The Battle of Algiers

I recently went to a screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic film “The Battle of Algiers”. The film covers the years between the start of the Algerian insurgency against the French colonisers in 1954, and until 1957. It was one of the fiercest struggles anywhere in a decolonising Africa, and independence was finally declared on 5. July 1962 – 50 years ago this year.

The film holds many lessons on how insurgency manifests itself, and, similarly, should hold lessons on how military surges are futile in prevailing in such conditions.

The film’s most prominent figure on the insurgents’ side is Ali La Pointe. La Pointe is a young man from the Casbah – the natives’ part of Algiers – who is arrested for transgressing against a French officer. While in prison, La Pointe witnesses the execution of an Algerian nationalist, and becomes radicalised. He promptly joins forces with the National Liberation Front (FLN) upon being released.

On the outside, La Pointe quickly becomes the personification of that “other” the West has come to fear so much in recent years. He is street tough and uncompromising and has crisp strong features and piercing eyes. La Pointe means business. He believes in something; a greater cause. His commitment to Algerian independence as well as a purer Algerian society is definite. No more Western decadence. No more pimping or drinking in the Casbah. La Pointe is a fearsome opponent.

Faced with this new and raw form of insurgency (several French police officers were shot and killed in cold blood), the French called in their top man; the sophisticated and calculating colonel Mathieu (although a fictional character in the film, Col. Mathieu is believed to be based on a composite of French commanders Jacques Massu and Marcel Bigeard). Col. Mathieu, although very elegant and sophisticated, is relentless, incisive, and as confident as he is ruthless. A lockdown of the Casbah is swiftly implemented, with the whole area fenced in, and mandatory body searches are undertaken at every checkpoint for all male passers-by. Intelligence is gathered through torture, and insurgents who don’t surrender meet their end in the split-second it takes for explosives to dissolve the building in which they hide.

Two committed sides poised to remain standing, and as the ante is upped by one side, the other unswervingly follows suit. Evil was not monopolised by the one side any more than virtue was. Punches were thrown by both parties to the best of their abilities, it seems.

Therein, Pontecorvo demonstrates his pledge to be an impartial outlet of the story of Algiers’ battle, as we are given insights into both sides’ thinking and motivations. All parties are presented as human beings, instead of being either heroes or villains.

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"The Battle of Algiers" has been screened in the Pentagon as a way to analyse insurgency, and how to approach it. The rationale for screening the film in the Pentagon is that there are lessons to be learned from it. The conclusion, similarly, must be that the US brass has failed just about every exam.

The French did their best to divide the public. Messages were spewed out over speakers informing the masses how weak the FLN was and how the best way was a continued union with France. After all, Algeria was part of France and all good Algerians could aspire to become assimilated Frenchmen.

Col. Mathieu, for the most part composed and cool sporting fancy sunglasses, only really loses his temper once in the film. When French journalists finally get around to enquiring critically about the justness of the French push, Mathieu chastises them for not doing their part; it is in everybody’s interest to keep Algeria French, Mathieu barks. The applied methods were required to achieve that, and so the journalists, he says, have a moral duty to galvanise support back home for the effort. (This is probably the one exam in which occupying forces of the last two decades have made the most sophisticated effort, and as a result we are now well acquainted with the phenomenon “embedded journalism”…)

The insurgents, on the other hand, fed on the support of the people and accepted that the French had to be bled in order to weaken their resolve. And as numerous examples avow, nationalism breeds inventiveness when it comes to reaching a common goal. As it was already in the Algerians’ culture to not violate a woman’s person, the French were confined to adhere, thus letting women wearing their haiks pass through their checkpoints un-frisked. It became customary for women of the cause to transport grenades and guns out of the Casbah and into the European quarters. Some also posed as French women adhering to the more hedonistic style of life in the European quarter, only to place explosives in a range of locations.

The French troops seem to have underestimated just how entrenched the popular nationalism was which longed for independence. There was only really one outcome possible. Popularly rooted insurgency simply means that any external elements, any alien culture, are doomed, and will lose. Director Pontecorvo displays this – although as a footnote right at the end – as the wave of people inundate the European quarters just as things seem to be calmed and civil. The French will finally drowns, and they disaffiliate their formal rule of Algeria in 1962.

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For those nations which have yet to truly accept the sovereignty of the peoples they are occupying, Col. Mathieu’s question should probably be put forward again; that if you are to stay in a foreign land, you’ll have to accept all the necessary consequences. To me that is a rhetorical assertion, as some measures can never be justified. Would that certain countries’ brass accepted that instead of exercising orientalism in practice...