Mondoweiss – November 30, 2024
Vietnam, Algeria, Palestine: Passing on the torch of the anti-colonial struggle
No discussion of decolonization can be complete without understanding the importance of Vietnam and Algeria, and how their liberation struggles inspire oppressed people all over the world, including the Palestinians.
By HAMZA HAMOUCHENE
Editor’s Note: The following is the fifth in a series of articles co-published by Mondoweiss and the Transnational Institute that places Palestine in the long trajectory of anti-colonial struggles, from Haiti to Vietnam to Algeria and South Afric
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Introduction
“Revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle.“ Mao Zedong, 1927 (Zedong 1953)
“Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.“ Frantz Fanon, 1961 (Fanon 1967)
“Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.“ Ghassan Kanafani, 1972 (Kanafani 2023)
This year, 2024, coincides with the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (May 1954), in which Vietnamese revolutionaries inflicted a crushing defeat on French colonialists. It also marks the 70th birthday of the Algerian revolution, which began in November of the same year. The Algerian and Vietnamese resisted colonial oppression for decades before leading two of the most significant revolutions in the twentieth century, against France (and its local collaborators), which was the second biggest European colonial power in the world at the time and which was also supported by NATO forces. No discussion of decolonization and anti-imperialism can be complete without understanding the importance of Vietnam and Algeria, and how their revolutionary liberation struggles were (and continue to be) so inspiring to oppressed people all over the world, including the Palestinians.
No one revolution exactly resembles another. This is because all revolutions are rooted in a specific national or regional history, are led by particular social and generational forces, and happen at a given moment in the development of a country. However, revolutions all share a common element, without which they would not be called revolutions: the arrival of a new bloc of classes who take up leadership of the state, or the transition from colonial dependence to national independence. In Leninﾒs words, “For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for the lower classes not to want to live in the old way; it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to live in the old way.” Despite all the elements that might point to continuity, it is this rupture that marks a revolutionary change.
Against this backdrop and understanding, my objectives in this longread are five-fold:
- To share some historical reflections on the Algerian and Vietnamese anti-colonial struggles, so as to bring to light important chapters in anti-colonial history.
- To draw connections and parallels between the two struggles, and between them and the ongoing Palestinian liberation struggle, to understand how Palestinians have been inspired by both struggles and at the same time themselves continue to inspire the world with their resolute resistance to Zionist settler-colonialism.
- To challenge and debunk attempts to portray a false equivalence between colonizers and those who are colonized.
- To highlight transnational solidarities between those who are oppressed and colonized.
- To firmly place the Palestinian resistance and liberation struggle within the long line of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles going back to the Haitian struggle at the end of the eighteenth century and start of the nineteenth century, when Haitian slaves rebelled against the French empire and established the first Black republic (James 2001)
- Colonialism denies the colonized their own history, national liberation re-invents it
“National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.“ Frantz Fanon, 1961 (Fanon 1967)
The Algerian independence struggle against French colonialists was one of the most inspiring anti-imperialist revolutions of the twentieth century. It was part of the wave of decolonization that started after the Second World War in India, China, Cuba, Vietnam and many countries in Africa. It inscribed itself in the spirit of the Bandung Conference and the era of the ‘awakening of the South’, a South that has been subjected for decades (and in many cases for more than a century) to imperialist and capitalist domination under different forms, from protectorates to proper settler colonies (as was the case for Algeria).
Retrospectively, French colonization of Algeria can be seen as unique, as Algeria was the first Arabic-speaking country to be annexed by the West and one of the first countries in Africa to be officially subjugated by a Western empire, long before the Berlin Conference in 1884, when different European empires (British, French, German, Belgian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) met to carve up the continent amongst themselves.
France invaded Algeria in June 1830. The French army was to spend the next 50 years suppressing an insurgency, 15 of them fighting the brilliant, fierce and dedicated resistance leader Abd-El-Kader. France’s war of conquest was conducted without let-up, especially under the command of the ruthless Marshal Bugeaud, who adopted a scorched earth policy (Fisk 2005), committing atrocities ranging from population displacement to land expropriation, massacres, and the infamous enfumades, where the French army eliminated whole tribes through asphyxiation.
Alongside Marshal Bugeaud’s pacification campaign, France actively encouraged colonization of Algeria by its own population. In a statement before the National Assembly in 1840 Bugeaud said: “Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate colons [settlers], without concerning oneself to whom those lands belong.” (This is exactly the approach the Zionists were to apply in Palestine, a century later). By 1841, the number of such colons/settlers already totaled 37,374, in comparison with approximately 3 million indigènes (native peoples) (Horne 2006). By 1926, the number of settlers had reached some 833,000, 15% of the population, and it increased to just under 1 million by 1954.
Colonization involved the expropriation of the basic factor of production, land, from the indigenous peasantry and its redistribution to the settlers, destroying the foundation of the peasant subsistence economy (Lacheraf 1965). The rural masses fought the encroachment of the colonial army until 1884, but the core of the Algerian rural resistance to colonialism was smashed in 1871, when the big politico-agrarian revolt that had spread over three-quarters of the country was finally crushed. This historic peasant uprising was a reaction to a series of disastrous confiscatory measures during the 1860s that outraged the majority of rural Algerians and led them to fear for their lives and livelihoods. Their situation was made worse by drought, harvest failures, famine, locust invasions and disease, which resulted in the deaths of more than 500,000 victims (around one-fifth of the population). In the period between 1830 and 1870 it is estimated that several million Algerians died (Bennoune 1988, Davis 2007 and Lacheraf 1965).
The Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin has described how the Algerian rural population transformed the colonial conquest into a protracted and devastating war:
‘The collapse of the regency government and the war of extermination undertaken by the French army gave this early period (1830–1884) certain special characteristics, which are not found elsewhere … faced with military power, the urban ruling class was thrown into thorough disarray and could think of no other alternative but flight … as for the peasants, flight was out of the question. Faced with the threat of extermination, they turned the Algerian countryside into the terrain for a fifty-year war which claimed millions of victims.’ (Amin 1970)
French colonial rule in Algeria lasted for 132 years (in comparison to 75 years of colonial rule in Tunisia and 44 in Morocco), having a duration and a depth that was unique in the experiences of colonialism in both Africa and the Arab world. In 1881, Algeria was administered for the first time as an integral part of France. With this extension of civilian rule to the country came the application of second-class status to Algeria’s Muslim population. The exclusion of Muslims was reflected at all levels of political representation, anti-Muslim discrimination was built into the electoral system, and the inferior status of Muslims was inscribed in law under the loathsome Code de l’Indigénat of 1881 (McDougall 2006).
After the French success in violently suppressing Algeria’s anti-colonial rebellions, the last of which took place in the 1870s and 1880s, over half a century was to pass before the Algerian resistance movement once again took up the fight, in the shape of Algerian nationalism in its modern form.
May 8 1945: ‘Victory in Europe Day’ and massacres in Algeria
“It was at Setif that my sense of humanity was affronted for the first time by the most atrocious sights. I was sixteen years old. The shock which I felt at the pitiless butchery that caused the deaths of thousands of Muslims, I have never forgotten. From that moment, my nationalism took definite form.“ Kateb Yacine, Algerian writer and poet (quoted in Horne, 2006).
On May 8, 1945 there were joyful celebrations across Europe as news spread of the Nazi capitulation. France rejoiced at being delivered from a five-year occupation. At precisely the same time, events in Algeria began that would lead to the colonial massacre of thousands of Algerian Muslims over the next two months.
On Victory in Europe Day, while Europeans celebrated, Algerians marched in Setif for independence and an end to colonization, deploying banners bearing slogans such as “For the Liberation of the People, Long Live Free and Independent Algeria!” They also brandished for the first time what would later become the flag of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) liberation movement. The French colonial authorities violently repressed the march, triggering a rebellion that led to the murder of 103 Europeans.
The colonial retaliation to these murders was savage. The French military (air, navy and army) bombed several regions, and burnt and razed many villages to the ground in Setif, Guelma and Kherrata. Over the space of two months, the French gendarmerie and troops, alongside vengeful settlers, slaughtered tens of thousands of Algerian Muslims, with some estimates as high as 45,000.
The parallels between the Setif, Guelma and Kherrata massacres and the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood operation by the Palestinian resistance against Israel, and the pitiless genocidal butchery that followed it, is too stark to ignore. In both cases, resistance whether peaceful or violent, was entirely disallowed, and aspirations for self-determination were crushed with grossly disproportionate force.
At the time (in 1945), one analyst, trying to explain the “barbarism” of the colonized and to justify France’s bloody repression, wrote: “The call to violence raises from the mountains a kind of evil genie, a wild and cruel Berber Caliban, whose movements can only be stopped by a force greater than his own. This is the historical and social explanation for the events that took place in Sétif on the very day that victory was celebrated“ (Gresh 2023). The same supremacist colonial mindset and the same racist, orientalist and essentialist explanations of why the oppressed and colonized revolt persist today: the Palestinian attacks on October 7 are often put down to the pure evil, irrational savagery and timeless barbarism of medieval and sub-human terrorists, far removed from the political context of more than 75 years of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation.
The massacres that followed the demonstrations of May 8, 1945 had significant repercussions for the Algerian nationalist movement. For the young generation of militants, the Algerian war had already started and the preparation for armed struggle could no longer be postponed. Most historians agree that the massacres of 1945 were traumatic, marking every Algerian Muslim who lived through the period. Moreover, every Algerian nationalist who was prominent in the FLN traces their revolutionary determination back to May 1945. It will not be surprising if future generations of Palestinian and Arab revolutionaries (of all political tendencies) trace their commitment to liberatory struggle to the genocide that followed the October 7 attacks and the heroic resistance in Gaza, which continues at the time of writing.
Ahmed Ben Bella, an FLN leader and head of the Algerian state from 1962 to 1965, had been a much-decorated sergeant in the 7th Regiment of Algerian Tirailleurs, a unit that distinguished itself in battle in Europe. But it was the events of 1945 that launched him on the path of revolution. He later wrote: “The horrors of the Constantine area in May 1945 succeeded in persuading me of the only path: Algeria for the Algerian.” Similarly, for Mohammed Boudiaf, another revolutionary FLN leader and also a future head of state, the colonial massacres of 1945 led him to reject electoral politics and assimilation and to embrace armed resistance and direct action as the only way to achieve liberation (Evans & Phillips 2007).
The traumatic events of 1945 were the first volleys in the Algerian struggle for independence.
Vietnam’s victory is Algeria’s inspiration
“Our actions aim to take the war to them, to let the whole world know that the Algerian people are leading a war of liberation against their European occupiers.” Djamila Bouhired
The Algerian struggle for independence cannot be divorced from the global context of decolonization. In 1945, the Arab League was formed, committed to Arab unity. In 1947, India won independence from Britain. In 1949, the Chinese Maoist revolution defeated the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and established the People’s Republic of China. 1955 saw the rise of Arab nationalism/Nasserism and the holding of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, where 29 non-aligned countries from Africa and Asia challenged colonialism and neocolonialism in a context of Cold War tensions.
The FLN leaders were under no illusion about the scale of the task confronting them, but their confidence was bolstered by the humiliating French defeat in Indochina in May 1954. As Frantz Fanon explained, the great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu was no longer, strictly speaking, just a Vietnamese victory: “Since July 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been ‘What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?‘” (Fanon 1967).
Fanon was fascinated by what the Vietnamese had achieved at Dien Bien Phu. In his view, the Vietnamese victory over the French in this remote Southeast Asian valley had demonstrated that the colonized could generate the revolutionary violence needed to force decolonization on the colonizer. News of the Vietnamese victory quickly reverberated across the French empire, shattering the myth of the colonizers’ invincibility and initiating cracks in the empire’s structure. The importance of Dien Bien Phu and its impact on the psyche of colonized people can hardly be overstated. Benyoucef Ben Khedda, president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, recalled: “In 7th May 1954, the army of Ho Chi Minh inflicted on the French expeditionary corps the humiliating disaster of Dien Bien Phu. This French defeat acted as a powerful catalyst on all those who had been thinking that an insurrection in the short term is by now the only remedy, the only possible strategy. … Direct action took precedence over all other considerations and became the priority of priorities.” (Ben Khedda 1989)
Ferhat Abbas, who became the first acting president of the newly independent Algerian Republic, cast the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu in epoch-changing terms, considering it as significant as the French revolutionary army’s victory over the Prussians in the historic battle of Valmy in 1792:
“Dien Bien Phu was more than just a military victory. This battle is a symbol. It’s the “Valmy” of the colonised peoples. It’s the affirmation of the Asian and African vis-à-vis the European. It is the confirmation of the universality of human rights. At Dien Bien Phu, the French lost the only source of “legitimation” on which their presence turned, that is the right of the strongest [to rule the weakest].” (Abbas 1962)
Others have described Dien Bien Phu as the Stalingrad of decolonization (Meaney 2024).
Holding the imperial line and solidarity between the colonized
‘It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because “quite simply” it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe.’ Frantz Fanon (Fanon 1967).
It is hard, at a distance of 70 years, to imagine the impact the first Indochina war, and especially Dien Bien Phu, had on the colonial world, particularly France’s overseas colonies, from Algeria to Senegal and from Morocco to Madagascar. A colonial power had been defeated. A regular army had been beaten!
In the 1940s, during the Second World War, when France was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany, tens of thousands of Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese, Vietnamese and others bravely joined the battle for its liberation, which they hoped would in turn lead to their own liberation. But when it finally rose from the ruins, France set about restoring its shattered empire in all its colonial pomp. Despite negotiations in Paris between Jean Sainteny and Ho Chi Minh to find a compromise on the question of post-war Vietnam, and despite the victory of the Left, including the Communists, in the November 1946 French elections, the French government nevertheless decided to reconquer Vietnam. Whether it was led by the right, the center, or the left, or by forces that were religious or secular, and from one republic to another, France continued to cling to its empire, from the Dien Bien Phu valley to the Kasbah of Algiers (Delanoë 2002).
Following the outbreak of the war in December 1946, from 1947 to 1954, tens of thousands of North Africans were sent to fight for France in Indochina (the figure ultimately reaching 123,000), at a time when their own countries were experiencing the first stirrings of the struggle for independence. Once in Vietnam, hundreds of them deserted and joined the Viet-Minh. In doing so, they were responding to Vietnamese appeals for anti-colonial solidarity (Delanoë 2002). One such appeal was made in a letter a minister in Ho Chi Minh’s government sent to the Moroccan independence leader Abd El-Krim, in exile in Cairo, in early 1949. He wrote:
‘Our struggle is your struggle and your struggle is in no way different from ours. Also, the solidarity of the national liberation movements within the framework of the former French empire is capable of putting a final end to French imperialism. Your Excellency, the government of Ho Chi Minh asks you to use your great spiritual authority to ask the soldiers of North Africa to refuse to leave for Viet Nam, and also asks you to appeal to the dockers to boycott French ships.’ (Saaf 1996)
Abd El-Krim, a revolutionary guerilla leader who had defeated the Spanish army in the epic battle of Annual in 1921 and who had set up the short-lived Republic of the Rif (1921-1926) before being ultimately defeated by the French and Spanish through air raids, gas and napalm bombing, self-propelled guns and tens of thousands of recruits from the Empire (Ayache 1990 and Daoud 1999), replied: “The victory of colonialism, even at the other end of the world, is our defeat and the failure of our cause. The victory of freedom anywhere in the world is … the signal of the approach of our independence.” (Saaf 1996)
The succession of setbacks suffered by the French army in Indochina only heightened awareness of the need for solidarity among colonized people. Responding to this need, Algerian dockers working in the ports Oran and Algiers refused to load war material bound for Indochina (Ruscio 2004).
The Vietnamese also asked Abd El-Krim and the Moroccan Communist Party to send them a North African who could establish a psychological warfare network that would encourage North African troops within the French Expeditionary Corps in the Far East (CEFEO) to desert, rally the Vietnamese, and ultimately return to their home countries to fight the French colonizers. This role was taken on by M’hamed Ben Aomar Lahrach (alias Maarouf). A Moroccan, like Abd El-Krim, Maarouf was a trade unionist and a member of the Moroccan Communist Party (Delanoë 2002). At the end of the 1940s, he traveled to Hanoi. He explained his activities with the North African soldiers who either rallied the Viet Minh or were captured as follows:
“I try to create real villages for my Arab and Kabyle prisoners, I put them in self-contained huts, I manage to give them a life reminiscent of the country. We mustn’t make these guys Vietnamese; we must repatriate them as quickly as possible! They must remain themselves; they will form the cadres of our liberation armies… I won’t let my Moroccan or Algerian deserters die.“ (Delanoë 2002)]
In his appeals to North African soldiers fighting on the French side in Vietnam, and in his political education work with North African captives and rallied soldiers, Maarouf’s message was “Go back home: these people, like you in Morocco, are fighting for their independence. … Return home and use your fighting spirit to liberate your country” (Saaf 1996). Above all, he sought to recuperate North Africans who were being used by the French as cannon fodder, and who found themselves lost in this distant Asian country, with the explicit aim of repatriating them as soon as possible to their own countries.
The effectiveness of Maarouf’s work is best demonstrated by the hundreds of Algerian repatriates who became effective military cadres for the Algerian National Liberation Front starting from 1954/55. Maarouf’s activities were truly heroic; they included participating in the arrest of French General De Castries in Dien Bien Phu. Testifying to the high esteem in which he was held, Ho Chi Minh gave him the name Anh Ma, which literally means ‘Brother Horse’, and the Vietnamese awarded him the rank of general, and decorated him with medals (Saaf 1996 and Delanoë 2002).
For France, Dien Bien Phu became a symbol of anachronistic obstinacy leading to catastrophe. For Vietnam, it was a symbol of the recovery of national independence. But Dien Bien Phu was not just an historical event for these two countries alone: throughout the world, the battle was seen as a turning point that heralded the coming of other battles for liberation. The echo of gunshots had barely subsided in the Tonkin valley before it was heard in the Aurès mountains in Algeria. And within less than a year, the ‘wretched of the earth’ gathered in Bandung (Ruscio 2004). As for the colonialists, De Lattre, France’s commander-in-chief, confided to the officer he had put in charge of creating his Vietnamese army, that they had to hold the imperial line: “it’s in Tonkin that we are defending our positions in Africa. Everything must be subordinated to this imperative“ (Goscha 2022). Today, it is in Gaza that U.S.-led imperialism seeks to defend its global hegemony.
In the U.S.-Israeli attempt to hold the imperial line in Gaza, they are applying similarly brutal methods to those applied by the French in Vietnam, including starvation of the civilian population. The French focused on breaking the Vietnamese’s access to rice, as part of French General Raoul Salan’s order to “Starve the adversary” (Salan later founded the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a clandestine terrorist organization that sought to prevent Algerian independence). The use of food as a weapon was by no means new. Imperial armies have practiced this form of warfare since antiquity. But the French were the first to apply this approach in a twentieth-century war of decolonization – with terrible consequences for the Vietnamese. In doing so, they collapsed the dividing line between combatants and civilians, and between the home front and the battle front. This was la guerre totale (total war), as advocated by General Lionel-Max Chassin, commander-in-chief of the French air force in Indochina during the early 1950s. Chassin insisted that this was the only way to win a colonial war, arguing that “One must starve people to death’ (Goscha 2022). In 1956, Chassin told his superior that he was ‘convinced that had we killed all of the water buffalos, destroyed all of the rice in Indochina, we would have had the Vietnamese at our mercy whenever we wanted.”
Similar logics prevailed in France’s attempt to ‘pacify’ Algeria between 1954 and 1962, and they are now again at work in Israel’s total war on Gaza. In fact, what is taking place today in Gaza is not just a genocide. Although it is almost impossible to find the right terminology to describe the level of destruction and death Israel is unleashing on Palestinians, a plethora of concepts are now being used to understand the enormity of what is taking place: urbicide, scholasticide, domicide, ecocide, and holocide – the annihilation of an entire social and ecological fabric.
