To Carthage I go

I take the Golden Road

Dear readers, this will be the last article for a bit.  I leave for Tunisia this coming Sunday and will be away for just over three weeks.  I’m so looking forward to it, my third trip to North Africa, following Egypt last year and Morocco a few years before.

I simply love to travel; it’s in my blood.  We had some wonderful vacations when I was a child, visiting quite a few unusual places.  I’ve continued this family tradition. The more unusual the destination the better I like it.  I’m not a travel snob, though; I’m as capable as most other people of doing touristy things and visiting touristy places.  I like to be pampered and I’m most assuredly not into any form of asceticism or personal hardship.  I go for pleasure, not for penance! 

Having said that, I do sometimes feel that I was born too late, at a time when the world gets smaller by the day; a time when all the great adventures are past; when all the trails are blazed and all the paths found.  I would simply loved to have been alive in the great age of exploration, which for me is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the maps were being filled out. 

Have you heard of Gertrude Bell?  She is a particular heroine of mine: the first woman down from Oxford with a degree in Modern History; an independent scholar, an archaeologist, and expert in several Middle Eastern languages, a writer, a political specialist, a traveller; a friend of sheiks and kings - the female Lawrence of Arabia!

In 1900 she dressed herself as a Bedouin man, riding alone into the dangerous Hauran Plain, still under the control of the Ottomans, in search of the Druze, a militant Muslim sect, which had been fighting the Turks for two hundred years. She made contact with Yahya Beg, king of the Druze, and conversed with him in his own language. Some weeks after he was to ask another visitor to his domain 'Have you seen a queen travelling?'

I’m no queen; I’m just a footloose English girl, going where the fancy takes me, hoping to understand other people and other cultures just a little better; hoping at the same time to understand myself a little better, my mind deeper, my horizons broader.

Why Tunisia, you may wonder?  In part because I have a fascination with past cultures, with the history of a country that once contained Carthage, the realm of Queen Dido, more completely lost than mere time would suggest.  I will be there, among the fragments and those later left by Rome, fragments upon fragments, traces upon traces.  Perhaps I shall find Dido, with Aeneas by her side. (I saw Anna Karenina this afternoon.  My present mood is fey and romantic!)

But my African adventure is deeper.  It will take me from Tunis and Carthage in the north to the oasis of Tozeur in the far south-west.  From there I’m off into the Sahara and also to see the great salt lake of Chott el Jerid, with mirages dancing in the sun! 

OK, there is a slight concern going to a Muslim country at this time, a time when things are so unsettled, a time when Tunisia itself is unsettled.  But I was in Cairo last November, leaving just before the latest round of trouble started on Tahrir Square.  If one worried about danger one would never travel at all.  Besides life is all risk and I am a fatalist, a jolly one at that.  I shall, in my own way, spread as much peace and light as I can…and keep my golden locks well tucked under a headscarf.

So, that’s it.  My next piece shall be a postcard from Tunisia.  

The Plague

There are two movies which gave me some limited understanding, like an archaeological evaluation, of the tragic modern history of Algeria – The Battle for Algiers and Of Gods and Men.

On the face of it they are about two completely unconnected events. The first deals with an episode in the Algerian War of Independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962; the second with an incident in 1996, when a small community of French Cistercian monks, living in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains, were kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by mujahedeen guerrillas, fighting a prolonged and brutal war with the government.

The connection lies at a deeper level; it lies in the nature of French colonialism in Algeria and the reaction of the local people; it lies in the nature of the resistance movements created in the drive for national liberation; it lies in the nature of a particularly brutal war that, so far as France was concerned, at lest until fairly recently, wasn’t a war at all; in lies in forms of uncompromising extremism, in torture and murder as legitimate political techniques; it lies most particularly in the pursuit of power, to he seized and held at all costs.

In Algeria: France’s Undeclared War Professor Martin Evans, who has previously published on Algerian history, weaves the various threads together. It’s an exhaustive piece of work, looking deep into the prehistory of a conflict that stands apart from Africa’s other wars of liberation in the intensity of its brutality. It also draws attention to its lasting significance, an unhappy postscript.

For a long time the Algerian conflict, like Vichy and war-time collaboration in general, was a particularly sensitive area in French national consciousness, visited at some peril. How could it not be, given that over a million settlers, the so-called Pieds-Noirs, were obliged to resettle in metropolitan France after Algeria achieved independence in 1962? Full of bitterness and resentment against the right-wing government of General De Gaulle, they went even further to the right, forming an active constituency that would eventually become the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

That’s perhaps the central paradox of France’s Algerian conflict: it was started by the left and ended by the right. In 1956 Guy Mollet, head of the Socialist-led Republican Front government, ordered the army to begin ‘pacification’ operations against Algerian nationalists. Although himself opposed to colonialism on principle, he had a duty, as he saw it, to defend the civilising mission of the Fourth Republic against the fanatical and barbarous forms of Algerian nationalism. As so often the defence of civilization descended into the forms of barbarism allegedly being fought against.

Evans writes that Algeria was one of the longest and most difficult episodes in the whole decolonisation process. There is one simple reason for this: officially it wasn’t a colony at all; it was part of metropolitan France - it had been since the 1880s -, no different from Brittany or Normandy. It was an illusion, of course, a legalistic fiction, but one with particularly bloody consequences.

The civilising mission was always barbarous. From the outset in 1830 the French intrusion into what was then an Ottoman province was marked by savagery. This was a genocidal war, one of partial ethnic cleansing, which might usefully be compared with the American expansion in the West at the expense of the indigenous peoples. It is estimated that by the mid-1850s Algeria had lost almost half of its pre-colonial population of some four million people. That’s when the settlement was planted, with roots so deep that they could only be pulled up in extreme violence.

The difference between the French and American example is that there were never enough settlers; that strong as they were the native Algerians were stronger. Fighting a war against history and demography, the French settlers, unlike the American colonialists, could never go their own way, which meant that France could not go its own way either without difficulty; without the death of one republic and the birth of another.

The French were brutal, certainly but, as Evans shows, the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), their leading opponent, were just as brutal, not just towards the colonialists but towards rival nationalist movements, applying savage cruelty even to deviationists within their own ranks. Liberation for them was about achieving power, to be held at all costs, which was to lead eventually to their own ‘pacification’ campaign against the Islamists in the 1990s.

The French mission was always hopeless. It gave rise to the ‘long hatred’, one of the key themes, as the author argues, that led to the revolt of 1 November, 1954, a new plague, that Albert Camus, author of The Plague and himself a Pied-Noir, had not anticipated.

There had been a prologue several years before in eastern Algeria, when a hundred Pieds-Noirs were killed in violent demonstrations, their corpses afterwards horribly mutilated. In wholly disproportionate acts of retaliation, the French slaughtered thousands, destroying many villages. “Nothing could be the same again,” Evans writes, “Rural Algeria had confronted European Algeria, producing a society more polarised than ever.”

The war caused thousands of lives and has left an unresolved legacy that exists so far as today; in Algeria, where the FLN ensures that there is no end to the Arab Winter; in France, where the 2005 riots by alienated migrants showed that the country still suffers from the ‘Algeria syndrome.’ For De Gaulle Algeria was a millstone around the neck of France. It still is.

Evans is to be congratulated on splendid piece of research, lucid, scholarly and balanced. He unfolds a tale whose lightest word harrows up the soul. Once again the lesson of history is that we learn nothing from history, otherwise we would not have had other ‘civilising’ missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, other plagues.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise

Keep out of Libya!

I’m beset with a sense of déjà vu. Speaking recently at the Women in the World conference, ex-president Bill Clinton, king of the liberal interventionists, called for the West to join in the Libyan civil war on behalf of the rebels. “I think we should support them”, he said, “We have the planes to make an appropriate contribution to this.”

Meanwhile, David Cameron, the British prime minister, a sort of political Mister Bean, has been seen trotting along the European corridors of power, trying – so far without a great deal of success – to get agreement on a no-fly zone and targeted airstrikes against Gaddafi’s forces. Europe, he believes, must do more to stop the Mad Colonel’s rampage against his own people.

Yes, as I have said, a sense of déjà vu. It’s Kosovo all over again; it’s Clinton in the same role; it’s Cameron pathetically trying to don the mantle of Tony Blair, Britain’s home-grown war monger. Was that a success? Well, I suppose it defends on one’s definition of success. A ruthless bombing campaign directed against civilian targets in Serbia, coupled with support for the Kosovo Liberation Army, a kind of murderous mafia headed by Hashim Thaçi, Blair’s chum, which is alleged to have smuggled heroin and cocaine into Western Europe, as well as butchering Serbs to sell their organs. The outcome was an independent and semi-criminal fiefdom in the Balkans, with Thaçi as Mr. Big. Yes, as I say, it really depends on how one defines success.

How much of this kind of self-righteous interventionism can the world take, I have to ask? How many more pyrrhic ‘successes’ must we celebrate; how many more Kosovos, Afghanistans and Iraqs? But there is more here, a more pertinent question: what business is it of ours, what business is it of Europe and America, to go dashing from here to there around the Third World setting wrongs to right? What incredible arrogance, what hubris, this displays, a nineteenth century gunboat mentality with a twenty-first century gloss of canting hypocrisy.

I have no doubt at all that Gaddafi is a ‘bad man’, a dictator, one under whom I personally would not care to live. But he is still a recognised head of state, one with whom we were quite happy to do business until quite recently. Do we know anything of the rebels? Do we know anything of their politics, other than their desire to get rid of the Colonel? Have Clinton or Cameron even paused to think what a post-Gaddafi Libya may look like? Do I need to hazard answers here?

The point is, like him or not, like it or not, Gaddafi has every right to deal with insurrection in any fashion he sees fit. Throughout history governments have taken action to contain rebellion, not excluding those of England and the United States. Yet there seems to be a special condescension when it comes to places like Libya that allows pontification over what is and what is not acceptable, schoolmasters addressing homilies to naughty children.

It’s as well to remember that we once intervened in Afghanistan on behalf of the Taliban. We intervene in places like Libya at our own peril. The last thing we should expect after the event is gratitude. That much should be obvious from the fiasco that is Iraq.

The Arab Winter

Things are moving so fast in the Arab world that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with events; events, that is, after the wave has passed and the revolution over. The world’s attention is now on Libya and the beleaguered Colonel Gaddafi. There is still half an eye on Egypt, because while the old dictator may be gone the structures that brought him to power are still in place. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, some prescient words from a song by The Who, an old British rock band.

In writing before about Egypt (Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt) I made the following related points;

Revolutions are all very well when they produce the results one approves of, but they don’t always do that, do they? If you are reading the book Egypt please don’t make the mistake of reading Eastern Europe 1989; read Iran 1979…What do the Egyptians want themselves? For some time now polls have shown that they want democracy…but they also want sharia law, a glaring contradiction. The source of law can be God or it can be the people; it can’t be both. Will another Nasser emerge – could the country take more of the absolute misery that he inflicted on it? – or someone altogether more sinister, more brotherly?

The brotherly reference is, of course, to the Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest political force in the country, poised rather like the Bolsheviks in the wings. But if one wants to look at Egypt’s possible future, and the possible future of Libya, look back, back to where the upheaval began: look back to Tunisia. Unfortunately most of the media seems blind to developments there, which is rather a pity, because things are far from good.

There the so-called Jasmine Revolution led to the fall of President Ben Ali in January. Now an interim government is in place, weak and uncertain. Ben Ali was a dictator, yes, there was corruption, yes, there was high unemployment, yes, but with all this Tunisia was one of the most advanced in the region; the wealthiest, the most secular and the most progressive.

The regime was the least brutal and the people the best educated in North Africa, a point made in a recent report I read. The veil was banned in public, polygamy was outlawed, mosques were shuttered outside prayer times and men required permission from the local police to grow beards. Sex education was mandatory in schools and pupils were taught the separation between religion and state. Radical Islamists opposed to the secular order were exiled or imprisoned.

Now what? They are back, that’s what, back in their hundreds, demanding an Islamist state. There have been widespread demonstrations calling, amongst other things, for the banning of alcohol in a country where much of the wealth came from the tourist industry. A Polish Catholic priest recently had his throat cut, the first sectarian murder in modern Tunisian history, and anti-Semitic slogans have appeared outside the main synagogue, this in a country where the persecution of Jews was previously unknown.

The agenda has been set even before elections are held; violence and intolerance is spreading, a power vacuum is being filled by people who want less democracy rather than more, who want laws supposedly made by God - meaning themselves – rather than by the people.

Actually, when I say the Islamic militants want less democracy that’s not quite true: they want democracy insofar as it offers a route to power, then we shall see. What shall we see? Why, the most awful forms of cultural totalitarianism, theocracy in the Iranian style. Returning to Egypt it’s possible to deduce what that might involve. Just before that fall of Mubarak a poll carried out by the Pew Research Centre found that a majority of people support stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for apostasy.

I would not for a moment seek to deny ‘democracy’ as a right of all peoples, the right to chose their own destinies, even if that destiny takes them into a new dark age. Yes, I feel sorry for people who take a more tolerant view of life; I feel sorry in particular for women, some of whom have been demonstrating in Tunisia in a futile rearguard action against the onset of fundamentalism. I feel sorry that they are threatened with ‘democracy.’

The point is ‘democracy’ has become such a mantra that people seldom pause to consider that there is no single road here, no one size fits all. In Morocco free and fair elections have seen the fundamentalist Party for Justice and Development grow bit by bit, election by election, to the point where it comes ever closer to forming a majority in parliament. In Gaza democracy laboured and brought forth Hamas, an openly terrorist organisation.

I have no solutions here and I can see no way forward. My view might be dismissed as pessimistic though I would argue that it is simply realistic. This Arab spring is already showing clear signs of turning into winter, with no summer in between.

Days of Glory, no, Indigènes!

Days of Glory is a French-language film directed by Rachid Bouchareb. Released in 2006, it won the best actor award that year at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film, but lost out on the day to The Lives of Others, a worthy opponent. It was broadcast on BBC 4 a few days ago, when I saw it for the first time.

The focus is on four men in particular: Said, Yassir, Messaoud and Abdelkader. They fight through campaigns in Italy, southern France and on to Alsace. They fight with courage and bravery but they are treated shabbily; they are discriminated against by the nation and the army they serve, forms of discrimination both petty and grand, from denying them tomatoes to refusing leave and promotion. It upset me. I can imagine how those men must have felt, risking their lives when their lives had such little apparent value.

The first thing I have to say is that the English title in retrospect made me angry, a vacuous cliché so lacking in imagination, one that says little or nothing about the movie itself, about what the director was trying to say. Who decides these things, I wonder? Do the film makers themselves have any input? I saw the movie advertised when it first came out but decided not to go because I thought it was just another ‘war movie’, another Saving Private Ryan, and I’m not all that keen on war movies as such. It’s not; oh no, it is not. The original French title is Indigènes, meaning Natives, more appropriate in every sense, as I will explain below.

Indigènes tells the story of the men of North Africa, the ‘natives’, who were recruited in the Second World War by the Free French to fight against the Germans in Europe. They volunteer for all sorts of reasons; because they believe in the cause, because they want to escape poverty, because the want to come to a ‘homeland’ they have never seen, because they are looking for a better life; all sorts of reasons.


The discrimination did not end when the war ended. When the nations of North Africa and the other French colonial territories became independent the French government discontinued payment of war pensions. A long legal battle ensued but it was only after the release of Indigènes that this was reversed and veterans paid what they were due. What a powerful medium for justice cinema continues to be, when it chooses to be.