toujours de l’arabe’,30 was the verdict delivered by Warnier in 1869. Warnier added a few other distinctions between the Berbers and Arabs. By comparing French and Kabyle institutions, he further brought a justification for the superiority of the Kabyles over the Arabs. The establishment of the douar-communes, local administrative units and the Senatus-Consulte law of 1863 took the contrast between them a step further. By establishing the division of tribal (arch) and statedbestowed (makhzen) lands into administered units all over Algeria, except in the region of Greater Kabylia, the French struck at the very foundation of tribal structure, further legalised the dispossession of Arab tribal lands and hit at the very identity of Arab society. The Kabyles were thus spared the major disruptions of the new colonial

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system. This relative stability allowed them to weather the storm of the economic crisis of 1867 – 9. The epidemics, poor harvests and famine that prevailed during that decade however greatly affected the traditional Arab society. The pauperisation of the Arabs increased crime rates, which provided another pretext to the metropolitan press for stripping the Arab of all morality. Thus unlike the Kabyles, not only had the Arabs been dispossessed of their lands and their traditional way of life disrupted, but they also lost any hope of being on a par with the Kabyles. Some colonials harshly criticised France’s paternalist treatment of the Kabyles and the racial dichotomy. Ismae¨l Urbain, a Saint-Simonian and an Arabist responsible for the Arabophile policies of Napoleon, for instance, argued that it was a pure French invention. In his 1857 article on the Kabyles, he expressed his indignation regarding the elevation of the Kabyles to a higher status and rejected the notion of republican democracy in the Kabylia.31 He thus called for more justice in the administering of the Arabs. Some years later, Urbain also attacked the French anti-Islamic tendencies and lamented the misinterpretation of Islam, asserting that Islam, like Christianity, was a religion of equality. His ideas on Islam and the indigenous people set off an uproar in the colony. When the Third Republic pushed legislation towards assimilation, after the collapse of the Second French Empire in 1870, as part of a national project to centralise the metropolis, the French divide-andrule policy however manifested only tenuous distinctions in practice.32 After the French suppression of the 1871 uprising in Kabylia, Vice Admiral Gueydon, the then Governor General, asserted that ‘all immunities granted to the Kabyles at the time of their submission could [then] be disregarded’.33 This clearly revealed the major purpose behind French categorisation of the Algerian population. By the early twentieth century, the French treatment of colonial categories gradually moved away from assimilating a target elite Kabyle population and instead focused on distinctions between Muslim and non-Muslim. ‘Muslim’ increasingly functioned to exclude a large group from full membership in the French State. Not only did the Kabyles lose their prestigious position, but France’s particularistic assertion of Kabyle Berber identity rendered them extremely suspect in nationalist eyes.

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Colonial categories and the nationalists The reformation of colonial categories first took place in the reformist branch of the Association of Oule´mas as early as the 1930s. The oule´mas restructured colonial categories to limit previous divisions and the nationalist parties building on these concepts would equally try to create a unified vision of Algeria. Arab Algerian nationalists increasingly gravitated towards the type of reform Islam being developed in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, which sought to ‘purify’ the religion by returning to its original text and tenets. Imazighen nationalists, however, objected to the ways Reform Islam linked together the Arabic language and the Muslim faith to the exclusion of the Maghreb’s Berber dimensions. The efforts of the Berber nationalists to articulate the anticolonial struggle around the notion of an Algerian Algeria rather than an Arab and Muslim Algeria, however, failed, leading to the marginalisation of most Berber leaders. The more radical salafi reformist movement inspired a new wave of nationalist theorists, like Tawfiq al-Madani, who at once disavowed the validity of the French colonial myth meant to influence the Berbers, used the same terms to describe them as ‘frugal labourers and noble warriors with a fearless love of Freedom’.34 Al-Madani also framed this history based on ‘scientific truth’, in much the same way as the military Scientific Commission had sought to construct the origins of the Berbers. Other Arabophone oule´ma writers, like Muhamad al-Mili, presented history as the core for Algerian unity. Before the FLN finally dominated the discourse in the mid-1950s, the fragmented development of a nationalist movement introduced several visions for an Algerian national conscience. The three major strands usually mentioned were the Association des Oule´mas, led by Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis, the evolving groups under the revolutionary guidance of Messali Hadj and the liberal factions which coalesced around Ferhat Abbas. This phase was also instrumental in the consolidation of a Kabyle identity. The political impetus for Berber nationalism started among the elite Algerian immigrants in Paris. Salem Chaker argues that the first evidence of a ‘Berber’ element in Algerian politics appeared in the discourse of the first ENA (E´toile Nord-Africaine, North African Star) secretary-general, Amar Imache, in his discussions of ‘la de´mocratie primitive Berbe`re’.35 Imache highlighted the role of Berbers in their

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fight against assimilation, targeting the intellectual Kabyle community that had been educated in French. Soon after World War II, the Berberist movement gathered momentum, fed by growing nationalist sentiments in Kabylia. The internal purges carried out by the PPA (Parti du Peuple Alge´rien, Algerian People’s Party) were devastating and the French-educated Kabyles students newly recruited to the maquis were especially targeted. Rising resentment appeared at the 1945 elections when the PPA issued orders to eradicate bothersome Kabyle candidates, throwing the region into disarray. In 1948, the Movement for the Triumph of Liberty and Democracy (MTLD), one of the precursors to the FLN issued a 50-page long pamphlet called ‘Memorandum a` l’ONU’, memorandum for NATO, which started with this sentence: ‘The Algerian, Muslim and Arab nation exists since the seventh century’,36 totally ignoring the significance of Berber identity and cultural heritage for the Algerian nation. More importantly, languages and cultures other than Arabic were seen as a threat to the Republic. This representation of Algerian identity thus meant that differences and diversity were denied in the name of unity. Berber ethnic identity was viewed in such a way that it could build on a number of socio-cultural factors to create a sense of ‘them’. It is in this divide between Arabs and Berbers in which Berbers have long felt the sting of second-class citizenship. Owing to the history of Algeria, the debate that has surrounded the question of Berber cultural identity became somewhat overheated in the postindependent period.

Ethnicity and internal political conflict Gurr defines ethno-political conflict as ‘identity groups, whose ethnicity has political consequences resulting, either in differential treatment of group members or in political action on behalf of group interests’37 and ‘conflicts in which claims are made by a national or minority group against the state or against other political actors’.38 He goes on by listing the factors leading to conflicts: the salience of ethno-cultural identity for members and leaders of the group; the extent to which the group has collective incentives for political action; the extent of the group’s capacities for collective action; and the availability of opportunities in

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the group’s political environment that increase its chances of attaining group objectives through political action. Gurr’s last comment that ‘state responses to communal grievances are crucial in shaping the course and outcomes of minority conflicts’,39 deserves attention in the case of the Berbers in Algeria.

Nation-alising the political space The effect of the French fragmenting had been such as to hinder the achievement of a common national identity and it created a post-colonial malaise. Today in Algeria some confusion about ethnic belonging prevails, which explains how acute the identity issue is. As discussed earlier, the valorisation of Algerian culture was an important component of nationalist representations, but instead of the harmony the leaders of the revival aimed at, frictions intensified in the post-colonial era. The Algerian revival developed an Arab side and a Berber side. Each of the two Algerias posited its own form of Algerianness. In this sense, they stood as two different cultures while sharing the same religion. Such opposition only helped reinforce the binary system of Otherness used in imperialist representations. After cleansing Berber elements from the nationalist movement, the FLN established the newly independent state on the ideological basis that Algeria was historically Arab and naturally Islamic. By placing an exclusive emphasis on Arabisation, the Berber aspects of the newly independent Algerian society were given short shrift, even as the process of state consolidation and economic integration went forward, inexorably leaving no room for Tamazighth in the Algerian leadership’s vision for the future. The apparent anachronism of this situation is reflected in the Berbers’ movements. Berberism The notion of an all-compassing unified state-nation resulted in clear-cut borders between inclusion and exclusion, thereby creating the radical Other. Anthony Smith’s description of the difficulties confronting demotic and peripheral ethnies seems apt for the Berbers: they were ‘excluded from the instruments of political transmission and bereft of institutional support . . . their memories tenuous, their heroes shadowy, and their tradition . . . patchy and poorly documented’.40 As Smith says, if ‘the secret of identity is memory, the ethnic past must be salvaged and

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re-appropriated, so as to renew the present and build a common future in a world of competing national communities’.41 No wonder, then, that the Amazigh movement places a premium on memory work. In current usage, the term ‘Berberism’, as a movement, loosely describes those associations and groups promoting Berber language and culture. The Berber claim is, however, not homogeneous in the various concerned areas within Algeria. Each region has evolved in its own way with regard to the Berber language and identity. This helps better understand the fierceness of the debate that ensued when the Imazighen question was brought up in the Kabylia. Contemporary Berberists explicitly claim Amar Ousaı¨d Boulifa as the forerunner of their own vision.42 The affirmation of Berber identity was also a central element of the work of Jean Amrouche and his sister Marguerite Taous Amrouche.43 More recently, especially since Algeria’s independence in 1962, the development of the Berberist movement as a cultural enterprise owes a great deal to the work of novelist and essayist Mouloud Mammeri.44 The popularisation of Berberist themes in the wider social consciousness also owes much to the appeal of a number of singer/poets, notably Slimane Azem, Hamid Cheriet (known as Idir), Loune`s Aı¨t Menguellet, Ferhat Mehenni and Matoub Loune`s. These figures became de facto spokespersons for Berber identity. But to view the Berberist movement as an essentially apolitical movement of ideas evolving mainly if not entirely in the cultural realm is to ignore the political content of much of the intellectual and artistic output of the leading figures in this movement. The split between the political and cultural wings of nationalism, which appeared in the early twentieth century, developed further towards the middle of the century. It was in the context of the Se´tif putsch of 8 May 1945 that the Kabyles, upholding the PPA, began to refer to Berber identity as a rallying call for supporting independence. Between 1945 and 1950, Kabyle members of the PPA and later MTLD developed songs in the Berber language to gather the younger population around the nationalist cause.45 The term ‘Amazigh’ first appeared in this context and has increasingly been used to represent a transnational identity in the scattered populations in North Africa and the Diaspora. The term then gained wide currency in 1948–9 when it was used by the leadership of the main Algerian nationalist party, MTLD, and especially its French extension, the Federation of France,

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which put forward the notion of an Algerian Algeria in opposition to the longstanding orthodoxy of the PPA-MTLD that the Algerian nation was properly defined as Arabo-Muslim. In challenging the nationalist orthodoxy of Arabo-Muslim Algeria, the Berberists were certainly bound to be regarded as dividing the nationalist movement in the face of the enemy along precisely the same fault lines that French colonialism had perennially exploited in its strategy of dividing the Algerians, namely the Kabyle – Arab dichotomy. The gulf between Berber and Arab nationalists widened when the central command issued a tract on 15 April 1949 condemning Berberism and declaring a general mobilisation against the Berberists. Things escalated when the FLN leaders held their first conference in 1956 and drafted the Soumam Charter on the nature of the future independent State. Kabyle leaders outnumbered Arab leaders at this conference, as the majority of the Arab leadership was unable to breach French military control over Algerian regions in order to reach the Soumam Valley in Kabylia. Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the detained FLN leaders, rejected the Soumam Charter on the grounds of its secularism and the misrepresentation of delegates, but according to Abane Ramdane, one of the FLN’s most prominent political members, the main reason behind Ben Bella’s stand was that the charter was drawn up by Kabyles.46 Even years after the event, former president Ben Bella pondered on the actions of Abane Ramdane at Soumam, which he believed were ‘tainted by Berberism and turning its back to Islam’.47 Some characteristics of elite Kabyles, such as being Frencheducated, consolidated rifts, and with the rising use of ‘Berber’ as a divisive label among the nationalists, references to ‘Kabyle’ and ‘Berber’ were increasingly employed to groups believed not to fit the nationalist agenda. This categorisation was used as a means to reinforce the notion of certain members as a distinct group, but it was not the impetus for division, nor explicitly culturally based. Rather, it was a method for consolidating FLN power. In 1958, the Tripoli Charter abrogated the Soumam Charter at a second FLN conference in Tripoli, Libya, where few Kabyles were present. The Tripoli Charter stated that the Muslim identity ‘stripped of all its excrescences . . . is to find expression in two essential factors in addition to religion as such: culture and identity’.48 The last point meant that priority was given to developing a national Arab Islamic

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culture and identity. Some Berberists saw this as a betrayal in view of the high price Kabylia paid as one of the main battlegrounds of the war. The Berbers played a major role in the development of the Algerian nationalist movement from the 1920s onwards and in the political and military leadership of the war of national liberation between 1954 and 1962. They were always in the forefront against the French and organised their first revolt in eastern Kabylia in 1871. In the aftermath of World War II, the Berbers were still leading the attack. Additionally, the Berber areas of Kabylia and Aures provided the strategic bases for the revolution leaders. But their role as active actors in the history of their own country was quickly lost in the process. Thus for the first time the Kabyles began to formulate their identity in cultural, linguistic and historical terms. This set the stage for the development of a specifically Berber nationalist consciousness and established the framework for the post-colonial Algerian identity in which the Berber identity movement consolidated. Overall, the Berberist discourse was profoundly sympathetic to Western liberalhumanist values and strongly condemnatory of the predominant monocultural order based on Islam and Arabism. Berber activists campaigned for greater cultural and political freedom for Imazighen. Their initial activities basically revolved around la revendication amazighe (the Berber claim) and resentment at the State’s denial of the Amazigh identity, commonly known as le de´ni identitaire. The main focus of Berberist dissatisfaction was the fact that Thamazighth had not been accorded national and official status thus could not be said to exist as a living language. Thus, just as the advocates of Arabisation in Algeria strove to establish the modern standard Arabic as the Algerian national language at the expense of the colloquial Arabic that most Algerians actually speak, so too the Berberists strove to establish in Thamazighth a modern standard Berber at the expense of the Berber dialects. In this way, despite being a predominantly Kabyle affair in the Algerian case, Berberism substituted the promotion of Thamazighth for the defence of Thaqbaı¨lith and could reconcile the two only by redefining them in terms of each other. To redress the situation, a number of cultural associations were founded to prevent a further decay of Berber and to attempt its revival before they began to campaign internationally for the recognition of their unique identity and Berber

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language, Thamazighth, as one of the official languages of the various countries of North Africa. And it was only around 1980 that Berber was used to mobilise a population self-identifying as a group along cultural lines against the Arab Algerian State. The result of decades of tension punctuated by the civil war and clash between the regime and the territorial and cultural core of Berberism resulted in two historical uprisings, the 1980 Berber Spring and the 2001 Black Spring, in which the Kabyles played a vanguard role in establishing and spreading the pan-Berber narrative both in the Berber diaspora and the international arena, while also privileging their Kabyle-ness.

Tafsut n imazighen The antagonism between Arabs and Berbers had been exacerbated into inter-ethnic violence since the 1980s. The Berbers’ claim to a distinct cultural identity, besides questioning the government’s sincerity about its rhetoric on equality of citizenship and rights, was a quest for recognition. Sporadic riots characterised by extreme brutality occurred periodically but what was striking about the events of the 1980s was the scale, which went beyond anything that had ever happened before. What, then, was the background to that explosion of insensate and destructive passions? As pointed out earlier, during the late 1970s the two connected issues of Arabisation and education became very strongly intertwined, to emerge as basically an anti-Berber issue. Up to then, all Algerians, Arabs and Berbers, had amicably studied and worked together. However, when the Boume´die`ne government placed a further strain on the educational system it revived the Berbers’ old resentments and language itself became a political issue and mobilised a Berber identity movement. The attempt of the Algerian independent State to create a single political culture overriding communal cultures reinforced the sense of Berber grievance and led the Berber community to seek for the psychological satisfaction of self-determination, even at great cost. In the Berber cry for recognition were two intertwined themes: one was the struggle for liberation from poverty and misrule and the second was the demand for the recognition of their language and cultural identity, for in this is the yearning of the community for a life of dignity and sufficiency.

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While the Berbers do not deny the Arab-Muslim identity of Algeria, they stressed the Amazigh ethnic origins of the Algerian nation. It is in this environment that can be placed the most important Berber rallying point: the Berber Cultural Movement (Mouvement culturel Berbe`re MCB), which held its first meeting in July 1989 in Tizi-Ouzou, with the ambition to coordinate initiatives and actions in favour of the Berber language and culture and to establish a permanent representation of Berber civil society. The Amazigh movement emphasised the correlation between the democratisation process and the recognition of Berber cultural rights. The Berber Spring of 1980 thus abruptly brought a largely ignored political and cultural problem into the public sphere. This cultural dimension of Algeria’s malaise, which coincided with the economic and political liberalisation of the early 1980s, exacerbated the situation. The first spasm of revolt against the regime occurred in the 1980s when Berber students in Tizi Ouzou launched mass demonstrations and a general strike to protest against the government’s Arabisation policies. These uprisings and the 1983 – 5 demonstrations of the Beurs in Lyon and Paris signalled the emergence on the political scene of a new generation of militants, mobilised around cultural difference. The politisation of language and culture in Algeria is exemplified by the 30 laws passed by the government to regulate the official use of language. Law no. 91-05 of 27 December 1990 advocated the Arabisation of all administrative offices, television broadcasts, declarations and official documents, as well as of schools by 5 July 1992 and higher education institutions by 5 July 2000. Another law on the generalisation of the use of the Arabic language was voted by a rubberstamp assembly, the National Transition Council, on 17 December 1996. It ostensibly aimed at displacing French dominance. Its main stipulation was that by 5 July 1998 – or, at the latest, 2000 in the case of higher education – all public administrations, institutions, enterprises and associations of whatever nature were to use the Arabic language in all their activities, including communication and administrative, financial, technical and artistic management. The act also specified that the use of any foreign language in the deliberations and discussions of official meetings was prohibited. Government offices, companies, political parties and associations had from then on to conduct all their business in Arabic. This, however, posed a direct

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threat to the identity of the second section of the Algerian population, the Berbers, whose education was still largely Francophone. The battle lines were thus drawn between Berber and Arabic. The Berbers demanded recognition of Thamazighth as their national language, the foundation of their collective identity. They also demanded respect for the Berber culture and economic development of the Berber homelands. The Berbers’ desire to belong and be located set the stage for the development of a specifically Berber nationalist consciousness. As in many previous movements, this started among intellectuals. The first manifestations of a modern type of Berber-Kabyle consciousness were embodied, since the 1990s, by the France-based intellectual production of such bodies as the Acade´mie Berbe`re/Agraw Imazighen, the Groupe d’e´tudes Berbe`res de l’universite´ de Paris-VIII and the Centre de Recherche Berbe`re at INALCO in Paris. Cultural expressions such as songs, music and militant poetry were dominated by references to the Berber and specifically Kabyle patrimony: the reclaiming of the pre-Islamic historical figures Massinissa and Jugurtha and the heroic resister to the Arab conquest, the Kahina; references to the Djurdura and the montagne/adrar as a symbol of resistance; and their fidelity to their ancestors and symbolic heritage. Their recovery, transmission and production of Kabyle cultural artefacts were crucial to the development of modern Kabyle identity. But Bendjedid’s attempts to impose Arabic characters on the Berber language49 and implicitly hinder the development of the Berber language and culture, along with the systematic repression of festivals, musical groups and finally the censoring of the renowned Berber writer Mouloud Mammeri’s lecture on ancient Kabyle poetry at the University of Tizi Ouzou, provoked a strong Berber reaction. The insurrection, known as tafsut n imazighen,50 involved people from all occupations and across generations. However, the demonstrations were crushed through a heavy military intervention resulting in hundreds of young people being killed. The two weeks of mass protests paralysed the country and put an end to the 27 years of single-party rule by the FLN. It was in this precarious situation that President Chadli Bendjedid promised the rioters full democratic reform.51 Paradoxically, political liberalisation seemed to have strengthened a decidedly non-liberal tendency toward closure and exclusion. This terrible blow to Algeria’s nation-building

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project undermined the very definition of nation and heightened the struggle between the Berbers and Islamists. Resentment and distrust of the government continued to simmer after the Berber Spring, leading to further shocks against the State. The attempted resolution of the dispute initiated a new wave of language strife in 2001, the highest point of Kabyle–State conflict, as blood flowed and Kabyle Berbers marched on Algiers demanding the democratisation of Algerian political life and the recognition of Thamazighth, along with the withdrawal of the hated gendarmerie from the region.

The ethno-linguistic movement Has a nationality anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In its speech resides its whole thought, its traditions, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul. To deprive a people of its speech is to deprive it of its one eternal good . . . As God tolerates all the different languages in the world, so also should a ruler not only tolerate but honour the various languages of his peoples . . . With language, the heart of a people is created.52 Johann Gottfried von Herder’s statement is often regarded as the basis for the notion of a close connection between national language and national identity, and was taken up and adapted by intellectuals in various countries from the eighteenth century onwards. Herder’s approach to history and culture does have the merit of yielding a synoptic view of things. For Herder, history is more than just writing about the past, it is the means of grasping the cultural unity of a collectivity. Understanding a culture and its specific course of development involves apprehending it in its totality, distinct from other, divergent sets of cultural values. Language is of key importance in this, because it is necessarily the product of a community, pre-existing any particular generation of individuals and carrying within it the main dimensions that render the cultural system in question unique. For Herder, language is more than a means of communication. In his Treatise on the Origin of Language,53 he argues that human autonomy is fundamentally constituted by language and asserts that humans, as freethinking and active beings, are creatures of language. Language also

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creates a social bond and cuts across hierarchical lines and thus becomes tied to the concept of nationhood. Indeed, since early antiquity, the adoption of a particular language has been a badge of membership within a particular group, a marker of a particular identity. Thus, if the dignity of a community is to be respected, its linguistic and cultural identity must be recognised to a satisfactory extent. By recognising a language, we do not simply recognise language in itself, but we recognise a linguistic community and, ultimately, the individual speakers who constitute that community. It is in that sense that language and identity have always been coupled and conjoined. A shift in language could signify a shift in identity since the social rights and obligations would change to adapt to the different language. Moreover, without a language of its own, a community loses its own mode of thinking. It is dehumanised. This is not surprising since language does in general constitute a very strong factor in group identity. This line of thought leads to a related argument that all languages are equal in worth and deserve the same level of protection, which will enable language speakers to assert their rights in the event of discrimination and linguistic assimilation. Developments in linguistic theory, however, provide an alternative to the idea that some languages are ‘better’ than others. While some languages are erased over time, others persist and live on the margins. Such is the case of the Berber language in North Africa. In bilingual situations, the significance of language takes on more complex dimensions. In many bi- and multilingual states, the question of national identity and its expression through language has led to much controversy, and in certain cases generated tensions. The case of the Berber language in Algeria exemplifies this in extremis. Understanding the foundations of the Berber linguistic movement presupposes knowledge of the historical context and its emergence. Nine listed of the greater Maghreb-Sahara-Sahel region, which comprises Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Niger, Mali, Burkina-Faso, Mauritania, Libya and Egypt, speak the Berber language, but the Berber language question arose most strongly in Algeria. Algeria is home to two linguistic groups. In addition to its Arabophone majority, Algeria has among its population Berberophones who speak different Berber dialects, which are variants of a single

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language belonging to the family of Afro-Asiatic previously classified as Hamito-Semitic languages: Thaqbaıˆlith from the Kabylie region; Chaoui from the Aure`s region southeast of Kabylie; Thamzabit of the Mzab valley in the south around Ghardaia; Znati, the dialect of the TouatGourara area in the southwest of Algeria; Thachenouit in the Chenoua and Zaccar Mountains west of Algiers, spoken by 100,000; and Thamesheq, the dialect of the nomadic Touaregs of the southern part of the country. Before the arrival of the Arabs in that region around the mid-seventh century, the Berber language or Thamazighth was spoken all over the area stretching from the Siwa Oasis in western Egypt, extending westward to the Canary Islands through Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and from the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea extending southward to Mauritania, Mali and Niger. The Arab invasion of the seventh century brought about the Arabisation of several cities and most of the coastal area, but most of Algeria’s countryside remained Thamazighth-speaking well into the twelfth century. The Arabisation of the countryside accelerated during the invasion of Arab nomads from Egypt in the late eleventh century and by the late eighteenth century, Berber speakers were limited to the least accessible parts of the country – high mountains, distant oases and desert plateaus. These areas include: Kabylia, southeast of Algiers; the Aure`s Mountains, southeast of Constantine; and Ouarseni Massiv, southwest of Algiers. Muslim Arabs invaders completely subdued the Berber countryside and islamised most of the Berbers, preventing the Berber language from developing as a written form. Writing was reserved for Arabic, which became the vehicle for propaganda as the new conquerors spread the Holy Word through the Qur’an. Arabic being the language in which the Qur’an is written, it has been held in much higher esteem. The Arabs thus argued for the superiority of the language. The first attempts to impose the Arabic language in Kabylia actually date back to the colonial period. In 1948, one year after the beginning of the Berber crisis, the Algerian Oule´mas, under the leadership of the panArabist, Mohamed Al-Bachir Al-Ibrahimi, wrote in their newspaper, AlBassaı¨r, that ‘the Arabic language is a free spouse and without a co-wife’, therefore obviously rejecting the Berber language that the Berbers, all of them from Kabylia, brought into the limelight as a constituent element of the Algerian identity. Then, from 1949 onward, Messali Hadj and his followers, relying on the support of the Arab States of the Middle East,

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declaimed that ‘Algeria is an Arab country. It must turn to the countries of the Near East and become an element of the Arab nation’, therefore unambiguously excluding the Amazigh element. In the general attempt to build a post-independent stable State in Algeria, language proved to be an important and contested force intimately linked with both political participation and the broader growth of a shared sense of national community. To foster a sense of nationhood, the Algerian State tried to sever all links with the French and encouraged the use and instruction of the Arabic language. However, the enshrining of Arabic in the Constitution, which defines it as both the national and official language, resulted in a controversy extending over generations and divided the people of Algeria into two camps, the Arabs and the Berbers. The use of at least four linguistic instruments – Berber, educated Arabic, spoken Arabic and French – rendered the Algerian identity question quite complex. When asked the question: ‘What are you?’, uneducated and rural community inhabitants identify themselves either as Arabs or as Berbers. When asked about their nationality, however, Algerians very seldom identify themselves with their ethnic groups. On the other hand, since decolonisation educated people view themselves as Algerian nationals. For many Kabyle Berberists, the challenge to the Arabo-Muslim orthodoxy was not only a demand for pluralism and democracy, but also the assertion of cultural and linguistic rights. It was mainly for this reason that the Berberist movement in Kabylia rigorously eschewed ‘Kabyle-regionalist’ appeals, asserting the broader Amazigh identity rather than the narrower Kabyle identity and demanded recognition for Thamazighth, the Berber language, rather than the dialect, Thaqbaı¨lith, which Kabyles actually speak. At this juncture, one is tempted to bring in the issue of the person’s ethnic language rights: can the Kabyles pretend to be true members of the Algerian nation if they do not speak the Arabic language? And conversely: if they speak that language, can they pretend not to belong to the ethnic group whose language they speak?

The Berber element of Algerian identity As peoples’ most distinctive and most precious legacy is their cultural identity, language is a key component of the Berber’s cultural capital. In the case of the Kabyles, there was undoubtedly an emphasis on

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language as a decisive factor in establishing the individual’s ethnic identity. And it was from the twentieth century onwards that Berber linguistic awareness gained a new dimension. The ultimate question is, why did the members of the Berber group feel the need to recover their language at that particular time? The fact that language is at the emotional core of Berber identity and the efforts of the various regimes in Algeria to deny it certainly made the Berbers more adamant about their language’s emotional significance and the memories of the past it evokes. The Berber language had been losing importance, falling back before the advance of the Arabic language and political pressure accentuated this decline. As a result, the Berber language became the most socially significant element for the maintenance of the idiosyncrasies of Berber collective identity. This affection for the language reinforced its value as a symbol of belonging to the community. The blow to the bilingual culture built up over the previous years was the beginning of a radical revision of the Berber position in the country. The Berbers in Algeria, whose education was still largely Francophone, found themselves in a dangerous position. And politically, it was impossible to battle for French: Arabic is the language of Islam and French that of the coloniser. Arabisation thus politicised Berber ethnicity. The period from 1963 to 1988 saw the depersonalisation of the Kabyles. The Berber language, its defenders and the whole Kabylia were subjected to a general attack not only from ordinary people but also from political and cultural personalities. Speaking the Kabyle language in the army, the administration and courts was strictly prohibited, therefore compelling the Kabyles to learn Arabic. It was also during that period that the Algerian State sent large groups of Arab teachers brought from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Palestine to force Kabyle schoolchildren to express themselves in class only in Arabic. And to reinforce the presence of the Arabic language in Kabylia, the administration, acting in favour of the Arabic language, falsified the Kabyle toponyms. And when, from 1980, under the influence of Berber movements, the Kabyles began to claim the official use of Amazigh forenames, the Algerian authorities replied with the distribution, in the services of the registry office, of a dictionary of Arab forenames. To cap it all, the publication of press articles and books spoke highly of the Arabic language. As though this literature was not enough for

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erasing the Berber specificity, the supporters of Pan-Arabism started to prosecute Kabyle intellectuals and artists accusing them of, besides Berberism, belonging to hizb franca owing to their use of the French language to the detriment of Arabic. It was in such circumstances that in 1993 Kabylia lost one of its brightest writers and journalists, Tahar Djaout, and in 1998 one of its most famous singers, Loune`s Matoub. Ever since independence in 1962, successive governments have stressed the Arab character of the State and the Berbers have been denied official recognition as a distinct community with its own cultural heritage. The mere existence of a Berber language was perceived as a danger to national unity. The emphasis on Arabness as a key feature of Algerian society led to confrontations and established the ethnic distinctiveness of the citizens of the new republic. It stressed the heterogeneity of the new nation. As far as the Berbers are concerned, it is the identification with the mother tongue that plays a crucial role in maintaining language loyalty. The ‘rivalry’ of the two languages in Algeria reached fever pitch in April 2001.

Kabylia’s Black Spring or identity crisis The notion that nothing had been gained since 1980 profoundly discouraged the Berbers. Shortly after the disarmament of the majority of the armed Islamist groups, a new conflict destabilised Algerian society. The movement as a whole was based on the premise that ‘the identity claim constitutes the foundation of the democratic claim’.54 While the status of the Berber language was not a priority for the first wave of Berberists in 1949, it would appear that, for the class of 2001, the language issue was not merely central to the latter’s preoccupations, but that it was their sole preoccupation. Non-violent protest demonstrations began in Beni Douala, a town and commune in Tizi Ouzou Province in northern Algeria,55 on 21 April 2001 and were punctuated by massive demonstrations across the region and in Algiers, developing quickly into riots as clashes occurred with the local gendarmerie in dozens of different places. Although the organised movement that developed out of Kabylia’s Black Spring failed to expand beyond the region and acquire a truly national standing, in reality, as Arab Aknine told the International Crisis Group, ‘the crisis in Kabylia is the national crisis in miniature’,56 a view echoed by Aı¨t Larbi, a solicitor and member of the Maison des Droits de l’Homme at Tizi Ouzou.57 This

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wave of violence resulted from many catalysts. For some, the movement was based on ‘tribal’ structures (Aarsh).58 For others, the deepening economic and social marginalisation of young people was the main cause of the unrest. For yet others, the disaffection from political action, which was noticeable as early as June 1997 when legislative elections were held for the first time since 1991, seemed to be the trigger. Still others viewed the conflict as opposing Algerian Berberists and Algerian Arabists respectively over the issue of Kabylia’s and Algeria’s cultural identity. The reality is, however, more complex. It is clear that this fragmentation is not the only one the country experienced at that time. Said Sadi, the Rally for Culture and Democracy’s leader, told ICG that ‘Kabylia express[ed] the problems of the [Algerian] nation’. But the Kabyles took this a step further. The most important resentment in Kabylia is socio-cultural, due to the State politics of marginalisation. In any case, the trigger of the riots was four provocative incidents: the assassination of Berber entertainer/ nationalist Matoub Loune`s in 1998; the unexplained fatal shooting of an 18-year-old high school student, Massinissa Guermah, held in police custody in the offices of the gendarmerie59 at Beni Douala, on 18 April 2001, which was the main complaint of the rioters; the outrageous terms of the communique´ subsequently issued by the gendarmerie accusing Guermah of theft; and the arbitrary arrest of three pupils at a school at Oued Amizour in the region of Bejaia, east of the country, on 22 April. After rioting had been in progress for about a full day across both Greater and Lesser Kabylia, on 24 April the Rally for Culture and Democracy’s office in Tizi Ouzou published the De´claration du Bureau Re´gional du RCD de Tizi Ouzou, which clearly stated that what was at issue in Kabylia were the ongoing ‘abuses and exclusions’ and ‘attacks on the integrity and rights of citizens’, as well as the specific incidents in Beni Douala and Oued Amizour, and thus faithfully articulated the demonstrators’ rebellion against la hogra,60 by which they meant the contempt they suffered at the hands of the authorities and the humiliations heaped upon them as their notional rights had been routinely violated by official abuses of power. The RCD also added that the main source of Kabyle frustration and anger was the identity question and specifically the government’s longstanding refusal to accord national and official status to Thamazighth,61 an issue that

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clearly distinguished and tended to isolate the population of Kabylia from those of other regions, and thus led to their forfeiting the sympathy and support of the rest of Algerian public opinion. The series of violent riots in 2001, which erupted in the region of Kabylia, spread to eastern and western Algerian cities in June 2001 and led to the death of 123 civilians.62 The ethnic problem was thereafter to escalate and dominate the politics of the country. The violent demonstrations in Kabylia highlighted crucial reasons that belonging had become such a central obsession among the Berbers. What opposition groups such as the Berberist movement attempted to challenge in June 2001 was the legitimacy of the regime’s construction of Algerian-ness or nationality as a basis for legitimacy. The main demands of the Berberist movement centred around the recognition of the Berber identity as the basis for a new and more authentic Algerian identity to replace the State-sanctioned national Arab identity. More importantly, The Coordination of the Aarsh, Dairas and Communes (CADC) which appeared as a grassroots movement early on in the 2001 riots, sought recognition for Berber culture as equal to Arab culture, in terms of its significance for the national culture of Algeria rather than as a minority. The Berber language inescapably being a badge of identity, it was one of the symbols that the Berber movement wanted to use in order to restore their long-denied collective identity. However, they were careful to stress the unity of Algeria and that they were neither secessionist nor regionalist in their project. The Berbers continued to press ahead with their demands and many more people died and were injured during the protests of 5 October 2001.63 El Kseur Platform, drafted by the CADC, formed the basis for the talks in 2005. It demanded not only civil and democratic rights, but also specific demands for economic priority to Kabylia and an official and immediate recognition of Berber culture and language. The Movement for Autonomy in Kabylia (Mouvement pour l’autonomie Kabyle, MAK), on the other hand, based its platform on the claim to a Kabyle identity that exists a priori to that of an Algerian identity. Mehenni, its leader, stated in an address to the Symposium on the Amazigh in 2005 that ‘Kabylia’s problem is that they lose their way every time, forgetting the initial reason for their actions, that of the re-conquest of its sovereignty’.64 From these words, it is clear that sovereignty has overarching connotations. While national sovereignty is the right of a

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country to rule itself, sovereignty is also a key variable in influencing regional integration, which roughly involves the association of all regions into a nation bloc to determine their affairs economically, socially and politically in a collaborative manner. From this statement, one can also see how localisation tends towards being a force that is exclusive rather than reinforcing. At this juncture, the question we should rightly ask is: to what degree did the Berberist movement succeed in nationalising its cause?

Thamazighth awakening and the Algerian State One black spot was that because of its strong connection with French academia, the Berber cultural movement came under harsh criticism from the Algerian State, which regarded it as ‘neo-colonialism’ and betrayal of Algerian unity and independence. Although the Berber movement was at first denounced as a separatist movement and thus as a threat to Algeria’s national unity, the Algerian authorities nevertheless tried to appease the Berbers and give the regime some democratic credentials. The changing balance of political power at national level was reflected first in the decision to create an ethnic definition for citizenship in the Constitution. Under pressure from Thamazighth communities of Algeria, Bouteflika’s government indeed promised the rehabilitation and the promotion of Thamazighth and the creation of the High Committee for Amazighity (Haut Comite´ pour l’Amazighite´, HCA). This was a critical step towards allowing the Algerian State to get its house in order, especially as far as stability was concerned. While accepting the fact that the Berbers have their very distinctive cultural identity, Bouteflika nevertheless argued that the Berbers were not entitled, in the words of John Stuart Mill, to ‘a government to themselves apart’,65 precisely because Algerian Arabs and Berbers share the same history of political independence. This means that indicators like language or race are not enough to constitute nationhood. In addition to the recognition of Amazigh culture and the creation of the National Pedagogic and Language Centre for the Teaching of Thamazight in 2000, the Berber language was recognised as a national language in 2002. The 2002 amendment states the following: ‘Thamazighth is thus [in the same way as Arabic] a national (watani) language. The State works for its promotion and its development in all

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its linguistic variety which is used across the national territory.’66 The explanation following the amendment states that ‘Amazigh [is] one of the ethnic elements that forms one of the essential structures (formations) of the national identity mentioned in the second extension of article 8 of the Constitution’, stressing, however, that Arabic remains the sole official and national language. The constitutional amendment has therefore been only partly seen as a formal recognition. Most evidently within this troubled political climate, governmental measures in favour of the Berber language and culture had to be reconsidered. Given the serious challenge to the regime posed by the Islamists at the same period, the dominant political forces may have considered that the Berber question had not been viewed as representing an immediate political danger, but what is certain is that the Berber issue put great strain on national unity, exacerbating instability within the regime and revealing how an issue that may lay dormant or be nonexistent in the political psyche of a community for generations can quickly become the basis for violence. The perpetuation of protracted identity conflicts can be a result of what I characterise as the hyper-securitisation of identity. One of the main challenges the Algerian State is facing is to try and find a solution to the Berber issue. Not only has this solution proved elusive but the challenges have grown even more complex and apparently intractable because the State has favoured a one-culture national agenda in a bicultural setting. And the State and nation-building formula of Algeria proved to be inadequate in addressing the specific Berber component of its society. This is why language and cultural issues have been so much at the forefront of Algerian political conflicts. Democratising the regime and improving ethnic relations are mutually enforcing processes. It is hardly an exaggeration to assert that the question of diversity occupies a central place in all attempts at elaborating a principle of democracy. As Robert Dahl cogently pointed out, the application of democratic procedures requires unity, a shared cultural identity in order to avoid political conflicts, which would otherwise threaten to tear apart the civic community.67 Using the term ‘community’, like ‘culture’, implies thus a homogeneity, a boundary and a consensus that are simply not to be found when one engages in research on Algeria. With respect to the change of regime under Chadli Bendjedid, the political liberalisation of the country did not bring about the far-

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reaching reforms many expected. A curious paradox remains in contemporary Algerian politics. On the one hand there is, among politicians and to a certain extent among lay people, a frequently heard argument about a single civic citizenship and the unification of the Algerian nation through the eradication of ethnic conflicts. On the other hand, there is a continuing game of ethnic politics, where ethnic belonging is celebrated to the detriment of nationhood based on the principle of equal rights and dignity for all as individuals. If we examine the degree of congruence among political and cultural integration patterns in Algeria, it becomes clear that there are fairly sharp differences between the paths of State formation. It is true that the different presidents made significant attempts to combine the goals of cultural revival; yet in view of the long-term results of these processes, the success story of the Algerian nation state appears to a large extent to be a mirage. The efforts that have been made to secure the political coexistence of Arab and Berber groups in Algeria have to be weighed against the potential costs caused by an intensification of linguistic conflicts. These tensions affect the whole complex of political integration in a democratic system exposed to claims for recognition raised by Berber people. And as Aristide R. Zolberg noted, a modern state may pretend to be ‘blind’ regarding religion for example, yet it cannot possibly behave like a ‘deaf-mute’ when it comes to language.68 It seems that the prevailing view is to take for granted the historically dominant model of the nation state, thereby linking democratic sovereignty to the existence of a political unit conceived of as culturally homogeneous to the extent that the Berber problem ceases to be a phenomenon of greater political concern. From the discussion above, it is clear that Algerian nationalism has never been homogeneous. For one thing, a nation that intends to foster true nationalism and ethnic cohesiveness must look for a more inclusive and more embracing approach. Up to now, the Berber issue has not been solved, only managed. Communal identity being an extension of individual identity that gives people a sense of belonging, it is therefore of much concern that the identity of the Algerian civil society should take into account the diversity of cultural patterns and that all means be found to re-establish inter-ethnic harmony and create a feeling of belonging to a single nation among the two groups present in the country. In my view, in order to foster inclusive participation in the

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future development of the Algerian nation, the Berber language has to be adequately empowered. This seems to be the key to improving Algerian citizens’ relations and eradicating the cause of conflict. The fact is that Berbers and Arabs are Algerians, though they speak different languages and have different cultures. The existential anxieties of ‘who is s/he?’ and who am I? can be reduced in togetherness within the womb of the Algerian community. From the perspective of the past three decades, the Kabyle-Amazigh identity project has made giant strides. However, given the political and social discontent bubbling up from below, the opportunities to pursue Amazigh identity politics are likely to increase. From the available evidence I gathered from a range of investigations of attitudes, it appears that there are actually largely positive attitudes towards the Berber language in its occurrence as the linking language of officialdom and education. A policy of official language bilingualism in Arab and Berber would foster national integration, ensure social peace, guarantee respect for constitutional rights and favour the socio-economic development of the country. In such a context, the identification and promotion of the Berber language as a second official and national language, as in Morocco, would seem to be the panacea for building up feelings of positive cohesion in the country and would be the first step in establishing a broad Algerian Arab-Berber national identity. If Berber is promoted in this way to help the growth of Algerian national identity, it will certainly have to confront and overcome a number of challenges. First, the endeavour to promote the Berber language across the nation through the educational system will require long-term commitment from the government in the form of major financial support for teacher training and the creation of teaching materials. Second, there will certainly be negative reactions from the Islamists and these will have to be addressed if the recommended linguistic resolution is to exercise any lasting effect on development. Despite such obstacles, I confidently believe that Algeria has the ability to make a success story from the promotion of Berber to official status, and this may well serve as a model of inspiration for other African countries to attempt similar solutions to the problem of language and national integration. Experience since the Black Spring indicates that a political community of Algerians who are ‘united in diversity’ will not come

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into being as a simple by-product of amendments to the Constitution. We should not ignore the fact that the bases of a common Algerian identity cannot be established one-sidedly from above, in a top-down process. After a protracted period of nationalist strife, during which the contending parties, Berbers and Arabs, articulated their political goals in the name of mutually excluding cultural identities, the project of national unity at independence was meant to entail entirely a new approach towards achieving unity. Yet, the country has so far not been able to set up a frame for responding to the challenges of diversity. Few other issues have attracted as much attention as the Berber question in current debates. One strand of these debates regards recognition as a key category for reconciling cultural diversity and democratic citizenship. However Algerian politicians have discussed the politics of Berber recognition at a high level of abstraction. Hence, it is worth mentioning a point that seems to be especially important in the present context: a linguistic status experienced as unequal on the side of the minority will easily give rise to demands for compensation. This would imply a local regulation of linguistic affairs that would no longer have to take into account the prerogatives of the State. The examples of Ireland and Finland are of great interest as they show that belonging to different linguistic groups does not override national identification. We must acknowledge that functional barriers to communication obstruct the formation of a shared political identity; at the same time, such barriers are likely to remain as long as the common political will to transcend them is lacking. With hindsight, one can argue that as long as a significant portion of the Algerian population is marginalised, the status of citizenship of the Berbers will necessarily remain on shaky ground. The Algerian ethnopolitical conflict had simultaneous and similar repercussions abroad. A similar process occurred in the constitution of a Berberist ethnic movement in France, with many second-generation Algerian immigrants today militating for the official recognition of Thamazighth on both sides of the Mediterranean.

CHAPTER 7 NEGOTIATING EXISTENCE IN EMIGRATION: ALGERIAN IMMIGRANTS IN FRANCE

Nowhere is one more a foreigner than in France.1 In the recent burgeoning literature on citizenship, the rhetoric of boundaries dissolving seems to be countered by the intensifying reality of borders, divisions and violent strategies of exclusion. Today, the problem of de facto exclusion from citizenship applies first and foremost to immigrants. Far from empowering individuals by breaking down boundaries, globalisation has indeed accelerated closures, and in the process it has exacerbated insecurities, uncertainties and anxieties in locals and foreigners alike. The phenomenon of migration has intensified the tensions between the universalistic principles of constitutional democracies on the one hand, and the particularistic claims of communities to preserve their culture and way of life on the other. It has generated the wider context for people’s preoccupation with belonging and created pressures for a redefinition of the concepts of citizenship and national identity of the host countries.

Citizenship within European nation state borders In the West, like elsewhere, there has been a revival of identity politics and overt conflicts over belonging and the building or re-actualisation of

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boundaries2 and differences through xenophobia and related intolerances. In countries where ethnic citizenship and belonging had almost disappeared in favour of a single political and legal citizenship and of nation-building, some citizens are considered less authentic nationals, ‘undeserving’ outsiders compared to ‘entitled’ nationals. In France, for example, where xenophobia is rife against migrants from North African countries, essentialist notions of culture, identity and belonging imply that not even marriage can bring together what cultural and social geographies have put asunder. Ethnic groups are treated with condescension and so are their offspring, who are compelled to bear the identities imposed by authorities. This has raised questions about the meaning of the juridico-political citizenship guaranteed by the French Constitution, often lauded as the most liberal in the world. The tightening of immigration conditions in the West, in particular in France, is clear evidence that the receiving countries are determined to crush every other civilisation in order to reduce them to the model of the West. This out-of-place condition compels us to rethink the question of the legitimate foundations of citizenship and the relationship between citizen, State and nation in the host country. In the modern world, the pre-eminent social and political community is the nation state, which exercises ultimate authority over all individuals and activities within its territorial borders. But the nation state has an inbuilt tendency to create difference and to racialise minorities. This is achieved through various forms of political and social action that separate and differentiate members of minorities from the mainstream population. The danger of such a development is that it denationalises features of citizenship, engendering formalisations of new types of rights and creating exclusive identities on the same national territory, thus new expressions of belonging. Minority groups that experience social and economic exclusion and racial discrimination seek to reconstruct their identity in enclaves. This assertion of a separate diasporic identity based on distinctive cultural practices is an attempt to create an autonomous social space in a hostile society. In the present context of increasing globalisation and an integrating Europe, recent immigration waves and the resulting presence of culturally different ethnic minorities have fundamentally challenged liberal nation states and traditional models of citizenship. If the backbone of the nation state is the institution of citizenship, that is the

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inclusion of all the citizens into a bounded political community, not all European nations fit this democratic ideal. First, since it exists in the context of a nation state, it has been based on cultural specificity. Thus citizenship implies the inclusion of some and exclusion of others. This negates the basic tenet of liberal democracy in which all citizens are meant to be free and equal persons. No wonder then that there has been an explosive growth in the debates over the meaning and function of citizenship within nation state borders. With increasing European integration, these debates often see contemporary Western Europe as the empirical testing ground for hypotheses on why countries with ostensibly similar flows of immigration and numbers of immigrants continue to maintain different ways of granting citizenship rights to non-nationals. Two major dilemmas have been addressed in these debates: can citizens with diverse identities be represented as equals if public institutions do not recognise their particular identities? Second, does social cohesion require a commitment to a notion of shared national identity? Comparative research has thus recently refocused attention on the importance of citizenship rights for explaining the different member states’ approaches for regulating immigration and the presence of foreign migrants. Many recent studies have combined the cultural rights dimension with legal requirements for citizenship, thereby creating an analytical distinction between three citizenship ‘regime’ types: collectivistic-ethnic, collectivistic-civic and individualistic-civic.3 The collectivistic-ethnic view considers the nation in unitary terms with a unique spirit or ethos. The essential point from this perspective is that citizenship is not simply regarded as membership in a political community, but also as a reflection of one’s cultural identity and Self.4 This relationship between nation and ethnicity is embodied in the jus sanguinis citizenship principle, which requires citizens to be of the same ethnic bloodline as that of the dominant or traditional ethnic group. Germany is often cited as the prototypical example, but Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg also share this tradition. The collectivistic-civic type, also known as the ‘assimilationist’ or ‘republican’ model, is typified by France as well as the old ‘melting pot’ approach in the United States. Here the nation state is defined in political not ethnic terms, which is intended to transcend cultural differences. To be a citizen means to be loyal to the nation as a political

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community, which entails giving up one’s linguistic, cultural or social idiosyncrasies to become undifferentiated from the majority population.5 In other words, ethnic minorities are allowed to maintain their cultural and religious traditions only in the private sphere. However, the claim that a nation state is solely political and culturally neutral proved problematic. Specifically, nation states that are ethnically exclusive and collectivistic oriented show the lowest levels of aggregate tolerance. By contrast, in the individualistic-civic regime type, also termed the ‘pluralist’ or ‘civic pluralism’ model, ethnic minorities are not required to give up their ethnic difference in any sphere of public life and the State explicitly protects the right to ethnic difference and expression.6 Moreover, such states often permit dual citizenship. In order to understand the contemporary formations of European citizenship, it is important to elaborate on two paradoxes. The first relates to rights and identities, the two main components of citizenship and their increasing decoupling. The second paradox regards the increasing tendency towards particularistic and group-based claims. These two paradoxes warrant a reconsideration of the dominant approaches to immigrants and citizenship and also categories of exclusion and inclusion. One way of conceptualising the relationship between nation states and their citizens is to examine first the concept of integration in a pluralist society, then transpose it into a European context to give a concrete palpability to what is happening in France.

The social inclusion/exclusion paradigm in a European context Citizenship rests with territory at the heart of the definition of nation state. If territory determines the geographical limits of State sovereignty, citizenship determines a State’s population. The modern conceptualisation of citizenship denotes the status of identity, but also the process of integration of those with membership into a collective, one supported by the notion of shared humanity and universal rights, as established from the European Enlightenment. Citizenship is, however, now plagued by a continuous clash between universal inclusion and particularistic exclusion. Thus, it remains unclear whether this model of the modern nation state is really promoting European integration. This raises one crucial question: how do the exclusionary aspects of European Union citizenship affect immigrants’ incorporation at the national level?

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The apartheid of European citizenship7 In what constitutes, more or less, a declaration of a central Western value, the European Union pledged its respect of minorities’ rights. A parallel account is provided by the Treaty of Maastricht, which states that nationals of all EU countries are citizens of the European community. As a result they have the right to settle in any country of the union, take jobs in their country of residence, vote and run for office in local elections for the European Parliament. International migrants are also nominally protected from racial discrimination by such legislation as the European Convention on Human Rights, in which an increasing number of member countries continue to sign more protective protocols. In the Tampere European Council Conclusions of 1999, the member states also agreed on the need for more vigorous integration policies to ensure the fair treatment of non-EU immigrants who were legally living in an EU country. The EU’s commitment to successful immigrant integration into the host society was reaffirmed by the document entitled ‘Common Basic Principles for Immigrant Integration Policy in the European Union’ and the 2007 Commission communication ‘Towards a Common Immigration Policy’, which were followed in 2008 by the document on ‘A Common Immigration Policy for Europe: Principles, Action and Tools’. Likewise, the Human Rights Committee, in its general comment on Article 27 ICCPR, the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, adopted by the UN General Assembly Resolution 47/135 in 1992, call on states to protect minorities’ cultural rights.8 In a similar vein, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992) and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1994), as well as the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO at its 31st session in 2001, all point in the same direction. The anti-discrimination directives adopted under Article 13 of the EC Treaty also set minimum standards for legal protection of racial and ethnic minorities from discrimination across the EU. These calls for greater focus on immigration integration, ethnic minorities and upgrading the meaning of citizenship have repositioned the question of unity and integration, along with that of citizenship, to the centre of the political arena. This process includes in particular the restructuration of the European system of nation states and with them the establishment of a new ‘European Citizenship’.

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Three citizenship principles are widely used in most countries today to define the way through which a person becomes a citizen of a nation state: jus sanguinis, literally the law of the blood or citizenship based on blood lineage often only of the father. The jus soli or the law of the soil refers to citizenship based on the land. Jus soli generally refers to a nation state built through the incorporation of diverse groups in a single territory. Brubaker’s historical study defines Germany as a case of pure jus sanguinis, where citizenship rights are still based on ethno-cultural belonging to nationhood, the German Kulturnation.9 He sees France, on the other hand, as a country where citizenship is a mixture of jus sanguinis and jus soli, but where jus soli is strongly dominant and encoded in the Jacobin republican civic concept of nationhood. In practice, most countries have citizenship rules based on a mixture of both jus sanguinis and jus soli. An additional principle, which is currently gaining momentum and that complements other layers of citizenship, is that of jus domicile or law of residence, according to which people may gain an entitlement to citizenship by means of naturalisation based on residence in a territory or a country. This option creates a new legal status that is more than that of a foreigner but less than that of a citizen. It facilitates naturalisation of young people of immigrant origin. According to the jus domicile principle of citizenship, immigrants can apply for citizenship when they meet certain conditions, typically related to the length of permanent residency, possession of basic knowledge of the state’s history and governance and the demonstration and expression of their loyalty to the State. However, such persons would be described as nationals with restricted citizenship. From a social or political perspective, they obtain a status equal or similar to that of a citizen. From a legal perspective, however, these immigrants are still aliens or noncitizens. Denizenship – what Linda Bosniak calls ‘alienage’ – is indeed clearly a less favourable status than citizenship. It subverts the view that citizenship is ‘hard on the outside and soft on the inside’ as even once immigrants have become residents of the state ‘they remain outsiders in a significant sense: the border effectively follows them inside’.10 Bosniak concludes that the shared features of ‘alienage’, including liability to deportation, lack of voting rights and limited access to welfare, make it the overarching status that shapes noncitizens’ lives. This quasicitizenship arises with many restrictive policies on naturalisation and the

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conferral of citizenship on the second generation. These deeply embedded national self-definitions of citizenship continue to shape the divergent European political responses of nation states to migrants up to the present day.11

Citizenship policies in Europe In the past decades, the European Commission has called for political leadership to overcome social divisions and to generate acceptance for diversity. It has emphasised that social cohesion requires the implementation of integration policies that promote equality and diversity, based on recognition of the pluralist nature of European society. The goal is to achieve a society where citizens have a strong feeling of solidarity and respect for each other in order to strengthen the bonds of mutual understanding between people of diverse cultural backgrounds. The foundation of solidarity is formed by liberal virtues such as tolerance and recognition. However, some of these policies might reasonably be criticised as embedding ethnic identities. Indeed, while EU citizenship aims at creating a sense of identity and belonging for people within the Union, it also resembles traditional nation state citizenship: the status of EU citizen favours only citizens of EU member countries and cannot be given directly to immigrants from non-European countries. For instance, the EU social agenda appeals for equal treatment for third-country-nationals (non-EU) as this would support their integration;12 nonetheless, their unequal legal status is irreconcilable with the right-based principles underpinning the European Union. They have been excluded from most of the rights it offers, notwithstanding the length of their legal residency as well as the contributions, financial or otherwise they have made to that country. These people are thus potentially vulnerable to exclusion from citizenship rights both symbolically and practically. They face a range of legal, political, economic, social and psychological obstacles to integration and are socially marginalised. In addition to legislative and policy action, the EC has adopted support programmes and finances national and transnational initiatives through structural funds, one of which was the EQUAL programme, which aimed at promoting innovative approaches to combat discrimination and inequality in the labour market.13 The Commission therefore established ‘the principle of empowerment’ as an assessment

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criterion for EQUAL actions. However, the Commission’s objective to achieve a coherent framework for inclusion policies remains, at this stage, unfulfilled. While over the course of the 1990s some EU member states explicitly adopted the concept of multiculturalism to understand relations between different population groups within their country, over recent years, and especially since 11 September 2001, an emphasis on loyalty to a particular national identity has returned. As a reaction to the rapid proliferation of transnational threats, the European Union has put a growing emphasis on the securitisation of its external borders with the aim of preserving the integrity of the nation state.

The securitisation of borders and Others As its name implies, this process is composed of two elements: a securitisation and an Other. Its logic, then, is embedded by a mixture of security and identity. The rationale behind the rhetoric of the securitisation of Others is precisely the mere fear of the presence of outsiders which in itself is considered as a threat to the continuity and development of the insider’s identity. The aim of the securitisation of Others is thus to take special measures to protect the insider’s identity. As a result, international migration and ethnic difference have risen rapidly to the top of the agenda for European foreign policy as major security issues. And the main target of anti-immigrant discourse has gradually become oriented towards migrants from Muslim countries. The making of a Muslim folk devil The political rhetoric emanating from the United States in relation to the so-called War on Terror has permeated Western Europe and heightened fears and anxieties about cultural and national security, further narrowing the discourse on Muslim immigrants’ inclusion. The pre- and post-9/11 experience of Muslims in the West serves not only as undeniable evidence for the latter assumption, but also hints at the magnitude of the securitisation of Muslims in the West. This ‘moral panic’14 towards Islam is not new, as explained earlier. What is new, though, is the belief that Islamic civilisation poses a threat to the rest of civilisations.15 As a result, the moral panic over recent years has essentially tapped into the public’s fears for their safety and that of society in years to come.

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Although European societies have undergone a drastic and seemingly irreversible process of secularisation, this process has not succeeded in reducing the unease and anxiety Europe feels towards the Islamic religion and Muslims. The increased politicisation of Muslim integration has reinforced commitment to policies believed to promote common values, national unity and ethnic desegregation. Grace Davie has characterised this general European situation as ‘believing without belonging’,16 while Danie`le Hervieu-Le´ger uses the expression ‘belonging without believing’17 to typify Europeans’ attitude towards religion. Rather than discuss these questions in abstract theoretical terms, I shall examine here the context in which the French government and the popular press also spoke of an Arab-Islamic threat. Algerians, in particular, were targeted because they are the largest non-EC nationality. Such fears were bound to impinge on the question of citizenship.

French citizenship, sovereignty and the nation state If we consider T.H. Marshall’s three categories of rights – civic-legal, political and social –Western countries seem to have extended most civil rights to all the people living on their territory. Immigrants have access to most welfare state and social security provisions; however, holding the nationality of the country of residence does not always guarantee migrants access to the fully equal treatment to which they are entitled. The rules governing nationality acquisition, the extension of rights to foreign residents and anti-discriminatory provisions govern the degree to which immigrants as individuals have access to equal citizenship. The cultural and ethnic mix that makes up present-day France provides an ideal landscape for exploring this complex interweaving of citizenship and intercultural relations.

Algerian migration to France The immigration situation in France has been strongly influenced up to the present day by the legacy of colonialism as well as the long tradition of recruiting foreign workers. To reverse the demographic slide between the two world wars, which was mainly due to the heavy losses the country incurred in World War I, France opened up prospects of membership in its political community for immigrants from European countries as well as from its colonial possessions. French law thus

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facilitated the immigration of thousands of colonials, ethnic or national French from former colonies of North and West Africa, India and Indochina, to mainland France. Over 1 million European pieds noirs migrated from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. French Maghrebis form around 70 per cent of the French Muslim community, but Algerians constitute the largest portion. Beyond the economic bond that ties Algeria and France, and despite the ongoing strain between the two countries, in particular over France’s refusal to atone for French colonial crimes in Algeria in December 2007, France remains the destination of choice for 90 per cent of Algerian immigrants. Between 1914 and 1919, it was estimated that approximately 80,000 Algerian colonial workers lived in France and that 87 per cent of them came from the Kabyle regions of Tizi-Ouzou, Bougie and the east of Algeria.18 The higher number of Kabyles as opposed to Arab recruits in France might be explained by the colonial stereotype of the Kabyle as a superior worker. When the Arabs began to immigrate to France after 1935, the Kabyles had already established a beachhead in that country. They entrenched themselves in the betterpaid sectors of the job market. Algerian migrant workers, almost exclusively male, were concentrated in coal-mining, iron, steel and car manufacture in Marseilles, Lyons, St E´tienne, Lille and the industrial east around Strasbourg, in addition to Paris and its suburbs. This constituted what sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad called the ‘first stage’ of Algerian migration to France. World War II changed the French imperial climate irrevocably. The French economy relied on immigrant labour not only to meet the demands of an expanding industrial economy and fill job vacancies in the most dangerous, dirtiest and lowest paid jobs but also to constrain the social and economic demands of the established workforce. In the post-1947 migration, Sayad’s ‘second stage’, the Kabyles, who had long dominated Algerian migration, were increasingly replaced by Arab migrants. Although then French citizens, the Algerians were at the end of the queue for social housing and many local authority agencies openly discriminated against them. With the passage of the landmark 1965 Immigration Act, France experienced a new wave of mass immigration which continued until the oil price increases of the early 1970s. With the subsequent embargo that accompanied the 1973 Arab– Israeli war, all Western host states were compelled to put a brake

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on labour recruitment from outside the European Community and to reexamine their policies of labour importing. Accompanying the ever-more restrictive French labour immigration measures, a policy of family reunion allowed the spouses and children of Algerian workers to go and live in France, subject to often more exacting housing criteria. This process significantly transformed the profile of Algerian migration, marking Sayad’s ‘third stage’ of migration, as many Algerian migrants decided to stay in France. Overall, there has been a steady increase in immigration over the last century and this has had a strong impact on the nature of French society, thus creating pressures for a redefinition of the concepts of citizenship and national identity of the host country.

Configuring French citizenship Continental views on the difference between nation and ethnic group have followed a different line, based on the famous distinction between the Kulturnation, cultural nation or the ethnic nation, and the staatsnation, state nation or the civic nation. These two ideas have best been exemplified by Germany and France. The major difference between these countries is in the political strategies they used for integrating minority populations. These incorporation regimes reflect the two different traditions of citizenship to which these countries belong. The French staatsnation, which developed through the democratic revolution of 1789, was seen as being based not on a common culture but on a common will. The common will creates and maintains the political unit whatever conflicts may exist within it. According to this line of thought, the political community should be defined only by reference to a shared commitment to the core principles of a democratic society. Despite the wide range of discourses associated with the policy in France, the ‘heartland’ of the concept of integration, at the policy level, issues such as race, ethnicity, culture and gender have been overlooked. Paradoxically, the tolerance model has resulted in aversion to and exclusion of ethnic minorities.

The French Republican integration model The pillars of French republicanism are universalism, unity, secularism and assimilation. During the revolution of 1789 and the first Napoleonic

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regime, the French State was regarded as a nucleus for a larger and ultimately universal state; hence membership in the French political community had a universal dimension. Citizenship was equated with a sharing of sovereignty and was open not only to provincials but also to any foreigner who would subscribe to French republican values.19 In the French case, citizenship thus means that all citizens are expected to share the core values of the society, regardless of their cultural background. To quote Article 1 of the 1958 French Constitution, the Republic is understood as ‘one and indivisible’ and the French people are conceived as being ‘one, without regard to origin’.20 The French concept of citizenship thus assumes that anyone, regardless of ethnic background, can become a French citizen. A good example of France’s will to effectively integrate immigrants was provided by former French president Francois Mitterrand, who asserted: ‘We are French [and] our ancestors [were] Gauls [and] Romans and a little German, a little Jewish, a little Italian, a little Spanish, increasingly Portuguese . . . and I ask myself if we are already a little Arab as well.’21 Ultimately republicanism was forever cemented in French society, with the separation of Church and State signalling a triumph of the secularisation of authority. And the role of the State as the embodiment of the Republic in this egalitarian mission was unquestioned: extending liberty, fraternity and equality from the political domain to the spheres of society and production. However, as many scholars have pointed out, this Jacobin universalist definition of French national identity has produced several paradoxes. Abdelmalek Sayad notes that immigrants’ characteristics and behaviours are always interpreted in terms of ‘failings’ or lacks with regard to host society norms.22 And Jack Hayward describes the Republic as a ‘resonantly hollow shell’,23 nowhere more so than in relation to equality. Indeed while the population seems to be regarded in France as a whole, a distinction is nevertheless made at the level of culture between the national culture and immigrant cultures.

La France au singulier: French multicultural drama Multiculturalism a` la Francaise is nothing short of a social and economic disaster. The kind of strong multiculturalism in which minority groups are guaranteed social equality and cultural recognition has actually perpetuated inequalities and maintained structures of domination. France

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thus typifies what is called ‘selective inclusion’, one in which a closed system is generally accompanied by exclusive prevailing strategies. French ethnic policy not only fuelled segregation and separation from mainstream society but also caused immigrants’ unemployment and economic marginalisation. For instance, according to the Sarkosy Law II on immigration and integration, the granting of the right to permanent residence is conditional on fulfilling the republican condition of integration and the requirements stipulated in the contract. The new versions of Articles L.311 (9) and 314 (2) of the Code for the entry and residence of foreigners and the right for asylum prescribe the subordination of the condition of republican integration to French society.24 Rather, the degree of integration will be evaluated according to the commitment of the person involved to respecting the principles governing the French Republic as well as their knowledge of the French language. At best, therefore, what is being offered is a revamped version of republicanism, with the Muslim immigrant replacing the central European Jew. Tzvetan Todorov, Bulgarian by birth but French by adoption, for instance, draws a comparison with anti-Semitism: It is truly depressing, one hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, to see that it is again the anti-Dreyfusards who are winning; those who think that the identity of an individual is entirely determined by the ethnic or biological group to which he [sic] belongs.25 This tribalisation associated with multiculturalism entails ghettoisation and social segregation. Although there have always been some fundamental ambiguities in the notion of citizenship regarding the immigrants in France, these did not seem to matter much as long as the political context appeared fairly coherent and stable. The French Republic has one explicit principle and one only, set out in the fifth line of Article 2 of the Constitution and directly borrowed from Abraham Lincoln: ‘Government of the people, by the people and for the people.’ But no matter how well expressed and how inspiring, this principle is the one the Republic has espoused without in fact always showing an equally effective concern for its implementation. Indeed, despite the importance of tolerance in democratic theory, the French government does not seem to hold such values very deeply. Not only does the integration model fail to reflect

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contemporary society’s composition, but there is also racism in French attitudes towards its foreign population and unwillingness to accept the migrant population that has lived in France for generations as equal French citizens. It seems that the concept of the civilising mission that has shaped the French psyche was fundamental in the creation of historical prejudices that are reinforced and justified in the maintenance of cultural biases throughout French society today. Also although anti-discrimination law is quite developed and condemns all forms of differentiation according to ethnic origin in a variety of domains, French policy is actually based on racial or ethnic characteristics, leading to open hostilities and discrimination towards ethnic minorities. Since the mid-1980s, the National Front discourse has shifted from notions of white racial superiority to arguments of ‘incompatibility’ among races or cultures. This discourse spread far beyond the limits of that party, to the Centre Right, but also into the Left. The Socialist Party, including members of the then-administration, began to reconsider the so-called problem posed by immigration as well as the ‘thresholds of tolerance’ and blamed Muslim immigrants and their offspring for the prevailing violence and a myriad of social ills. This potential threat posed by difference is reflected in how racism and discrimination have been framed. Official data, for instance, reveal racism in employment of people from North African origin, in particular Algerians. According to SOS Racisme, a French campaigning group, CVs with African/Arab names, in particular with ‘Mohamed’ first names, get far fewer chances to be considered for interviews than CVs with a typical French name. Even more shocking is the fact that French employers have devised a special abbreviation system such as ‘BBR’ (Bleu Blanc Rouge or Blue White Red), the colours of the French flag), meaning French/white and ‘NBBR’ (Non Bleu Blanc Rouge or Not Blue White Red), meaning not French/white indicating race in employers’ databases. The relative social disadvantage of French-Algerian Muslims increases the probability of their alienation from mainstream society. There is also segregation in housing. The majority of the French immigrant population, mainly of Maghrebi origin, lives in the so-called ‘cite´s’. These very precarious dwellings, situated in the outskirts of big cities, Paris and Lyon, were built in the 1970s in order to help poor immigrants and their families with temporary housing. These banlieues (suburbs), in France, were designed as ‘high priority urban zones’ (Zones

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urbaines prioritaires, ZUP) and the schools in these areas as ‘high priority zones of education’ (Zones d’e´ducation prioritaire, ZEP). Social policies of integration for these areas, which looked a priori like affirmative action, translated into ‘affirmative discrimination’.26 They helped reinforce the negative image of the inhabitants of these areas. At the moment, 80 per cent of non-EU nationals are still trapped in these areas blighted by bad schools, endemic unemployment and daily skirmishes between the police and local inhabitants. These problems often place ethnic minority youth in an even more disadvantaged position, while increasing French fears of a more fragmented society. Thus, one characteristic of the suburb is the permanence of nonintegration. And for the young generation, the feeling of inequality reveals mistrust towards the State. The difficulties and social tensions Algerian citoyens Francais face in their search for better working and living conditions is well captured in an Algerian worker’s written testimony published in the journal l’Esprit. He was complaining about the poor conditions and the widespread abuse of housing regulations in immigrant areas, as well as racial discrimination and the incessant police harassment of North African immigrants: ‘nous, e´tant “assimile´s”, nous sommes moins bien traite´s que des e´trangers’ (‘we, being assimilated, we are less well treated than foreigners’).27 A young Algerian immigrant in France asked: ‘How am I supposed to feel French when people always describe me as a Frenchmen of Algerian origin? I was born here. I am French. How many generations does it take to stop mentioning my origin?’28 This feeling of lack of protection of their citizenship by the State has paradoxically relocalised the conflict in the banlieues. In November 2005, riots erupted all over France after two teenagers of African descent died by electrocution when apparently hiding from police in a power station. Violence increased after Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of Interior, called the rioters, most of them inhabitants of the banlieues, rabble and hooligans in a transmission on France 2 and vowed that: ‘The louts will disappear. I will clean this estate [the banlieues ] with a Ka¨rcher vacuum in order to let honest people live in peace.’29 During a political meeting, talking about the Arab origins of one of the participants, Brice Hortefeux, then Minister of the Interior, Overseas Territories and Territorial Collectivities, stated, in similar racist terms, in front of cameras: ‘He doesn’t correspond to the prototype. We always need one [Arab]. When there is only one of them it’s all right. But it

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becomes a problem when there are too many of them.’30 This, then, is French liberal racism tolerance in its purest form. To cope with this new environment, the French State reviewed the parameters that had traditionally defined citizenship. Drawing from preexisting institutional and cultural repertoires of citizenship and nationhood, policies have become more demanding with regard to migrants. The French approach is geared towards an assimilationist model in the thicker, ethnocultural sense. For instance, newly arriving migrants are now compelled to follow a course programme to facilitate their integration into French society and citizenship that encompasses the French language and a basic knowledge of French politics and culture. But language and cultural policies were sometimes negative. They were aimed at the suppression of non-national elements, which triggered bitter conflicts and further ethnic separatism. One of the most important and successful demands, partly implemented in the so-called Pasqua Law, was the abolition of the jus soli attribution of citizenship and making naturalisation dependent on assimilation into French culture. The creation of a Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity also made the racist stand against immigration the cornerstone of Sarkozy’s mandate. Sarkozy’s agenda sharpened the focus placed on the integration of immigrants living in France as well as their acquisition of national identity. Alternative policies were formulated in immigration policy, such as the quota system. At the beginning of 2008, a proposal was made to parliament to decide each year on the number of immigrants to accept, which was based on skill and origin. However, this quota policy contradicts the French Constitution and constitutes a breach in the universalistic ideology of the French Republic.31 Moreover, in a July 2010 speech, in Grenoble, Sarkozy, the son of immigrants himself, declared that any French citizen with foreign origins who was found guilty of a murder of someone working for the public authority should be stripped of their French citizenship, in addition to the penal condemnation. Also, the waiting time for family reunification was increased from one year to two. To cap it all, the 2011 decree signed by Claude Gue´ant, Sarkozy’s Minister of Interior, caused national and international consternation. This law made it almost impossible for foreign students who graduated from French universities to obtain a work permit and

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thus undertake their first professional experience in France on the grounds that priority was given to French citizens. In the construction of French citizenry, the formation of ‘good’ citizens thus tends to override simple tolerance and basic respect for individual rights. Moreover, if nationality can be defined as the status of belonging to a state and citizenship as full membership of a political community, this fusion is easily understood: the nationals of a state are also the full members of the political community that is organised within that state, that is that state’s citizens. Nevertheless, the two concepts should be distinguished: a person can be the national of a state without being a citizen and vice versa. North Africans immigrants in France offer a case in point. Algerians, in particular, find themselves at the centre of a gap between the stated principles of a society built on equal citizenship (liberte´, e´galite´, fraternite´) and the reality of social, economic and political forces that generate inequality. In contrast to ‘second-class citizens’, these individuals possess both nationality and formal legal equality in their country of residence, but their ability to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship is hindered by such factors as racism, sexism and economic deprivation on the part of the society in question.

The politicisation of nationality The persistently higher naturalisation rates in France compared to Germany seem to be empirical evidence in support of French national strategies to incorporate its migrant population. However, as Brubaker’s formula demonstrates, citizenship is less a system for attributing rights and more a contested political field for redefining the symbolic boundary markers for a national identity. The central question, as he remarks, is not ‘who gets what?’ but ‘who is what?’32 Here, as Brubaker pointedly observes, the importance of the signification process is in the structuring of the relationship between the migrants and the nation state. This is well demonstrated by the national policies that France has applied to migrants. For instance, the 14 March 1945 French ordinance gave Algerian immigrants in France settled there since 3 September 1938 the right to vote in municipal and cantonal elections in France. The further law, the Lamine-Gueye legislation of 7 May 1946, and the subsequent modification of articles 80 and 82 of the Constitution conferred French

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citizenship on all Algerians in the metropolis. A year later, the law on the constitutional status of Algeria passed on 30 September 1947 stipulated in the opening sentence of Article 3: ‘when the French Muslims reside in the metropolis, they are granted the same rights as the French and are submitted to the same obligations’. Nevertheless, the era of discrimination had not yet ended and inequalities remained. The Algerians had to wait for the Fifth Republic to attain equal footing. Surprisingly, perhaps, in that Fifth Republic, the distinction between people with a ‘statut civil de droit local’ and those with a ‘statut civil de droit commun’ regained importance in public law. The act of 21 July 1962 relating to Algerian independence stated that people with the latter status living in Algeria were to remain French automatically, while those with the former status could opt for French nationality by declaration before 1 January 1963. Article 23 of the Nationality Act of 1973, in combination with Article 24, stipulated that children whose parents were born in France were automatically French if they themselves were born in France. But do Algerian immigrants really benefit from their rights as French citizens? Given the context of the development of human rights since World War II, one would expect that the new European Convention would have heralded a liberalisation of policy. However, while the new convention fitted the paradigm of universal human rights and accepted the notion of dual nationality, representing a sharp break from the 1963 Convention on the Restriction of Dual Nationality, it was far from representing the liberalisation of citizenship policy. The conferring of citizenship through naturalisation and the extension of post-national rights occurs on the basis of carefully calibrated practices of selection and exclusion. Under these practices, non-status immigrants have remained excluded from formal citizenship. The practice of the jus domicile citizenship principle remains subject to state arbitrariness. Barriers to naturalisation clearly obstruct the creation of a sense of belonging and identification. A problem with dual citizenship is the well-known and publicised fear of the receiving countries that a large-scale inclusion of the ‘Other’ will constitute a threat to the identity of the national political community. In light of this, the denizen status accorded to the migrants could be seen as promoting a particular notion of insecurity to the State: the sense of marginalisation among immigrants and the consequent possibilities of societal conflict are thereby increased and the

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fundamental question of the identity of the nation posed. From the perspective of the migrant, however, securing a second nationality opens up new opportunities, provides greater participation rights and lays the basis for a fuller identification with the host country while preserving some ties with the country of origin. The dual citizenship of non-EU nationals has been a central point in debates on French citizenship reform, when it has been argued that dual citizenship might prevent immigrant integration. Arguments against dual citizenship attempt to make citizenship conditional whereas arguments in favour emphasise individual rights. Although the 1793 Constitution made no distinction between foreigners and French nationals, in the French context, nationality and citizenship are two distinct notions. Nationality reflects this conception of an inclusive republican citizenship, coupled with a strong conception of national identity, allegiance and cultural integration. Naturalisation is thus granted on a discretionary basis by the government. The string of conditions attached to naturalisation includes the foreigner’s assimilation into the French nation. A person is considered ‘French’ only if s/he can be socially absorbed by the Republican model of belonging, which entails the relegation of any socio-cultural-religious identity to the private domain. Cultural difference thus becomes a label for exclusion and racialisation. The politics of cultural difference As pointed out earlier, secondgeneration Algerians are automatically granted French citizenship at the age of 18. In addition, they obtain Algerian citizenship under the jus sanguinis laws, thus furnishing a large percentage of Algerian youth in France with dual identities. But the question to be asked is: do they really feel French? In attempting to answer this question, I shall explore the impact of Franco-Algerians on the French nation state and analyse the intricacies of their engagement with transnationalism. To do so, I shall focus on two case studies that illustrate the dichotomous nature of transnational identities. The first case study considers the treatment of Islam in France, which includes a closer look at the French government’s attempt to ‘republicanise’ Islam. It also examines Algerian reactions to the policy of state secularism as well as the bargaining of national identity by French Muslim groups such as the Great Mosque of Paris and the French Council of Muslim Citizens (Conseil Francais des Citoyens Musulmans,

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CFCM). The second case study examines Franco-Algerian cultural and political formations as an expression of Algerian civil society, which also speaks to the vigour of transnationalism and its impact on the nation state. To corroborate the liberal universalist understanding of transnationalism and suggest its consequences for nation state sovereignty, my analysis includes an historical review of the 1980s Beur Movement, which comprised Algerian organisations in France such as the Berber Cultural Association as well as a consideration of Beur literature and raı¨-beur music, all of which tried to mediate secondgeneration Algerian immigrants’ dual identities against the nation state’s imposed conception of French-ness.

The crisis of national identity The political malaise that afflicted France in the 1980s, combined with the economic crisis and rising unemployment that accompanied the pursuit of greater European integration made immigration and nationality law reform a major political issue. Debates during that period centred on the concept of jus soli and led to three main alterations in French nationality laws and the role of immigration in French society. Starting in 1985, the extreme right, and shortly thereafter the mainstream right, began publicly to attack the ease with which foreigners became French. In the eyes of the extreme right and many French voters, easy access to French citizenship created increasing numbers of ‘false’ French, who were French by nationality but not by culture – culture understood not in the thin sense of adherence to universal republican values such as democracy, liberty and equality but in the thick sense of folk traditions, Catholicism and sometimes plainly race. Thus when the right returned to power after the legislative elections of March 1986, the newly-appointed Minister of Interior quickly announced a series of immigration-related priorities. Sarkozy’s message to immigrants and minorities was loud and clear: French citizenship is not a given. It is an invaluable good and must be treated accordingly. It must be deserved and comes with moral and political requirements. He therefore imposed restrictions on migrant flows, increased the number of repatriations of illegal immigrants and reformed the nationality code. The political scene was further complicated when the right-wing government of Jacques Chirac proposed a bill on 12 November 1986 which would remove the automatic attribution of

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citizenship by marriage and required a declaration of will to become French for children between the age of 16 and 21 born in France with one parent born in France (double jus soli). Their declaration had to be registered either by a judge, a mayor or a local police officer. This change was hotly contested. But the law of 22 July 1993 was an even more serious attempt to restrict access to French nationality from several angles. The most contested part of this law was the reform of simple jus soli. Prior to 1889, a child born in France to foreign parents would become French, without any formalities, at age 18 if s/he had lived in France for the previous five years. The child had also the right to claim French citizenship declared by the parents between his/her birth and age 18. But in 1993 these two options were abolished. In 1997, a new nationality report commissioned by Lionel Jospin, the socialist prime minister, argued in favour of automaticite´ or the autonomic acquisition of citizenship. In 1998, a new law thus duly restored the pre-1993 provisions on the automatic acquisition of nationality. In the same vein, in its report of October 1998, the Haut Conseil de l’Inte´gration recommended the reform of France’s antidiscrimination laws through the incorporation of Dutch and Britishstyle legal measures against direct and, importantly, indirect discrimination. However, when the right wing returned to power in 2002, it attempted to restrict foreigners’, in particular Algerians’, access to French visas and French nationality. And the 2003 law reinforced the condition of fluency in the French language for naturalisation, set as early as 1945, adding the requirement of sufficient knowledge about the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship. But as Sue Wright has noted, the citizenship tests served as a mechanism of exclusion within a discourse of social cohesion, making it difficult for aspiring citizens to join the nation.33 Despite government policies espoused by French political leaders, which stress equal citizenship, Algerian immigrants’ struggle for social inclusion remains part of everyday life.

Excluding Algerians from the French national imagining As discussed earlier, much discussion has arisen over recent concern about immigrants in general and a specific fear of an invasion of Muslim people in particular. The subject has moved to the top of the international political agenda, due mainly to the sudden increased

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visibility of Muslims migrating from Africa, especially from the Maghreb. Such controversies as the headscarf debates and the 2005 riots around Paris, combined with the underlying issues of unemployment, poverty, crime and civil violence have brought to the forefront concerns regarding North African immigrants in France. Today, new forms of Orientalism are constructing Islam as a threat to secularity and modernity, so it is increasingly believed that Muslim immigrants have failed the national integration test. Muslim immigrants have thus been regarded as ‘bad’ migrants and their problems blamed on their culture and their strong attachment to Islamic values. This has helped forge the perception that there is indeed a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam, leading to the conclusion that Muslim communities and Islam are culturally incompatible with Western secular societies. But, as Ramin Jahanbegloo so rightly observed, today we are not experiencing a clash of civilisations, but a clash of intolerances.34 French national Republicanism stigmatises the foreigner. It has been argued that the texture of French society would be so thoroughly ‘orientalised’ and even ‘bastardised’ that it would no longer be possible to speak of a French nation. It is also believed that a mere naturalisation act cannot wipe out an immigrant’s cultural and linguistic background and will therefore not suffice to transform him or her into a genuine member of the French nation. Therefore, only the cultural identity qualified as ‘French’ is subject to the State’s politics of recognition. In this view, there appears a form of ‘national preference’ by which an immigrant is deprived of his rights and can be excluded as a function of capacities of integration established by the nation state according to subjective criteria. As a result, there is reluctance and unwillingness to accept Muslim people as a part of ‘indivisible’ France and treat them as equal. Three crucial events profoundly affected the French State’s rhetoric about Islam and its compatibility with the French nation state: these were, first, the 1995 bombings in Paris and Lyon; second, the attacks on the World Trade Center; and third, the failed attack on a high-speed train from Paris to Lyon on 26 August 1995, which was traced to two Beurs, one of whom was a second-generation Algerian named Khaled Kelkal. In the wake of these three events, the Algerian immigrant population became associated with Islamist

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terrorism and this resulted in a focus on secularism as a way to preserve French identity.

Laı¨cite´ in France The development of a secular standard in France actually goes back to the law passed on 9 December 1905, during the Third Republic.35 This law, which ensured the neutrality of the State and guaranteed the right of worship in the Republic, became the backbone of the French principle of laı¨cite´, an essential component of French national identity. Although the law clearly promotes tolerance and acceptance of differences, in France it did quite the opposite. Its interpretation in contemporary legislation raised religious disputes. Over recent decades, the political atmosphere around the issue of Islam in France has been explosive. Concerns over the force of Islam have positioned laı¨cite´ in direct opposition to French Muslims. A sense of ‘moral panic’ has underlined current debates about Islam in France as is apparent in discussions about citizenship and religious minority rights. The hostile stereotyping of Muslims and the demonisation of Islam led to demands to tighten national security, so as to preserve French ideals of civil liberty. In 1991, the parliamentary Liberal Party declared that France should not accommodate certain practices carried out in the name of religion. According to contemporary French leaders, the necessity to assimilate into a State-conceived model of citizenship is non-negotiable. In plain terms, the French government conceives French-ness as necessarily encompassing secularism and expects immigrants to adhere to this definition. To facilitate this transition to the ‘republicanisation’ of Islam and pave an easy pathway for Muslim residents to become full participants in French public life, the French State astutely endeavoured to build a moderate strain of Islam, known as ‘French Islam’.36 This domesticated form of Islam was given impetus by the erection of the Grande Mosque´e de Paris in the fifth arrondissement.37 The creation of the Conseil francais du culte musulman (CFCM) further strengthened the State-centred paradigm of laı¨cite´. But in reality, both the creation of the CFCM and that of the Conseil de re´flexion sur l’Islam en France (CORIF), whose members were chosen to ensure regional and ethno-national diversity, were grounded in French fears about the rise of political Islam and Islamist terrorism, particularly at the height of the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s. Nicolas Sarkozy’s

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major concern was to regulate imams and called for these religious men to be trained in France. On many an occasion, he stated that French Muslims ‘should not have to depend on foreign countries to obtain imams who do not speak a word of French’. It is worth noting that although the French State designated the Grand Mosque of Paris and the CFCM respectively as ‘privileged interlocutors’, that is representatives of Islam in France, there remain very many queries when it comes to the undemocratic nature of these bodies and their true functions. Although the establishment of the CFCM upholds the recognition of and tolerance towards religious and cultural differences and their inclusion in the Republic, Sarkozy made it difficult for Islamic associations run by second- and third-generation Muslims born and/or raised in France to gain acceptance by the French State as legitimate representatives. Because second-generation immigrants demanded two statuses simultaneously – equality in citizenship by law and full recognition of cultural diversity affecting a significant part of citizens – the issue of cultural diversity in France began to be viewed differently. From that moment, social behaviours prompted by racists considered individuals of foreign origin to be incompatible with the values of the Republic and thus completely unacceptable and harmful for the national interests. In practice, therefore, this has meant that France has been reluctant to operate targeted integration policies as these would amount to recognising specific group needs and experiences. For minority groups, in recent years in particular, the price of belonging and conditions for banishment have shifted dramatically. Citizenship is no longer enough. The clothes they wear, the language they speak and the faith they embrace have all become grounds for dismissal or exclusion. And it is specifically Islamic beliefs and practices that have recently been singled out as incompatible with liberal democratic and human rights standards in European countries. This has led to the situation where any expression of Islamic religious identity, for instance, is suspected of being a sign of fundamentalism or radicalism and therefore a potential national threat. Muslim immigrants, as a consequence, have been relegated to the margins of citizenship. These disproportionate and distorted actions subjected French society to bouts of ‘moral panic’. The intensification of this panic, which takes place through media’s treatment of Arabs/Muslims as folk devils, serves to appeal to the public so that they concur with ready-made opinions about

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the course of action to be taken, and these opinions have been heard from the members of what Cohen refers to as the ‘moral barricade’,38 that is high-ranking clergy, politicians and editors. In the 1980s, the French Muslim population was confronted with conflict regarding socio-religious issues such as the observance of some of their religious practices, which precipitated a sharp reaction from the Muslim community. A recent illustration of this type of conflict can be found in the French law banning the headscarves. It is therefore worth considering this issue in the light of Rawls’ theory of the ‘reasonable citizen’.39 According to Rawls, citizens who can be termed ‘reasonable’ can hold whatever beliefs they wish in private, as long as they are willing to affirm the supreme political authority of liberal principles in public.

The headscarf affair Durkheim views religion as being more than belief.40 According to him, it is religion that gives humanity the strongest sense of collective consciousness. Basic to his theory, therefore, is his stress on religious phenomena as communal rather than individual. The rituals and ceremonies are important as they help bind together the members of a religious group. They reinforce their sense of solidarity. For the vast majority of second-generation French Muslims, the search for individual identity has been represented in the veil and the study of Islam. However, some prescriptions of Islamic law sit uneasily alongside or even clash with Western laws because there has been a progressive displacement of the humanistic dimension. For instance, the roots of the French integration model, which promotes the principle of secularism, implies the exclusion of religion from the entire integration model as well as protection by the State from pressure from any religious group. The debate on national identity rocked the French nation and sent tremors around the world. Problems regarding a unified French identity came to the surface and the idea of Algerian Muslims’ exclusion became a central political issue in France. The increase of long-term unemployment, together with the growing public debate about racism in French society, pushed this issue onto the policy agenda. Although Sarkozy repeated several times that the 5 million Muslims in France had finally become full citizens, his speech on Islamic radicalisation implied a whole new way of thinking.41 The former president linked Muslim practice in France with the darker side

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of extremist Islam by harnessing images of Al-Qaeda, while trying at the same time to persuade the French that his goal was to create a respectable and fair society in which Muslims could worship. Sarkozy went as far as pointing out that through the national body of CFCM the French government was conceding French Muslims a measure of legitimacy. This inevitably made it difficult for the Council to project legitimacy, given that Sarkozy appropriated legitimacy to this Muslim national body. Even when an issue was part of the CFCM’s prerogatives, Sarkozy chose to criticise it. One such instance was when he spoke directly to the Egyptian grand sheikh of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University in 2003 in order to secure his approval for headscarf bans, hence legitimising Chirac’s headscarf prohibition. The Council thus stood merely as another platform for the French State to orchestrate events resonant of colonial days, rather than offer an occasion to ‘invite Muslims to the table’, as Sarkozy promised. Sarkozy went so far as to manipulate the opinions of the leaders of the Council as much as the organisation itself42 and to threaten with expulsion any incoming imam whose views challenged secularism. While the European Union claims to pursue progressive policies for ethnic minorities, the French definition of multiculturalism in terms of sovereignty hinders any meaningful turn to it. The French nation state’s legitimacy, authority and integrative capacities are being weakened from within because of France’s participation in intense and harsh categorisation to reinforce its own internal authority. France’s aggressive form of nationalism, centred on exclusive allegiance, reached its highpoint in the 1980s and 1990s, bringing a change in the institution of citizenship and its relation to nationality. Unlike the Anglo-Saxons, who cherish the right to be different, France recognises no ethnic minorities. France claims to be ‘one’ and ‘indivisible nation’ based on a single culture. To be its citizen is thus to transcend, to shed one’s ethnic and cultural particularity and to be fully assimilated into French culture. And the school is the very tool of assimilation. No better event symbolises the importance of the Jacobin tradition in French politics than the headscarf affair that erupted into a national crisis in France in September 1989, when three Muslim girls from North Africa wore the headscarf to their college, Gabriel-Havez in Creil, north of Paris. The headmaster expelled them on the grounds that this kind of dress in the classroom went against French schools’ concept

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of secularism. The girls refused to comply. They were then barred from the school. In an act of solidarity, many Muslim girls throughout France began to wear the hidjab to school and this issue acquired national importance, alarming French authorities. Wearing the hidjab symbolised both an alien culture and the subordinate status of women but, above all, the refusal to integrate into French culture. The hidjab was thus constructed as a dire threat to French identity and the ban as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism. The French State could not compromise with it without damaging its identity, as Serge July, the editor of Libe´ration, put it: ‘Behind the scarf is the question of immigration, behind immigration is the debate over integration and behind integration the question of laicite´.’43 The national debate on the headscarf issue thus went to the heart of the French conceptions of citizenship and national identity and divided political parties along three lines: liberal or pluralist, Jacobin and nationalist. Intellectuals and politicians rallied in defence of the Jacobin model of assimilation and the e´cole laique. Liberal and anti-racist spokespeople took a different view, arguing that French unity should be based on recognition of differences rather than their denial and that the State school’s laicite´ should be interpreted to make room for minority cultures. Lionel Jospin, the then Minister of Education, after consulting the Council of State, asserted that the hidjab did not transgress in any way the principle of laicite´ and stood against the school’s discrimination against individuals on the basis of their religious preferences. When the issue of the scarf flared up again in 1994, after the principal of a middle school in Nantua also barred two girls from school, the Education Minister, Francois Bayrou, ruled that ‘discreet religious symbols were acceptable’ but ‘ostentatious symbols’ such as the hidjab, were unacceptable. So, for example, if the 1995 report devoted to Liens culturels et integration indicated that Islam should be treated like any other religion practised in France and that efforts should be made by the State to facilitate its organisation, it is equally unambiguous in its condemnation of the dangers of ‘communitarianism’. The report makes clear that ‘French universalism’ cannot acknowledge the ‘rights of minorities’ or accept the claims of communal ‘particularisms’.44 This controversial vision of French identity, which found expression in the strong position of the French Minister of Education, was exacerbated by the Pasqua Law of 1993 and the Cheve`nement Circulaire of 1997,

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giving rise to a wealth of claims pertaining to minority integration politics.45 The law, which banned ‘signs and dress that ostensibly denote the religious belonging of students’ in public elementary and high schools, was officially proposed by President Jacques Chirac in a speech given on 17 December 2003 and submitted for constitutional review by the Ministry of Education on 5 January 2004.46 According to Chirac’s claims, the proposed law was sought to affirm the present doctrine of laı¨cite´ and protect the religious neutrality of the State. Though the new proposal aimed at ‘a peaceful coexistence of different religions’,47 it was explicitly meant to curb a perceived threat by Islam to the secular nature of public institutions within France. The Code of Education was accordingly amended to impose a prohibition on the endorsement of any religion in State schools. Paradoxically, although according to the Ministry of Education the law would cover all signs and dress, in reality it targeted only the hidjab. The 2004 law banning ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols cast France as an intolerant and radically secular State hostile to the manifestation of difference – especially Muslim difference – in the public sphere. Not surprisingly, the law was interpreted by Muslims all over the world as a direct assault on Islam. Muslim spokespeople argued that allowing the cross but not the hidjab was discriminatory. However, the supporters of the law proposal, regarding laı¨cite´ as a fundamental and immutable pillar of the French republic, maintained that the hidjab reinforced women’s oppression and was a politically and ideologically motivated affirmation of religious identity inspired in particular by the rise of fundamentalism. Such arguments, of course, were totally devoid of substance and only speculative. Ce´cile Laborde went beyond this account of domination and concluded that if the scarf affair became a national affair in France, it was not just because of its religious dimension but mostly for its cultural significance and for the ‘threat’ it seemed to pose to French national identity, a position expressed in French debates through the chronic condemnation of ‘communautarism’.48 In addition to Laborde’s argument, I would say that the ban on the Islamic scarf in State schools was counter-productive because it enacted civic integration by coercively imposing the rejection of traditional practices. Indeed, awareness of one’s own cultural origins and the sharing of a common cultural heritage provide a secure identity. Thus, the wearing of the headscarf ‘should not

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be interpreted as a rejection of French citizenship but as a desire for integration without assimilation, as an aspiration to be French and Muslim’.49 As the French proverb goes, ‘l’habit ne fait pas le moine’,50 and so one can be a good French citizen and at the same time wear a religious insignia in the public domain. The headscarf does not make the person wearing it a fundamentalist, let alone a terrorist. Such a prejudicial approach violates the individual’s basic rights. Here lie the contradictions through which French republicans address the issue of multiculturalism and national identity. On the one hand, they reject any kind of politicisation of ethnic identities on behalf of civic universalism; on the other hand, they defend the specificity of French culture. But such a nationalist turn changed the meaning of the cultural identity praised by the French republicans. The ambiguous meaning of culture here is problematic since it denies the recognition of cultural differences. It seems to me that if republicans stay committed to a strong conception of the republican project, they should also favour a strong inculcation of the sense of belonging. If French identity is inherently diverse and if one can be Basque and French, why could not one be Algerian, Muslim and French? This suggests that France should promote a stronger sense of solidarity created by the national identity but in a reworked frame that allows for the recognition of cultural diversity. And the headscarf seems an appropriate subject for the exercise of cultural tolerance. But France’s cultural politics and rejection of cultural diversity only served to reinforce Muslims’ calls for recognition. In the wake of the changes introduced by the Mitterand government which lifted restrictions on foreigners’ rights of association,51 France witnessed some movements that celebrated diversity, such as the droit a` la diffe´rence movement in the early 1980s and the vivre ensemble campaign of the mid 1980s. These associations called for greater civil rights and an end to the racist violence and substantial discrimination against North African immigrants in France.

Cultural and political formations for Algerians in France Immigrant groups not only in France but throughout Europe mobilised around claims for group-specific provisions, emphasising their group identities. Music and associations have been important vehicles through which Franco-Maghrebis identify simultaneously with French and Arab/

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Muslim cultures and resist French ethnocentrism and Algerian conservatism. Probably the most well-known channels for resistance were the raı¨/rap/hip-hop/graffiti culture of the banlieues and the Beur movement, which were increasingly associated in French racist discourse with criminal gangs, drugs, welfare scrounging and the violence thought to be inherent in immigrant culture. Beur writers, male and female, also had a distinct political dimension as part of the larger Beur Movement. They emerged onto the literary scene in the early 1980s and their writings largely contributed to a number of transformations in the identity politics among Algerians and Franco-Algerians in France. Algerian immigrants, who played a significant role within the independence movement, remained an active and powerful force in the violent debates and crises that erupted in France. The economic woes of the heavily immigrant suburbs of Paris, Marseille and Lyons, torn by dual nationality and the inadequacy of educational institutions, aggravated the problem. Social movements led by people from Algerian communities challenged the fact that, while most descendants of Algerian migrants have French nationality, hence citizenship, they were not treated on an equal footing within French society. This group’s sense of rootlessness served to reinforce a nationalist consciousness which gave rise to antiracist associations emerging in the banlieues in order to express the demands of second-generation North Africans, the so-called Beurs or what Silvestrein calls the ‘post-modern mutant hybrids’.52

The Beur movement The French banlieues are peripheral in two ways. They are situated on the physical edges of cities like Paris, Lyon and Toulouse and metaphorically, they relegate ethnic North African immigrants, the so-called Beurs, to the margins. A recent French survey indeed revealed that the people who suffer most from racism in France today are neither Black nor Asian, but the Maghrebis and their offspring, the Beurs and Beurettes. Born in France and educated in the French school system, they follow the same way of life as other French people and have never set foot in their parents’ countries of origin. They therefore see France as their patria, their homeland. Yet, despite their Frenchness, a large section of the French population resents their presence in France and holds them responsible for much of the social and economic ills of contemporary France. This

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systematic exclusion of Maghrebi culture and its influences on Frenchborn youth of Maghrebi descent makes it difficult for these young people to negotiate their position in France. These hybrids53 find themselves in an ambivalent position, always falling between two polarities: similarity and difference. In the light of Homi Bhabha’s remarks about the hybridised ‘third space’, then, we might argue that the young Franco-Maghrebis occupy a displaced position.54 This concept of ‘third space’, which according to Bhabha allows for the development of ‘new structures of authority, [and] new political initiatives’,55 is an effective way of categorising the 1980s Beur movement. Author Ben Jelloun referred to the Beurs as the lost generation. ‘Relegated to the periphery, in exile everywhere, nomads in their own existence, they [the Beurs] go round in circles . . . Even if they have French identity cards, they are not sure . . . where they belong’, he observed in the 1980s. They needed thus to acquire a proper cultural identity, something that would ‘attest both to their identity and their difference, thus giving them a face and a voice’,56 Jelloun went on. In the 1980s, this group thus attempted to forge a new identity fusing elements from French and Arab culture. As a result the word ‘Beur’ developed a certain stereotype, which also stigmatised it. It is therefore important to explore the roles integration and inclusion in society play in Beurs’ development of individual identity and larger group identity in France, in terms of both ethnic French perceptions of this group as well as the Beur perspective of their individual and collective cultural identities. It is also worth examining how Beur youth experience feelings of belonging, alienation and a sense of personal worth through political and social action and popular culture. The Beurs played a key role in consolidating North Africans communities in France and spurred the development of activist groups, an outstanding genre of music, a slang dialect of French and an entire French subculture. At this stage, it is worth starting with an explanation of the word ‘Beur’. Throughout my research, I realised that scholars all attempted far-fetched explanations for the word and referred to the socalled inversion of the French term ‘Arabe’. It is true that the youth of the banlieues used Verlan, a vernacular language in which a French word is altered through an inversion of its syllables, but in calling themselves ‘Beurs’57 I do not think that they used that vernacular. Neither the English word ‘Arab’ nor the French one contains letter ‘u’. The term

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‘beur’ rather calls to mind the French word ‘beurre’. To my sense, the amputation of the word is very telling and draws attention to the youth’s acute sense of rootedness in France, which inhibited their ability to live fully meaningful lives in their own terms like true French citizens, that is to have, like them, ‘le pain et le beurre’ (‘bread and butter’). This French expression implies a decent life. The term ‘Beur’ thus suggests all the hardships experienced by second-generation immigrants in terms of good jobs and well-situated housing, for example, which hindered their very integration. To carry this argument a step further, if we look at the type of collective identities expressed in immigrants’ group demands, the phonetic interplay of ‘Beur’ and ‘Peur,’ in my view, refers to their struggle against racist state terror and social injustice. Being ‘Beur’ was thus simply being trapped between two cultures and belonging to neither. ‘Beur’ thus revolves around the concept of Otherness, which includes both identity and difference. On the one hand, the Beurs, as non-Europeans, have been projected as Others and thus as a threat and a challenge to French morality. Yet, on the other hand, the French attempt to domesticate them and abolish this otherness by bringing them into ‘civilisation’, making them ‘knowable and visible’,58 through integration. This ambivalent position of the Beur subjects never secures them in place. They therefore sought to find the location of their culture(s) in the marginal space between dominant social formations. The question of Beur identity as distinct from either French or Arab/ Berber identity, which symbolises the unique position that these young people occupied in French society, emerged in France in the late 1970s and early 1980s after a series of equal rights marches and the establishment of Beur media such as Beur 1Y and Beur FM. Several violent incidents targeting second-generation of immigrants led them to call into question French national politics of difference. Notable among these were violent police attacks such as the killing of three young North Africans in the Parisian banlieues in the spring of 1980. Likewise, the use of force by the police and security officers against young North African banlieue residents in the so-called e´te´ meutrier (deadly summer) of 1983 resulted in more deaths. Notable among these were the shooting of 19year-old Moussa Merzogh by a Radar supermarket security officer in the Parisian suburb of Livry-Gargan; the killing of 9-year-old Tawfik Ouanes by a subway security officer in La Courneuve; the serious injury

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of 24-year-old Kader Layachi in Tourcoing by an off-duty police officer; and the killings of 19-year-old Djamel Itim and 23-year-old Djamel Kherko in Montreuil by a former security officer. Similar bloody events occurred in other areas of France, such as the killing of 20-year-old Toumi Djaidja by a police officer in Ve´nissieux, a suburb of Lyon. The perpetrators often succeeded in being acquitted on the basis of legitimate defence. As a result of such ‘legitimated’ violence, in the 1980s second-generation Algerian youth began to mobilise collectively against abuses. Their contestation of French practices of belonging found expression in several associative movements, the first of which was Rock against Police (RAP). They also organised free concerts to increase public awareness of racism after the 1980 shootings.59 Likewise, the first grassroots organisation of young North African women in France was formed in March 1981 in the Busserine quarter of Marseille where two youths – Lahouari Ben Mohammed and Zahir Boudjlal – had previously been killed. The association was founded by Zahir’s sister and had the explicit goal of documenting racist killings. In a similar way, the anti-racist Association Gutenberg de Nanterre was founded in November 1982 following the murder of a local community youth organiser, Abdnebi Guemiah. It was because of such police provocation that the youth began to become aggressive and organise themselves to escape from the everyday ‘gale`re’ 60or mess, as one of the activists put it. But the Beur movement, which arose with the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism (Marche des Beurs) and reached its apex in 1985 with the March for Civil Rights (Marche pour les droits civiques), remains the most notable association to respond directly to the violent summer of 1983.61 This struggle for recognition and acceptance affected the community as a whole, regardless of gender. Gathered around the slogan ‘le droit a` la diffe´rence’ (‘the right to be different’), they demanded the recognition of second-generation immigrants’ rights in the nation’s cultural political spheres and their protection against racist violence. The young demonstrators accused the police not only of being racist but also of violating their privacy and, above all, of showing little consideration for their parents. The Beurs’ aim was to compel public authorities to undertake more appropriate practical steps for social cohesion and for recognition of

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cultural diversity in the framework of implementation of the laws of the French Republic. They thus used the language of citizenship rights to underline their relative disadvantage. This ‘right to difference’ as a universal human right had also been highlighted by Francois Mitterrand who, from the first few years of his tenure, spoke of a multicultural plural France. In his preface to a programmatic report entitled La France au pluriel, Mitterrand declared that ‘we profoundly believe that if France must be united, it must also be rich in its differences. Its unity has enabled our country; respecting its diversity will prevent its undoing. One and diverse, that is France.’62 Mitterrand’s declarations did somehow translate into concrete policy. The president did abrogate the deportation laws and formally recognised the Beurs as fully-fledged citizens. He also allocated a budget for the banlieue rehabilitation programme and created Educational Priority Zones (ZEP) to promote immigrant educational success. But Mitterand’s utopian future of a ‘plural France’ resulted in more confrontations between cite´ youth and the police. In November 1990, 21-year-old resident Thomas Claudio died in a motorcycle chase with police in the Mas-du-Taureau cite´ of the Lyonnais suburb of Vaulx-enVelin; 18-year-old Djamel Chettouh was shot by a security guard in March 1991 in one Euromarche´ supermarket in Sartrouville in Paris; and 18-year-old Aı¨ssa Ihich died, asphyxiated after being denied his asthma medicine while in police custody in May 1991 in Val-Fourre´. The growing resentment for the French State and a rejection of Beurgois ideals of peaceful assimilation in the early 1990s sparked the rise of a new era of Franco-Maghrebi youth culture in which religious fundamentalism and gang violence were the most visible markers of identity. As a result, they started to map their belonging in ethnic or religious terms. For many, religion helped to affirm identity and served as a bulwark against social discrimination and rejection. It was used by these second-generation immigrants to compensate for the social disorientation caused by their displacement and subsequent isolation. The growth in importance of an explicitly Muslim identity component was triggered by the Islamist Front’s rapid development of hegemony over the Algerian religious field in Algeria itself. Although the Islamist perspective promoted by the FIS was based on a rejection of the West, Muslims in France advanced the idea of how to be a Muslim

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and French at the same time. The Beurs’ focus on religious identity was a way of keeping ties with their society of origin heightened the French government’s fears regarding the cultural cohesiveness of the nation state. As a result of State anxieties, second-generation Algerian immigrants became the privileged targets of integration policies. By the end of the 1980s, le droit a` la diffe´rence and la nouvelle citoyennete´ were finished as political movements and credible policy proposals. Despite their tremendous efforts, most of the Beur associations disbanded and today most Beur militants reject these associations as being ‘irrelevant to their daily lives’.63 It would be interesting to see why the Beur movement deteriorated and what types of collective action, if any, now govern Algerian civil society in France. Many arguments have been advanced to explain the failure of the Beur movement. Some critics argue that the main culprit behind its disintegration is the nation state itself, which appropriated and institutionalised various elements of Algerian civil society. Thus, as Beur civic engagement built, so did State intervention and co-option. Some Beur activists, however, put the blame on the heavy influence that Marxist organisations had on the movement, although other Beur activists came to view Marxist ideology as an antidote to the generational parochialism of Beur concerns, as a means to open up the movement to the ‘universal’. Others attributed its demise to the disillusionment relating to the movement’s shortcomings. They accused its members of not achieving enough concrete realities to draw in second-generation Algerians. Dissenters from within the Beur generation accused successful Beur activists-turned-businesspeople of selling out the banlieue youth for personal political interests and of constituting a cultural and economic ‘Beurgeoisie’. In addition, the Beur movement had to struggle against the influence of the Amicale and the National Union of Algerian Youth (UNJA), representative bodies of the Algerian government in France whose aim since mid-1960 was to unite Algerian immigrants around Algerian nationalist issues and help them discover their Algerian-ness through such activities as cultural events and Arabic classes to children of immigrants. The cite´ youth of the mid-1990s, for its part, reproached the Beur movement for causing a generational rupture, one marked by increased political apathy and disenchantment with collective organisation as an

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effective means of social struggle. Young cite´ residents in the 1990s thus took two routes: many organised themselves into multiracial groups identified with particular housing projects rather than forms of cultural identity. Others, on the other hand, attached themselves to transnational religious or ethnic social movements such as the Berber movement.

The Berber Cultural Association Founded in 1979 by a group of second-generation Kabyles who, like the first generation of Kabyle emigrants, viewed their residence in France as an exile, the Berber Cultural Association (ACB) in Paris attempted to forge close ties with other key Beur associations such as ANGI and Radio Beur, and strove to reconcile its local community actions with active support for the nascent Berber cultural movement in Algeria. As pointed out in Chapter 6, when the Algerian government banned Mouloud Mammeri’s lecture at the University of Tizi-Ouzou on 10 March 1980, a wave of riots spread throughout Kabylia, culminating in a general strike late in April and violent clashes between police and demonstrators, the ACB served then as a primary centre for information and protest. In the following years, the ACB became the centre of the Berber revival in France, following in the footsteps and including many of the original members of the Berber Academy and Berber Study Group of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s, the ACB served as a meeting place for Kabyle scholars, journalists, authors, artists, musicians and political activists who had fled political persecution and civil war violence in Algeria. The Berber Association, moreover, provided a staging ground for political action in Algeria, becoming the de facto seat of Said Saadi’s Kabylia-based Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD) and supporting the RCD-led boycott of the November 1996 constitutional referendum. Besides maintaining the Berber community’s development activities in Me´nilmontant, the ACB created sister associations in the banlieues of Saint-Denis, Cre´teil, Mantes-la-Jolie and the Val d’Oise, where a large number of Kabyle families lived. It also developed a larger network of Berber associations throughout metropolitan France, the Federation of Amazigh Cultural Associations in France (FACAF), bringing together Franco-Kabyle activists in regular meetings and jointly run public activities such as weekly talks by Berber scholars and artists, political debates and celebrations of yearly Amazigh festivities.

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The diffusion of Thamazighth, however, remained one of the main concerns of the ACB and Berber activism in France more broadly. From its inception, the ACB saw learning Thamazighth as a means for the immigrant Berber youth to gain an understanding of their culture, and accordingly offered Berber classes.64 This education initiative received a spur from the French State, as Thamazighth now functions as the second most popular optional language section of the national high school examination. This concern, together with the transferral of Berber culture and language to young Franco-Algerians, triggered tensions between Islam and Berberity. At a conference on ‘Berberity in France’, launched by the ACB for the April 1996 commemoration of Tafsut at the Sorbonne, participants sought to respond to the question: ‘Are there any referents other than Islam for the current generation of Algerians in France?’ Specifically responding to what moderator Hend Sadi referred to as the ‘problems of the banlieues’, the presenters asserted that Berberity was not only the cultural soul of these young FrancoAlgerians, but that it was also open to and in tune with modernity. Sharing the government’s fear about the threat posed by the fundamentalists, the ACB positioned themselves as the protectors of the French Republic’s laı¨cite´ against radical Islam and as a mechanism through which, in the words of the association representative from ACB-Mantes-la-Jolie, ‘our children can be integrated into French society while maintaining our distinctions’. Rather than assimilation, this imagined integration necessarily involved the maintenance of a Kabyle historical and cultural consciousness to avoid social disorder, which played into the hands of the Islamists in the banlieues, as many presenters observed. Franco-Algerian political activism was reflected not only in anti-racist demonstrations and the founding of associations but also in music and the production of literary works.

Literature as a badge of identity Franco-Algerian writing, as a socio-political act, remains inevitably linked to the specific French political context from which it emerged. It thus forms one of the prime loci for the expression of immigrant political individuality in France. The Beur novel brings to light the undeniable link between racism, discrimination and gendered

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oppression. It is structured as a traditional migration narrative, a tale that depicts the Beurs’ uncertain sense of identity. Beur authors write from their in-between position. Their works draw heavily on their own life histories in the cite´s in the early 1980s. Many of the protagonists in Beur narratives ‘experience their identities as one of lack’.65 They therefore attempt to rediscover their own identity, in particular the cultural conflict between family and the public space as well as the problematic relationship to education, which represents assimilation into French culture.66 The theme of physical mobility also plays a significant role and becomes a key metaphor for Franco-Algerian migration and identity as a whole. For instance, Akli Tadjer’s novel Les ANI du Tassili67 takes place entirely on the Tassili, a ferry from Algiers to Marseilles, with the protagonist Omar negotiating his relationship with a variety of Algerian and French characters as the ferry negotiates its passage across the Mediterranean.68 The violent process of exclusion of Franco-Maghrebi immigrants is also well voiced in Azoug Begag’s work. While bridges can bring people together, they also reinforce difference and create barriers. In Begag’s words, a bridge can either determine or undermine what he calls, in his 1990 sociological essay, ‘un e´cart d’identite´’, a distance between people or groups.69 And so the bridge that the children from Le Gone du Chaaˆba (1986), the first Beur novel to appear in France, must cross to reach their primary school highlights the separateness of the two worlds, each with its own linguistic and social code. As he crosses it, the narrator transfers his anxiety onto the river his sense of bewilderment onto the Rhone River.70 Here the narrator hints at the difficulties of navigating between the two banks. Learning thus, in a sense, means forgetting one’s own origins. As Serres has it: ‘I will never again know what I am, where I am, where I come from, where I’m going, through where I pass. I am exposed to others, to foreign things.’71 This is exactly the sense of bewilderment that Azouz experiences in Le Gone. When Begag published Be´ni ou le paradis prive´ in 1989 discussions on the nature of French identity were well under way. Several scenes in this work lay bare the institutionalised vocabulary of citizenship and the questions relating to automatic versus voluntaristic attribution of French citizenship that targeted second-generation youths of Algerian and North African origin at large. The protagonist’s willingness to

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change his name from Ben Abdullah to Be´ni can be regarded as his desire to integrate. Much like his literary predecessor, Azouz in Begag’s first novel, Be´ni encounters linguistic difficulties, finding it difficult to express himself. Meanwhile, outside the classroom, he encounters the enforcers of French nationality, the so-called controˆleurs d’identite´ whose aim is to protect and reinforce national identity. In one memorable scene, as Be´ni leaves the examination room where he had been tested, to his teacher’s question: ‘What are your origins?’ Be´ni’s response, ‘Human’72 reveals that he had to clarify that, while his origins are Algerian, he was born in Lyon, which makes him a full French citizen and a full human being. This infers the political dimensions of the sociological vocabulary in place, the vocabulary of citizenship which can be read as what Brubaker calls an ‘idiom of nationhood’.73 Brubaker describes such an idiom as ‘thinking and talking about and thereby in large parts constituting “identities” of various kinds – class, gender, national, ethnic, religious or generational’.74As Brubaker pointed out in the 1980s, ‘the French idiom of nationhood . . . remains political rather than ethno-cultural’.75 In Be´ni, moreover, Begag makes the question of faux francais into a faux proble`me and points towards a deterriorialisation of national identity. This interpretation of French identity is also depicted in Un Mouton dans la baignoire (2007). The title recalls a scene in Le Gone in which Azouz hands his father over to the police. The novel starts with a paratextual quotation that reveals that, despite his diplomatic position, the writer is not afraid to speak his mind. He cites Nicolas Sarkozy’s words in 2006: ‘You have to respect France’s rules, which means that you do not practice polygamy or excision on girls, you do not slaughter a sheep in your bathtub and you respect republican principles.’ The writer depicts the pervading hypocrisy at the level of the French government and details the effects of being an outsider. In a provocative comparison, he contrasts the institutional violence he himself experienced inside the government with the violence of the rioters of 2005. He also attributes the bloodshed of that period to the cruelty of such politicians as Sarkozy: ‘Young people in the projects are sensitive to the violence of politicians. They assume this violence in their own war and on their own terms. But they are not the real bad guys.’76 Ironically, in the wake of the 2005 riots, at the time of passing a law on equal opportunity before parliament it was Louis Borloo, Minister of Social Affairs, who came to the fore, not Begag, then

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Minister for the Promotion of Equal Opportunity. Begag’s marginalisation suggests that France is still not ready to welcome its own ethnic minorities and address the consequences of pluralism. As in the above-mentioned novels and most of his sociological writings, in his 2004 governmental report, La Re´publique a` ciel ouvert, Begag debunks the myth of integration and replaces the vocabulary of integration with that of discrimination and exclusion. By ascertaining the failure of the French project of integration and reversing the terms of inclusion, the writer-minister suggests an empty hospitality that thwarts the possibilities of real social reception. Begag uses two telling analogies in his report: that of a road race, making sure that everyone starts from the same point and that of rebalancing a car’s differential, thus highlighting the shared responsibility in recasting the French republican social pact. In the heyday of the Beur movement, Beur women also struggled to find a voice, particularly through the medium of literature. Their difficulties in freely entering and exiting the male-dominated public space within the banlieues or in forming associations that would address their needs pushed them to forcefully insert themselves into the public discourse through their writings. Beur female writers set out to retrieve suppressed feminine voices, rescuing Algerian women from disregard by both French society and patriarchy. Having dealt with the condition of women in Algeria in Chapter 5, here I would like simply to draw the reader’s attention to the point that, though immersed in the culture of France, Franco-Algerian women face the same oppression. The banlieue is a space in which men continue to assert their control over the public sphere and women are forced back into the private sphere. The regression of women’s rights in Franco-Maghrebi communities during the 1990s, which was inextricably linked to the turn towards Islamic fundamentalism, rendered their situation even more difficult. Franco-Maghrebi men in the banlieue – increasingly frustrated and restless in the face of socioeconomic hardships – used a sexist, oppressive Islamist rhetoric to control women and made the banlieue a male-dominated space in order to reassert their lost dominance. The Beurettes are thus shunned by their society because they are females and ostracised by the host society. Young Kabyle immigrant Sohane Benziane’s burning alive by her former boyfriend, a local gang leader, made women’s plight in the banlieue a public reality.77 The March of Neighbourhood Women for

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Equality and Against the Ghetto was one of the more successful public manifestations against gender violence following both Sohane’s murder and the release of Samira Bellil’s book Dans l’enfer des tournantes.78 Some of the most significant texts to emerge from the Beur movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s were Farida Bleghoul’s Georgette (1986), Ferrudja Kessa’s Beur Story (1990) and Soraya Nini’s Ils disent que je suis une Beurette (1993). Most of these stories follow the lives of an individual Franco-Maghrebi girl as she attempts to deal with familial restrictions as well as her exclusion from mainstream French society. The protagonists in these stories articulate their crosscultural position. By focusing on the educational system, the three texts point out the pivotal role played by the problematic marriage of their two cultures. The female narrators in these three stories signal the importance of finding their own voices after long having had their identities contained in ideological straitjackets. Hamida Ben Sadia, who was forced to marry at age 16 and endured immense physical and psychological violence at the hands of her husband, also wrote a telling autobiography, Itine´raire d’une femme francaise: Clamart, Bab-El-Oued, Epinay-sur-Seine,79 in which she highlighted the complexities of immigrant life and women’s oppression within immigrant communities. She focused on the multiple sources of her oppression, including her exclusion from French society. It is interesting to contrast her account with Samira Bellil’s testimony of the gang rapes she endured in the banlieue and her inability to denounce her aggressors. While both writers evoke common themes of isolation, loneliness and fear that can be found in almost any woman’s testimony of sexual assault, Bellil’s autobiography stands out not only as a scathing critique of Franco-Maghrebi men but also as an expression of outrage at the French State’s profound failure to respond to the desperation in the banlieues and to support her in her attempts to seek justice, leaving women to bear their burdens in silence. Bellil states: ‘Si je parle . . . [il] va me dire: “Tu l’as bien cherche´ a` traıˆner dans les rues!’”80 Thus, as Nada Elia has it in her discussion of the correlations between Beur literature and identity construction in France, Beur literature, both male and female, articulates ‘the dilemma of identity construction in Diaspora, highlighting not the both/and of biculturalism, but the neither/nor of homelessness’.81 Like novelists, Beur musicians also

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assumed the function of political and cultural mediators between France and Algeria.

Music: an avenue of belonging Music has been used to express the new identities produced by immigration itself. Since the start of Algerian emigration to France, Kabyle music has been the most famous in the Arabic neighbourhoods of Paris and their cafe´s as, in most cases, immigrants came from this region. Idir and Ait Menguellet were the most famous Kabyle singers and their music was for many Algerian immigrants a unique comfort during their ‘exile’. Their songs are about immigrant workers’ everyday hardships and loneliness, but they also deal with the political problems of their homeland. In the 1970s, the music from Kabylia or other regional repertoires such as the Chaabi were no longer adequate to represent the immigrants’ new reality. Thus, from Oran, a western city of Algeria, raıˆ-Beur music arrived in Paris. I shall therefore concentrate on raı¨ music, in particular raı¨-Beur, as opposed to other Maghrebi and Algerian music styles existing in France, for two reasons: 1) the phenomenon of immigration has deeply influenced raı¨ music; 2) for many Beurs and Algerian immigrants, though for different reasons, raı¨ represents their identity, which is, in my view, the most important motivation for selecting this repertoire in the context of this chapter. During the whole history of raı¨ both emigration/immigration and cultural contacts have played important and constant roles, giving rise to its heterogeneity. To better understand the power of raı¨ music, some background on its origins is necessary. And in order to better understand the development of raı¨ and explain how the meeting of these very different cultures – namely Algerian, Beur and French – has allowed for the existence of many distinct raı¨ styles, I shall use Kartomi’s concept of ‘musical transculturation’.82 Rai is a form of folk music that dates back to the 1930s and originated as women’s music at the Algerian port of Oran, a Spanish, French and Arabic speaking city where meddahats sang to other women on private occasions such as weddings. The geographical location of Oran allowed for the spread of many cultural influences, allowing raı¨ musicians to absorb an assortment of musical styles such as flamenco from Spain, gnawa music and French cabaret, allowing them to

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combine with the rhythms typical of Arab nomads. The singers in this new style were called cheikhs or masters for men and cheikhas for women. They sang together with Jewish players, experts in the Arab – Andalusian style, in the Arab cafe´s. The common repetition in their texts of the expression ya-rayi literally meaning ‘my opinion’, gave birth to the term raı¨. During colonialism, many cheikhs and cheikhas sang in cafe´s for the French troops. Cheikha Rimitti was one of these singers. However, at that time, raı¨ songs seemed to ask more for social change than revolution. Singer Houari Blaoui used for the first time rhythms coming from American music such as foxtrot, bebop and boogie-woogie and created new raı¨ styles. From that time there emerged different sound groups identified with one style or another. During the 1950s, the meddahats started to use raı¨ as part of their repertoire, which was mainly religious. As a consequence, the image of raı¨ music and its audience improved at the social level.83 The most famous of these young singers was to be Cheb Khaled. In 1974, popraı¨,84 a mixture of jazz, rock and Afro-American rhythms, emerged. The introduction of electronic keyboards characterised the sound of this style and allowed the singer to play alone. So many young people called chebs, meaning ‘young’ in contraposition to the cheikhs and their old style, attempted careers as singers. The texts of pop-raı¨ dealt with love, in particular forbidden love, sadness, alcohol and so forth. During the 1980s, raı¨ music reached the pinnacle of its popularity. Rai musicians have had a greater opportunity to oppose the government without censorship in France than in any other country. Political and cultural mobilisations by young Maghrebi people competed with intense Arab discrimination and raı¨ music became one of the main means of cultural expression for a minority struggling to carve out an identity in this racist environment. Raı¨ singers carried the cultural collisions of everyday life in music and called attention to ethnic differences. Cheb Hasni was the most renowned singer of this style. He sang in particular of love and France and so it was named raı¨-love. Since the 1980s raı¨ has had a great success – in particular thanks to Cheb Hasni – among Algerian immigrants. Many raı¨ singers fled terrorism and emigrated to France during that period. In 1986, a concert in Bobigny, in Paris, made the contact between these raı¨ singers and the French and international record companies easier. Khaled,

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Mami and others began to work for the most important major company. Contact with the musical market transformed raı¨ music so much that now one speaks of French-raı¨. If in Algeria raı¨ songs represented for people an occasion to express love without fear of societal judgements and freedom from the narrow rules of Algerian society, in France, however, the same songs had, and have, a different meaning. Hasni’s music, for instance, is topical and very much appreciated by Algerian immigrants. His songs, as often happens in raı¨, tell stories of love, in particular of tormented love. But in these songs the subject of love is often linked to the theme of flight to France. They express the immigrants’ pain of abandoning their own country and the feeling of being always an exile. The love for a woman in his songs stands as a metaphor of love for Algeria. Other raı¨ singers deal with the disruptions, dislocations and insecurities of migration, racist discrimination and economic marginality. But raı¨ music has another function inside the immigrants’ musical group. It takes on many characteristics of Algerian raı¨ but with a strong and personal elaboration. The Beurs’ sound group, for instance, expressed its preference for raı¨ music in order to represent its selfhood. Beurs’ interest in raı¨ music truly began with the Bobigny concert in 1986 and has been used as an essential tool to affirm their specific identity within French society and, starting from this identity, to affirm a social one as well. In order to understand this point, it is worth turning to Bhabha’s concept of ‘identity and culture’s in-between’85 instead of the classic vision of Beurs as owners of a double culture. For one reason, in the double culture system the clash between the two different cultural heritages prevents the full expression of one cultural identity, permitting only the choice of some particular characteristics from both cultures. On the contrary, the ‘identity in-between’ allows for the crossing of the cultural boundaries between the two cultures – in this case Algerian and French – producing a new identity because, as Bohlman puts it, ‘the space in-between possesses the qualities of transit: one gains entrance to it or across a threshold at its boundaries; exchange of language, of songs, of culture, defines those boundaries by transgressing them’.86 And raı¨ music, with its heterogeneity and its deep tie with musical transculturation, allows this crossing of boundaries between French and Algerian cultures. Raı¨-Beur becomes an important instrument to show this new identity inside French society.

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Although Cheb Khaled is probably one of the first raı¨-beur87 singers to articulate the younger generation’s rebellion against the constraining mores of the older generation as well as against the Islamists, today the most successful singer is Faudel. In Faudel’s raı¨ music French and Algerian cultures are ‘crossed’ in order to produce a new raı¨ style. Faudel sings in an Algerian dialect, but sometimes in French too. His albums, unlike immigrant singers such as Khaled and Mami, include the translation of song texts. Faudel reclaims the musical and textual tradition of his parents’ country and transforms it through the banlieue musical culture. For example, some of the texts for Faudel’s songs come from the meddahat tradition and he has chosen to use the name ‘Cheb’, but the music and rhythms are considerably Westernised and sometimes there are some stereotypical Arabic musical elements derived from a Western standard image of Arabic Egyptian music. Thus even if there is not a real recognition of Beur identity by French society, there is at least the well-accepted existence of a Beur style, of which raı¨-beurs are a positive expression, as opposed to the negative image attributed to rap music. For Beurs, raı¨ music is not only an aesthetic and musical experience but also offers the possibility of changing their social status and constructing their social identity. What conclusion can we draw from this discussion on the issue of Algerian immigrants’ citizenship? A cluster of structural and cultural factors have marginalised Algerian immigrants in France. This has had negative effects not only for the marginalised people but also for the political culture as a whole, as democratic citizenship cannot flourish in a society based on exclusion. The banlieues disturbances, in several French cities and in Paris in particular, painted a vivid picture of fractured and divided communities, lacking a sense of common values or shared civic identity to unite around. Algerian immigrants’ access to full citizenship thus remains a mirage as social exclusion continues to threaten them. The analysis has also shown that processes of inclusion and exclusion are far too complex to be reduced to a matter of having or not having a national passport and that securing citizenship does not directly equal inclusion. Firstly, the impact of formal citizenship on the citizen’s sense of being included is contingent on the national context. Secondly, being a French Algerian no longer yields the national privileges and opportunities or promises of French citizenship laws, of which the

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underlying premise was the subordination of all cultural identities to national identity to become ‘French’. Today, Algerian immigrants in France continue to suffer injustice in the form of what Charles Tilly calls ‘durable inequality’.88 Rather than responding to continuing inequality and exclusion, the French have actually reintroduced divisions where none existed before. Some institutional rules and practices and stereotypical assumptions conspire to produce systematic and reinforcing inequalities. These inequalities also put great obstacles to and constraints on the ability of group members to achieve well-being. Torn between two countries, two different cultures, and thus two conflicting choices, the Algerian emigrant community lives as though it were in ‘transit’.89 Their future seems always uncertain. While it is true that immigrants have been recognised in France as bearers of a collective identity, nevertheless different groups or cultures have never had a freedom of their own, as described in the EU Commission. Consequently, as one Maghrebi rightly observed, Maghrebis remain part of the ‘de´cor’ of French society rather than a component of the French nation. To bring this chapter to a close, I would say that the Franco-Maghrebi problem is a litmus test not only of democracy but of a civil society as well. If there is one lesson to be drawn from the Algerian experience in France, it is that choosing to denigrate and segregate a minority rather than respect and integrate its members as fellow citizens is corrosive for the whole of French society and undermines the liberal content of democracy. A democratic state cannot praise individual autonomy and, at the same time, make choices on behalf of its citizens, thus exercising a permanent coercion on them. Moreover, future integration policy should help to prevent and manage intercultural conflicts. The starting point for the government’s efforts in this area is that respect for fundamental values such as human rights, democratic governance and equality between all citizens is maintained and enhanced. One way to strengthen unity among citizens is to promote and support dialogue. And dialogue is one way to bring about a better understanding of democracy and human rights.

CONCLUSION: WHAT FUTURE FOR ALGERIA?

Throughout this book, I have discussed the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin citizenship and how belonging was/is variously construed, claimed and contested and reached the conclusion that citizenship in Algeria resides in a notion of deficit. The discussion on the subject of rights and citizenship outlined factors that explain how identity actually serves as a form of exclusion. The five-decade-long campaign of the post-colonial Algerian State to build a unified nation has resulted in a fracture of national identity. In the first part of the book we have seen that 130 years of colonial occupation irrevocably destabilised, destructured, ruptured and fragmented Algerian society. During the colonial period, access to French citizenship required commitment to the political and legal institutions of the metropolis, knowledge of the language of the coloniser and literacy in that language. Also, because the French viewed the Algerians as racially or culturally inferior, few Algerians had access to the kind of Western education needed to achieve a certain level of cultural equality that could be used to claim the rights of citizenship. The imposition of harsh common law sanctions formulated in the Code de l’Indige´nat, the Senatus-Consulte laws and the 1870 Cre´mieux Decrees, which extended French citizenship to Algerian Jews and European settlers while excluding Muslim Algerians from citizenship, created social schisms that were to have a negative legacy into the twenty-first century.

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The independence of Algeria in 1962 did not automatically bring the answer to the agonising question of what it means to be Algerian. It promised a new era of citizenship in full dignity and equality with the rest of humanity for all Algerians. Algerian people cheered the prospect of a democratic country because they believed it would bring them not only freedom but equality as well, both as individual citizens and as a nation. The analysis of the Algerian post-colonial State reveals that the State has slipped into what Crawford Young describes as ‘the impasse of permanent transition’.1 Like many other African states, it has been predatory and always threatening. This constrained the prospects for transition to democratic rule in significant ways. The first years of independence saw the triumph of mediocrity and the total negation of the norms of dialogue and consensus in the political process. In such a situation, mediocre performance became the foundation of the nation and incompetent individuals became the leaders of frustrated citizens. This allowed opportunistic elements of the political class to emerge at the expense of popular and democratic social forces in civil society. Also, despite its immense human and natural resources, the Algerian post-colonial State has failed to effectively harness these resources and deploy them for meaningful development and to meet the basic needs of the citizens. The ruling elites, who patrimonialised state power in the post-independent era, did not sustain the ‘social contract’ of development and national unity. Instead, in the past 52 years, Algeria has witnessed more poverty, violence and instability, which seriously undermine the very foundations of the country’s fragile unity, heightening thus the stakes in the national question. Although the factors described above, colonialism and the unstable nature of post-colonial politics are important to understand in relation to Algeria’s problems, the country’s inability to extricate itself from them has also much to do with the fact that it has been trapped in theoretical and policy frameworks borrowed from the outside. A good instance of this trend is the educational system. At independence, Algeria committed itself to Arabisation and democratisation but the country encountered huge problems in implementing these goals. At the intellectual level, alternative frameworks for Algeria’s development did not succeed because they were inappropriate to the Algerian context. Development approaches that ignored the Algerian realities were bound

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to hamper the building of a new political architecture required to promote development. The State faced two additional difficulties: first, the lack of a sufficiently strong political base to pursue, even at a gross level, policies that ran counter to the existing distribution of power among sectors in the society; second, the inadequate power base for the State made it a tempting prize for those who did have some organisational backing, either in society at large or even within one of the State’s many tentacles. But the prize has often been chimerical, for what these aspiring leaders sought was not the capability to transform their society in accordance with their goals, but simply seats coveted by others. As a result, substantive policy issues were pushed to the back burner. Another weakness is the country’s over-reliance on the hydrocarbon sector for its export and foreign currency earnings. This dependence has rendered the economy extremely vulnerable to even the slightest downturns in the global oil and gas markets. It was such a slump that jeopardised Chadli Bendjedid’s nation-building programme, causing him to introduce political reforms that eventually created not only economic but also socio-political instability from the 1980s onward. Since then, the concept of national citizenship of equal rights, benefits and duties for all Algerian citizens has been bifurcated because the State has sunk into a cesspool of identity-based conflicts, civil war and conflicts over the distribution of public goods, all of which are manifestations of a deep-seated problem of citizenship in the national context. The claims of marginalisation, domination and social injustice by groups and individuals often derive from this reality. Moreover, although democratisation and the opening up of the political space have been high on the agenda of the political class in Algeria, the reality on the ground reveals that authoritarianism and the imposition of economic adjustment reforms not only fomented agitation in civil society but also exacerbated ethnic and religious crises, which in turn militated against the consolidation of democratic rule and political stability. The Algerians did in fact attempt to establish democratic institutions, but their inability to come to terms with the problem of difference rendered them incapable of creating the kind of political culture that would support those institutions in times of crisis. The socalled democratic State that was formed after freedom from French

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colonial rule was expected to remain an autonomous actor that would reform society, create opportunities for the poor and promote development. Its purpose was to embody certain normative doctrines about the justification of political authority, about who should wield power in political society and about the extent of that power. This double meaning that Algerians attached to democracy meant a set of political ideals that would help create a system of governance that was just for all citizens and at the same time, it would be a form of governance that would enable the Algerian nation to flourish. In other words, it was to be both egalitarian and ethno-nationalist. However, creating a political culture capable of sustaining those democratic institutions has proved a far more difficult task. While the Algerians’ love for democracy has remained quite strong, this attachment to democracy has increasingly become an attachment to a name rather than to any specific set of political ideals. The unity and coherence the Algerian State has tried to achieve since independence has had the effect of emphasising its separateness with respect to the larger society. The rhetoric of rights has induced disunity, double standards and moral decadence. Such a situation potentially undermined the development agenda and it became increasingly clear that the State was unable to fully assure respect and guarantee effective citizenship in the country. The government’s incapacity to live up to its democratic promises has resulted in a tremendous disconnect between the State and citizens. Consequently, the State has lost its moral legitimacy. To the majority of citizens, it is no more than a tax machine, reaping what it has not sown. Many citizens see the State as an external entity that should be shunned. Also, the failure of the State to provide a level playing field for all ethnic groups has led people to emphasise ethnic over national citizenship. Still worse, very few Algerians are willing to become active citizens to work at least for a better society. They leave professional politicians to do that for them or simply want to be left to get on with what is oddly called the quiet and private life. This lack of trust has lead to public cynicism and disengagement in the political system and has seriously impaired the democratic project. Moreover, the State’s action suggests that while it is acting through the Constitution and bestowing universal citizenship, in practice that citizenship is selective of only certain citizens and interests. While legal

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provisions promise citizenship to all Algerians in principle, the practice is one of inequality in citizenship. There is a hierarchy of citizenship fostered by political, economic, social and cultural inequalities such that it makes some individuals much more able to articulate their rights than others. Being a rights-bearing Algerian is a matter of degree and power relations; some are less Algerian than others, even if they are armed with the same identity card and inspired or protected by the same Constitution. Therefore, building inclusive democracy through State – society relations is also selective and certain groups are more likely to be excluded. The decline of the democratic public sphere has resulted in a closure of the notion of civil society and thus a closure of opportunities for dialogue, undermining the contractarian perspective that underpins much of the historical analysis of citizenship. After 52 years of independence, Algeria is still struggling to create a unifying Algerian identity and still trying to create a real democracy, because the nation and the State do not fit together. Specifically, the transition to democracy in Algeria has always involved the same social classes, the same types of political issues and even the same methods of solution. This political regression has jeopardised the future of the new generation of Algerians.2 Post-independent Algerian history has indeed shown that the chance of seeing political reforms has been enormously weakened by the reelection of the FLN. Of course, we cannot deny these veterans’ endeavours for the development of the country in the past, but Algeria belongs to all Algerians and the majority of people believe that youth should be given a chance to use its potential to try and effect some positive change. The FLN’s triumph at the legislative elections of 10 May 2012 exacerbated uncertainties and anxieties in Algerian citizens, bringing about an even greater obsession with citizenship and belonging. Their victory revealed that although Algeria is actively involved in reframing citizenship, at the same time the policy of ‘social vivisection’,3 in Pierre Bourdieu’s brutal words, continues. Rather than heralding a break with the past and inaugurating a new democratic regime, the elections inaugurated a new phase in the struggle for democracy. I am tempted to adopt here the term ‘dembacracy’ instead of democracy. The Haalpulaar ruling families in the Senegal River Valley coined this word to designate their so-called democratic institutions. Demba is a Pulaar name given by

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a mother to her second son. In a society in which the oldest son enjoys more economic and political privileges than any other child, ‘demba’ became a term used to describe those men who cannot claim equal rights with the older brother. Indeed, through a process that recalls Jean-Francois Bayart’s concept of the ‘reciprocal assimilation of the elites’, Algerian elites have, since the end of French colonial rule, reasserted their perception of democracy as dembacracy in different sites of political socialisation such as, among others, the army and the structure of the FLN. The FLN’s dominance in Algerian politics has not only intensified despotism but also predatory rule characterised by concentration of personal power at the centre. In Peter Lewis’s words, the regime has been based on ‘networks of personal loyalty and patron-like ties . . . Public and private resources are melded, as State assets come under the discretionary control of political elites and public offices serve as conduit for private accumulation.’4 This concentration of power has evidently deepened repression, corruption and the assault on civil society, in general and fundamental human rights in particular. From what has been said so far, it is clear that ‘exit’ has characterised relations between the State and important sections of the citizenry for a considerable period but the 1980s and 1990s saw unprecedented levels and dramatic forms of massive retreat from the State. The construction of parallel economic systems, the proliferation of Berber and women’s organisations as well as of religious fundamentalism and the extraordinarily high level of emigration of Algerians abroad, all attest to heightened levels of ‘exit’. This can be attributed to such factors as the rapid economic decline, which crippled the capacity of the State to provide jobs, the high degree of insensitivity to the plight of the masses and a lack of responsiveness and accountability by successive governments, together with the marginalisation and virtual exclusion of others from enjoying the same privileges and benefits of belonging to the State, all of which nurtured a culture of cynicism on the part of most Algerians and mistrust in the ability of the State to meet their socio-psychological needs. As a result, many youths turned to ethnic and religious organisations for solace in the face of acute unemployment while others preferred to leave their native soil. Exit seriously challenges the State’s legitimacy and nation-building project. Few would contest that the Algerian nation and its national identity have been subject to huge pressures and have undergone considerable

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alterations. The question remains whether, as a result of such pressures and changes, Algerian people are still tied to their nation and more or less wedded to a vibrant sense of national identity.

The Algerian modern paradigm of nationalism Following the Algerian Revolution, nationalism reinforced the power of the State by providing an emotional and psychological element that made Algerian people feel as though they genuinely belonged. The nation state then was a more cohesive and stronger political unit than ever before. However, the paradigm of nationalism, which achieved its canonical formulation in the 1950s, seems to have lost its significance. Especially symptomatic of these changes are the displacements that occurred in nationalist thinking. I carried out an empirical verification of the extent of the diffusion of ‘national consciousness’ in Algeria. The rise and decline of nationalism is mirrored in the survey data collected in December 2011 and January 2012, in which I attempted to test Dekker et al.’s findings on national attitudes among the Algerian population.5 In their empirical studies of three states – The Netherlands, an established state; Slovakia, a newly created state; and the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain, a region in which the citizens are struggling to develop a new free state – Dekker et al. distinguished a hierarchy of interrelated national attitudes, one neutral and five positive: The basic neutral national affection is national feeling [or] the feeling of belonging to one’s people and country. The five positive national attitudes are national liking (liking one’s people and country), national pride (being proud of one’s people and country), national preference (preferring one’s people and country over others), national superiority (feeling that one’s people and country are superior to others), and finally, nationalism (feeling a sense of belonging to a particular ‘nation’ with a common origin. . . Desiring to establish and/or maintain a separate and independent state for that particular ‘nation).6 They concluded that the lack of positive attitudes generates feelings such as alienation from one’s people in one’s own country, shame, disgust and

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national hate. It is therefore the positive attitudes that give an individual ‘a positive national identity’ as well as a sense of ‘positive selfidentity’.7 While I agree with Dekker et al.’s classification of national pride, national liking and national feeling as positive attitudes, I believe that national/regional superiority, national/regional preference and part of their definition of nationalism constitute negative attitudes in the sense that they verge towards marginalisation, perpetuate Otherness and create classes and, thus, would lead to clashes instead of uniting people in a common goal, the very goal of nationalism. To my mind, such negative attitudes towards foreigners or ethnic groups tend to develop segregationist feelings rather than nationalist ones. Also, the national/regional attitude in this instance creates cliche´s and stereotypes. In addition, those feelings of superiority/preference tend to override internationalism as such. Using Dekker et al.’s questionnaire, I tried to find out what kinds of people in Algeria tend to be nationalists. I also tried to understand the motives behind their nationalist stance. The language of the interviews was either French or Arabic. In general, better-educated and older generation respondents preferred French and less-educated ones and some young people preferred Arabic. Four variables were included in the analysis: age, education, gender and profession. The timing of the survey should also be noted. Since the interviews were carried out after a period of turmoil and violence in the Arab world, it was almost certain that those events would in some way affect virtually all members of society’s views. Non-response was very low. While nationalism no doubt stirs up passion, the study of the different sectors of Algerian society debunks the simplistic myth of the crushing effects of nationalism and national identity in engendering the united nature of a group among individuals. My findings suggest that passing through pre- and early adulthood while the country was emerging from colonialism and newly governed by its own political leaders, especially if the regime was judged at the time to be making meaningful economic progress, predisposes individuals to be particularly nationalistic. This is likely because the period was also characterised by a national concern with reasserting the country’s cultural identity after years of colonial domination. Yet it is only possible to speculate about more specific causes accounting for particular responses. For example, were some Algerians largely shaped by the ideological orientation that prevailed

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when its members passed through their formative years or were they influenced to an equal or even greater degree by the forward-looking and hopeful national mood that prevailed immediately after independence? There is also evidence that attitudes about salient political events are in fact influenced by complex combinations of factors. Those acquired during pre- and early adulthood are most likely to be remembered and imbued with importance, thereby contributing to shared characteristics among the members of a birth cohort. Other considerations, such as family structure, educational attainment, class and economic circumstances, create a degree of variability that makes it difficult or even impossible to distinguish nationalist patterns. Each life-stage brings new roles and responsibilities, altering interests and experiences and modifying attitudes as a result. Another challenge posits that major historical events have a similar impact on people of all ages. Some respondents tended to frame their responses in terms of the wrongs they suffered as human beings rather than as violations of their rights. Their benchmark was justice rather than citizenship. Although it was not singled out in the questionnaire, the right to shelter was emphatically underlined as a fundamental expression of citizenship as the people understood it. The strongest articulation of this right came from the younger generation who had not been able to get married. There is also a discrepancy with respect to sex. While the older generation of women reported strong national sentiments and seemed to reflect Dekker et al.’s data, younger women’s attitudes were more positive than males’ and did not take political gains into consideration. Certainly there is ample evidence of ‘prisoner-like’ behaviour among many respondents in the urban areas: the fear of unemployment, corrupt practices and the despair expressed by many city dwellers regarding the idea of who could be trusted to represent their interests. The anger with which the respondents spoke of the prevailing injustices, their antagonism towards privileged sections of society and their views that government acted on behalf of the well-off summarise the ills of Algerian society.8 The study also demonstrated that generation effects are limited in substantive scope. They help to account for variance in some normative orientations but were not present in many other instances. In terms of the broader challenge of constructing citizenship in Algeria, it is clear that State–society relations exemplify many of the barriers to citizenship. My

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findings demonstrate the importance of contextual knowledge in formulating and testing hypotheses about nationalist sentiments.9 In sum, the reflection on the different stages of Algerian nationalism leaves a contradiction open: the impossibility of setting objective parameters for the definition of the nation and opens a fissure in the discourse of the nation, revealing the aporias within. At the outset, nationalism was an inclusive and liberating force. It broke down the various localisms of region, dialect, custom and clan and helped to create a large and powerful nation state. Right up until the late 1960s and early 1970s, an optimistic and realist view of nation and nationalism prevailed. In the late 1980s and 1990s, this optimism began to wane. There seems to have been a gradual dissolution of the bonds of the nation in the minds and hearts of many of its members. Not only have the early democratic dreams of the Algerian State not been realised but the earlier beliefs in a single civic nation with a homogeneous national identity which could be used as a model for ‘healthy’ national development seemed touchingly naı¨ve, as the country experienced the rumblings of ethnic discontent and fragmentation. As a result, the old models have been discarded along with much of the paradigm of nationalism in which they were embedded. We can thus discern the four stages, which I call awakening, incipient action, triumph and passivity. It is an unfortunate fact that Algerian nationalists’ efforts to create one nation, one people and one language tended to produce the very opposite of what they originally intended. Thus the key questions to ask for the future of Algeria are: how can the State reclaim its citizens? How can we build an accountable and responsive State in Algeria? How can the nationalist fibre be revived in Algerian children?

Political fitness for Algeria Political fitness for Algeria must involve a careful selection of those styles and practices that privilege inclusion, such as: 1) a careful selection of leaders; 2) the placement of peoples’ needs and aspirations at the centre of the political system; 3) citizen engagement and participation; 4) the creation of a broad coalition between State and citizens so that change is sustainable. It is undeniable that change can only come when there is both citizen action and political will from the inside. Enhancing the role of the State

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in safeguarding citizens’ rights requires rebuilding the political relationship between the State and society. My main point is that sustainable change requires a shift in mindset. This can be achieved when State and society become partners in processes of policy change and political reform. On the one hand, the State is the provider, the dutybearer and the agent being held accountable; on the other hand, the citizens have to do their share of duty and only then claim their rights. Algeria now requires more innovative ways to produce development models that reflect the unique conditions of the country. As Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi rightly observed: ‘Politics is a reflection on the manner to serve the People. It is not that sum of shouting and gesticulations often used to take profit from the People.’10 Therefore strategies and political choices need to be re-examined more closely. First and foremost, the foundations of the Algerian State must be strengthened as a pre-condition to remodelling the relationships connecting its citizens to the organisation of power and distribution of wealth. Such remodelling depends to a large extent on the degree to which citizens at all levels, not simply the elites, can play a key role in the management of public domains within their political spaces and have equal access to opportunities for improving their socio-economic conditions. Good governance is indeed achieved only when the two halves of the consolidation process – top-down change and bottom-up change – are mutually reinforcing. One approach to avoid the biases towards elitism or lack of accountability can be offset by investing in a vibrant civil society. More importantly, active citizens can make a State more democratic and responsive and make human rights become a reality. Democracy should thus be extended ‘from a democracy of voters to a democracy of citizens’.11 A successful strategy for citizen engagement in Algeria would be to socialise individuals into practising basic civic and democratic values such as tolerance, trust, solidarity, reciprocity and dialogue. These are the indicators of a healthy democracy. Democracy, moreover, is not just about who governs, it is mostly about how they govern, the institutions through which they govern and the institutional identities by and through which they organise different categories of citizens. For a policy of substantive democratic change to succeed, Algeria must focus on the creation of effective and independent political parties, the institutionalisation of truly representative legislative bodies and the firm application of the rule of law.

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One should, however, be aware that it is not simply the presence or absence of civil society associations that affects democracy but what these organisations actually do. The impact of such movements is, of course, linked to the effectiveness and legitimacy of the mediators. Certainly, citizens cannot be treated like nonentities, but neither can the nature of the State be ignored. In Algeria, these organisations have scored poorly on their contributions to improving the quality and equality of representation of the citizens’ interests mainly because of the absence of a clearly articulated and well-organised stance in these spaces. Thus instead of strengthening the culture of citizenship, they have undermined it. In the case of women, for example, participation is tokenistic and is experienced as humiliation. There are instances in which women were present and yet remained silent mainly because they were either there at the behest of others or feared reprisal if they spoke out. Also, in a striking number of cases, the greatest percentage of negative outcomes of citizen engagement is not so much related to the response of the State but rather to citizens’ practices – to the lack of skills needed to be an effective citizen. It is unrealistic then to expect accountability from the State. In such a situation, reprisal instead of constructive response is the result. The State stifles dissent, crushes rebellion and punishes troublemakers, who in reality act not as genuine representatives of citizens’ concerns, but work to undermine the potential for deepening the democratic dynamic between State and society. Citizen engagement would, then, strengthen people’s sense of citizenship and help create a more responsive and accountable State as well as a more inclusive and cohesive society. Participating actors can make an invaluable contribution to solving problems not only within their own communities, with their governments, but also in global affairs. In other words, citizen involvement helps to create citizenship and gives it new energy. By building a sense of citizenship and democracy, the initiatives undertaken by associations would encourage new relationships between State and citizens. This process would not only influence policy in a more formal way, but also contribute to a cultural change in politics. The Algerian case provides examples of attempts to institutionalise citizen participation and social rights through constitutional means. However, legal means for ensuring rights are not enough. Broader

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approaches are needed, which recognise the diversity and identities of local actors and the ways in which they can be pre-empted from claiming rights by forces of social and economic exclusion. I argue thus for a more strategic approach, one that would embrace a wider perspective of rights and citizenship and aim to challenge existing social relations and rules of the game over the longer term. Such strategies may also require resistance from below to participation in certain public spaces created from above and construction of more autonomous spaces, which are based on recognition of the culture and identities of people, as well as changing meanings of rights and citizenship and opening up new roles and spaces for citizen participation. While it is true that engagement is sometimes perceived as decorative – meaningless because it reinforces social hierarchies, serves corrupt and discriminatory ends or may provoke a backlash by the State against those who dare challenge the status quo – and while it also faces bureaucratic brick walls, we should not ignore the gains. While State accountability in the past was often seen as a horizontal process, in which one branch of government monitored another, the Bouteflika government has tried to build vertical strands of accountability to connect discriminated groups to the State and international institutions. Nonetheless, the myriad of social, economic and political reforms undertaken by the current government have not given the expected results because of the citizens’ passivity. This has weakened accountability networks. Building relationships between citizens and their local government means working together for the common good, for the nation. Unfortunately, in Algeria, the ‘demand’ side of the citizens has always been prominent in matters of ‘good’ governance. Likewise, research on lawmaking would be of scholarly value. From this perspective, an area that needs more study is that of women’s social rights and entitlements. The rights that women have won over the past two centuries reflect not so much a steady advance towards some goal of full emancipation, as the outcome of conflicts with the State and with society reveals. One area where research could fruitfully be directed is into how local civil courts are positioned to deal with the problem of improvement of women’s access to justice. Small claims courts are becoming increasingly important in settling family disputes and cases of domestic violence. However, women’s organisations are divided over whether this is a positive or negative development. Some, for example,

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THE STATE OF ALGERIA

see the judgements on domestic violence as too lenient and call for outright penalisation. Economic growth is also a critical factor for achieving development goals, including raising the overall standards of living. And productivity is the magic bullet for achieving high growth rates. By productivity is meant the efficiency with which labour and capital are combined to produce goods and services. The ‘self-sufficiency’ policy for food production is an important positive step in this direction. Health care, security and education are also key factors affecting productivity. All in all, the Algerian case study suggests that what is urgently required to address the impasse of the post-colonial State is the imperative of reconstructing the State to embody the various identities that exist within its boundaries and to respond in meaningful and transparent ways to issues of social equity, human rights, a viable economy and accountable public institutions. This implies that society must be empowered through its involvement not only in the electoral process but also in decision making at various levels of governance. It must address such questions as resource redistribution, equity and recognition of the diverse identities that constitute society. Last, but not least, Algeria needs a democratic system that not only places emphasis on political rights but also incorporates social, economic, cultural and citizenship rights and invests heavily in the development of social capital, mainly through education because, as Helve´tius put it: ‘Education is capable of changing everything.’12 Like Helve´tius, I believe that government and education are in a symbiotic relationship: a good government produces good education and vice versa. Of course, all these efforts to evolve a more inclusive and universal approach to citizenship will remain in vain without a strong sense of patriotism and nationalism.

Educating for citizenship In Algeria, there are signs that citizenship has become problematic in recent years. There is also a growing recognition that Algerian schools are preparing children neither for life nor to serve the country but simply for work. Also, Algerian children have been left to pick up their values as and when they can and this has left them open to influence and manipulation at the hands of those less concerned for their well-being

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and that of society in general. What Algerian students need urgently today is, in my view, literacy in citizenship. There has certainly always been a strong emphasis on moral education in Algerian syllabuses. From an educational point of view, this is necessary so that students can learn what it is to behave morally, but moral learning cannot develop in a vacuum. As John Wilson argues, moral education does not involve passing on specific content to students in the form of ‘right answers’ to moral questions at all.13 What is ultimately important is to understand the reasons why they must do the right thing. In Algeria nowadays, we are left with a very impoverished form of moral education. The greatest mistake has been to present students with a range of alternative moral views and leave them free to select whichever took their fancy. Children have been trained to follow moral rules, but commitment to a set of rules or moral principles does not guarantee that they will always live up to these principles in practice. For one thing, the various elements of moral understanding have not been brought to bear on practical situations in such a way that children actually act in accordance with the decisions made. To live up to the principles involves both motivation and strength of will. In view of these complexities, one should ensure that students understand the importance of morality in their own lives so that they have the moral courage to do what they know and feel is right. Also, in all Algerians schools, it is a tradition for children to start each morning by raising the flag and singing the national anthem, but they do that mechanically. Some, not to say the bulk of, pupils find this national practice so boring that they may only hum the tune or even refuse to sing altogether – these same children will, however, readily sing the lyrics of a song, line by line, by favourite music stars – but in many cases the pupils arrive late to school in order to avoid what they see as a burdensome activity. What accounts for this rejection? Could it be that those who are unwilling to sing do not know the anthem? Or do they refuse to sing the anthem because they do not know the purpose of the activity? I would opt for the second reason. If citizenship aims at providing a unifying force to enable people to live together, and if moral values are an essential part of being a person, it is clear that some systematic attempt must be made to help the new generation to understand and develop a commitment to their role as

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citizens. This is why I am advocating the study of citizenship across the curriculum. The perception of political disengagement and cynicism among young people is another major factor behind this suggestion of introducing citizenship as a compulsory subject in Algerian schools. To date, to my knowledge, nothing has been undertaken to try and find remedies to the problems of the Algerian youth. In a more general sense, citizenship refers to a person’s moral quality as exemplified by his/her behaviour. Thus one is a good citizen if one is civicminded, that is one acts responsibly and honestly, obeys the laws, makes reasonable demands on the social and political systems and is cognisant of the interests of society at large. Citizenship teaching seeks both to promote certain forms of behaviour and to foster active citizens. Of course, it is impossible to impart knowledge about citizenship or morality without some kind of values framework. Sharing common values, such as human rights, tolerance, the equal right of all individuals to liberty, equal opportunities, democracy, justice and the rule of law, is essential to any civilised society. Taken together, these values provide the basis for a liberal worldview that lies at the heart of citizenship. These values are likely to be those that are central to the political institutions of the society. And this is where the pivotal role of schools comes into action. According to Derek Heater, there are three ways in which schools transmit values to children: 1) in the choice and selection of resources and materials to be studied; 2) in the identification of aims to be reached; and 3) through the hidden curriculum. Value judgements are implicit when decisions are made about what is to be studied and the reasons for doing so.14 And herein lies the main problem with the Algerian educational system. Algerian schools must thus adopt a more active and critical role in leading social change. The school has three distinct roles to play in values development: first, as a public institution, it should reflect the values on which the society is based. Second, it should increase students’ knowledge and understanding, including knowledge of the importance of values. The third and perhaps most important role of the school is to help students choose a rational path through the variety of influences that impinge on their developing values. The school helps pupils sift and evaluate the different influences on their values development. Moreover, the role of the school is unique in helping students to become critically reflective adults with a thought-through commitment

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to civic and moral values. By providing opportunities for discussion, reflection and increasing understanding, the school influences the twin processes of understanding citizenship and morality and of values development more generally. These begin in earliest childhood and go on throughout life. But it is important to note that learning values is not enough; pupils should also learn about values. The teaching of citizenship opens significant possibilities in terms of understanding how we might live. It aims at more than simply making students understand these values and the part they play in the institutions of society. Its main objective is to make students develop a commitment to them in practice. If the role of citizenship education is to encourage reflection on and commitment to society’s core values, the first step is to identify what those core values are. The core values with which Algerian youth must be imbued include honesty, humility, respect, patriotism and loyalty to the State. While patriotic songs, including the national anthem, cannot be relegated to the background in the affairs of the country, I believe that it is high time the school took the bull by the horns to educate the populace about the importance of the national anthem. As future leaders of the country, the youth must ensure that they know the country’s history and that the national anthem is a marker of their cultural identity as Algerians. They should also be taught how love and loyalty for one’s country promote unity among citizens. Only then will the youth be able to embrace people of other ethnic groups different from theirs and live together peacefully. Citizenship education can improve the lives of young people, empower them and lead to transformative action. It would also tackle their boredom with politics and their sense of disempowerment, counter their suspicion of institutionalised authority, reduce crime and even change the political culture of the country. In its narrow sense, citizenship education can help foster ‘politically literate citizens’.15 It should at least introduce students to a wide variety of possible ways of being an informed, committed and active citizen. For instance, students learn about civic virtue and the principles underpinning their society, about local, national and international governments, elections and political institutions, the legal system, citizens’ rights and responsibilities, democracy and participation, equal opportunities and race relations. The educational task of preparing students for citizenship of such a new Algerian State thus involves, in the first place, being conscious

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of the interests of others and the wider society and acting accordingly through cooperation, meeting community obligations. In my view, citizenship education would be the best guarantee for the Algerian nation to maintain the social bond in the future. Learning citizenship would strengthen civic feeling and integrate young people into social and professional life, thereby contributing to the process of the democratisation of civil society. Children who are able to identify injustice and exclusion are in a position to strive for justice and inclusion. This is, I believe, where the future of Algeria resides. To bring this book to a close, I would say that this citizenship research is not only about producing greater knowledge about Algeria, but it also aims at helping to bring about change through informing citizen action and state policy, strengthening the awareness and capacity for sustainable change. Of course, I do not pretend to have exhausted this subject. There are many other important aspects of the issue not addressed here. Nevertheless, I hope that this agenda, embedded in social development approaches, will provide insights into how to help marginalised people acquire political agency to pursue a dignified life. It is my hope that this book will not only contribute to a better understanding of the meanings of citizenship, but also contribute to the construction of a new democratic Algeria where the rights of all citizens become a reality.

GLOSSARY

Acade´mie Berbe`re Al Hakimia al-qiyam anthropos aarsh automaticite´ banlieue or cite´ barbar Bureaux Arabes Cantonnement

chaabi cheb cheikh cheikhas Citoyens Franc
ais Citoyennete´ commissaires-enqueˆteurs Commandant de cercle Conseil ge´ne´ral Controˆleurs d’identite´

Berber Academy divine sovereignty values man tribe autonomic acquisition of citizenship. suburb barbarian Arab offices a key state policy objective through which Algerians land-holding and land-use patters could be brought under control. type of Algerian music young person master for man for women. French citizens citizenship investigation commissioner circle commanders General Council identity inspectors

266

De´le´gations financie`res

djebr Djezar’ara de´ni identitaire douar-communes droit a` la diffe´rence e´coles normales e´coles indige`nes e´coles gourbis e´cole laique ´ete´ meutrier e´volue´s Fatwas faux franc
ais faux proble`me fidaı¨ fitna gale`re gendarmerie gharbzadih gourbi habus harem haraam hidjab Hizb fransa hogra ijma

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

The De´le´gations was an elected assembly established on 23 August 1898 in order to advise the colonial government on matters concerning taxes. It was composed of three groups. prepubescent girls’ marriage acronym for the Islamic Association for the Edification of Civilisation denial of identity local administrative units right to difference teacher training schools indigenous schools schools where native Algerians received rudimentary education even less than in e´coles indige`nes secular school deadly summer Gallicised Algerian Muslims who were French by education judicial rulings false French false problem revolutionary man division mess national police West-intoxicated small and precarious dwelling religious foundations women prohibited, inviolable but also sacred Muslim dress party of France (defectors from the French army to the ALN) contempt, marginalisation consensus of the people

GLOSSARY

imam imazighen istislam khol’a laı¨cite´ liberte´, e´galite´, fraternite´ mahram Majlis Achaabi Al Watani Majlis Al Umma makhzen

maquis Marche des Beurs Marche pour les droits civiques Maures meddahats medersa moujahidates m’tournis nashiz nouvelle citoyennete´ pieds noirs qadis raı¨ re´gime d’exception revendication Amazighe royaume arabe shaheed salam sharia statut civil de droit commun statut civil de droit local ta’til

267

religious man free people surrender money paid by women to their husbands to get divorced secularism liberty, equality and brotherhood male National People’s Assembly National Council in Arabic, makhzen literally means ‘shop, store’. In Moroccan language, it refers to the Moroccan state and its institutions military front March for Equality and Against Racism March for Civil Rights Moors women traditional singers Qur’anic school women fighters turncoats insubordinate wife new citizenship formerly, a person of French origin living in French-ruled Algeria man of law a form of folk music exceptional regime Berber claim Arab kingdom martyrs peace Islamic law civic status of common right civic status of local right suspension of the rule of god

268

tawhid thamazighth thaqbaı¨lith: Oule´mas umma vivre ensemble watani

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

oneness of God Berber language Kabyle dialect scientists nation/mother living together national, my nation

NOTES

Introduction 1. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, ‘Civil citizenship against social citizenship’, in Bart Van Steenbergeen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London, 1994), pp. 90 – 106, p. 90. 2. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, 1984). 3. Scarcity is the basis of all economic theory. By scarcity is meant that the resources of society can never be completely or systematically distributed in an egalitarian way. 4. Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, 1993), p. 20. 5. Ibid. 6. Cynthia Weber, ‘Designing safe citizens’, Citizenship Studies 12/2 (2008), pp. 125– 42, p. 125. 7. See Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950) and Citizenship and Social Development (New York, 1964). 8. This work is based on primary sources gathered at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM) in Aix-en-Provence, France, an annex of the French national archives and the repository for the documents of the Gouvernement ge´ne´rale d’Alge´rie (GGA). 9. John Gaventa, ‘Seeing like a citizen’, in Institute of Development Studies, Blurring the Boundaries: Citizen Action across States and Societies (Brighton, 2012), p. 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Anna Yeatman, Postmodern Revisionings of the Political (London, 1994). 14. The phrase ‘Third Wave Democracy’ also known as Democracy’s Third Wave, was coined by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington to refer to the third

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major surge of democracy in history. The first wave began in the early nineteenth century when suffrage was granted to the majority of white males in the United States; the second wave started with the Allied victory in World War II and the third wave began in 1974. 15. Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, in Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, ed. Raoul Girardet (Paris, 1997) (lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on 11 March 1882). 16. Ibid. ‘Avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore’ (translation mine).

Part I

Algeria under Colonial Eyes

1. These wars were the War of the Austrian Succession (1744 –8), the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 63), the War of the American Revolution (1778 – 83), the French Revolution (1793 – 1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803– 15). 2. France officially set up a protectorate over Tunisia from 12 May 1881 to 20 March 1956 and, by the Treaty of Fez of 30 March 1912, it established a protectorate in Morocco, nominally maintaining the role of the Sultan while effectively controlling economic and political life in the kingdom.

Chapter 1 The Pacification of Algeria 1. Algeria sits at the crossroads of the Atlantic, European, Arab and African worlds, and was known as the Regency, the land of the Berbers. In the late eighteenth century, this land became part of the ‘Barbary Coast’. For about three centuries, it had harboured the cruiser ships of the corsairs who raided the mainland of southern Europe, exacting money, attacking vessels sailing in the Mediterranean including those of the independent United States and taking a great part of the population off into slavery. The United States paid huge sums of money in return for a promise that the pirates would not accost US shipping but even this could not stop the pirates. By 1815, Congress launched naval action against the so-called Barbary States, the then independent states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. The bombardment of Algiers under the commander Stephen Decatur ended up in a Treaty between the Untied States and the Regency. 2. Following Napoleon I’s deposition in 1814, the Allies restored the Bourbon Dynasty to the French throne. The ensuing period was known as the Restoration. 3. Nicolas de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progre`s historiques de l’esprit humain (Paris, 1988), p. 269. 4. Although originating in the early seventeenth century, assimilation emerged as a clearly defined doctrine in the wake of the 1789 revolution. This doctrine,

NOTES TO PAGES 22 –29

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

271

based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the main constitutional document of the Revolution, with its solemn commitment that ‘men are born free and live free and in equal rights’, rests on the principle that equality, fraternity and freedom should apply to anyone who was French, regardless of race or colour; thus, rights of citizenship, including political rights, had been extended to residents of the cantons of Saint-Louis in Senegal in the 1790s. Paradoxically, assimilation was predicated on a presumption of the superiority of French culture and ‘civilisation’. Although heavily influenced by the political philosophy of the Enlightenment and by Enlightenment principles of human rights, the doctrine of natural rights held to be universal and valid in all times and places, individual rights in French-ruled Algeria frequently became synonymous with anarchy and subversion. This phrase was used by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, when Kurtz plundered the Congo region. It was also used by Pe´lissier, the French soldier who set fire to the caves of Nacmaria in Algeria. Cf. Jean-Francois Delfraissy, Colonisation de l’Alge´rie par le syste`me de colonisation du Mare´chal Bugeaud (Algiers, 1871), p. 13. Quoted in Jean-Pierre Bois, Bugeaud (Paris, 1999), p. 379. Ibid., pp. 320– 1. Farriadis Fleurus Duvivier, Solution de la question de l’Alge´rie (Paris, 1841), pp. 285– 6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York and London, 1956), p. 77. Archives Nationales, section d’Outre-Mer (hereafter CAOM), 2EE 11, Bugeaud to Pe´lissier, 23 June 1845. ‘The whole city is enveloped with a delicious smell of grilled meat’ (italics mine). Cf. Pierre Francois Joseph Bosquet, Lettres du Mare´chal Bosquet a` sa me`re, 1829– 1858 (Pau, 1877). Lucien-Francois de Montagnac, Lettres d’un soldat: neuf anne´es de campagnes en Afrique (Paris, 1885), p. 308. Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, 2001), p.70. Claude-Henri Saint-Simon was an influential economic and social thinker of the French Revolution and post-revolutionary period who took the view that the French Revolution had proceeded at such a hectic pace on the political front that the economy had been left behind. His vision of the economic future of France was one where investment should be concentrated in manufacturing and industry, and it would follow the English example which he considered to be the route to future French prosperity. Cited by Magali Morsy, North Africa 1800– 1900: A Survey from the Nile Valley to the Atlantic (New York, 1984), p. 160. Benjamin Stora, Histoire de l’Alge´rie coloniale: 1830– 1954 (Paris, 1991), p. 25.

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Chapter 2 Citizenship under Colonial Rule 1. The section dealing with the French language has been published in my article entitled ‘The syndrome of the French language in Algeria’, International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3/3 (2009), pp. 77 –89. Permission for reproduction has been obtained from the publisher. 2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1961), p. 250. 3. Cf. Peter P. Ekeh, ‘Colonialism and the two publics in Africa: a theoretical statement’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 17/1 (January 1975), pp. 91 – 112. 4. Cf. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996). 5. Pierre Bourdieu, The Alge´riens, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston, 1962), p. 121. 6. Emile Larcher and Georges Rectenwald, Traite´ historique, the´orique et pratique des juridictions re´pressives musulmanes en Alge´rie (Algiers, 1931), p. 9; for the civil aspect of the Decree, cf. Emile Larcher, Traite´ e´le´mentaire de le´gislation alge´rienne, 2nd edn (Paris, 1911), pp. ii, 155– 6. Translation mine. 7. Kamel Kateb, Europe´ens, ‘indige`nes’ et juifs en Alge´rie (1830 – 1962): repre´sentations et re´alite´s des populations (Paris, 2001), p. 194. 8. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture: Discussing Post-Colonial Culture (London, 1996), p. 152. 9. Ferry was a staunch defender of colonialism during the second colonial empire and Minister of Public Instruction in the 1880s. 10. Albert Camus, ‘Mise`re de la Kabylie’, Chroniques alge´riennes 1939– 1958, Essais (Paris, 1965), p. 921. 11. A qadi is a man of law. 12. Teacher Training schools. 13. Indigenous schools. A gourbi is a small and precarious dwelling. 14. CAOM, B3058, ‘Plan d’e´tudes et programmes de l’enseignement primaire des indige`nes en Alge´rie’ (August 1898), p. 9. 15. Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), Introduction. 16. For more details, see Mohamed Teguia, L’Alge´rie en guerre (Alger, 1982), pp. 19–20. 17. Adolphe Cre´mieux was a French-Jewish lawyer and statesman and a staunch defender of the Jews’ human rights in France. He served in the 1848 government. 18. Michel Abitbol, Le Passe´ d’une Discorde. Juifs et Arabes depuis le VIe`me sie`cle (Paris, 2003). 19. This myth is dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 6. 20. Mohamed Teguia relates other similar uprisings occurring in 1872, in the south of Constantine, Biskra, Touggourt and Ouargla; in 1876 in the Ziban; in 1879 in the Aure`s; in 1881 in the southern part of Oran under the leadership of Bouamama; in 1882 in the M’Zab region. See Teguia, L’Alge´rie en guerre, p. 18. 21. Circle commanders and district commanders were the chief judges of the Indige´nat legal code in the area they headed.

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22. Cf. Sidi Mohammed Barkat, Le Corps d’ exception: les artifices du pouvoir colonial et la destruction de la vie (Paris, 2005). 23. Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana and placed in solitary confinement. Two years later evidence came to light identifying Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a French Army major, as the real culprit. 24. Gallicized Algerian Muslims also known as e´volue´s were Arabs by tradition and Frenchmen by education. 25. Cf. Ali Merad, Le Re´formisme musulman en Alge´rie, 1925– 1940 (Paris, 1967). 26. ‘Pied-noir’, literally meaning ‘Black-Foot’, is a term that refers to people of French and other European ancestry who lived in French Algeria. The term is sometimes also used to include the indigenous Jewish population who settled in the Maghreb long before the French invasion of Algeria in1830. 27. The Jonnart Law of 1919 allowed Muslim men who renounced their right to be judged according to Muslim law to become French citizens. 28. In Barbarie coloniale en Afrique (Algiers, 2002), Amar Belkhodja reveals some other scenes of horror lived through by Algerian people such as the mutiny in the douar of Deschmya in April 1948, the night of terror experienced by the Muslim population on 30 April 1949 in Baba Ali in Mascara, the tragedy that occurred in Sid Ali Bounab douar in October 1949 and the butchery that occurred in El-Asnam on 14 May 1952. 29. Women’s citizenship will be dealt with in a separate chapter. 30. Cited in Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria (Trenton, 1991), p. 95.

Part II

Reframing Citizenship

1. Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York, 1992). 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologie de l’Alge´rie (Paris, 1962). 3. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996).

Chapter 3 The Construction of the Post-Colonial Nation 1. Gilbert Grandguillaume, ‘Comment a-t-on pu arriver la`?’, Esprit 208 (January 1995), pp. 12 – 34. 2. James Ciment, Algeria: The Fundamentalist Challenge (New York, 1997), p. 18. 3. Ben Bella was a key figure in the Algerian independence movement. As an organiser of the Comite´ Revolutionaire d’Unite´ et d’Action and later of the Front de Libe´ration Nationale (FLN), Ben Bella was a founder member of the

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and instrumental in the subsequent armed revolt that eventually led to independence from French rule. Trinh T. Min-Ha, ‘Not you/like you: postcolonial women and the interlocking question of identity and difference’, in Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, 1989), p. 58. Ibid., pp. 16 – 7. On arrival at Tunis airport with his former prison companions, where they were awaited by President Bourguiba, Ben Bella stepped up to the microphone and with great vigour proclaimed ‘Nous sommes des Arabes!’ The Fourth International (FI), created and established in France in 1938, is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky (Trotskyites) whose goal was to help the working class bring about socialism. Trotsky and his disciples, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Third International to have become ‘lost to’ Stalinism and incapable of leading the international working class to political power. The Trotskyites thus, founded their own, competing ‘Fourth International’. It is worth noted that the Trotskyites had a long history of involvement in the Algerian Revolution, having been one of the first groups in Europe to support the cause of the FLN. Michel Raptis, alias Pablo, once head of the Fourth International, has worked for the FLN since the very start of the war of liberation and in early 1962 was commissioned to draw up a project for a land reform in Algeria. In the fall of 1962, Ben Bella named Raptis to the special commission set up to study the institution of a self-management system in Algeria. He also appointed Luftallah Solliman, an exiled Egyptian Trotskyite, and Mohamed Tahiri, a Moroccan land reformer expert sympathetic to the Trotskyite philosophy. The Algerian members of the commission, among them Mohamed Harbi, later Director of the weekly Re´volution Africaine, and Abdelkader Maachou, director of the newly created Bureau National des Biens Vacants, were intellectuals of similar persuasion. These were Hocine Ait Ahmed, Mohamed Boudiaf, Belkacem Krim, Rabah Bitat, Larbi Ben M’Hidi, Mourad Didouche,Moustafa Ben Boulaid, Mohamed Khider and Ben Bella. Articles 2 and 3, Constitution of 27 June 1976. The Charter was adopted by national referendum on 27 June 1976 and became the country’s new constitution after a second referendum in November 1976. The Berber question will be discussed in Chapter 6. The Islamist challenge to the nation state will be explored in Chapter 4. Amartya Sen, ‘Democracy as a universal value’, Journal of Democracy 10/3 (1999), pp. 13 –6. Gay W. Seidman, ‘Facing the new international context of development’, in Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs and Jill Cutler (eds), Global Visions (Boston, 1993), p. 179. R.A. Dahl, ‘A democratic paradox’, Political Science Quarterly 115/1 (2000), pp. 35 – 40, p. 38.

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16. Ibid., p. 38. 17. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, 1996), p. 28. 18. Yves Me´ny and Yves Surel (eds), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 7 – 10. 19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York and London, 1956), p. 299. 20. Variations in definitions of membership in a political community have their roots in the different historical experiences and, more specifically, different circumstances surrounding the building of that political community. 21. Cf. Freedom House, ‘Democracy momentum sustained as “Freedom’s Century” ends’ (New York, 1999). Available at https://freedomhouse.org/article/ democracy-momentum-sustained#.VG8UAoeJf8s (last accessed 20 November 2014). 22. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, 2003), p. 11. 23. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London and New York, 1993). 24. Cf. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, 1957). 25. See http://www.mevs.org/index.html. 26. Not all Arabs are Muslims. 27. Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America (Princeton, 2002), pp. 14 – 5. 28. Ibid., p. 23. 29. Ibid. 30. See Lisa Anderson, Transitions to Democracy (Columbia, 1999). 31. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in the American City (New Haven, 1961). 32. Andre´ Be´teille, Antinomies of Society: Essays on Ideologies and Institutions (New Delhi, 2000), p. 179. 33. Robert I. Rotberg, ‘Failed states, collapsed states, weak states: causes and consequences’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Cambridge MA and Washington DC, 2003), pp. 1– 29. 34. Patrick Bond, Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance (Cape Town, 2001). 35. Constitution of 1963, Art. 13. 36. Constitution of 1976, Art. 128. 37. Ibid., Art. 8. 38. Constitution of 1989, Art. 10 – 1. 39. Mohamed Talbi, ‘A record of failure’, in Larry Diamond et al. (eds), Islam and Democracy in the Middle East (Baltimore and London, 2003), pp. 1 – 12, p. 5.

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Chapter 4 Challenges to the Nation State: Violence and Belonging 1. Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, Collected Works Vol. 3 (New York, 1976). 2. Davis Lehmann, ‘Religion and globalisation’, in Linda Woodhead et al. (eds), Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations (Routledge, 2002), pp. 299– 315; p. 300. 3. Henrietta Moore, A Passion for Difference (Cambridge, 1994), p. 2. 4. Cited in Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion: anthropological study’, in David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 13 (1968), pp. 398– 406, p. 402. 5. Robert D. Nye, Three Psychologies: Perspectives from Freud, Skinner and Rogers (Belmont, 1999), pp. 7 – 43. 6. Vamik Volkan, Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts (Charlottesville, 2006), p. 17. 7. Ibid. 8. Robert Scott Appleby, ‘Religion as an agent of conflict transformation and peacebuilding’, in Chester Crocker et al. (eds), Turbulent Peace: the Challenges of Managing International Conflict (Washington DC, 2001), p. 824. 9. Robert Scott Appleby, Ambivalence of the Sacred (New York, 2000), pp. 78 – 9. 10. Jocelyne Cesari, When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and in the United States (New York, 2004), p. 35. 11. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York, 1996). 12. Cf. Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York, 2002). For instance, she wondered why the label of Catholic terrorism had never been used for IRA bombings. 13. James Ciment, Algeria: The Fundamentalist Challenge (New York, 1997), p. 63. 14. Text available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ (last accessed 21 November 2014). 15. Nilufer Gole, ‘Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries’, Public Culture 14/1 (2002), pp. 173– 90, p. 174. 16. Ibid. 17. It should be noted that some of these organisations existed well before 1989. The organisation of working women, for instance, dates back to the 1970s. 18. Ali Kafi, the head of the national organisation of war veterans, succeeded him. 19. Cited in Francois Burgat and William Dowell, The Islamic Movement in North Africa (Austin, 1993), p. 125. 20. Part of what follows has been published in Malika Rebai Maamri, Nehama Verbin and Everett L. Worthington Jr (eds), A Journey through Forgiveness (Oxford, 2010). 21. See Gareth Evans, ‘The responsibility to protect: an idea whose time has come. . . and gone?’, International Relations 22/3 (2008), pp. 283– 9.

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22. Houston Chronicle, ‘We cried . . . but no one came: scores await burial as survivors describe massacres in Algeria’, A32, 31 August 1997. 23. Rachid Khiari, ‘Days of massacres, bombs and fighting kill more than 150 in Algeria’, Associated Press (6 September 1997). 24. Agence France Press, ‘63 civilians massacred in Algeria’, 6 September 1997. 25. Francois d’Alancon, ‘Alge´rie. A trois jours des e´lections municipales, Bentalha continue de panser ses plaies’, La Croix, 21 October 1997, p. 10. 26. I myself nearly lost two of my children. A young terrorist pursued my little son after he left his school, trying to make him take a bag, which contained a bomb, to his mother whom he said he knew. Another bomb exploded in a secondary school where my daughter studied. That explosive disembowelled many girls. 27. It is worth noting, however, that most political parties refused to send representatives to the NCT and called for genuine parliamentary representation. 28. Cf. Christopher Bennett, ‘The varieties of retributive experience’, The Philosophical Quarterly 52/207 (2002), pp. 145–63 and his ‘Is amnesty a collective act of forgiveness?’, Contemporary Political Theory 2/1 (2003), pp. 67–76. 29. Law no. 99-08 of 13 July 1999. 30. Donald W. Shriver Jr, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (Oxford, 1995), p. 58. 31. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York, 2001), p. 39. 32. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Nas (Stanford, 1999), p. 4. 33. Hannah Arendt, Crisis of the Republic (New York, 1959), p. 163. 34. ‘J’accuse, mais, je pardonne’, cited in Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford, 1999), p. 93.

Chapter 5

Algerian Women’s Struggle for Recognition

1. Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child (New York, 1987), p. 94. 2. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Boston, 1972). 3. Marnia Lazreg, ‘Citizenship and gender in Algeria’, in Suad Joseph (ed.), Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (New York, 2000), p. 60. 4. Chandrea Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Torres Lourdes (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, 1991), p. 72. 5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London, 1987), p. 306. 6. Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Cambridge, 2002). 7. Cf. Charles Tilly (ed.), Citizenship, Identity and Social History (New York, 1996). 8. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley, ‘Is feminism relevant to Arab women?’, Third World Quarterly 25/3 (2004), pp. 521– 36. 9. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World in the C19th and C20th: History of the Women’s Movement (Philadelphia, 1982).

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10. During a symposium to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Code of Personal Status at the Library of Congress in November 2006, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor depicted Tunisia’s Code as the most progressive law in the Arab world, a model for other countries in the Islamic world in the field of gender legislation. 11. Cf. Mounira Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley, 2001). Marriage and family law in Algeria were based on an substantial regional and even individual variation from customary law among the Kabyle people, to the Ibadite code of the Mzab and the minority Hanafi school of law, but the Maliki variant of Sunni law was predominant and it was this that was largely applied in the move to create a unified system of law. 12. Cited in Suzan Ilcan, Longing in Belonging: The Cultural Politics of Settlement (Westport and London, 2002), p. 19. 13. Cf. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary, trans. (New York, 1998), Surat 9; Surat 23. 14. Cf. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington, 1987). 15. See Ryme Seferdjeli, ‘French “reforms” and Muslim women’s emancipation during the Algerian War’, Journal of North African Studies 9/4 (2004), pp. 24 – 5. 16. Debates on Women’s Condition at the Economic and Social Council, letter of 12 March 1952 from Roger Le´onard to Minister of the Interior, CAOM 10CAB22. 17. ‘Convention on the Political Rights of Women’, UN General Assembly, Year 7 (20 December 1952). Available at http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3b08. html (accessed 16 September 2012). 18. CAOM, FM 81, F1218. 19. One such moudjahidate, Baya Hocine, then aged 17, was condemned to death, then reprieved and spent the rest of the liberation struggle in jail until Algerian Independence in 1962. She was accused of planting a bomb in an Algiers stadium, killing two people and injuring 24 others. Moudjahidate Malika Koriche was jailed in August 1957 after planting two bombs in a beach in the vicinity of Algiers. 20. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford, 1995), p. 7. 21. Cited in Nora Benallegue, ‘Algerian women in the struggle for independence and reconstruction’, International Social Science 35/4 (1983), pp. 703– 17. 22. Cf. Chikwenye Ogunyemi, ‘Womanism: the dynamics of the contemporary black female novel in English’, Signs 11/1 (1985), pp. 63 – 80. 23. The large proportion of rural women was a reflection not only of the limited urbanisation of Algeria, as Djamila Amrane noted, but also of the fact that most of the war was fought in the countryside. 24. ‘The Battle of Algiers’ is the name given by the French military and media to the period comprising January to September 1957 during which Algiers was under military siege. 25. Djamila Amrane, Les Femmes Alge´riennes dans la Guerre (Paris, 1991), p. 90.

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26. El Moudjahid 26, 4 July 1958. Statement made at the Women’s Democratic Federation in Vienna (1– 5 June 1958). 27. El Moudjahid 72, 1 November 1960. 28. Zhor Zerari, interview by El Watan, 24 March 2005. 29. Cited by Neil MacMaster, ‘The Colonial “emancipation” of Algerian women: the Marriage Law of 1959 and the failure of legislation on women’s rights in the post-independence era’, Vienna Journal of African Studies 12 (2007), pp. 91 – 116. 30. Cited in Amrane, Les Femmes Alge´riennes dans la Guerre, pp. 123– 46. 31. El Moudjahid, 23 March 1963. 32. Maurice Borrmans, Statut Personnel et Famille au Maghreb de 1940 a` nos jours (Paris, 1977), p. 539. 33. He´le`ne Vandevelde-Daillere, Femmes alge´riennes a` travers la condition fe´minine dans le constantinois depuis l’inde´pendance (Algiers, 1980), pp. 374–5. 34. Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York, 1994), p. 151. 35. Danie`le Djamila Amrane-Minne and Farida Abu-Haidar, ‘Women and politics in Algeria from the war of independence to our day’, Research in African Literatures 30/3 (Autumn 1999), pp. 62 – 77. 36. Charte d’Alger: Ensemble des textes adopte´s par le 1er congre`s du Parti du Front de Libe´ration Nationale (Algiers, 1964), pp. 81 – 2. 37. Ibid., p. 82. 38. Alge´rie, naissance d’une socie´te´ nouvelle: Le texte inte´gral de la Charte nationale adopte´e par le peuple Alge´rien (Algiers, 1976), p. 163. 39. Ibid., p. 163. 40. Ibid. Italics mine. 41. Code de la famille (Algiers, 1993). 42. Marie-Blanche Tahon, Alge´rie: La guerre contre les civils (Montreal, 1998), p. 20. 43. Cf. Amrane and Abu-Haidar ‘Women and politics in Algeria’. 44. Toumi, known as Khalida Messaoudi before her divorce, was Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2014. In Khalida Messaoudi and Elisabeth Schemia, Unbowed: An Algerian Woman Confronts Islamic Fundamentalism (trans. Anne C. Vila (Philadelphia, 1998), Toumi highlighted the FIS’ totalitarian attitude. 45. Cited in Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czecoslovakia, 1918– 1950 (Pittsburgh, 2006). 46. Halim Barakat, The Arab World: Society, Culture and State (Berkeley, 1993), p. 98. 47. Law 84 – 11, in Journal official de la re´publique de´mocratique et populaire d’Alge´rie, 9 June 1984. 48. Ibid., pp. 19 – 21. 49. See Vandevelde-Daillere, Femmes alge´riennes, pp. 68 – 9. 50. See Articles 52, 62 and 65. 51. The 2014 revision of the constitution corrected this injustice. 52. The collective created in 1991– 2 brought together a number of independent organisations struggling to promote women’s rights in the three countries of the Maghreb – Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. It chose Morocco as its

280

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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headquarters when women’s rights were most advanced in Tunisia. It is helpful to consult Rabe´a Naciri’s Preface to Auto-portrait d’un mouvement, in which she writes that the collective’s mission was ‘to contribute to the consolidation of a Maghrebi movement for equality between men and women’ in a context where there was ‘terror and barbarian fanaticism in Algeria, a restriction of free spaces in Tunisia, some democratic although fragile advances in Morocco, always under threat by a phenomenon common to the region: the fear of women and the strong and ever-present desire to dominate them.’ Cf. Collectif 95 (2003a), p. 3. Other networks followed, such as Aicha, formed in 1993, which brought together independent women’s associations in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan and Tunisia. Their objective is to fight the abuse of women and campaign for women’s rights. The Court of Arab Women, formed in 1996, struggles against violence against women in public and in private. The Sisterhood Is Global Institute (SIGI), formed in 1998, works in Jordan to strengthen women’s rights by offering women training in communications and technology. The Maghreb/Mashreq Network for Information and Training on Gender, formed in 2000, promotes discussion of women’s conditions in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and Algeria. Bouguerra Soltani a` propos du Code de la Famille, ‘Incitation a` la de´sobe´issance civile’, El Watan (11 September 2004). ‘Re´vision du code de la famille. Des conservateurs s’opposent’, El Watan, 1 August 2004. The MRN or El Islah was founded in 1999 after a schism with El Nahda, Mouvement de la Renaissance Islamique, which chose a more cooperative tendency with the regime. In the 2002 legislative elections it gained 43 seats. FLN et Code de la Famille. ‘Daadoua appelle a` “un referendum”’, El Watan, 1 September 2004. ‘Les partis politiques et le nouveau code de la famille’, Le Quotidien d’Oran, 21 August 2004. The MSP wanted to restore its political credibility. The MRN, for its part, endeavoured to capitalise on an identitarian/religious issue in order to boost its consensus and the FLN wanted to circumvent the risk that such a sensitive issue would turn out to strengthen the MRN. Cited in Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Berkeley, 1989), p. 157. Cf. ‘Communique´ du Conseil de Gouvernement’, 18 August 2004. Available at www.cg.gov.dz/dossiers/communiques/Conseil%20GVT/com-cg-18-08-2004. htm (accessed 20 April 2012) (link no longer working). Carol C. Gould and Pascale Pasquino (eds), Cultural Identity and the Nation-State (Oxford and New York, 1988), p. 294. Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p.110. Cited in Gisela Bock and Susan Mames (eds), Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity (London and New York, 1992), p. 29.

NOTES TO PAGES 140 –165

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64. ‘The world’s women 1995’, United Nations Development Programme (New York, 1995), p. 41. 65. Pippa Norris, Politics and Sexual Equality: The Comparative Position of Women in Western Democracies (Boulder, 1987), p. 129. 66. Cf. Wilma Rule and Joseph Francis Zimmerman (eds), Electoral Systems in Comparative Perspective: Their Impact on Women and Minorities (Westport, 1994). 67. Hannah Arendt’s most important contribution to political thought has been summarised in her often-cited notion of the ‘right to have rights’. The philosopher and political theorist attempted to re-formulate human rights, invoking the right of each and every individual to be a member of a political community, so that every individual’s basic rights are protected by the community to which s/he belongs. 68. Cf. Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is not One?, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, 1985). 69. In The Liberation of Women and The New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism (Cairo, 1899), Qasim Amin linked the deterioration of Islamic society to the inferior status of women. For progress to be achieved, he claimed that women needed education, employment and respect, all due by right by Islam. He thus called for an improvement of the status of Arab women. 70. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 44. 71. Cf. Naila Kabeer (ed.), Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions (London, 2005). 72. The phrase ‘ethic of care’ (responsibilities) as distinguished from ‘ethic of justice (rights) was first coined by Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambidge, MA, 1982) to describe what she believed to be the two different modes of moral reasoning reflected in feminine and masculine thought. 73. In Rawls ‘s view, two general principles of justice structure society in the real world: 1) The Principle of Equal Liberty by which each individual has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all. 2) The Difference Principle: Social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity. 74. Maxine Molyneux, ‘Refiguring citizenship: research perspectives on gender justice in the Latin American and Caribbean region’, in Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay and Navsharan Singh (eds), Gender Justice, Citizenship and Development (New Delhi, 2007), pp. 58 –115, p. 64. 75. This idea informed efforts to advance reforms in the domains of family and sexuality, and influenced the ways in which the campaigns against gender violence were waged. 76. Adriana Cavarero, ‘Equality and sexual difference: amnesia in political thought’, in Bock and Mames, Beyond Equality and Difference, pp. 32 –47, p. 45.

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Chapter 6 The Imazighen’s Quest for Inclusion 1. Dario Durando, ‘The rediscovery of ethnic identity’, Telos 97 (Candor, 1993), p. 24. 2. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992). 3. Cf. Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, ‘An integrative theory of intergroup conflict’, in William G. Austin and Worchel S. Wentzel (eds), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (Monterey, 1979), pp. 33 – 47. 4. Cf. Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, 1997). 5. Ibid. 6. Ole Wæver et al., Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London, 1993), p. 23. 7. Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford, 1996), p. 8. 8. Quoted in Aberrazek Dourari, ‘ Pluralisme linguistique et unite´ nationale: perspectives pour l’officialisation des varie´te´s berbe`res’, in Pluralisme et identite´ au Maghreb (Paris, 1987), p. 45. The original text reads as follows: ‘En fait il n’y a aujourd’hui ni langue Berbe`re dans le sens ou` celle-ci serait le reflet d’une communaute´ ayant conscience de son unite´ ni un peuple Berbe`re et encore moins une race Berbe`re . . . et cependant les Berbe`res existent’ (Translation mine). 9. Robert Brock Le Page and Andre´e Tabouret-Keller, Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge, 1985). 10. Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethno-political Conflicts (Washington DC, 1993), p. 3. 11. Rogers Brubaker, ‘Migration, membership, and the modern nation-state: internal and external dimensions of the politics of belonging migration and membership’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41/1 (2010), pp. 61–78, p. 65. 12. Ibid. 13. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des e´tablissements et du commerce des Europe´ens dans l’Afrique septentrionale (Paris, 1826). 14. Euge`ne Guernier, La Berbe´rie, l’Islam, et la Francaise: le destin de l’Afrique du Nord, vol. 2 (Paris, 1950), pp. 171–3, p. 173. 15. Edouard Lape`ne, Vingt-six mois a` Bougie (Paris, 1839), p. 177. 16. Ibid., pp. 117– 8. 17. Francois Ducuing, ‘La guerre de montagne. La Navarre et La Kabylie’, Review des Mondes 9 (January – March 1851), pp. 661– 700. 18. Cited in Patricia M.E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London, 1995), p. 30. 19. Emile Fe´lix Gautier, ‘Le cadre ge´ographique de l’histoire en Alge´rie’, in Jean Alazard, Histoire et historiens de l’Alge´rie (Paris, 1931), p. 34. 20. In an interview, which caused a considerable stir, Monseigneur Lavigerie criticised the colonial authorities for impeding the missionaries in carrying out

NOTES TO PAGES 174 –182

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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their work: ‘If we had not been interfered with, Kabylia would now be Christian’, he asserted. Cf. Le Temps, 17 March 1887. Abdelmajid M. Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (Portsmouth, 2001), p. 344. Gilles Boetsch and Jean-Noe¨l Ferrie, Le paradigme berbe`re: approche de la logique classificatoire des anthropologues francais du XIXe sie`cle (Paris, 1989), p. 262. Pascal Duprat, Essai historique sur les races anciennes et modernes de l’Afrique septentrionale (Paris, 1845). Pellissier Reynaud de, Annales Alge´riennes (Algiers, 1854). Hannoum, Colonial Histories, p. 347. Cited in Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France (Bloomington, 2004), pp. 53 – 5. Euge`ne Bodichon, Conside´rations sur l’Alge´rie (Paris, 1845). Antoine Ernest Hippolyte Carette, Etudes sur la Kabilie propement dite, 2 vols (Paris, 1848), p. 6. For further details on this topic see Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination masculine (Paris, 1998), p. 134. ‘Arabs, Arab bureaux, Arab affairs, Arab kingdom, time and again Arab, only Arab’ (translation mine). Cf. Jules Duval and Auguste Warnier, Bureaux arabes et colons: re´ponse au Constitutionnel pour faire suite aux lettres a` M. Rouher (Paris, 1869), pp. 115– 25, pp. 177– 8. Ismay¨l Urbain, ‘Les Kabyles du Djurdjura’, Revue de Paris 36 (1 March 1857), pp. 91 – 110. Silverstein, Algeria in France, p. 44. There was no official Berber policy as was the case with Morocco’s Berber Dahir. Lorcin, Imperial Identities, p. 175. Cited in Silverstein, Algeria in France, p. 69. Salem Chaker, ‘L’affirmation identitaire berbe`re a` partir de 1900. Constantes et mutations (Kabylie)’, Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Me´diterrane´e 44/44 (1987), pp. 13 –34, p. 17. ‘La nation alge´rienne, arabe et musulmane, existe depuis le VIIe sie`cle’ (translation mine). Ted Robert Gurr, People versus States (Washington DC, 2000), p. 5. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 65 – 6. Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, 1995), p. 64. Ibid., p. 146. Salem Chaker, ‘Documents sur les pre´curseurs: A.S. Boulifa et M. A. Lechani’, in S. Chaker (ed.), Berbe`res: une identite´ en construction, special issue of Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Me´diterrane´e, 44 (October 1987), pp. 97– 115. Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche, whose Kabyle parents converted to Christianity, was a prominent figure in Franco-Algerian letters in the last three decades of the colonial era. He wrote Chants berbe`res de Kabylie (Paris, 1939), republished in

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44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

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Paris in 1986 and the famous essay, ‘L’e´ternel Jugurtha: propositions sur le ge´nie africain,’ L’Arche (Paris, 1946). Mouloud Mammeri is widely regarded as the intellectual giant of Algerian Berberism. He was a prolific writer of novels and poetry in French. He was the author of La colline oublie´e (Paris, 1952); Le sommeil du juste (Paris, 1955); L’opium et le baton (Paris, 1965); as well as the editor of important collections of Kabyle poetry such as Les isefra: poe`mes de Si Mohand ou M’Hand (Paris, 1969) and Poe`mes kabyles anciens (Paris, 1980). He held the chair of Berber at the University of Algiers from 1967 until its abolition in the early 1970s. In March 1969, he became the director of the Centre de Recherche en Anthropologie Pre´historique et Ethnographique (CRAPE) in Algiers, in which capacity he inspired many other researchers and especially oversaw research on the various Berber dialects in Algeria and the production of dictionaries. Chaker, ‘L’affirmation identitaire berbe`re a` partir de 1900’, p. 17. Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 1830– 2000: A Short History (New York, 2001), p. 62. Chaker, ‘L’affirmation identitaire berbe`re a` partir de 1900’, p. 19. Stora, Algeria, 1830– 2000, p. 125. The president answered a journalist of the local channel that he was not against Tamazighth, but that it should be written only in Arabic characters. Berber expression meaning Berber Spring The revised Constitution ratified on 28 November 1996 explicitly consecrated l’Amazighite´ alongside l’Islamite´ and l’Arabite´ as one of the three fundamental components of Algeria’s national identity. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), p. 80. Ibid. Fariza Slimani, member of the RCD National Executive and President of the Collectif des Femmes De´mocratiques de Kabylie; ICG interview, Tizi Ouzou, 18 January 2003. Beni Douala is both the name of a commune (baladiyya) and that of an administrative district. He was interviewed by ICG on 17 January 2003. ICG interview, Tizi Ouzou, 18 January 2003. The name ‘Aarch’ means tribe in Arabic and stems from a traditional model of inter-village councils that would convene when the region experienced a crisis or threat from the outside. The gendarmerie performs two functions in addition to its general role as a kind of Highway Patrol. As a paramilitary security force it has been very actively involved in the anti-terrorism campaign across Algeria. It also performs the function of an investigative police force in the countryside. Criminal activities investigated by the Sureˆte´ Nationale in the towns are investigated by the gendarmerie in rural districts. Cf. Ahmed Kaci, ‘Cole`re pour une dignite´’, La Tribune, 25 April 2001, and especially his article in La Tribune, 28 April 2001, where he wrote: ‘Ce serait

NOTES TO PAGES 194 –204

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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un . . . crime que de re´duire le ras-le-bol actuel des jeunes, parce que s’exprimant pour l’instant en Kabylie, a` la question linguistique et identitaire.’ In addition to official statements, we might note the declaration on 26 April of Djamel Ferdjallah, the RCD’s vice-president and one of the party’s deputies for the administrative region of Bejaia, that ‘these demonstrations are an expression of deep resentment by the Berber population over its identity and cultural claims’ (Reuters). Statistics released in 2002 by the Algerian Human Rights League reported the death of 90 people and 5,000 injured, of which 200 were maimed, as well as thousands of arrests, torture and arbitrary detentions. London’s newspapers reported that allowing troops to move against demonstrators was a direct response ‘to a Berber-led anti-government march by almost a million people last week in the capital’. ‘Le proble`me de la Kabylie est qu’elle s’oublie, a` chaque fois, en cours de route et perd de vue la raison initiale de son entreprise: celle de la reconqueˆte de sa souverainete´.’ See John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861). All the extracts from the Constitution are taken from the Algerian government official website at http://www.conseilconstitutionnel-dz.org/Arabe/IndexArab. htm (accessed on 25 March 2013). Robert Alan Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, 1989), p. 207. Aristide R. Zolberg, ‘Splitting the difference: federalization without federalism in Belgium’, in Milton J. Esman (ed.), Ethnic Conflicts in the Western World (New York, 1977), pp. 103– 42, p. 140.

Chapter 7 Negotiating Existence in Emigration: Algerian Immigrants in France 1. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York, 1993), p. 30. 2. It is worth noting that boundaries can be inclusive or exclusive depending on how they are perceived by other people. An exclusive boundary arises, for example, when a person adopts a marker that imposes restrictions on the behaviour of others. An inclusive boundary is created, by contrast, by the use of a marker with which other people are ready and able to associate. At the same time, however, an inclusive boundary will also impose restrictions on the people it has included by limiting their inclusion within other boundaries. 3. Cf. Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992). 4. Ibid., p. 51. 5. Stephen Castles, ‘How nation-states respond to immigration and ethnic diversity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 21/3 (1995), pp. 293– 308, p. 297. 6. Greenfield, Nationalism, p. 50.

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7. I am borrowing Etienne Balibar’s expression. Cf. Etienne Balibar, ‘World borders, political borders’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 117/1 (2002), pp. 71 – 8. 8. UN doc. CCPR General Comment 23, The Rights of Minorities (8 April 1994), para. 6.2. Emphasis added. 9. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, 1990). 10. Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, 2008), pp. 1 –4. 11. Cf. Rogers Brubaker, ‘The return of assimilation: changing perspectives on immigration and its sequels in France, Germany and the United States’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 24/4 (4 July 2001), pp. 531– 48. 12. COM, 379 final, Social Policy Agenda (Brussels, 2000), p. 22. 13. Communication from the Commission to the Member States establishing the guidelines for the Community Initiative EQUAL concerning transnational cooperation to promote new means of combating all forms of discrimination and inequalities in connection with the labour market (Brussels, 2000). 14. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London, 1972). 15. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York, 1996), p. 177. 16. Grace Davie, ‘Believing without belonging: is this the future of religion in Britain?’, Social Compass 37/4 (1990), pp. 455– 69. 17. Danie`le Hervieu-Le´ger, ‘Religion und Sozialer Zusammenhalt in Europa’, Transit: Europa¨ische Revue 26 (Summer 2004), pp. 101– 19. English translation available at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-08-17-hervieuleger-en.html (accessed 4 December 2014). 18. Mohand Khellil, L’exil kabyle: Essai d’analyse du ve´cu des migrants (Paris, 1994), p. 13. 19. With the 17 articles of 1789 and 18 paragraphs of 1946, France and the French are thus endowed with fundamental rights and freedoms. 20. Article 1 of the French constitution (1958) stipulates that ‘France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.’ 21. Cited in Paul Godt, Policy-making in France: from de Gaulle to Mitterand (London, 1989), p. 184. 22. Abdelmalek Sayad, La double absence: des illusions des e´migre´s aux souffrances de l’immigre´ (Paris: 1999). 23. Jack Hayward, Fragmented France: Two Centuries of Disputed Identity (Oxford, 2007), p. 343. 24. Article 45 stipulates that article L.411 (5) of the Code de l’entre´e et du se´jour des e´trangers et du droit d’asile is modified as follows: ‘Le demandeur ne se conforme pas aux principes fondamentaux reconnus par les lois de la Re´publique.’

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25. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Du culte de la diffe´rence a` la sacrilisation de la victime’, Esprit 212 (1996), pp. 90 – 102, p. 96. 26. Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (Cambridge, MA, 1987). 27. Andre´ Vielle-Michel, ‘L’e´volution des travailleurs musulmans en France’, Esprit (1955), p. 879. 28. Cited in Henri Astier, ‘Ghettos shackle French Muslims’, BBC News. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4375910.stm (accessed 4 April 2013). 29. The Guardian, ‘Inflammatory language’, 23 December 2005, p. 13. 30. Cited by Julie Owono, ‘The fate of multiculturalism in France’, Aljazeera (Paris, 2012). 31. Christophe Bertossi, ‘France: the state strives to shape “chosen” immigration’, Institut francais des relations internationales (Paris, 2008). 32. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, 1990), p. 182. 33. See Sue Wright, ‘Introduction’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 10/1 (2008), pp. 1 – 9. Available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/ 001607/160772M.pdf (accessed 8 December 2014). 34. Cf. Ramin Jahanbegloo, The Clash of Intolerances (New Delhi, 2007). 35. It should be noted that the ‘dechristianisation’ of France had been attempted by various governments of France between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Concordat of 1801. These brief separations of Church and State form the basis of the later laı¨cite´ movement. 36. Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France (Bloomington IN, 2004), p. 10. 37. Since 1982, the mosque has received financial support from the Algerian government. 38. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London, 1972). 39. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1971). 40. See for example E´mile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J.S. Swain (London, 1915). 41. Declaration in a nationally televised debate about the failure of multiculturalism in France which. according to him. fostered extremism. 42. Sarkozy’s insistence on Muslim Algerian rector Dalil Boubakeur’s leadership exemplifies the simultaneously explicit meddling of the French State in Muslim affairs. 43. Cited in Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 251. 44. Haut Conseil a` l’inte´gration, Affaiblissement du lien social, enfermement dans les particularismes et inte´gration dans la cite´ (Paris, 1997), p. 14. 45. When Charles Pasqua became interior minister in 1993, he drew a deliberate distinction between ‘foreign Islam’ and ‘French Islam’, enacting a series of measures including the writing of a Muslim Charter. When Jean-Pierre Cheve`nement of the Socialist Party succeeded to him in 1996, he brought in a

288

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

NOTES

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number of influential ‘grand’ mosques. He also chose six individuals as ‘qualified personalities’ to represent a more ‘modernist’ Islam. This ban was the culmination of a long and intense debate including a fivemonth investigation by the non-partisan Stasi Commission appointed by President Jacques Chirac in July 2003. John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, 2007), p. 34. Ce´cile Laborde, ‘Female autonomy, education and the hijab’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9/3 (2006), pp. 351 – 77, p. 367. Francoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la Re´publique (Paris, 1995), p. 204. Literally, ‘clothes don’t make the monk’, for which the closest equivalent English proverb would be ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’. Immigrant associations were prohibited by the law of 1938. The French government funded the new organisations through the Deixonne decentralisation programme and the Social Action Funds (FAS) established during the Algerian War to earmark government monies for the integration of immigrant workers. Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France (Bloomington, 2004), p. 9. The term ‘hybridity’ become one of the buzz words of late twentieth century critical theory, cited and celebrated on the one hand as a space of resistance and protest, and on the other hand as one of tolerance. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture: Discussing Post-Colonial Culture (London, 1996), p. 56. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (eds), Post-Colonial Cultures in France (London, 1997), p. 4. Tahar Ben Jelloun, French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants (New York, 1999), p. 107. Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France, p. 162. It is worth noting that the term ‘Beur’ was first publicised in 1981 by Nacer Kettane, a co-founder and DJ on Radio Beur, a Parisian radio ‘libre’ station, created by a group of young people, most of whom were Maghrebi. The term first appeared in print in 1982 in the newspaper Liberation in a story entitled ‘Un petit Beur et des youyous’, by Mustapha Harzoun and Edouard Waintrop. Bhabha, The Location of Culture,pp. 70 – 1. The second concert was held on 15 May 1981 and took place in the cite´ of Couzy in the Parisian suburb of Vitry, on the exact site where one of these victims, the young Kader Lareiche, had been killed by a night watchman three months earlier. Cited in Silverstein, Algeria in France, p. 162. The event was organised by Lyon-based Association SOS Avenir Minguettes whose 20-year-old president Toumi Djaidja had been seriously wounded several

NOTES

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

TO PAGES

233 –246

289

months earlier while attempting to intervene between several policemen who had unleashed their dogs on a group of young residents of the cite´. Parti Socialiste, La France au pluriel (Paris, 1981). Ibid., p. 166. Many parents, however, refused to enrol their children and preferred their children to learn Arabic, which they saw as the national language of Algeria. Susan Ireland, ‘Writing at the crossroads: cultural conflict in the work of Beur women writers’, French Review 68/6 (1995), pp. 1022 –34, p. 1024. Hargreaves and McKinney, Postcolonial Cultures in France, pp. 236– 9, p. 237. Akli Tadjer, Les ANI du Tassili (Paris, 1984). Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France, p. 175. Azoug Begag, E´carts d’identite´ (Paris, 1990). Azoug Begag, Le Gone du Chaaˆba (Paris, 1986), pp. 56 – 7. Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge (Michigan, 1997), p. 8. Azoug Begag, Be´ni ou le Paradis prive´ (Paris, 1989), p. 38. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, p. 162. Ibid., pp. 162– 3. Ibid., p. 163. Azoug Begag, Un Mouton dans la baignoire (Paris, 2007), p. 111. This horrible incident occurred in front of her friends in the basement of an apartment building in her own community and led to the founding of the feminist rights movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises. Cf. Samira Bellil, ‘Insight: Muslim women rebel in France’, interview by Christiane Amanpour and Jonathan Mann (24 May 2004). Available at http://transcripts.cnn.com/ TRANSCRIPTS/0405/24/i_ins.00.html (accessed 3 February 2013). Samira Bellil, Dans l’enfer des tournantes (Paris, 2003). Hamida Ben Sadia, Itine´raire d’une femme francaise (Paris, 2008). Cf. Bellil, Dans l’enfer des tournantes, p. 69: ‘If I speak, they will tell me you deserved it for lingering in the streets’. Nada Elia, ‘In the making: Beur fiction and identity construction’, World Literature Today 7/1 (Winter 1997), pp. 47 – 54, p. 49. Margaret Kartomi, ‘The processes and results of musical culture contact’, Ethnomusicology 252 (1981), pp. 227– 50, p. 234. In the distant past, rai was a type of music attributed to disreputable places. The term pop-raı¨ was coined by Messaoud Bellemou, the first trumpeter to accompany a raı¨ singer, Bouteldja. Cf. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. Cited by Gabriele Marranci, A Complex Identity and its Musical Representation: Beurs and Raı¨ Music in Paris (Bologna, 2011), p. 7. Beurs’ raı¨ music mixes others’ musical styles common to French suburbs such as rap, reggae – mixtures which produce new styles that are typically raı¨-beur. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley, 1998). Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Cambridge, 2004), p. 58.

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What Future for Algeria?

1. Cf. Paul Beckett and Crawford Young, Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria (Rochester, NY, 1997). 2. Brahim Takheroubt, ‘L’appellation “de´mocratique et populaire” en question: quelle Re´publique pour l’Alge´rie?’, L’Expression, 24 April 2013. Translation mine. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, The Alge´riens, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston, 1962), p. 121. 4. Peter Lewis, ‘From prebendalism to predation: the political economy of decline in Nigeria’, Journal of Modern African Studies 34/1 (1996), pp. 79 – 103. 5. Henk Dekker, Darina Malova` and Sander Hoogendoorn, Nationalism and its Explanations. Political Psychology, Special Issue: National Identity in Europe 24/2 (June 2002), pp. 345– 76. 6. Ibid., p. 347. 7. Ibid. 8. For more details about the Algerian youth’s response to injustices see my article entitled ‘The Dimensions of Democratic Citizenship’ (Grin Verlag, 2013). This essay is based on a paper given at a conference on ‘Place, (Dis)place and Citizenship’ at the University of Wayne, Michigan on 20 – 22 March 2014. 9. Additional research is needed to shed light on causal pathways. Propositions derived from the study of one Algerian city cannot be assessed without research in other locations. We need to check data from Algerians living in small towns and villages and see if they would lead to different conclusions. 10. Cited by Anwar Haddam, ‘The Algerian Islamic movement and “political Islam”: an insider’s perspective’ (Washington DC, 2008), p. 8. 11. Cited in John Gaventa, ‘Seeing like a citizen’, in Blurring the Boundaries: Citizen Action across States and Societies (Brighton, 2012), p. 5. 12. Claude A. Helve´tius, De l’homme, de ses faculte´s intellectuelles et de son education, vol. II (London, 1774), p. 402. 13. John Wilson, A New Introduction to Moral Education (London, 1990), p. 90. 14. Cf. Derek Heater, What is Citizenship? (Cambridge, 1999). 15. Ibid., p. 9.

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INDEX

Abbassi, Madani, 91, 127, 179 Abdelkader, Emir, 23, 58, 274 Abduh, Mohammed, 84 accountability, 8, 11, 61, 68, 252, 257– 9 Aı¨t, Larbi, 193, 274 Aı¨t Menguellet, Lounis, 182, 242 affirmative action, 15, 106, 155, 156, 215 Africa, 1 – 11, 19 – 23, 26, 30, 36, 43, 45 – 6, 50 – 1, 54, 57, 59, 63, 65 – 6, 68, 80, 82, 84 – 6, 99, 104, 106, 110, 112, 114, 150, 155, 169– 70, 179, 182, 185, 189, 199, 202, 210, 214– 7, 222, 226, 229, 230– 3, 238, 248, 270– 1, 272, 273, 274., 275, 276, 278, 279, 283, 288, 290 African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, 106, 155, 215, Afrique Occidentale Franc
aise (AOF), 20 Algerian Constitution 1976, 124 Algerian Islamist Movement, 13 Algerian League of Human Rights, 125 Algerian Muslim Congress (CMA), 41 Algerian Ordinance, 62-010, 71 Algerian Penal Code, 131 al-Qaeda, 82, 90

Amrouche, Jean, 182, 283 Amrouche, Marguerite Taous, 182 anarchy, 39, 271 Angola, 6, 144 Appleby, Scott, 79, 276 Arab – Israeli war, 1973, 210 Arab Bureau (Bureaux Arabes), 174, 175, 177, 265, 283 Arab Spring, 57, 65 Arab/Arabs, 16, 23– 31, 36, 49, 52– 7, 63, 65, 71, 76, 93, 106– 8, 110, 143, 149, 151, 170– 87, 190–3, 195– 9, 209– 15, 229–32, 243, 254, 265, 267, 270, 273, 275, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283 Arabisation, 48, 52, 55 – 7, 181, 184– 6, 190, 192, 248 Arendt, Hannah, 66, 99, 157, 277, 281 Aristotle, 70, 139, 168 Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Arme´, GIA), 49, 89, 94– 5 Armed Islamic Movement (MIA), 89, 94 Armstrong, Karen, 82, 276 Asia, 20, 43, 63, 68, 112 Assemble´es populaires communales (APC), 55

308

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

Assemble´es populaires de wilaya (APW), 55 assimilation, 10, 17, 21, 22, 31 –7, 42, 52, 174, 178, 180, 189, 203, 211, 216, 219, 226– 9, 234, 237, 238, 252, 270, 271, 286 Association des Oule´mas, 179 Association for Equality between Men and Women (l’Association pour l’e´galite´ devant la loi, APEL), 125 Association for the Defence and Promotion of Women (l’Association pour la de´fense et promotion des femmes), 135 Association for the Emancipation of Women (l’Association pour l’e´mancipation des femmes), 135 Association for the Triumph of Algerian Women’s Rights (l’Association pour le triomphe des droits des femmes Alge´riennes), 109 Avritzer, Leonardo, 64, 275 Azem, Slimane, 182 Bagehot, Walter, 66 Baichi, Fatma, 120 banlieues, 214, 215, 230– 2, 236, 237, 240, 241, 245 Barkat, Sidi Mohammed, 38, 273 Barker, Ernest, 66 Battle of Algiers, 119, 278 Begag, Azoug, 238– 40, 289 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BDPA), 105 Belhadj, Ali, 91, 93, 134 Bellil, Samira, 241, 289 Benabi, Malek, 88 Ben Badis, Abdelhamid, 40, 43, 86, 179 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 51 – 4, 56, 88, 121, 122, 127, 183, 273, 274 Bendjedid, Chadli, 56, 57, 89, 92, 187, 249

Berber Cultural Association (ACB), 220, 236– 7 Berber Cultural Movement (Mouvement culturel Berbe`re MCB), 186, 196, 236 Berber Myth, 175, 177 Berber Spring, 57, 185– 6, 188, 284 Berber/Amazigh Culture Movement, 13 Berbers/Berberism, 15 – 6, 24, 29, 31– 2, 36, 46, 49, 57, 59, 64, 80, 89, 92, 95, 100, 110, 114, 166, 169– 200, 220, 232, 236–7, 252, 270, 274, 282, 283, 284, 285 Amazigh, 13, 196– 9, 236, 267, 284 Chaouias, 171 Kabyles, 16, 36, 171, 173– 8, 180, 182– 185, 191–2, 194, 210, 236, 283, 284 Mozabites, 171 Tuaregs, 171 Beur/Beurs/Beurettes, 186, 220, 222, 230–8, 240– 2, 244– 5, 267, 288, 289 Beur Movement, 186, 220, 230– 1, 233, 235, 240 –1 Bhabha, Homi, 31, 231, 244, 272, 288, 289 Black Spring 2001, 185, 193, 199 Blum – Violette plan, 41 Blum, Le´on, 41 Bodichon, Euge`ne, 175, 283 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III), 27, 33, 35, 177– 8 Bosniak, Linda, 206, 286 Bosquet, Joseph, 25, 271 Boudiaf, Mohamed, 92, 274 Boumedie`ne, Houari, 54, 88 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 31, 61, 251, 269, 272, 273, 283, 290 Bourguiba, Habib, 84, 274 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 14, 69, 72, 97, 99, 135, 137, 196, 259 Britain see United Kingdom

INDEX Brubaker, Rogers, 17, 172, 206, 217, 239, 282, 286, 287, 289 Buddhists/Buddhism, 77 Bugeaud, General Thomas, 23 – 5, 28, 271 Burgat, Franc
ois, 87 – 88, 276 Burkina-Faso, 149, 189 Cameroon, 6, 150 Camps, Gabriel, 170 Camus, Albert, 32, 272 Canary Islands, 190 Carette, Ernest, 176, 283 Cavarero, Adriana, 165, 281 Centre of African Studies, 8 Cesari, Jocelyne, 81, 276 Chad, 20, 150 Chaker, Salem, 179, 283, 284 Charles X, 19, 21 Charrad, Mounira, 108, 278 Charte d’Alger 1964, 123, 124, 279 Charter of Algiers (1964), 49 Cheriet, Hamid (Idir), 182 Chettouh, Djamel, 234 Chirac, Jacques, 220, 226, 228, 288 Christians, 34, 77, 80 Ciment, James, 82, 273, 276 citizens ‘second-class’, 2, 217 ‘stunted’, 3, 17 citizenship, 1, 14 – 8, 20, 25, 30 – 1, 33 – 48, 53, 59 – 63, 66, 68 –9, 71, 75 – 6, 79, 101– 4, 108, 112– 20, 122, 124, 127, 129, 132– 9, 142, 155, 157– 69, 172, 180, 185, 196, 198, 200, 201– 7, 209, 211– 3, 215– 21, 223– 4, 226– 7, 229– 30, 234, 238– 9, 245, 247– 51, 255, 258– 65, 267, 269, 271–3, 277, 279, 280, 281, 286, 287, 289, 290 Civil Harmony Law, 98 Civil Organisation of the National Liberation Front, 118

309

civil society, 12, 61 – 3, 72, 74, 76, 98, 109, 133, 137, 162, 164, 186, 198, 220, 235, 246, 248– 9, 251– 2, 257–8, 264 civil war, 48, 93 –4, 100, 137, 185, 223, 236, 249 class, social, 4, 9, 118, 125, 251, 269 Code Morand, 113 Collectif, 95 Maghreb Egalite´, 135, 280 collective action, 4 – 5, 8, 12, 39, 64, 69, 163, 180, 235 colonialism/colonialist, 10 – 1, 20 – 1, 27, 30, 40, 46, 48, 50, 84, 110, 183, 196, 209, 243, 248, 254, 272, 273, 274 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), 114 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 21, 270 conflict, 4, 8, 11 – 3, 16, 19 – 20, 35, 43, 48 – 52, 56, 63, 65 – 6, 68, 77, 79, 82, 85, 87, 94, 96 – 9, 105, 111, 118, 127, 138, 162, 166, 168–9, 177, 180– 1, 188, 193– 4, 197–201, 211, 215– 6, 218, 225, 238, 246, 249, 259, 276, 282, 285, 289 Constitution of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria (1963), 49 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 105 Convention on the Political Rights of Women, 114– 5, 278 Coordination of the Aarsh, Dairas and Communes (CADC), 195 corruption, 43, 56, 65, 73, 81, 92, 122, 252 Coˆte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), 7 coup d’e´tat, 27, 54 Cre´mieux Decree, 34, 36, 247 Cre´mieux, Adolphe, 36, 272 cultural heritage, 22, 41, 180, 193, 228, 244

310

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

culture, 5, 9 – 10, 13, 22, 30– 2, 35, 39 – 40, 43 – 6, 49 – 50, 56, 67 – 68, 73, 76, 84 – 6, 88, 102– 4, 106– 7, 111, 117, 121, 122, 127, 136, 142, 158, 163, 165– 7, 170– 1, 174– 5, 180– 8, 192, 194– 7, 199, 201– 2, 211– 2, 214, 216, 220, 222, 226– 7, 229– 32, 234, 236– 8, 240– 2, 244– 6, 249– 50, 252, 258– 9, 263, 271, 272, 276, 279, 288, 289 minority, 5, 227 Czechoslovakia, 57, 147 d’Alanc
on, Franc
ois, 94, 277 Dahl, Robert, 60, 197, 274, 275, 285 Dahomey, 20 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 66 Davidson, Basil, 46, 273 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 33, 272 decolonisation, 68, 82, 88, 191 Dekker, Henk, 253– 5, 290 democracy/democratic, 2 – 4, 7– 13, 18, 22, 45, 48 – 50, 53, 55, 58 – 74, 78, 87, 91 – 4, 98, 100, 105, 107, 109, 113, 121, 123, 125, 133, 135, 139– 43, 146, 149, 152, 155, 157– 8, 160– 1, 164, 168– 9, 178, 180, 187, 191, 193–8, 200– 1, 203, 211, 213, 220, 224, 236, 245, 246, 248– 52, 256– 8, 260, 262– 4, 269, 270, 271, 274, 275, 276, 279, 280, 282, 285, 286, 290 democratisation, 9, 13, 59, 61, 63 – 5, 68 – 69, 73, 87, 161, 164, 186, 188, 197, 248– 9, 264 liberal, 2, 61, 98, 155, 201, 224 Democratic Association of Moroccan Women (l’Association De´mocratique des Femmes Marocaines De´mocrates), 109 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 7, 152

Democratic Union of Algerian Manifesto (UDMA), 43, 113 Denmark/Danish, 81, 144 Derrida, Jacques, 99, 277 development, 8 – 9, 11, 15 – 6, 18, 20, 40, 44 –5, 47 – 9, 51, 53, 55, 57, 61, 67, 70, 73, 78, 88, 98 –9, 104, 106, 108– 10, 112, 118, 122, 136, 141–2, 156, 161, 164, 166, 179, 182, 184, 187– 9, 196, 199, 202, 208, 218, 223, 231, 234, 236, 242, 248– 51, 256– 7, 259–60, 262–264, 269, 274, 277, 281 diaspora, 182, 185, 241 dictatorship, 45, 93, 135 difference, 1, 4, 7, 9, 14, 17, 33, 35 – 6, 39, 45, 51, 65, 68, 81, 101– 5, 111, 114, 121, 128, 139, 143, 155, 157, 159, 165, 167, 171– 2, 174–6, 180, 186, 198, 202– 4, 208, 211, 214, 219, 223– 4, 227– 9, 231–2, 234, 238, 243, 249, 266, 274, 276, 280, 281, 285 ethnic, 17, 65, 204, 208, 243 discrimination, 7, 34 – 5, 38, 105, 122, 131, 189, 202, 205, 207, 214– 5, 218, 221, 227, 229, 234, 237, 240, 243– 4, 286, 287 diversity, 4, 9, 40, 60, 155, 173, 180, 197–200, 205, 207, 223– 4, 229, 234, 259, 285, 287 divorce, 123, 127, 129– 30, 133, 136, 138, 159, 165, 267, 279 Djaidja, Toumi, 233, 288 Djaout, Tahar, 95, 193 djebr, 115– 6, 266 Djezar’ara (Islamic Association for the Edification of Civilisation), 91, 266 domestic violence, 131, 135, 259– 60 Dreyfus, Alfred, 39, 273 Dreyfus Affair, 39, 213 Ducuing, Franc
ois, 173, 282 Duprat, Pascal, 175, 283

INDEX Durkheim, Emile, 78, 225, 287 duties, 4, 18, 59, 120, 122, 129– 31, 133, 137, 249 economy, 12, 22, 49, 54, 58, 70, 90, 96, 210, 249, 260, 271, 277, 290 Edict of Nantes, 34 education, 3, 7, 9, 16, 22, 31 – 3, 41, 49, 52, 55, 58, 60, 69, 88, 90, 104– 5, 121– 2, 124, 141, 155, 185– 7, 192, 199, 215, 227– 8, 230, 234, 237– 8, 241, 247– 8, 254– 5, 260– 4, 266, 273, 281, 288, 290 Educational Priority Zones (ZEP), 215, 234 Egypt, 63 – 74, 76, 88, 153, 179, 189– 90, 192, 280 Ekeh, Peter, 30, 272 elections, 11, 14 – 5, 51, 60 –1, 64– 5, 69, 71 –3, 90, 92 – 3, 96 – 7, 143– 4, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154– 5, 180, 194, 205, 217, 220, 251, 263, 280 Elia, Nada, 241, 289 emancipation, 14, 104, 107, 110, 113, 121– 2, 124, 134–135, 165, 259, 278, 279 employment, 3, 9, 37 – 8, 58, 104, 109, 121, 164, 213, 215, 220, 222, 225, 252, 255, 281 equality, 2, 3, 8, 14 – 7, 33, 35, 41, 49, 62, 65, 67, 70, 77, 80, 97, 101–3, 105– 6, 108, 110– 3, 115, 121–6, 128, 131– 6, 138–40, 142, 157– 62, 166, 169, 178, 185, 207, 212, 215, 217, 220, 224, 233, 241, 246– 8, 251, 258, 267, 271, 279, 280, 281, 286, 287, 289 gender, 14 – 5, 97, 105–6, 108, 110, 122– 3, 159 Eritrea, 7, 147 Ethiopia, 6, 7, 145 ethnic cleansing, 6

311

ethnicity/ethnic groups, 4, 6, 18, 35, 46, 122, 167, 171– 2, 180, 191–2, 202– 3, 211, 250, 254, 263, 282 ethno-linguistic movement, 188–200 E´toile Nord-Africaine, North African Star (ENA), 179 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992), 205 European Commission (EC), 205, 207, 246 European Convention on Human Rights, 205 European Parliament (EP), 205 European Union (EU), 204– 5, 207– 8, 226 exclusion, 3, 5 – 6, 11 – 2, 14, 17 – 8, 38, 46, 48, 56, 66 – 7, 74, 86, 103, 111–2, 127, 133, 156– 7, 164– 5, 167, 169, 172, 179, 181, 187, 201–4, 207, 211, 218– 9, 221, 224–5, 231, 238, 240– 1, 245– 7, 252, 259, 264 family, 15, 39, 80, 83, 98, 102, 104– 6, 108–9, 115– 7, 119, 121, 123, 125–7, 129– 31, 133– 8, 142, 157, 160– 2, 164–5, 177, 190, 211, 216, 238, 255, 259, 278, 281 Family Code, 108, 116, 121, 124– 125–39, 157 Family Law, 108– 9, 115– 6, 127, 133, 135–8, 160, 162, 164, 278 fanaticism, 14, 280 Fanon, Frantz, 31, 272 Faudel, Cheb, 243 Federation of Amazigh Cultural Associations in France (FACAF), 236 Federation of France, 182 feminism/feminist, 9, 13, 15, 46, 101–3, 106– 7, 109– 0, 122, 124–7, 134– 5, 138, 141, 158, 161, 274, 277, 280, 281, 289

312

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

Ferhat, Abbas, 40, 41, 43, 51, 113, 79, 182 Ferry, Jules, 32, 272 First Five-Year Plan (1961 – 6), 49 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1994), 205 France, 10, 13 – 4, 16 – 34, 36 – 43, 46, 50, 52, 56, 91, 95, 108, 112– 4, 141, 146, 176– 8, 182, 187, 200, 201– 46, 266, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 277, 283, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289 Franco-Algerians, 17, 219, 230, 237 Franco-Prussian War, 19, 35 freedom of belief, 13 of expression, 13, 59 – 60 of thought, 13 French Constitution, 202, 212, 216, 286 French Council of Muslim Citizens (Conseil Franc
ais des Citoyens Musulmans, CFCM), 219– 20, 223– 4, 226 French Empire, 19, 21, 40, 178 French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Franc
aise), 20 French National Assembly, 41, 113 French Republic, 18, 42, 117, 211–3, 216, 228– 9, 234, 237, 240 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 276 Friedrich, Carl J., 66 Front de Libe´ration Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front), 48–51, 54–5, 58–9, 65, 67, 69, 71–2, 82, 89–93, 96–7, 110, 112, 118, 120–3, 125, 137, 157, 179–81, 183, 187, 251–2, 273–4, 280 Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), 59, 89, 96 – 7 fundamentalism, religious, 1, 77, 234, 252 fundamentalists, Muslim, 6, 89

Gabon, 20, 149 Gautier, Emile, 174, 282 gender, 4, 6, 14 –5, 31, 46, 79, 97, 100–6, 108– 0, 117, 119, 122– 4, 126, 128– 9, 131–5, 138–40, 142, 155– 6, 158–61, 164, 166, 202, 211, 233, 237, 239, 241, 254, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281 gender -differentiated/differentiation, 101, 103 justice, 103, 132, 138, 160– 1, 281 -neutral, 101, 103, 135 relations, 14, 101, 110, 119, 139, 158, 161 general strike, 57, 186, 236 genocide, 6, 93, 95, 98 Germany, 28, 81, 145, 173, 203, 206, 211, 217, 286, 287, 289 Ghannouchi, Rachid, 84 gharbzadih/‘west-intoxicated’, 91, 266 Al Ghazali, 58 Ghezali, Salima, 135 globalisation, 1, 9, 13, 77 – 81, 169, 201–2, 276 Gole, Nilufer, 83, 276 Golley, Nawar Al-Hassan, 106, 277 Gould, Carol C., 139, 280 governance, 3 – 4, 21 – 22, 48, 61, 63, 65, 67, 73 – 4, 76 –8, 92, 105, 142, 155, 206, 246, 250, 257, 259–60 Greenfield, Liah, 4 – 5, 269, 285 Guinea, 20, 151– 154 Gurr, Robert, 172, 180– 1, 282, 283 Haddad, Aziz ben Cheikh El, 36 Hadj, Messali, 40, 43, 179, 190 Al Hakimia (Divine Sovereignty), 1, 265 Hanoune, Louisa, 135 harem, 107, 266 Hasni, Cheb, 243– 4 Haut Conseil de l’Inte´gration, 221

INDEX Hayward, Jack, 212, 286 headscarf/scarves see also hidjab, 222, 225– 9 health, 7, 41, 60, 104, 123, 125, 132, 158 Heater, Derek, 262, 290 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 176, 188, 284 Hervieu-Le´ger, Danie`le, 209, 286 hidjab see also headscarf/scarves, 227– 8, 266 High Committee for Amazighity (Haut Comite´ pour l’Amazighite´, HCA), 196 High State Committee (HSC), 92 Hindus/Hinduism, 77 Hobsbawm, Eric, 167, 282 Hocine, Baya, 120, 274, 278 Hortefeux, Brice, 215 housing, 3, 58, 60, 70, 130, 210– 11, 214– 215, 232, 236 Huguenots, 34 Human Rights Committee, 205 Huntington, Samuel, 81, 269, 276, 286 identity, 1– 6, 8 – 18, 21, 29, 31, 39– 50, 52 – 4, 59 – 60, 75 –82, 84, 86, 88, 92, 100, 104, 106–7, 110, 117– 8, 121, 126, 129, 134– 6, 155, 159–60, 165– 73, 177– 204, 207– 8, 211– 3, 216– 20, 222– 5, 227– 32, 234– 9, 241– 7, 249, 252– 6, 263, 265– 6, 274, 276, 277, 280, 282, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290 Algerian, 49 – 50, 53, 86, 180, 184, 190– 1, 195, 200, 251 Berber, 15 – 6, 171, 178, 180, 182, 184– 5, 192, 195, 232 citizenship, 8, 277 collective, 9, 75 – 6, 79, 84, 172, 187, 192, 195, 246 cultural, 9, 21, 52, 100, 167, 180, 185, 189, 191, 194, 196– 7, 203,

313

222, 229, 231, 236, 244, 254, 263, 280 ethnic, 6, 171, 180, 192, 282 hybrid, 17 linguistic, 16 national, 92, 100, 107, 110, 134, 168– 9, 181, 188– 9, 197, 199, 201, 203, 208, 211– 2, 216–7, 219– 20, 223, 225, 227 –9, 239, 246– 7, 252– 4, 256, 284, 290 political, 11, 31, 40, 169, 200 social, 3, 4, 16, 167– 8, 245 ideology/ideological, 13, 22, 32, 40, 48– 50, 54, 63, 66, 82 – 3, 87, 90– 1, 118, 121, 127, 131, 134, 136, 156, 164, 166, 181, 216, 228, 235, 241, 254, 275 Imazighen see Berbers, 167– 200 immigrants/immigration, 3, 17– 8, 27, 46, 124, 179, 200– 24, 227, 229–30, 232 –5, 237– 8, 240– 6, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289 imperialism/imperialist, 19, 31, 50, 52, 54, 106, 111, 181 inclusion, 1, 3 – 6, 11 – 2, 16 – 8, 38, 46, 48– 9, 56, 66, 74, 77, 113, 134, 156, 167– 200, 203– 4, 208, 213, 218, 221, 224, 231, 240, 245, 256, 264, 282, 285 independence, 5, 11 –4, 42, 45 –6, 48– 50, 52, 57, 63, 67 – 8, 70, 72, 76, 84 – 86, 88, 91, 108, 110–2, 115, 117, 119– 21, 123, 134, 155, 161, 164, 166, 182, 193, 196, 200, 218, 230, 248, 250– 1, 255, 273– 4, 278, 279 India, 19, 151, 210 Indigenat Code (Code Alge´rien de l’Indige´nat), 34, 37 industrialisation, 47 – 8, 54 inequality/inequalities, 2 – 3, 15, 56, 60, 62, 67 – 8, 70, 101, 110– 1, 113, 121, 138, 140, 142, 162,

314

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

166, 207, 212, 215, 217– 8, 246, 251, 281, 286, 287, 289 gender, 140– 55, 166 instability, 39, 48, 51, 197, 248, 249 integration, 8, 12, 18, 28 – 30, 32, 40 – 1, 78, 137, 165, 181, 196– 246, 288 International Bill of Rights for Women, 105 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 105, 205 International Crisis Group (ICG), 193 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 58, 97, 275 International Women’s Day, 122, 124 Iraq, 146, 192 Islam, political, 82 – 91, 223, 290 Islam, Salafi/Salafism, 76, 84 – 5, 90 – 91, 94, 179 Islam, Sufi/Sufism, 85 Islam/Islamist/Islamism, 13 – 4, 16, 28 – 9, 49, 53, 56 – 7, 59, 63, 68 – 9, 74, 76 – 7, 80 – 97, 100, 109– 11, 122– 4, 127, 129– 38, 158, 169, 173– 9, 183, 188, 192– 3, 197, 199, 208, 219, 222– 8, 234, 237, 240, 245, 267, 274, 275, 276, 281, 282, 284, 287, 288, 290 Islamic Salvation Army (Arme´e Islamique du Salut, AIS), 94 Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), 59, 89 – 97, 134, 234, 279 Islamicisation/Islamisation, 13, 46, 82, 91 Islamist group (FIS), 59, 89 – 97, 134, 234, 279 Islamophobia, 82 Italy, 19, 147 Itim, Djamel, 233 Jahanbegloo, Ramin, 222, 287 Japan, 140, 151

Jelloun, Ben, 231, 277, 288 Jews/Jewry/Jewish, 22, 31, 34– 6, 39 – 40, 212– 213, 243, 247, 272, 273 jihad, 14, 80 – 1, 87, 128 Jonnart Law, 42 Jordan, 63, 151, 280 Jospin, Lionel, 221, 227 jus domicile, 206, 218 jus sanguinis, 17, 128, 203, 206 jus soli, 17, 38, 132, 206, 216, 220– 1 justice, 4, 47, 56, 61 –2, 68, 77, 80, 98, 103, 105, 124, 128, 131– 2, 135– 6, 138, 160– 2, 178, 232, 241, 246, 249, 255, 259, 262, 264, 281, 287, 290 Justrabo, Rene´, 114– 115 Kabyle see Berber Kabylia, 29, 74, 171, 173–84, 190– 5, 236, 242, 283 Kanun el ousra (1984) (Algeria), 126 Kartomi, Margaret J., 242, 289 Kateb, Kamel, 31, 272 Kenya, 6, 80, 152 Khaled, Cheb, 243, 245 Kherko, Djamel, 233 Khider, Mohamed, 51, 88, 274 khol’a, 130, 267 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 76, 89 Laborde, Ce´cile, 228, 288 laı¨cite´, 223– 5, 227 Lamine Gueye Law, 38 language, 3, 6 – 9, 13 – 6, 32 – 3, 36, 39, 46, 49, 52 – 9, 83, 86, 94, 167, 170–1, 173, 176, 179– 80, 182, 184–99, 205, 213, 216, 221, 224, 231, 234, 237, 244, 247, 254, 256, 267– 8, 272, 282, 284, 286, 287, 289 Berber, 170– 1, 176, 182, 186– 7, 189– 99, 268 Thamazighth, 184– 96, 200, 237, 268

INDEX Lape`ne, Edouard, 173, 177, 282 Lavigerie, Monseigneur, 28, 282 law, 1, 3 – 4, 7, 10, 14 – 5, 17, 20, 23, 25, 27 – 8, 30 – 4, 37, 41 – 2, 61 – 2, 67 – 8, 72, 76 – 7, 101– 2, 105, 108– 10, 113– 6, 121, 123– 38, 147, 156– 65, 177, 186, 206, 209, 214, 216– 28, 234, 239, 245, 247, 257, 262, 267, 272, 273, 278, 286, 288 Lazreg, Marnia, 103, 122, 277, 279 Lebanon, 2, 64, 153, 280 le Collectif Fe´minin (Women’s Grouping), 125 Lefaucheux, Marie-He´le`ne, 114– 5 Lehmann, David, 77, 276 Lewis, Peter, 252, 290 liberalisation, 13, 58, 64, 69, 90, 166, 186– 7, 197, 218 liberation, 5, 40, 42 – 3, 48, 50, 65, 71 – 2, 79, 85, 106– 7, 117– 8, 122, 164, 184– 6, 274, 278, 281, 288 national, 48, 71, 85, 106– 7, 118, 184 Liberia, 6, 151 Libya, 85, 183, 189– 90, 270 Lijphart, Arend, 66 Lincoln, Abraham, 213 Linz, Juan, 61, 275 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 66 literacy, 33, 55, 66, 88,109, 247, 261 literature, 7, 10, 65, 173, 177, 192, 201, 220, 237, 240–1, 278, 279, 289 Low Countries, the, 19 Maadi, Zainab, 109 Madagascar, 84, 149 Al-Madani, Tawfiq, 179 Maghreb/Maghrebi, 15, 20, 64, 82, 85, 108– 10, 126, 133, 135, 179, 189, 210, 214, 222, 229, 230– 1, 243, 246, 273, 279, 280, 282, 288

315

Majalla (1956) (Tunisia), 126– 7 Malawi, 7, 147 Mali, 151, 189– 190 Malta, 19, 152 Mamdani, Mahmood, 46, 272, 273 Mammeri, Mouloud, 182, 182, 187, 236, 284 March for Civil Rights (Marche pour les Droits Civiques), 233, 267 March for Equality and Against Racism (Marche des Beurs), 233, 267 March of Neighbourhood Women for Equality and Against the Ghetto, 240–1 marginalisation/marginalised, 3, 8, 84, 86, 93, 102, 105, 131, 138, 155, 179, 194, 200, 207, 213, 218, 240, 245, 249, 252, 254, 264, 266 marriage, 29, 105, 110, 114– 6, 123, 127, 129– 38, 142, 155, 161, 163–4, 202, 221, 241, 266, 278, 279 Marshall, T.H., 9, 18, 104, 153, 209, 169 massacre/s, 24 –6, 43, 81, 94 – 95, 98, 119, 227 of women, 119 Matoub, Loune`s, 95, 182, 193– 4 Mauritania, 20, 147, 189– 190 Mauritius, 19, 148 meddahat, 242– 5, 267 medersa/s (Qur’anic school/s), 32– 3, 52, 57, 84, 267 Mehenni, Ferhat, 182, 195 Mernissi, Fatima, 111, 278 Messaoudi, Khalida, 135, 279, 289 Middle Congo, 20 Middle East, 6, 57, 66, 82, 86, 104, 107, 179, 190, 275, 277 Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 6, 57, 62 –3, 66, 104– 8, 118, 126, 132, 141– 3, 155, 165 migration, 1, 208– 11, 238, 244, 282, 285

316

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

Mill, James, 137 Mill, John Stuart, 196, 285 Min-Ha, Trinh T., 52, 274 Mitterrand, Franc
ois, 212, 234 modernisation, 5, 51, 54, 78, 91, 104 modernity, 13 – 4, 53, 85 – 6, 113, 117, 134, 222, 237, 269, 285 Mohammed V, 84 – 5 Mohammed VI, 133 Mohanty, Chandrea, 104, 277 Mokrani, Hadj Mohamed, 36 – 7 Molyneux, Maxine, 163, 281 Moore, Henrietta, 77, 276 Morand, Marcel, 113, 180 Morocco, 6, 7, 15, 20, 25, 63, 84 – 5, 92, 108– 9, 126, 129, 133, 149, 189– 90, 199, 210, 270, 278, 279, 280, 283 moujahidates, 118, 125, 267 Mourou, Abdelatif, 84 Mouvement de la socie´te´ pour la paix (Movement of Society for Peace, MSP), 136– 7, 280 Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique, 84 Mouvement du renouveau national (Movement for National Reform, MNR), 136 Mouvement pour le triomphe des liberte´s de´mocratiques (Movement for the Triumph of Liberty and Democracy, MTLD), 41, 43, 180, 182– 3 Movement for Autonomy in Kabylia (Mouvement pour l’autonomie Kabyle, MAK), 195 Mozambique, 7, 144 Mudawana (1957 – 8) (Morocco), 126 multi-party system, 51, 73, 85, 89 – 90 multiculturalism, 18, 208, 212– 3, 226, 229, 287 music, 187, 220, 229, 231, 236– 7, 242– 5, 261, 265, 267, 289 raı¨, 220, 230, 242– 245, 267, 289

French-raı¨, 243– 4 raı¨ -Beur, 220, 242 Muslim Brotherhood, 76, 88 Muslim, Shi’i, 89 Muslim, Sunni, 89, 278 Napoleon I, 19, 270 Napoleonic Wars, 24, 270 nashiz, 131, 267 nation state, 3– 6, 12 – 4, 17, 46, 48, 60, 66, 75 – 100, 108, 117, 127, 198, 201– 11, 217, 219–20, 222, 226, 235, 253, 256, 273, 274, 276, 280, 282, 285 nation-building, 5– 6, 45 – 6, 49, 56, 65, 84, 100, 121, 187, 197, 202, 249 National Anti-Semitic League, 39 National Charter, 56 National Constitutional Assembly, 71 National Council (Majlis Al Umma), 72, 267 National Council of Transition, 96 National Liberation Army, 118 National Martyrs Day (Shaheed), 72, 267 National Pedagogic and Language Centre for the Teaching of Thamazighth, 196 National People’s Assembly (Majlis Achaabi Al Watani), 71 – 2, 92, 267 National Popular Army (ANP), 54 National Socialism, 25 National Transition Council, 186 National Union of Algerian Youth (UNJA), 235 national unity, 49, 193, 196, 200, 209, 248 nationalism/nationalist, 1, 4– 7, 10, 12, 14, 20, 36, 40 – 6, 48, 50, 52, 56 – 7, 63, 65, 68 – 9, 73, 75, 78 – 9, 82, 84 –5, 88, 90, 107, 116– 8, 127, 165, 167, 178– 84, 187, 194,

INDEX 196, 198, 200, 226–7, 229, 235, 250, 253– 6, 260, 269, 277, 282, 283, 285, 290 nationality, 2 – 3, 7, 17, 31, 35, 83, 108, 123– 4, 132– 3, 162– 3, 188, 191, 195, 209, 217–21, 226, 230, 239 Nationality Code, 1970, 132, 220 nationhood, 5 – 6, 8, 9, 12, 40, 45, 52, 117, 176, 189, 191, 196, 198, 206, 216, 239, 286, 287, 289 naturalisation, 3, 30, 34 – 35, 206, 216– 22 Netherlands, 144, 253 New Zealand, 140, 145 Niger, 6, 20, 150, 189, 190 Nigeria, 6, 153, 290 Nini, Soraya, 241 noncitizens, 2, 16, 206 North Africa, 6, 7, 20, 36, 57, 66, 80, 82, 85, 169– 70, 182, 185, 189, 226, 271, 276 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 180 Ogunyemi, Chikwenye, 118, 278 oil, 54, 56, 58, 210, 249 oil crisis, 58 oppression gendered, 105 political, 93 Ordinance No., 76, 35, 55, 59, 274, 116 Organic Statute, 113– 4 Orientalist/Orientalism, 80, 106, 111, 222 Otherness/Other, 7, 23, 26, 40, 52, 104, 110– 1, 119, 125, 128, 179, 181, 208, 218, 232, 235– 6, 254– 5, 269, 274, 270, 280 Oule´mas, 88 – 9, 127, 179, 190, 268 pacification, 10, 21 – 9, 115, 270 Page, Robert Brock le, 171, 282

317

Palestine, 192, 280 Parti Colonial, 19, 35 Parti du Peuple Alge´rien, Algerian People’s Party (PPA), 180–3 Parti populaire alge´rien, 40 – 1 participation, 8, 11, 14, 17, 47, 60 – 61, 64, 73, 89, 91, 96, 103, 105, 122, 127, 130, 141– 3, 156– 7, 160, 163–4, 167, 191, 198, 219, 226, 256, 258– 9, 263 Pateman, Carole, 139, 280 patriarchy, 109– 10, 117, 240 patrimony, 90, 187 patriotism, 25, 55, 260, 263 Pe´lissier, General, 25 – 6, 175, 271, 283 Personal Status Law (PSL)/Personal Status Code, 116, 133– 4, 136– 8, 162 Personal Status legislation, 13, 46 pieds noirs, 41, 210, 267 pluralisation, 9 poetry, 187, 284 Political Bureau, 51 polygamy, 115, 127– 8, 136, 138, 176, 239 post-colonial/post-colonialism, 8, 10– 4, 20, 31, 46, 47 – 74, 84 –5, 109–10, 164 –5, 181, 184, 247–8, 260, 272–3, 288 post-independence, 50, 66 – 7, 108, 110, 121, 134, 279 Prague Spring, 57 Protocol on Women’s Rights on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, 155 Putnam, Robert, 61 – 2 Qasim, Amin, 158, 281 Al-Qiyam, 88, 90, 265 Qur’an, 53, 82 – 3, 87, 93, 109, 111, 128, 130, 133, 135, 158, 173, 175, 190

318

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

race relations, 18, 263 racism/racist, 17, 22, 175, 214– 7, 225, 227, 229– 33, 237, 243–4, 267, 288 Rai, Shirin M., 104, 277 Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), 194, 236, 284, 285 Rassemblement national de´mocratique (National Rally for Democracy, RND), 137 Rawls, John, 136, 162, 225, 281, 287 Raynal, Abbe, 173, 282 reconciliation, 66, 98 – 100 reconstruction, 45, 98 – 9, 105, 278 reform, 11, 28, 31, 52 – 3, 55, 58, 67, 70, 85, 88 – 9, 106, 110, 114– 5, 121, 128– 9, 135– 8, 164, 179, 187, 219– 21, 250, 257 religion, 3, 4, 13, 28, 31, 34, 46, 49, 63, 75 – 83, 86 – 7, 92, 95, 99, 106, 108, 110, 116, 122, 134– 5, 138, 178– 83, 188, 198, 209, 223, 225, 227, 276, 286 Renan, Ernest, 15, 270 resistance, 45, 70, 91, 113– 7, 187, 230, 259 Revolution, Algerian (Algerian War of Independence) (1954– 62), 11, 91 – 2, 111,124, 253, 274 Revolution, Iranian (1979), 76, 89 Reynaud, Pe´llissier de, 175, 283 Rida, Rashid, 84 rights, 1 – 4, 7 – 11, 13 – 4, 16 – 8, 20, 22, 29, 30, 33 – 8, 41 – 3, 46, 49, 59 – 62, 65 – 71, 83, 89, 91, 94, 97 – 9, 101– 43, 155– 67, 185– 6, 189– 91, 194– 5, 198– 9, 202– 7, 209, 217– 9, 221– 4, 227, 229, 232– 4, 240, 246– 7, 249– 52, 255, 257– 60, 263– 4, 267, 271, 272, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 285, 286, 289 ‘knowledge’, 10

citizenship, 1 – 2, 13 – 4, 20, 36, 46, 68, 108, 120, 124, 142, 158, 164, 203, 206– 7, 234, 260 economic, 10, 16 human, 7, 11, 13, 17, 59 – 60, 65, 67, 83, 94, 97, 99, 102, 105, 109, 119, 125, 133, 136, 155, 157, 160, 205, 218, 224, 246, 252, 257, 260, 262, 271, 272, 281, 285 legal, 9, 11, 102– 3, 109, 115 social, 2, 9– 11, 18, 60, 70, 189, 258– 9 of women, 9, 13 – 4, 103, 106, 108– 10, 113, 123– 4, 132, 134– 8, 155– 63, 240, 278, 279, 280 riots, 46, 185, 193– 4, 215, 222, 239 Rock against Police (RAP), 233 Romans/Roman, 21, 23, 88, 170, 174–7, 212 Rome Accords, 97 Rwanda, 6, 144 Sadia, Hamida Ben, 241, 289 Said, Edward, 31 Salafis, 90 Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafiste pour la Pre´dication et le Combat, GSPC), 94 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 215– 6, 220, 223– 6, 239, 287 Sayad, Abdelmalek, 18, 210–2, 286, 289 scarcity, 3 – 4, 269 Schattschneider, E.E., 66 Scott, Joan, 159, 281 secularism, 34, 49, 63, 65, 183, 211, 219, 223– 7, 267 securitisation, 15– 6, 92, 168– 70, 197, 208 segregation, 111, 209, 213– 4, 254 Seidman, Gay W., 60, 274

INDEX Senatus-Consulte Law, 27, 34 – 5, 177, 247 Senegal, 20, 147, 251 Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar, 100 Seychelles, 19, 144 Sharia law/Shar’ia, 34, 76, 86, 267 Shriver, Donald, 99, 277 Skocpol, Theda, 62, 275 Slovakia, 149, 253, 279 Smith, Anthony, 181, 283 social cohesion, 18, 49, 98, 203, 207, 221, 233 social justice, 47, 56, 61 – 2 social policy, 11, 165, 286 social security, 3, 209 social status, 1, 109, 129, 245 socialism/socialist, 25, 41, 49– 51, 53, 56, 61, 82, 91 – 2, 106, 118, 121– 3, 162, 214, 221, 252, 257, 274, 287, 289 solidarity, 3– 5, 73, 75, 116, 158, 169, 207, 225, 227, 229, 257 Soltani, Abdelatif, 89 Soltani, Abou Djerra, 136 Somalia, 6, 153 Soumam Charter, 183 sovereignty, 13, 53, 55, 60, 71 – 3, 86 – 87, 167, 195– 8, 204, 209, 212, 220, 226, 265 Spivak, Gayatri, 104, 177 St Lucia, 19 Stepan, Alfred, 61, 275 Stora, Benjamin, 21, 32, 52, 88, 98, 270, 271, 284 Sub-Saharan Africa, 6 – 7, 63 subordination, 105, 111, 131– 2, 158, 164, 213, 246 Sudan, 6, 20, 146, 280 suffrage, 41, 71, 104, 113– 4, 121, 124, 140, 270 Surel, Yves, 61, 275 Sweden, 140, 144 Switzerland, 141, 145, 203 Syria, 151, 192, 280

319

Tabouret-Keller, Andre´e, 171, 282 Tadjer, Akli, 238, 282 Tafna Treaty, 23 tafsut n imazighen, 185– 8 Tahon, Marie-Blanche, 124, 279 Tajfel, Henri, 167, 282 Tajikistan, 112, 148 Talbi, Mohamed, 73, 275 Taliban, 89 Tamzali, Wassyla, 108 terrorism, 13, 81 – 2, 85, 93, 96, 223, 243, 276, 284 11 September 2001 (9/11), 80, 81, 208, 222 World Trade Center, 80, 222 Third Republic, 13, 22, 178 Third Worldism, 47 Tilly, Charles, 104, 246, 277 Tobago, 19, 145 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 24 – 6, 61, 271, 275 Todorov, Tzvetan, 213, 287 Togo, 6, 151 Toumi, Khalida, 125, 279, 288 Treaty of Maastricht, 205 Treaty of Paris, 19 Tripoli Charter, 183 Tripoli Programme, 49, 122 Tunisia, 6 –7, 15, 20, 25, 84 – 5, 108, 126, 129– 30, 133, 146, 189– 90, 210, 270, 278, 279, 280 Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (l’Association Tunisienne des Femmes De´mocrates), 109 Turner, John C., 167, 282 Tutu, Desmond, 99 umma, 93, 111, 121, 268 UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 114 Union De´mocratique du Manifeste Alge´rien (UDMA), 43, 113 United Kingdom, 19, 141, 143, 147, 286

320

THE STATE OF ALGERIA

United Nations (UN), 83, 112, 114, 205, 278, 281, 286 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 108, 205 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 83, 105 United States of America (USA), 19, 149 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 83, 105 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, 205 Upper Volta, 20 uprising, 36 – 7, 57, 178, 185– 6, 272 Urbain, Ismae¨l, 178, 283 Vandals, 170 veil/veiling, 107, 111– 3, 115– 7, 168, 278 violence, 13, 27, 42, 74, 75 – 101, 103, 123, 131, 135, 158, 162, 185, 194, 197, 214– 5, 222, 229– 30, 233– 4, 236, 239, 241, 248, 254, 259– 60, 276, 280, 281 Volkan, Vamik, 79, 276 war, 7, 11, 19, 23 – 5, 34 – 6, 40, 43, 48, 50, 68, 81 – 2, 85, 87, 90, 93 – 4, 110– 2, 115– 7, 121, 125, 137, 174, 180, 184– 5, 209– 10, 218, 223, 236, 239, 249, 270, 274, 276, 278– 9, 288 War of Independence, 11, 111, 115, 279 War of the Sixth Coalition, 19

Warnier Law, 28 Warnier, Auguste, 28, 177, 283 Wilson, John, 261, 290 Wittfogel, Karl, 63, 275 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 103, 277 women, 3, 9, 13 – 5, 25, 28 – 9, 43, 59, 67, 73, 83, 89, 100, 101– 66, 176–7, 227, 233, 240– 3, 255, 258–259, 265, 267, 274, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 289 Women’s Association for Equality and the Exercise in Citizenship (l’Association des femmes pour l’e´galite´ et l’exercice de la citoyennete´), 134– 5 Wood, Patrick, 66 – 7 World Bank, 58, 275 World War I, 209 World War II, 34, 43, 82, 112, 180, 184, 210, 218, 270 Wright, Sue, 221, 287 xenophobia, 202 Yeatman, Anna, 12, 269 Young Algerians, the (la Jeunesse Alge´rienne), 40 Young, Crawford, 248, 290 Zaire, 6 Zambia, 7, 151 Zerari, Zhor, 120, 279 Zeroual, Liamine, 95 –7 Zimbabwe, 7, 149 Zolberg, Aristide R., 198, 285