Bulletin N° 30 décembre 2022 At the beginning of the 19th century, capitalist societies found it necessary to expand into other territories to access raw materials and sell their goods.
With the precious help of the bourgeois States in their service, the latter had engaged their armies in the conquest of territories on the most distant continents in order to extend their domination over the conquered countries.
France and England have agreed to share the African and Asian continents.
Colonization will authorize the exploitation of land and slave labor which will enhance the agrarian and merchant capital. Capital swells with the circulation of foodstuffs unknown in these countries and which will be dumped on their markets.
The colonies will allow the accumulation of enormous capital which, in turn will promote the development of industry.
Colonialism is, so to speak, only the natural extension of capitalism.
Concerning Algeria, it was in 1808 that Napoleon Bonapart instructed the spy Boutin to establish a military plan for a colonial conquest.
The conquest was violent, and the Algerian population for two years put up a resistance commensurate with the ferocity of the conquest.
A long and unwavering resistance was punctuated by numerous insurgencies which were bloodily crushed.
The numerous armed revolts which have marked the history of the Algerian resistance were repressed in a cruel and brutal way; since the war led by ABDELKADER in 1832 and which was a very structured armed resistance, followed by that of EL MOKRANI (1871) which had resulted in deaths and distant deportations in New Caledonia, passing by the revolt of the Ouled Sid Echikh who set Oranie ablaze (1864), to that of the Aurès (1879), to that of Chikh Bouamama (1881), or even the revolt of Miliana (1901) to that of Belzma (1916).
To establish its domination, colonialism used the most cruel and brutal methods such as the kidnapping of women and children used as hostages, rape, killings for no reason, theft of cattle, grain , the smoking of populations in caves, deportations, displacements of populations, the organization of famines and all sorts of moral and physical repressions, thus instituting terror and the dispossession of the popular from their lands.
During the first two decades of the conquest, there were no less than 400,000 deaths, or about 1/3 of the population at the time. It is a war of depopulation that has been waged against the Algerian people.
The objective was for a long time to make Algeria a continuation of France.
Algerians who were subject to prohibitions and all sorts of repressions from the colonial administration, were also subject to the pangs of discriminatory taxation, which led in the majority of cases to the dispossession of all their property, land even jewelry.
To impose this repression with all the misery it brought with it, the administration and the colonial army relied on local feudal notables and certain religious brotherhoods.
As for the question of education, in the opinion of all historians, even those from the colonial classes; at the time of the conquest, 95% of the Algerian population was literate, in 1962, at independence, only 5% were literate.
The teaching of the Arabic language was only authorized in 3 medersas.
The congress of mayors of Algeria in 1909 had passed a motion calling for "the disappearance of native education".
There was thus destruction of a culture for the benefit of another imported and imposed: valuable historical monuments were destroyed or transformed into administrations, cathedrals or even worse into stables as was the case with the mosque of Sidi Ghanem in Constantine which dates from the 11th century.
The destruction of culture and historical monuments proceeds from the destruction of the memory of a people, consequently of its history and its culture, reducing it to decultured and destructured tribes, thus allowing easier submission.
The adoption of the native code in support of all this scholarly paraphernalia of repression, oppression and dispossession ended up subjugating the populations through fear; for example, an Algerian should not look a European in the eye; he was thus liable to a penal sentence pronounced by any European administrative body.
In this project of annihilation of the Algerian nation, arises an island of freedom practically unknown but which should be underlined as it is necessary in these times to recall the solidarities which are built beyond the dominant ideologies and repressions.
The breath of freedom is spreading faster than the bourgeoisie can believe, it has spread and won over what it considered to be die-hard followers. Small ruined settlers rose up very early on against the dispossession of Algerian peasants and against the tortures of the administrative beast of mixed municipalities to rally to the cause of the Algerians: VICTOR SPIELMANN in the region of Bordj Bou Arreridj had left his native Alsace and had founded a newspaper of anti-colonial demands "Le Cri de l'Algérie", this revolutionary had become the secretary of the Emir Khaled and founder of the editions "le Trait d'Union".
Other Alsatians followed in his footsteps, his friend DEYBACH who wrote in "L'Echo d'Ain Tagrout".
In this jumble of violence and raids, the weakened Algerian people, dominated and dispossessed of all their property, resolutely opposed the colonial project.
The resistance became silent while waiting for renewal. Oppression lasts for a while, not all the time. For a few decades, the populations granted themselves a little respite, because the incessant struggles which last over several decades are humanly very hard.
The previous failures had allowed the resistance to mature, which was to be organized in a more modern, more scientific and safer way.
Emigration, an essential element of the capitalist system and its corollary, colonialism, will push many Algerians dispossessed of their property and reduced to misery, to choose this path.
Engaged as workers, they rub shoulders with French workers and rub shoulders with the struggles waged against exploitation and misery.
The first steps in the anti-capitalist struggles paved the way for independence struggles by launching the first political movements in 1920. This is how the ENA l'Etoile Nord Africaine was born in 1925, built by Abdelkader HADJ ALI, IMACHE AMAR, BOUKORT and others who took their first steps in the workers' struggles.
It is in the name of this organization supported by the Communist International that MESSALI claimed at the Brussels Congress the independence of Algeria with all that it entails as sovereignty.
Without further ado, the colonial administration decided to ban it.
From the 1930s, several political movements imposed their existence, including the PPA and the PCA.
The atrocities silenced the revolt, but did not annihilate it. It took a few decades for the Algerian people to reorganize in relation to the new economic and social political givens resulting from the Bolshevik revolution and the transformations that Algerian society has experienced.
On May 8, 1945, the day of victory over Nazism, the Algerian people who had given tens of thousands of children, died under the French flag, seized this symbolic date, to go out en masse in the streets of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata and claim its dignity and independence.
The reprisals were commensurate with the fears of the colonial authority, it was necessary to crush immediately and definitively any attempt at insurrection.
On this day of May 8, 1945, colonialism had reached the pinnacle of atrocities, it had adopted Nazi methods. “Dead bodies were strewn on the streets, there were dead people everywhere, dead people, dead people, corpses everywhere in every street, wrote Kateb Yacine, that day continues my mother lost her memory…”:
The Algerian memory for its part retained 45,000 thousand dead….. and that without counting that more than 50 Kabyle villages had been razed in those bloody days. The Algerians decimated in these villages are not counted and even the national history does not mention them; only researchers have raised this question which remains under construction and which will have to be updated….
Colonialism's barbaric response to peaceful protest has shown the only way to end oppression and terror.
Nationalism on the move will structure itself and lead to the organization of the FLN which nine years later will trigger what history will remember as being the Algerian war: the bloodiest conflict of the second half of the 20th century .
Several attacks in different places took place on this day of November 1 , 1954, colonial France woke up flabbergasted, fear began to change sides.
To reassure the Blackfoot populations and the Parisian authorities: the implacable colonialists decided that these were skirmishes that would be crushed in no time.
War was declared: a long, murderous war which lasted until July 4, 1962: 8 years of conflict in which A MILLION AND A HALF Algerians will perish: A GENOCIDE!
Encouraged by the capitulation of the French army in Indochina and the resounding victory of Dien Bien Phu, the Algerians in turn began the struggle, a bloody and merciless struggle.
The Algerian war had shaken the French republic.
René Coty, politically weakened, appealed to General de Gaulle who, according to the bourgeoisie and the ruling class, was the man for the job.
France showed significant signs of weakening (discontent within the army), the population in mainland France was exhausted by deprivation, due to the war effort (Indochina and then Algeria), and some politicians feared that this political instability would lead to a coup d'etat; fear which will become effective in 1958.
General De Gaulle considered that Algeria was the finest colonial jewel that should remain in the bosom of the bourgeoisie.
Thus, on leaving Algiers on August 14, 1944, he sent a directive telegram to General Martin (commanding the 19th army corps in Algeria) in these terms: "It is a question of preventing the 'North Africa does not slip through our fingers while we liberate France', this historical element was not listed in the collection of 'Charles De Gaulle's letters, notes and notebooks' published by his family; just as the text of the instructions sent by the same General De Gaulle to Governor General Chataigneau was not listed, ordering him to inflict rigorous repression on the populations of Sétif, Guelma then the riots of May 8, 1945.
These elements of great importance, deleted by General de Gaulle's family from the collection, are part of the mythology built on the personality of General de Gaulle: democrat and humanist.
General De Gaulle and his thurifers have indeed built a mythology presenting him practically as a hero of the independence of Algeria.
This mythology was even adopted in Algeria by the neocolonial bourgeois class.
It was under the Fifth Gaullist Republic that were employed " against the Algerian people and against the ALN, military means of an unprecedented scale in the entire history of French expeditions across the seas. ". The deployment of an army of more than 500,000 men, without counting the harki auxiliaries, was followed by several bloody military operations with the aim of exterminating the military and popular resistance against the colonial war. Thus, in addition to the Challe lines and the Maurice line built to isolate Algeria from all forms of solidarity and the supply of weapons, military operations known as Challe, Jumelle, Pierre bleu, la Gerboise and others had destroyed hundreds of villages and killed thousands of children, women and old people. It is with napalm and white phosphorus that the French army bombarded our douars and our forests and caused fires which for a long time exterminated the vegetation in our fields and our countryside.
Civilian populations were dislodged from their homes and gathered hundreds of kilometers away in regroupment camps with a view to ending their support for the ALN.
Faced with this plan of massive destruction of the resistance and the paramilitary organization on Algerian territory, the FLN and its popular organizations have changed tactics and are going to extend the war on French territory, developing other forms of struggle for reach the final goal: independence.
By giving his approval for such crimes, de Gaulle entered the history of the greatest exterminators of the 20th century . Faced with the determination of the Algerian people, he had tried everything to keep Algeria as a colony, by intensifying the war, and by his plan to partition Algeria. He failed. Those who describe him as a humanist cannot clear him of the heinous crimes he committed through his warlike directives towards the Algerian people.
The Algerian people achieved their liberation from the colonial yoke by using all forms of military, political and diplomatic struggles with heavy sacrifices. There was no longer any question of continuing to suffer the humiliations, prohibitions, ferocious exploitation of the settlers and all the horrors to which he was subjected.
Aware of the extent of the atrocities they have inflicted on the Algerian people, the settlers understood that any coexistence would be impossible, this is the reason that pushed them to leave massively as soon as the ceasefire, followed by the harkis and all the traitors…
But the colonialist impulses remained alive.
The colonial administration has cleared out, but it has left its servants hidden in society and in the apparatuses of the new independent state. The objective was to submit the new state to the domination of French power to safeguard the interests of French capitalist societies.
Moreover Just after our independence France de Gaulle instructed the Kingdom of Morocco to claim a large part of our territory, Mauritania and Mali. The colonial aims of France have never been extinguished, they are manifested by new methods neocolonialism and imperialism in collaboration with other capitalist powers with the aim of imposing an international division of labor which excludes third countries world of economic and social development. These powers proceed today by other forms of destabilization by hiding behind proxy wars led by forces built on cultural, identity, territorial and religious claims.
Algeria, because of its geostrategic position and the importance of its natural resources, finds itself confronted with the spiral of neocolonialism and imperialism.
THE PCA, November 18, 2022