‘Is there a Gestapo in Algeria?’
Paris attacks left everyone shocked and fuming around the world, with millions coming out and denouncing the barbaric act on unarmed civilians in a city with which people across the globe are glued in romance.
My heart bled when I watched the scenes of mayhem and cries of the wounded on the streets of Paris.
One wonders why unarmed French people were attacked when they had nothing to do with their government’s policies regarding the so-called Islamic State.
One may find its traces in recent history, I suppose.
Almost all the attackers were of Arab origin, and their attacks, never to be justified, might be linked with French regimes’ cruel treatment to millions of human in its Arab and African colonies until the ‘50s and ‘60s. Arabs in Algeria, Syria, Lebanon and Morocco were enslaved, tortured and killed by the French.
Historians, mostly from the west, state that around one million Muslims were killed only in Algeria during the independence movement from 1950-62.
While it is difficult to enumerate war’s casualties, the FLN (National Liberation Front) estimated in 1964 that nearly eight years of revolution affected 1.5 million deaths from war-related causes. Some other French and Algerian sources later put the figure at approximately 960,000 dead, while French officials estimated it at 350,000.
More than 12,000 Algerians died in internal FLN purges during the war. In France, an additional 5,000 died in the “café wars” between the FLN and rival Algerian groups. French sources also estimated that 70,000 Muslim civilians were killed or abducted and presumed killed by the FLN.
Historians, like Alistair Horne and Raymond Aron state that the actual number of Algerian Muslim war dead was far greater than the original FLN and official French estimates, but was fewer than the one million deaths claimed by the Algerian government after independence.
Horne estimated Algerian casualties during the span of eight years to be around 700,000. Uncounted thousands of Muslim civilians lost their lives in French army bombing raids, or vigilante reprisals. The war uprooted more than two million Algerians, who were forced to relocate to French camps or to flee into the Algerian hinterland, where many thousands died of starvation, disease, and exposure.
For Algerians of many political factions, the legacy of their War of Independence was a legitimisation or even sanctification of the unrestricted use of force in achieving a goal deemed to be justified. Once invoked against foreign colonialists, the same principle could also be turned with relative ease against fellow Algerians.
The FLN’s struggle to overthrow colonial rule and the ruthlessness exhibited by both sides in that struggle were to be mirrored 30 years later by the passion, determination, and brutality of the conflict between the FLN government and the Islamist opposition.
Torture was a frequent process in use from the beginning of the colonisation of Algeria, which started in 1830. Claude Bourdet had denounced these acts on December 6, 1951, in the magazine L’Observateur, rhetorically asking, “Is there a Gestapo in Algeria?”
In the backdrop of this bloody history, one may understand why France was targeted by Islamic State militants, led by Abdel Hamid Abaaoud.
Another interesting fact is the Islamic State is a by-product of Arab and western countries’ interference in Syria. The civil war was manufactured; rebels were created, armed, trained and launched to pull down Bashar al-Assad. They ended up creating the Islamic State.
No one can allow regimes to gang up, gather funds and create, arm and nurture mercenaries to topple regimes in countries that refuse to toe their diktat as more than often the monster turns back to its creator(s).
This is precisely what’s happening now in the Middle East as the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS or Daesh, is now turning to its own creator(s). If France is under attack now, soon the US and other western countries may face the same music.
