Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Fawzi al-Qawuqji had prepared the ground for revolt in Hama, waiting for the right moment to strike. Having watched as previous Syrian revolts against the French had surged and faltered, he believed the situation was different in 1925. There was a new degree of coordination among the opponents of French rule, between the Druzes, the Damascenes, and his own party in Hama. The Druzes had launched their revolt with devastating effect on the French. Al-Qawuqji still followed the news of the Rif War in Morocco and knew that France’s position there was deteriorating: “The French army had gotten entangled in the fighting with the tribes of the Rif under Abd el-Krim’s leadership. News of his victories began to reach us. We also began to receive news of French reinforcements sent to Marrakesh.” Al-Qawuqji realized that with the French dispatching troops to Morocco, there would be no reinforcements available for the French army in Syria. “My preparations were complete,” he concluded. “All that remained was to implement them.”²⁶ In September 1925, al-Qawuqji sent emissaries to Sultan Pasha al-Atrash in the Druze Mountain. Al-Qawuqji suggested that the Druzes escalate their attacks to draw all available French soldiers to the south. He would then launch an attack in Hama in early October. The Druze leader was willing to expose his fighters to heavy fighting against the French to secure a second front against the French in Hama, and he agreed to al-Qawuqji’s plan.

On October 4 al-Qawuqji led a mutiny of the Syrian Legion, assisted by fighters from the surrounding Bedouin tribes, with the support of the town’s population. They captured a number of French soldiers and laid siege to the town’s administrators in the government palace. By midnight the town was in the hands of the insurgents. The French were quick to respond. Though most of their soldiers were in the Druze Mountain, as al-Qawuqji had anticipated, the French still had their air force. The French began an aerial bombardment that struck residential quarters and leveled parts of the town’s central markets, killing nearly 400 civilians, many of them women and children. The town’s notables, who had initially pledged their support to al-Qawuqji’s movement, were the first to break ranks and strike a deal with the French to bring both the revolt and the bombardment to a close. Within three days of launching their revolt, al-Qawuqji and his men had to withdraw to the countryside, leaving the French to reclaim Hama. Undaunted by their failure in Hama, al-Qawuqji and his men carried the revolt to other towns and cities across Syria. “The gates of Syria’s fields were opened before us for revolt. By these manoeuvres,” al-Qawuqji boasted, “the intelligence and cunning of the French collapsed before the intelligence of the Arabs and their cunning.”²⁷ Within a matter of days, the revolt had spread to the villages surrounding Damascus. The French tried to stifle the movement with displays of extreme violence. Whole villages were destroyed by artillery or aerial bombardment. Nearly one hundred villagers in the hinterlands of the capital were executed. Corpses were brought back to Damascus as grisly trophies to deter others from supporting the insurgents. Predictably, violence begat violence. Twelve mutilated corpses of local soldiers serving the French were left outside the city gates of Damascus as a warning against collaboration with the colonial authorities. By October 18, the insurgency had reached the Syrian capital, where men and women alike joined the resistance. The men who fought were reliant on their wives and sisters to smuggle food and arms to them in their hiding places. Beneath the watchful gaze of a French soldier, one Damascene wife carried food and weapons to her fugitive husband and his rebel friends. “It never occurred to [the French sentry] that women were helping the rebels to escape over the rooftops or that they were delivering weapons to them under the cloaks and plates of food to contribute their part to the revolution,” Damascene journalist Siham Tergeman recalled in her memoirs.²⁸ For the nationalist leaders in Damascus, the revolt had become a sacred jihad, and the combatants holy warriors. Some four hundred volunteers entered Damascus and managed to secure the Shaghur and Maydan quarters, driving the French administrators to seek refuge in the citadel. One detachment of insurgents made their way to the Azm Palace, the eighteenth-century vanity project of As’ad Pasha al-Azm that had been taken over by the French as a governor’s mansion, in an attempt to capture the high commissioner, General Maurice Sarrail. Though Sarrail had in fact already left his quarters, a fierce gun battle ensued, which left the old palace in flames. It was but the beginning. The French used force majeure to defeat the revolt in Damascus. They shelled the quarters of Damascus indiscriminately with artillery from the citadel. “At the appointed time,” the Damascene nationalist leader Dr. Shahbandar wrote, “those hellish instruments opened their mouths and belched their ashes upon the finest quarters of the city. Over the next twenty-four hours, the shells of destruction and fire consumed more than six hundred of the finest homes.” This was followed by days of aerial bombardment. “The bombardment lasted from midday Sunday until Tuesday evening. We will never know the precise number of those who died under the rubble,” Shahbandar recorded in his memoirs.²⁹ Subsequent estimates put the number of dead at 1,500 in three days’ violence. The impact on the civilian population made the insurgents bring their operations in Damascus to a close. “When the rebels saw the terror that gripped the women and children from the continuous shelling of the quarters, and the circling of aircraft dropping bombs indiscriminately on houses, they left the city,” Shahbandar recounted. Though they had been driven from Hama and Damascus, the insurgents had succeeded in relieving the Druze Mountain, which for three months had borne the brunt of French repression. If the French had hoped to discourage the spread of the revolt through the use of indiscriminate violence against Hama and Damascus, they were to be disappointed. French troops had to be dispatched to all corners of Syria as the revolt spread across the country in the winter of 1925–1926. Only after they had quelled revolts in northern and central Syria were the French able to return to the Druze Mountain, where Sultan Pasha al-Atrash still led an active resistance movement. In April 1926 the French retook Suwayda’, the Druze regional capital. After May 1926, when Abd el-Krim finally surrendered in Morocco, the French were able to divert a large number of soldiers to Syria, bringing the total French force up to 95,000 men, according to Fawzi al-Qawuqji. The Syrian resistance was overwhelmed by the French, and their leaders went into exile. On October 1, 1926, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash and Dr. Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar crossed the border into neighboring Transjordan. Fawzi al-Qawuqji tried to continue the struggle long after the other nationalist leaders had given up. Between October 1926 and March 1927 he campaigned tirelessly to resume the revolt, but the fight had gone out of the Syrian people, who had grown cautious in the face of violent French retaliation. In his last campaign, in March 1927, al-Qawuqji managed to raise a band of seventy-four fighters, of which only twenty-seven had horses. They skirted Damascus, taking to the desert, only to be betrayed by desert tribes that formerly had supported the movement. Through guile and deception they managed to retreat to Transjordan, eluding capture but leaving their country secure in French hands.³⁰ The Syrian Revolt failed to deliver independence from French rule. The nationalist movement passed to a new leadership of urban elites who eschewed armed struggle to pursue their aims through a political process of negotiation and nonviolent protest. Until 1936 the Syrian nationalists would have little to show for their efforts.

Even though French colonial authorities from Morocco to Syria spent much of the 1920s suppressing rebellions, they at least had a party in Algeria to look forward to. A century had passed since the dey of Algiers sealed the fate of his country with an ill-tempered swish of the fly whisk in 1827. Since landing their first troops at Sidi Ferrush in June 1830, the French had ousted the Ottomans, defeated Amir Abd al-Qadir, and suppressed a number of major rebellions—the last in 1871–1872. By the early twentieth century they had completed their conquest from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. By the 1920s, over 800,000 settlers had moved from France to Algeria.³¹ The French in Algeria were no longer on foreign soil; since 1848, when Algeria had been declared French territory, the three provinces of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine had been converted into dйpartements of France, with elected representatives in the French Chamber in Paris. The “Algerian” deputies—or more precisely, the French Algerian deputies, as native Algerians were allowed neither to vote nor to stand for election to national office—enjoyed disproportionate influence in the Chamber and worked as a bloc to protect settler interests. With the approach of the 1930 centenary, the French Algerians took the opportunity to impress on both the Metropolitan French and the native Algerians the triumph and permanence of the French presence in Algeria. The planning for the celebrations began years in advance. The first step was taken by the governor-general of Algeria in December 1923, when he decreed the creation of a commission “to prepare a program celebrating the centenary of the French seizure of Algiers in 1830.” The French parliament authorized a budget of 40 million francs and the convening of a commission charged with the task of organizing events. In the end, the celebrations cost more than 100 million francs. Algeria was transformed for the year. Artists were commissioned to create monuments celebrating major milestones in the history of French Algeria, to decorate the towns and countryside. Museums were built in the great cities—Algiers, Constantine, Oran. Public works were constructed across the country—schools, hospitals, orphanages and poor houses, agricultural colleges and professional schools, and the world’s most powerful broadcasting station to ensure news of the centenary events reached across all Algeria. A major exposition was organized in the western coastal city of Oran, with all the fanfare of a world’s fair. Well over fifty international conferences and congresses were held on virtually every subject under the sun. Sporting events, trans-Saharan auto rallies, and yacht races marked the calendar. Cities were lit at night, with prominent buildings outlined in strands of electric lights and exquisite firework displays. The symbolism of the centenary was best captured in the monuments commissioned to mark the event. In Boufarik, a few miles south of Algiers, a massive stone plinth 45 meters wide and 9 meters high (about 148 feet by 30 feet) celebrated “the glory of the colonising genius of France.” The sculptor Henri Bouchard (who designed the Protestant Reformation memorial in Geneva) placed at the center of the monument a cluster of French ?pioneering heroes of civilization? headed by General Bugeaud and General de Lamorici?re, the military commanders who scorched Algeria to defeat the Amir Abd al-Qadir in the 1830s and 1840s. A group of French nobles, mayors, and ?model settlers? stood in proud ranks behind the military men. To the rear, looking over the shoulders of the French men in uniforms and suits, the sculptor included a few Arabs in national dress, representatives of ?the first natives whose active fidelity made the task [of French colonization] possible.?³² The French even managed to insinuate a sympathetic Algerian presence into the 1830 military memorial. The French press had heatedly debated whether the monument proposed to celebrate the landing of French troops at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1830, would “upset the natives.” “All those who know Algeria,” wrote Mercier, the official historian of the centenary, “and who live in daily contact with its Arabo-Berber population, had no apprehensions in this respect.” The true feelings of all native Algerians, Mercier insisted, were captured in the remarks of the tribal leader Bouaziz Ben Gana, who claimed: “If the natives had known the French in 1830, they would have loaded their rifles with flowers rather than bullets to greet them.” These sentiments were captured in the inscription on the 10-meter-high monument, picturing a cockaded Marianne gazing down into the eyes of a dutiful Arab son: “One hundred years later, the French Republic having given to this country prosperity, civilization and justice, a grateful Algeria pays homage of undying attachment to the Motherland.” It was as though the French wished to cast the Algerians in a supporting role in the colonization of their own country.³³ The centenary celebrations reached their climax at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1930. Here again, the organizers sought to present colonial Algeria as a Franco-Arab joint production, officially known as “the celebration of the union of the French and indigenous populations.” A massive crowd gathered around the new monument of Sidi Ferrush to watch the military parade and hear the speeches. The governor-general headed a phalanx of colonial officials. The air force made a flyover and dropped flower petals on the crowd surrounding the memorial. Torch bearers, following Olympic example, set off running from the monument to Algiers, some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) to the east. The speeches given by the French were predictably triumphalist, but far more astonishing were the comments that came from the Algerian dignitaries who took to the podium. Hadj Hamou, a religious scholar speaking on behalf of the teaching staff of the mosque schools, expressed his gratitude for the freedom he enjoyed to teach Islam without interference. All mosque-goers, he claimed, followed the lead of their imams in “the common love of the secular holy French Republic” (la sainte Rйpublique Franзaise laпque)—a wonderful oxymoron. M. Belhadj, speaking on behalf of Muslim intellectuals, remarked on the day’s celebration of “the profound union of the French and indigenous people? who had transformed into ?a single, unique people, living in peace and concord, in the shadow of the same flag and in the same love of the Mother land.? M. Ourabah, a leading Arab notable, supplicated: ?Instruct us, raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level. And let us join in one voice as in one heart to cry: Long live France, ever greater! Long live Algeria, ever French!?³⁴ In an age of burgeoning Arab nationalism, Algeria seemed to be embracing imperialism. Yet the Algerians were not satisfied with their lot. Many of the educated elite recognized they could not beat the French, and so they sought to join them—with the full rights of French citizenship that, down to 1930, had been denied them. Accepting French rule as inevitable, these Algerians opted for a civil rights movement instead of nationalism. Their spokesman was a student of pharmacology at the University of Algiers named Ferhat Abbas. Ferhat Abbas (1899–1985) was born in a small town in eastern Algeria to a family of provincial administrators and landholders. He was trained in French schools and came to share in French values. What he wanted more than anything else was to enjoy the full privileges of any Frenchman. Yet the laws of France put severe limits on the legal and political rights of Algerian Muslims. These laws divided Algeria geographically, between areas with relatively high European populations, where French common law applied; rural communes with European minorities, where a combination of military and civilian rule applied; and Arab territories, which were under full military administration. The laws also clearly distinguished between Europeans and Muslims in Algeria. In 1865 the French Senate decreed that all Algerian Muslims were French subjects. Although they could serve in the military and civil service, they were not actually citizens of France. To be considered for French citizenship, native Algerians would have to renounce their Muslim civil status and agree to live under French personal status laws. Given that marriage, family law, and the distribution of inheritance is all precisely regulated in Islamic law, this was tantamount to asking Muslims to abandon their faith. Not surprisingly, only 2,000 Algerians applied for citizenship during the eighty years in which this law remained in force. Unprotected under French law, Algerian Muslims actually came under a host of discriminatory legislation known as the Code de l’Indigйnat [“Indigenous People’s Law Code”]. Like the Jim Crow laws passed after the American Civil War to keep African Americans in a segregated, subordinate status, the code, drafted in the aftermath of the last major Algerian revolt against French rule in 1871, allowed native Algerians to be prosecuted for acts that Europeans could legally perform, such as criticizing the French Republic and its officials. Most of the crimes set out in the code were petty, and the punishments were light—no more than five days in prison, or a fine of fifteen francs. Yet the code was applied all the more regularly because its consequences were so trivial. And, more than any other legal distinction, the code reminded Algerians they were second-class citizens in their own land. To someone like Ferhat Abbas, who had been schooled in French republican thinking, the indignity was unbearable. Abbas responded to the centenary celebrations with a sharply critical essay, written in French, that captured the disillusionment of a young Algerian after a century of French rule. Entitled The Young Algerian: From Colony to Province, Abbas’s book was an eloquent plea to replace French colonialism in Algeria with the more enlightened aspects of French republicanism. The century which has passed away was the century of tears and blood. And it is we the indigenous people in particular who have cried and bled.... The celebrations of the Centenary were but a clumsy reminder of a painful past, an exhibition of the wealth of some before the poverty of others.... Understanding between the races will remain but empty words if the new century does not place the different elements of this country on the same social rank and give the weak the means to raise their standing.³⁵

We hear in Abbas’s writing the echoes of the Muslim notables who spoke at the centenary celebrations in Sidi Ferrush—“raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level.” Yet Abbas was more assertive in his demands. Abbas claimed that the Algerians had earned their rights of citizenship by virtue of their wartime service. France had placed a heavy burden on indigenous Algerians since conscription was first introduced to Algeria in 1913. Over 200,000 Algerian Muslims had been drafted during the First World War, and many never returned. Estimates of Algerian war dead range from 25,000 to 80,000. Many more were wounded.³⁶ Even after the war, Algerians were conscripted into the French army. Abbas maintained that he had earned his rights of citizenship through his own military service in 1922. France did not distinguish between soldiers by race and religion in military service, he argued, and should not do so in law. “We are Muslims and we are French,” he continued. “We are indigenous and we are French. Here in Algeria there are Europeans and indigenous people, but there are only Frenchmen.”³⁷ Yet native Algerians had been reduced to an underclass in their own country through colonial society and its laws. “What more can be said about the daily insults which the indigenous man suffers in his native land, in the street, in the cafйs, in the slightest transaction of daily life? The barber closes the door in his face, the hotel refuses him a room.”³⁸

Abbas was particularly critical of French naturalization laws that required Muslims to renounce their personal status. “Why should an Algerian seek to be naturalized? To be French? He already is, as his country has been declared French soil.” Writing of Algeria’s French rulers, he asked rhetorically: “Do they wish to raise this country to a higher level or do they wish to divide and rule?? For Abbas, the answer was self-evident. ?What is needed is for the same law to be applied to all, if truly we wish to guide Muslim Algeria towards a higher civilization.?³⁹ Even so, he clung to the cultural rights of Algerians to preserve their religion and to be taught in their own language—Arabic—without prejudice to their rights as French citizens. Abbas was not the first to set out a claim for full citizenship rights; the Young Algeria movement had pressed for such reforms since the early 1900s. Nor did he speak for all Algerians. The Islamic reform movement, headed by Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889–1940), rejected Abbas’s idea of assimilation out of hand. The differences between Abbas and Ben Badis were captured in an exchange of editorials in 1936, when Ferhat Abbas famously declared there was no such thing as the Algerian nation: “Algeria as a fatherland is a myth. I have not discovered it. I have questioned history; I have questioned the dead and the living; I have visited the cemeteries: no one has spoken to me of it.” Algeria, he claimed, was France and Algerians were French. Indeed, carried away by his rhetoric, Abbas went on to say that he was France (“La France, c’est moi”).⁴⁰ “No, sirs!” Ben Badis retorted:We have scrutinized the pages of history and the current situation. And we have found the Algerian Muslim nation.... This community has its history, full of great feats. It has its religious and linguistic unity. It has its own culture, its habits and customs, good or bad, like all nations. Moreover, this Algerian and Muslim nation is not France. It would not know how to be France. It does not want to become France. It could not become France, even if it wanted to.

Yet Ben Badis made no more claim for Algerian independence than did Abbas. Whereas Abbas sought equality with the French, Ben Badis wanted Algerian Muslims to be “separate but equal” to the French. He asked the French to grant indigenous Algerians liberty, justice, and equality while respecting their distinctive culture, their Arabic language, and Muslim faith. Ben Badis concluded his essay by insisting that “this Algerian Muslim father land is a faithful friend to France.”⁴¹ The differences between the secular assimilationists and the Islamic reformers were hardly insurmountable. Ironically, the only activists to demand full independence for Algeria came from the expatriate worker community in France. A handful of politically engaged men in the 100,000-strong Algerian workforce in France came to nationalism through the Communist Party. Their leader was Messali Hadj (1898–1974), who founded the workers’ nationalist association L’Йtoile Nord-Africaine (the North African Star) in 1926. Messali presented the new organization’s program to the Congress of the League against Colonial Oppression in Brussels in February 1927. Among the points called for were independence for Algeria, the withdrawal of the French occupation forces, the formation of a national army, confiscation of settler plantations and a redistribution of farmlands to native farmers, and a host of social and economic reforms for independent Algeria.⁴² The association’s demands were as just as they were unrealistic at that time, and they attracted little support among Algerians at home or abroad. Of all the Algerian political activists in the 1930s, Ferhat Abbas was the most influential. His writings were widely read by educated Algerians and French policy makers alike. “I read your book with great interest,” Maurice Violette, former governor-general of Algeria, wrote to Abbas in 1931. “I would not have written it in the same way. I regret certain pages in it, but faced with some veritable provocations . . . I recognize that it is difficult for you to retain your composure and I understand.” The tone was condescending, but Abbas clearly did not mind (he used the quote as encomia on the dust jacket of his book). He knew that, through Violette, his arguments would be discussed in the upper echelons of the French administration. Maurice Violette had grown yet more influential since the end of his term as governor-general of Algeria and his return to Paris. He was named to the French Senate, where in March 1935 he opened a debate on granting citizenship rights to a select group of Algerians on the basis of their assimilation of French culture and values—referred to in French as йvoluйs. The expression, meaning “more highly evolved,” was pure Social Darwinism that conceived of Algerians as advancing from a lower to a higher state of civilization as they shed Arab culture in favor of “superior” French values. This “civilizing mission” was one of the principles by which the French justified their imperial project. While playing to the ideals of the “civilizing mission,” Violette argued before the Senate that the enfranchisement of progressive Muslim Algerians would forestall nationalism and encourage assimilation. The French colonial lobby (comprising settler representatives and their supporters in Paris) was too powerful, however, and defeated Violette’s 1935 motion. They feared that granting full citizenship rights even to a select group of Algerians would only lead to a broader enfranchisement that ultimately would undermine European dominance in Algeria. Violette found a more sympathetic hearing for his controversial views in 1936, when he was appointed to a cabinet post in the socialist Popular Front government led by Lйon Blum. The Popular Front spoke of a whole new relationship between France and its colonies, and Algeria’s political elites knew Violette to be an ally to their cause. The Islamic reformers led by Ben Badis decided to unite forces with Ferhat Abbas’s assimilationists. They met in the first Algerian Muslim Congress in Algiers in June 1936 and endorsed Maurice Violette’s proposal to grant full citizenship to a select group of Francophile Algerians without requiring them to renounce their Muslim civil status. The Congress then dispatched a delegation to Paris to present its political demands to the government. The delegates were received by Blum and Violette, who promised to satisfy many of the Algerians’ demands. By the end of December 1936, Blum and Violette had drafted a bill on Algeria and submitted it to parliament. The Blum-Violette bill, they believed, was enlightened legislation that would secure France’s position in Algeria once and for all, through the cooperation of the country’s political and economic elites. “It is truly impossible, after so many solemn promises made by so many governments, notably at the time of the centenary (1930), that we should not realize the urgency of this necessary task of assimilation that affects in the highest degree the moral health of Algeria,” they wrote in the bill’s preamble.⁴³ The bill set out the categories of indigenous Algerian Muslims who would be eligible for citizenship. Nine different groups were defined, beginning with those Algerians who served as officers or career master-sergeants in the French army or were soldiers decorated for valor. Those Algerians who had attained diplomas of higher education from either French or Muslim academies, as well as civil servants recruited through competitive examination, were also eligible. Natives elected to chambers of commerce or agriculture, or to administrative positions in the financial, municipal, or regional councils, were named, as were notables holding traditional office such as aghas and qa’ids. Finally, any Algerian awarded such French honors as the Legion of Honor or the Labor Medal would be eligible for full enfranchisement. In all, no more than 25,000 Algerians from a total population of 4.5 million would have qualified for citizenship under the terms of the Blum-Violette bill. Given the bill’s very limited aims, and its authors’ clear intention to perpetuate French rule in Algeria, it is amazing how much opposition the Blum-Violette reforms encountered. Once again, the colonial lobby went into action to ensure the bill was not even debated, let alone put to a vote. The colonial press savaged the bill as opening the flood gates to the Islamization of France and the end of French Algeria. The debates in the French Chamber set off disturbances in the streets of Algeria between proponents and opponents of the bill. Indigenous Algerians took to the streets in mass protests and demonstrations to assert their demands for civil rights. The unrest in Algeria only reinforced the arguments of the conservatives and the colonial lobby, who claimed that the troubles were caused by the disastrous policies of the Blum government. French mayors in Algeria went on strike in protest, as did elected Algerian politicians, as the bill passed from one parliamentary committee to another without ever coming to the floor for debate. In the end, the colonial lobby prevailed. The Blum-Violette bill was abandoned in 1938 without ever having been discussed in the Chamber of the National Assembly. The centenary was over. In spite of the many solemn promises made, the French government would not concede the urgent task of assimilation. It is hard to capture the depth of disillusionment that set in among Algerian elites, whose expectations had been raised to new heights only to be dashed by the failure of the Blum government to deliver on its promises. Henceforth, the dominant trend in the Algerian opposition movement would be nationalist. France would not get another century in Algeria. Within sixteen years the two countries would be at war.