Algerians protest against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth mandate. Algiers, March 2019

This article is a preview from the Summer 2020 edition of New Humanist

On the eve of Algeria’s presidential election in December, a cartoonist sketched Ali Ammar, alias Ali La Pointe, the resistance fighter who died in the war for independence against the French. The drawing, based on a scene from the 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers, shows La Pointe receiving a note from the National Liberation Front (FLN) via a young boy. As in the film, Ali, unable to read, asks the boy to read it out loud. The message: “Tomorrow there is no vote.”

On the street in late 2019, Ali La Pointe’s face was waved on placards. His name and those of other martyrs from the period rang out during the marches that took place every day that week. “My country is in danger, Ali Ammar, there is no coming back! We will continue the battle of Algiers!” went one chant. “We are the sons of Amirouche, we are bringing freedom. The tables will turn! We will take them all down!” was another in the protesters’ repertoire, recalling Amirouche Aït Hamouda, a colonel with the National Liberation Army (ALN), who was killed in combat in 1959.

“Ali La Pointe was one of the greatest martyrs of Algeria, with the famous saying ‘Everything will change in the Casbah’, and we immortalise and remember him when we say, ‘Everything will change in the system’,” said Nabil Gouraya, a 19-year-old from the old Casbah neighbourhood in Algiers. I met him protesting from a treetop in the centre of town the day after the election.

Gouraya was among the first to take to the streets on 22 February last year when a mass protest movement – known as the Hirak – erupted in response to the announcement that the octogenarian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika would run for a fifth term. The army sided with protesters and Bouteflika resigned in April, but not before naming a new government. The protests continued, demanding more resignations.

The movement was born of indignation and a refusal to be ruled by an ageing, absent leader. It was fuelled by anger with corruption at the highest level of government and the widespread feeling that the country’s oil wealth was only benefiting a corrupt elite, as well as foreign companies. Numerous politicians were jailed for corruption, but the pro-democracy activists were still not content, since the army was now seen to be pulling the strings.

In December, a new president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, was elected. However, the Hirak supporters rejected this result, viewing him as a civilian figurehead for the political-military regime. That is why Gouraya is still climbing trees. “We are not tired,” he said. History helps: “The martyrs have established the confidence that Algeria is free.”

Algeria’s war for independence lasted from 1954 to 1962 and ended 132 years of French colonial rule. The military overthrew the first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, in a bloodless coup in 1965, ushering in an authoritarian military-backed regime. And so, more than half a century later, calls for istiqlal – the Arabic word for independence – ricocheted once more between the French-era buildings lining the main thoroughfare of Algiers every Tuesday and Friday, the two designated protest days.

The protests lasted until March, when the Hirak was paused by activists and banned by the government due to the spread of coronavirus. “The war for independence is a strong part of Algerian identity [and it] comes up again and again since 1962,” says Benjamin Stora, an Algerian historian whose recent book looks at historical echoes in the Hirak. “It is a factor of legitimation for political power but it also [resonates] with the population itself.”

In 2019, popular discontent swelled around the world. Cities in Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, Iran and Sudan were overrun with anti-government protests – but nowhere else did protesters invoke their history as much. “Algeria emerged out of a revolution: it is a nation that produced and was produced by a revolution,” says Stora. “The Algerian story, and its prestige in the Arab world, is its very long and very violent [fight] against the French. It was victorious in the end but they paid a very high price. The war of independence left millions dead. In other contexts – Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese – the birth of the nation was not the product of such a long war for independence.”

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Although he learned about the war at school, Gouraya says that a lot of what he knows about Ali La Pointe, including his “famous saying”, is from the 1966 Pontecorvo film. This is also true for many of the younger generation who “didn’t live through the battle of Algiers but who grew up with that movie,” says Muriam Haleh Davis, a historian at the University of California Santa Cruz. It has migrated into urban culture: American rapper Mos Def’s 2009 song “The Auditorium” samples a piece of dialogue from a scene featuring Ali La Pointe. He is an icon for football fans even outside of Algeria, in Marseille. “He is this urban figure who was very heroic but couldn’t read at all and was alienated from high culture,” she says.

Since independence, the Algerian government itself has made Ali La Pointe a national symbol. Pontecorvo’s film was subsidised by the newly independent state to serve as anti-colonial propaganda. In the opening scene, French paratroopers ambush Ali La Pointe as he hides at the top of the Casbah inside the walls of a house. Today, the house is still in ruins – preserved as a memento.

In the lead up to the election, the state apparatus used the same revolutionary rhetoric as was recycled on the streets. Lying on the table in the waiting room at a presidential candidate’s headquarters, I found a pro-regime magazine whose cover read: “1 November 1954 – 12 December 2019. A people born of revolutions.” The article described the start of the war against France and the recent election day as “two revolutions . . . separated by time and connected by history”.

The government has long relied on revolutionary credentials to underpin its legitimacy. Up to and including Bouteflika, every head of state was a war veteran, a mujahideen, while the dominating party in Algerian politics, the FLN, has its origins in the independence struggle. But respect for that ruling class has faded. Protesters associate army generals with their old enemy, calling them “sons of France”. Many distrust the regime’s take on events. “Those who are considered to be mujahideen have forged information, especially those who occupy important positions but who were working with France,” says Kader Azemira, a 33-year-old land surveyor. “Us Algerians, we do not trust official information sources, especially regarding history.”

The anniversary of the revolution, 1 November 2019, fell on a Friday, the Hirak’s main protest day, as did Independence Day in July. Fahem Dahi, an activist with a leftist political party and unemployed engineer, felt that the stars had aligned. “We are re-appropriating our flag, we are re-appropriating our national anthem, we are re-appropriating the symbols of the revolution,” said the 29-year-old. “1 November is ours, not theirs.”

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Once the centre of the insurgency against colonisation in the 50s and 60s and the target of French bombs, the Casbah is now a victim of time and neglect. The traditional white buildings of the ancient citadel, which have overlooked the Mediterranean since the 18th century, are crumbling – many have collapsed and others are in a critical condition.

Hafida Bouhired, a conservationist and a Casbah native, despairs at the situation of her neighbourhood and her country. The population of the Casbah has ballooned from 30,000 in 1958 to around 70,000 today. She says that migration from other parts of Algeria was encouraged after the 1965 coup d’état three years after independence, which brought in the new regime under Colonel Houari Boumédiène. “They bussed people in to applaud [the regime] because the Casbah families were not [supportive of] him,” she says.

Bouhired’s heritage association, which she set up with her sister and daughter, now operates from a building opposite the Barberousse prison. She spent six months there as a baby after her mother was arrested in 1957 for being part of the resistance. She never knew her father, who was executed by the French that same year. “I walked my first steps here. I had my first feed in prison, I had my first words in prison,” she said, as we walked past the closed prison doors towards an Ottoman citadel covered in scaffolding.

Her cousin Djamila Bouhired was also arrested in 1957 and sentenced to death (later lifted) for planting bombs in the capital during the war. A symbol of resistance in the region, Djamila was immortalised by Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine in his 1958 film Djamila the Algerien. In 1959, the Lebanese singer Fairouz recorded her own tribute, “Letter to Djamila Bouhired”. But the woman herself is discreet, keeping a low profile since
independence and not giving any media interviews.

In March 2019, however, at the age of 83 she appeared on the streets of Algiers to march with the Hirak. That month, she wrote a column in an Algerian newspaper expressing her gratitude to the younger generation “taking up the baton” from their elders. “They liberated Algeria from colonial domination; you are bringing Algerians their freedom and their pride, of which they have been dispossessed since independence,” she wrote.

Dozens of old photos of those revolutionary elders were splayed out on the table when I visited an artisanal carpenter’s workshop at the top of the Casbah in December. Khaled Mahiout, 62, one of the few remaining practitioners of his craft, had printed them to make a placard for the protest. “[Our independence] is thanks to God and thanks to these people who gave their life for their country,” said Mahiout, whose uncle was the head of a resistance cell and whose workshop floor still covers an old well that was used as a hiding place during the war. “[But] independence was sold, the provisional government was betrayed by Ben Bella [Algeria’s first president]. With the Hirak we are taking our country back.”

Louisette Ighilahriz, another war veteran who has joined the Hirak, remembers this time. “I had just come out of five years of prison, with one and a half years of incredible torture. We were physically weak, we were looking for our family members, we were getting back on our feet. We were exhausted and they had us,” said the 83-year-old, her left eye slightly squinting and her mouth forming a straight unsmiling line, in contrast to the fanclub of cheerful younger women sitting around her at a café near the Grande Poste, the main post office in the centre of Algiers where protesters gather. “If I am here then it is because I am not yet independent.”

Historian Haleh Davis says that the notion of a “confiscated revolution” goes back to the divisions that arose almost immediately after independence was won. “The summer after [March] 1962 was incredibly violent, with factions pitted against each other. I don’t think it is only one party that felt the revolution was confiscated,” she says, adding that revolutionary figures that were marginalised by the official history, and glossed over by the 1966 film, have been brought back into the national narrative by the Hirak.

Placards bring back leaders like Messali Hadj, a nationalist politician whose supporters were massacred by the FLN in 1957. Another popular hero is Abane Ramdane, a militant who many suspect was murdered by fellow FLN members in 1957 and who organised the Congress of Soummam, which established the primacy of civilian rule. Davis says it is a moment “to express discontent with what ended up being the official national discourse [and] to rectify some of the things that didn’t work out in the first independence, [for example] the primacy of civilian powers over the military.”

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Weighing out apples and tomatoes in her husband’s grocery store, Nawal, 42, was neither protesting nor voting that week. At the beginning of the Hirak, she was scared because it wasn’t clear who or what was driving the leaderless mass. “I want the situation to be calm and peaceful. We don’t want another black decade,” she said, referring to the long and bloody civil war following the cancellation of the 1991 election result, in which the Islamist group Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the first round and was poised to win the second. The army stepped in to stop the Islamists taking power and violence ensued, with somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people killed.

Before the Hirak started, there was a “wall of fear,” says Mostefa Bouchachi, a human rights lawyer and leading figure in the movement. The government instrumentalises this fear to maintain the status quo. The chaos that followed the 2011 Arab uprisings bolstered their argument, he says. “Each time there were protests, [the government] would threaten them, saying, ‘You are good like this, if you want to protest you risk ending up like the Libyans, the Syrians.’”

The relative calm in Algeria during that period may be partly explained by the still fresh memories of the decade of bloodshed and instability in the 90s, as well as oil-financed payouts to “buy peace” from the population. But in 2019, the wall of fear fell.

Nawal’s husband said he was happy when the Hirak started. “We experienced the 90s and we learned from that experience,” said Fateh, whose brother was killed during the civil war by a land mine while working with the military. “The minister Ouyahia said that we will end up like Syria, we proved him wrong.”

The aftermath of the Arab Spring has provoked a general wariness among observers. It is rare to see a foreign newspaper refer to the Hirak as a “revolution”, though the Algerians participating describe it in such terms.

At breakfast in my hotel the day after the election, I met a German journalist couple, whose pessimism was rooted in their experience reporting on the region since 2008. Martin Gehlen, a writer with the German newspaper Zeit, said he now approaches “hopes and enthusiasm” very carefully.

“The result of the first uprisings [in] 2011 is catastrophic,” he said. “Three civil wars, Libya, Yemen, Syria; one extreme brutal dictatorship, Egypt; and Tunisia as a hybrid state with democratic practice and at the same time the old public-private elite network still in place and in power.”

There’s another reason why Gehlen avoids the term “revolution”. While the movement has managed to avoid chaos, it has not yet succeeded in winning major concessions from the government, let alone overturning the system. Many Algerians, like Fateh, are content with the change in president. Reports in the months before the pandemic said the Hirak was losing steam as it struggled to organise a way forward. But Gouraya and his fellow marchers continue to pursue more radical change. Ighalirez, the 83-year-old revolutionary, is also defiant.

She finds hope, like many others, in recalling the war against France, which raged for over seven years before Algeria gained independence.