Revolutionary violence and urban guerilla warfare in a time of decolonization
“We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.” Mao Zedong (Zedong 1967)
“Knowing everything that had happened in our country, it was clear for us there was no option but an armed struggle, and that we had to confront the French, and with violence.“ Zohra Drif (Drif 2017)
The Indochinese and Algerian wars against French colonialism have become foundational to modern politics in both countries. Both independence struggles were to profoundly shape the character of anti-colonial thought over the subsequent decades.
Christopher Goscha argued in his excellent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu that Ho Chi Minh ended up administering two kinds of wartime states, one capable of holding out against the colonizer, in guerilla form, just as the Algerian FLN were to do in North Africa, the other capable of generating the required military and organizational force needed to defeat a Western colonial army in a set-piece battle, of the kind the Chinese communists had created. Thanks to Chinese military assistance and advisers, instruction in modern military science, and the introduction of the draft and mobilization laws, the Vietnamese communists presided over a military revolution unknown in any other war of decolonization in the twentieth century (Goscha 2022). Indeed, the Algerian nationalists were not alone in their inability to transition from guerilla warfare to conventional warfare: in no other twentieth-century war of decolonization was there to be anything like the People’s Army of Vietnam, and there was never to be another Dien Bien Phu. But that did not mean that colonial powers could not be vanquished in other ways, including guerilla warfare.
The Vietnamese anticolonial fight against the French did not take place independently of other events in Asia. The first Indochina war (1945–1954) was taking place in parallel to the Korean war in a context of an expansion of the Cold War in southeast Asia, where the U.S. saw aiding France as a way to fight the Communists. The resumption of the war in Vietnam in 1960 saw the direct entry of the United State into the fray, with its formidable war technology and its belief that its victory was assured. The United States no longer needed the aid of a third country to inflict decisive blows on the Communists in Asia. The American war against Vietnam was to last 15 years before its ‘invincible armada’ was forced to withdraw without glory, leaving behind a devastated country.
The devastation and violence were not unique to Vietnam’s anti-colonial revolutions. The declaration of war in Algeria on November 1, 1954 also initiated one of the longest and bloodiest wars in the history of decolonization, replete with merciless atrocities (Stora 2004). The FLN leadership had a realistic appreciation of the military balance of power, which starkly favored France, whose army was the fourth largest in the world at the time. In response to this reality, their strategy was inspired by Ho Chi Minh’s dictum “For every nine of us killed we will kill one – in the end you will leave.” The FLN wanted to create a climate of violence and insecurity that would be ultimately intolerable for the French, to internationalize the conflict, and to bring Algeria to the attention of the world (Evans & Phillips 2007). Following this logic, the revolutionary leaders Abane Ramdane and Larbi Ben M’hidi decided to take guerilla warfare into the country’s urban areas, and specifically to launch the battle of Algiers in September 1956.
There is no better way to fully appreciate this key and dramatic moment of sacrifice in the Algerian revolution than watching the classic realist film by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, released in 1966. Initially banned in France, the film powerfully reenacts some of the critical moments of the Algerian resistance in the capital and the French crackdown on it. In one dramatic moment, Colonel Mathieu, a thinly disguised General Massu (who had also fought in the first Indochina War), presents the captured FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi at a press conference, where a journalist questions the morality of hiding bombs in women’s shopping baskets. The journalist asks: “Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many people?” Ben M’hidi replies: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.” (quoted in Fisk 2005).
Djamila Bouhired, a revolutionary icon who has become an inspirational figure in the whole Arab world (especially for Palestinians), as well as beyond, was a key figure in the battle of Algiers and was, alongside Zohra Drif, and Samia Lakhdari and her mother, one of the women who planted bombs across the city. After being captured, raped and severely tortured, she heroically challenged her colonial captors and torturers: “I know you will sentence me to death but do not forget that by killing me you will not only assassinate freedom in your country, but you will not prevent Algeria from becoming free and independent.”
Zohra Drif, another heroine of the Algerian War of Independence, well-known for her involvement in the Milk Bar Café bombing in 1956, was an integral part of the FLN’s bombing network in Algiers, working with Ali La Pointe, Djamila Bouhired, Hassiba Ben Bouali and Yacef Saâdi, head of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers. She was eventually captured and was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor by the military tribunal of Algiers for terrorism. Drif was imprisoned in the women’s section of Barbarossa prison. In her memoirs, she reflected on the role of Djamila Bouhired: “They had their Marianne, we had our Djamila … For colonial France, she was “the soul of terrorism”. For us and for all freedom-loving peoples, she became the soul of liberation and the symbol of Algeria at war, beautiful and rebellious.” (Drif 2017)
Bouhired’s heroic struggle, courage, abnegation, sumud (steadfastness) and sacrifice still reverberate in Palestine and still feed the beating heart and inspire the language and imaginaries of resistance, revolution and the struggle for liberation. Bouhired’s mantle was taken up by the Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled, alongside many others.
The urban revolt in Algiers was eventually crushed without mercy, through the resort to torture on a systematic scale to extract information, including fitting electrodes to genitals (Alleg 1958). By October 1957, the FLN network in Algiers was dismantled, after the blowing up of the last remaining leader Ali La Pointe along with Little Omar, Hassiba Ben Bouali, and Hamid Bouhamidi, in their hiding place in the Casbah. Despite this military loss, the FLN had scored a diplomatic victory: France was isolated internationally because of the scandalous methods of repression it used.
The Algerian experience of urban warfare as part of a decolonization struggle was not an unprecedented one. Over a decade before the FLN set off bombs in Algiers, the Vietnamese had already fought major urban battles in Saigon, Haiphong and Hanoi. They too were brutal affairs, with the French using tanks, artillery and bombers to blast Vietnamese urban positions. Like the Casbah in Algiers, the Old Quarter of Hanoi was ground zero for the battle for that city (1946–1947). During the fighting, the commander-in-chief of France’s Expeditionary Corps in Indochina, General Jean Vally, instructed his subordinates to “hit them hard with the cannon and the bomb….in order to put an end to the resistance and to prove to our adversary the overwhelming superiority of our capabilities.” (Goscha 2022) By the end of the battle, Hanoi’s ‘Casbah’ lay in ruins.
The level of violence inflicted by the French across the Red River Plain and the rest of upper Vietnam from January 1951 until mid-1954 had no equivalent in the preceding history of twentieth-century wars of decolonization. Among the Vietnamese there were more than a million dead, and hundreds of thousands wounded, including victims of torture, while the losses of the French Expeditionary Corps amounted to 130,000 men. Similarly staggering levels of violence were reached in Algeria. Official estimates suggest a million and a half Algerians were killed in the eight-year war that ended in 1962. A quarter of the population (2.35 million) were confined in concentration camps, at least 3 million people (half the rural population) were displaced, around 8,000 villages were destroyed or burned, hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests were burned or defoliated by napalm bombs, cultivable lands were either sown with mines or declared ‘prohibited zones’, and the country’s livestock was decimated (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964; Bennoune 1973).
In both cases (Algeria and Vietnam), the colonizers dirty work of vengeance against the colonized’s daring acts of resistance involved furthering and entrenching the dehumanization of the ‘other’ and casting hate in racialized terms. For the French and their allies, the Vietnamese and the Algerians were no longer a people, they were bandits, criminals and terrorists. One young French soldier who lost a confidant in Vietnam explained what he wanted to do to the Vietnamese: “We have to destroy all of them, without any pity for them, they’re real savages.” (Goscha 2022) The practice of torture was endemic within the French army years before French paratroopers ever set foot in Algiers. The same mechanisms and tactics of dehumanization are now being used by Israel in Palestine, with Israeli generals, officials and media figures describing Palestinians as ‘human animals’, ‘rats’, ‘barbarians’, and ‘terrorists’ to justify their war crimes, torture and genocidal massacres. Colonialism, and its racialization strategies, has not ended yet.
In Vietnam, Algeria and Palestine, it is not just the armed forces of the colonial powers that have applied these strategies: the colonists/settlers themselves have also played a role. When the elite paratroopers brought in by the French government to crush the uprising in Algiers, marched down the main street of the city, throngs of ecstatic French settlers came out to greet them. Similar scenes took place in Saigon in 1946 when settlers turned out in droves to welcome the soldiers liberating them from ‘native’ rule (Goscha 2022). In both cases, there was a close alliance between the army and the settler communities, which acquiesced in the colonial violence and cruel repression. Likewise, today, Israeli settler society is overwhelmingly in support of the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza and pursuit of a full-blown war in the whole region. Countless videos and images show Israelis cheering and celebrating the death of Palestinians and explaining how they would like to see them disappear from the lands they have taken away from them.
The level of violence that spread through the Red River plains and the rest of upper Vietnam from January in 1951 until the guns finally went silent in mid-1954 had no equivalent in the history of 20th century wars of decolonization. Perhaps only matched by what took place in Algeria. More than a million dead and hundreds of thousands of victims, including those tortured, among the Vietnamese, while the losses of the French Expeditionary Corps amounted to 130,000 men. As for Algeria, official estimates claim that in fact a million and half Algerians have been killed in the eight-year war that ended in 1962. The suffering reached disastrous proportions: a quarter of the population (2.35 million) was in concentration camps; at least 3 million people (half the rural population) were affected by displacement, which was considered by Bourdieu and Sayad in 1964 as one of the most brutal displacements in history; around 8,000 villages were destroyed or burned, hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests were burned or defoliated by napalm bombs, cultivable lands were either sown with mines or declared “prohibited zones”; the country’s livestock was almost decimated, etc (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964, Bennoune 1973).
Palestine: Taking up the mantle of anti-colonial revolution
“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased…“ Aimé Césaire (Césaire 2000)
“We remembered all the miseries, all the injustices, our people and the conditions they lived, the coldness with which world opinion looks at our cause, and so we felt that we will not permit them to crush us. We will defend ourselves and our revolution by every way and every means.ﾓﾠGeorge Habash, 1970
What do the Algerian and Vietnamese struggles have to do with the Palestinian struggle today? The answer is that the Palestinian liberation struggle must be uncompromisingly situated within the long line of anti-colonial revolutionary efforts. Despite their own specificities and differences, these three struggles need to be understood as such: as anti-colonial struggles for liberation. At the same time, the events in Palestine, including the current genocide, also demonstrate that the colonial world has not yet been fully dismantled.
The sections below focus on the intersections between the Palestinian liberation struggle and its Algerian and Vietnamese counterparts.
Palestine and Algeria: two sisters in the Arab world
“I traveled on an Algerian airplane under Algerian protection as if I was an Algerian envoy, not just a Palestinian one. [Boumediene] wanted to tell the world that Palestinian envoy Yasser Arafat wasn’t coming alone but with Algeria by his side.” Yasser Arafat
For obvious reasons, there are multiple connections between the Palestinian and Algerian revolutionary liberation struggles. One of them is the deeply racist, inhumane and genocidal settler-colonial experience both nations have been subjected to, uniquely within the Arab region. Sharing this common experience, Palestinian revolutionaries look up to their Algerian brothers and sisters, while the Algerians see in the Palestinian resistance and revolutionary efforts a mirror image of their revolution against the French colonialists. The Algerian FLN inspired the Palestinian strategy of armed struggle and the union of different political groups under a common banner. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Algerians have assisted the Palestinians since the 1960s in every realm: diplomatic backing, military assistance, and the provision of weapons and financing.
For a big part of the ‘Third World’, especially those countries that were still under the grip of colonial domination, Algeria’s liberation in 1962 provided hope and a model to follow. Its capital Algiers became a Mecca for revolutionaries from all over the world – from Vietnam to Palestine to southern Africa – who desired to bring down the imperialist and colonial order. The 1964 charter of Algiers declared Algeria’s support for the “struggles of other people in the world,” including “armed struggle“ (Deffarge & Troeller 1972), and independent Algeria went on to provide asylum and financial support to movements all over the world fighting for independence and against racism, colonialism and imperialism.
In the Arab world, the new regime in Algeria established ties with the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and was firmly part of the anti-colonial wave that chased out the French and the British after their pitiful adventure in the Suez in 1956, and which included independence in Tunisia and Morocco also in 1956, and the overthrow of the monarchies in Iraq (1958) and Northern Yemen (1962). In this period, the Palestinians also initiated their first actions to put their country back on the political map, from which it had been removed (Gresh 2012).
In the following paragraphs, I mainly rely on material gathered by the excellent educational website on the Palestinian revolution (https://learnpalestine.qeh.ox.ac.uk/), curated by the Palestinian scholars Karma Nabulsi and Abdel Razzaq Takriti, as well as on the enlightening The Dig podcast seriesﾠThawra, on Arab radicalisms in the twentieth century.
The Palestinian liberation movement actively engaged with Algeria in the years after its independence in 1962, at a time when the country was a meeting point for various Afro-Asian liberation movements. The Palestinian writer and politician Muhammad Abu Meizar, who joined Fatah (the Palestinian National Liberation Movement) in 1962, has described how the first Palestinian meeting with the Cuban revolution took place in 1964, when Che Guevara travelled to Algiers. Palestinians at this time were establishing relations with various liberation movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. It was also from Algeria that the first Palestinian delegation travelled to China in 1965.
Abu Meizar describes Algeria’s support to the Palestinian struggle at this time:
“through Algeria, several interactions took place with liberation movements, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, African movements, it was a meeting place. Algeria also hosted one of the most important institutions, the Cherchell Military Academy, where many Palestinians were enrolled. Until that time Fatah had not fired its first shot. However, through Algeria, it made connections with the Moroccans, the Tunisians, the Africans, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Cuba. These were not minor relationships, they were extremely precious, and valuable.“
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) opened its office in Algeria in 1965. Its first chairman (1964–1967), Ahmad al-Shukeiri, was known for his ardent support for the Algerian cause: As a representative of Saudi Arabia and then Syria at the United Nations in New York, he played an active role in defending the Algerian revolution from 1955 till 1962, during annual sessions and special meetings. Algeria repaid the debt in kind: the first public support for the Palestinian revolution from any government was from Algeria. It took the form of the cover page of the official newspaper Al-Moudjahid, on January 1, 1965, which bore an article titled “The Revolutionaries of the 1st of November Salute the Revolutionaries of the 1st of January.”
During this time, Fatah opened a training camp for Palestinian fighters in Algeria, outside the framework of the Cherchell Military Academy, in coordination with the Algerian Joint Forces Command. A large number of Palestinian volunteers from Europe and the Maghreb, and even from the USA, trained there, some of whom went on to conduct resistance operations, becoming themselves symbols of the liberation struggle, such as Mahmoud al-Hamshari, Ghazi al-Husseini and Abdullah Franji.
Abu Meizar described Algeria’s support to the Palestinian armed struggle:
“[In 1967 [w]e secured the first weapons shipment from Algeria to Fatah, with the delivery facilitated by Mohammad Ibrahim al-Ali [Commander of the Syrian Popular Army]. The first plane flew to Damascus loaded with weapons for Fateh. … This was our first weapons deal, but it should be remembered that in the days of Boumediene in 1966, the first official financial support was offered by the Algerian government to Fatah.“
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO from 1969 to 2004, always acknowledged Algeria’s uncompromising and unshakable solidarity with the Palestinian cause, as well as its firm support for pan-Arab war efforts against the Zionist entity. For example, he explained how Algerian President Houari Boumediene sent forces to Egypt to fight in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Boumediene also went to Cairo and Damascus to ask what they needed for the war effort, and thereafter visited the Soviet Union to request they send Egypt and Syria tanks and weapons to replace those they had lost. Arafat recounted the negotiations between Boumediene and the Soviets at this time: “They told him they needed more time, and he said if by time they meant money then Algeria would pay. He immediately paid the Soviet Union 200 million dollars which would amount to 2 billion dollars today. He paid to make the Soviet Union expedite the delivery of weapons to Egypt and Syria. No one can forget this.“
After the Naksa (defeat) of 1967, Boumediene declared:
“History will judge us as traitors and losers … if we accept the defeat … The Arab nation will not kneel. If Israel thinks that it captured the Sinai, the Golan and the west bank, it knows that the Arab depth reaches Algeria … Algeria cannot accept the defeat. Is the Arab nation using all its tremendous human resources? Is it using all the tremendous physical energies it has today … to say that it lost the battle. … The battle is not just a Palestinian battle. It is true that we are far geographically, but we have a role to play.“ (Boumaza 2015)
The Algerian troops Boumediene sent remained in Egypt to defend its borders until the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, during which they fought alongside Palestinian troops on the Suez front.
Finally, Algeria’s active support for the Palestinian liberation struggle was also seen in the choice of its capital Algiers as the site for the Declaration of Independence of the State of Palestine in November 1988, announced during the 19th session of the Palestine National Council.
