Australia’s Part in the Algerian Civil War

Near the Cinema Rex a woman’s body hung from a butcher’s meat hook. I don’t know this, of course. I arrive in Oran, Algeria, almost fourteen years later. Neither do I know that at Petit Lac, a dismal place along the airport road where I sometimes go to poke around in a junk yard, men, women and children snatched from my familiar city streets were slaughtered—bulldozers were used to bury them. The bodies are still hidden there. Over fifty years later the families of those who disappeared are uncertain of their fate. On streets where people like me were hunted and killed, lynched, butchered or kidnapped I walk without fear, without knowledge. There are killers among the faces I see around me. The manhunt of nearly 700 Europeans and an unknown number of pro-French Muslims in Oran happened on Independence Day, July 5, 1962. The pogrom occurred despite assurances given for their safety in the worthless Évian accords which transferred control of a French department to a terrorist group, and in the presence of 18,000 French troops, ordered not to intervene.

When I know it, the socialist state has no history and the present is tightly controlled—history books are banned and the past is told in storytelling terms of bad French colonists and good Muslims, noble martyrs and the National Liberation Front’s (FLN) glorious fight for “independence”. I live there, for five years and four days. These are the new country’s golden times—the best days of the dictatorship. From the outside, through a leftist verbal mist, socialist Algeria shone brightly as a leading, perhaps the leading, nation of the Third World. I was inside a bubble of peace—kept in place by petroleum and natural gas dollars, the army and its secret police, prisons and torture chambers. At independence the FLN took control of the French Army’s torture sites, which had aroused such furious condemnation during the war, and kept them operating without criticism from moralising progressives. The brutality of the FLN during the war, and after, is generally ignored or casually excused by historians who have chosen sides in their depiction of the conflict and independence.

Looking back on the late 1970s, on one side lay the war of 1954–62 and the violent years as the dictatorship established itself, and on the other the violence and ferment of the 1980s as the regime weakened and then the bloody years of the 1990s civil war which broke out when a popular Islamic extremist political party and an unpopular dictatorship collided. Little considered outside the French-speaking world, Algeria is a country worth closer examination.

Did Australia cause the Algerian civil war?

At the beginning of the 1990s one of the few reasons to laugh in miserable times was a one-man show called A Boat to Australia—Un bateau pour l’Australie. It was about frustration and hopelessness, and people laughed, for the performer was a writer and brilliant actor named Fellag (pronounced Fee-lag). The title comes from 1987. A rumour swept Algiers, an urban myth that sent hundreds of young men to besiege the Australian embassy. A big liner was coming—supposedly it was somewhere just over the horizon—to take unemployed young Algerians to Australia.

The young were trapped between a crashed economy and a corrupt and authoritarian government which continued to plunder the state as though the 1970s had never ended. Just the name “Australia” offered hope. The embassy, up till then probably not the busiest of places, turned them away. Even three years later embassy officials still reported receiving weekly phone calls asking if the report was true. For a moment the furphy offered a dream and chance for rescue until it sank into the Bay of Algiers. In October the following year, these young men were actors in nationwide riots which challenged the one-party state. Though violently put down by the regime, the riots forced political changes which ended the dominance of the FLN. The Islamists seized their opportunity, and just as they were on the verge of gaining power through the ballot box with the promise of installing an Islamic state, the regime cancelled the scheduled elections and civil war broke out.

Un bateau pour l’Australie isn’t about Australia. It deals with the lives of those who would have been its passengers. These are the conditions which made a rumour believable because it offered them hope of escaping their own country. Ten years after it was first presented, a 2001 Paris performance, rewritten in French with some Arabic and Kabyle, is available on YouTube.

Australian cinema audiences have seen single-name performer Fellag in the Canadian film Monsieur Lazhar, which is worth finding at the video shop. Alone on stage he is a skilled story-teller, an oral tradesman with an attention-holding stage presence. For over a hundred minutes he talks, sings and dances—out of nothing he conjures up a strange, fascinating and broken nation. In the early 1990s the performer showed Algeria to Algerians, he now tells Algeria to France.

Fellag is from the minority Berber, Kabyle, population. Without clown make-up or circus setting he is a Berber Littlechap—Stop the World, I Want to Get On. Algerian majority Arabs and minority Kabyles have a long and unhappy history of not living together. When Fellag talks of colonisers it’s not always the French he is referring to—in fact there is probably less coolness towards the departed French than towards the still-in-the-way Arabs.

Centre-stage in a pool of light his costume is that of a stand-up comedian: dark trousers, wide braces, long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the wrists, white socks and black shoes—op-shop chic from the wrong end of town. On his head, jammed low on his forehead, is a stage comic’s narrow-brimmed hat. A shovel-shaped face has two long, deeply etched frontier lines running north-south between eyes and mouth. Face slightly puffed, expression slightly vacant—if seen on a city street with three shells, a pea and a smile it would be wise to keep walking. He has a quick tongue, a supple body, and courage. Fellag now lives in exile in France. Homeland throat-cutters would not take lightly his freedom of expression—neither would compatriots who are touchy about national pride.

The classically bare Paris stage, with only a wooden park bench somewhat smaller than normal, is about to be filled with the stories of people for whom that ship to Australia seemed to be their last chance. He is on stage. The audience look at Fellag; Fellag looks at the audience. Then the story-telling begins, with an eagerness to share his tales. He starts with a new beginning—his family’s exodus from their Kabyle village, where only the rooster was employed, and their installation in an already overcrowded Algiers apartment. The narrative grabs real life and reshapes it as an outrageous comic absurdity. The escape to the capital doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement: perhaps that voyage to Australia would have been just the same.

A world many of his audience don’t know is described with a vocabulary of windmill mannerisms familiarly Algerian, shared gestures that men use when talking in cafes or in the streets. This Paris staged performance also taps into traditional village marketplace story-telling—plus acting school. Fellag’s dance movements are funny in themselves and immediately recognisable as waist-twitching Algerian—via Egyptian television soaps. The immediate detonations of laughter as his body adopts dance positions probably come from Algerian audience members. They react a moment before his French audience decide it’s all right to laugh at the racial caricatures. There are also verbal street expressions which even I recognise. Algerians have a strong shared sense of humour. Catching a city bus is a dangerous business calling for ruthlessness and decisiveness in unarmed combat. Yet after bashing each other viciously to get aboard—it’s the ones in the sheets you have to look out for—you can then find yourself surrounded by people all rocking with shared laughter at some repartee between the driver and a passenger. And this is a nation where civil war has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and untold thousands are simply “missing”—tortured, presumed dead.

On dogs: Algerians, says Fellag, kick dogs even though “Chez nous in Algeria, the life of a dog is better than that of a human.” He corrects the French belief that Algerians don’t like dogs: “We like hitting them. Here in France we miss it.” The Australian playwright who had dog-loving Arabs at the heart of an Israel-bashing play should take note. Our guide tells of the visit of President of the Republic Bouteflika to the Elysée Palace—“He’s our president; the republic we’re still waiting for.” As Fellag suddenly arches backwards, Bouteflika appears out of nowhere as a little man looking upwards at Jacques Chirac, to whom he gives a little finger-wagging. Enter Mrs Chirac and dog. Bouteflika gives in to his delightfully uncontrollable urge to kick the dog. He then resumes finger-wagging the French President for allowing his wife to walk around in public. It is comic and critical and with the unexpected element that locks an audience’s attention around an out-of-the-ordinary performance.

On Algeria: “A country where killing is nothing, but loving is a serious crime.”

On family life: “When someone from our family marries someone from another family it’s a mixed marriage.”

On independence: “… a few days later independence arrived, or did it leave? I don’t remember. [Laughter.] Either way it went by very fast.” In the 1970s a joke like that would have been unthinkable, and unsayable.

On Arabs versus Kabyles: An Arab policeman belting a Kabyle street protester over the head with his riot baton urges the Kabyle to respond in good classical Arabic rather than emitting a Kabyle “ouch”. There is an ongoing linguistic war for the Berber language, Amazigh, to join Arabic as an official language of the state. Funny on stage in Paris, it means bloodshed in Algeria.

Fellag is right when he talks of the rules for living in a dictatorship that were necessary in the 1970s, and of the influence and presence of the secret police. What is missing from the performance are the really scary bits, the public emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism in the late 1970s after the death of The Dictator. Within a matter of years mosque-nurtured fanatics were set to take over the state legally, even as they organised networks of terrorists and a bloodthirsty annihilating maquis.

In Algeria the civil war criminals, on both sides, are protected by an amnesty. It is illegal to talk in public about “terrorism” and there is an even greater penalty for talking of “Islamic terrorism”. The religious extremists have changed course and now disguise themselves in suits and ties. On Algerian streets they are known as “Jekyll and Hyde”.

Suppose the ship to Australia was real. How could those people on Fellag’s stage have merged into our society? How would we have even known what ideas or social beliefs they held in their minds? These emigrants for an imaginary ship went to obtain visas. Our real boat people have come without papers but with cultures and life experiences of which we have no knowledge. Outcasts in Algerian society sought solace in Islamic militancy, Muslim outsiders in Australia are taking the same route. In Algeria the Islamists were beaten back by a regime that did not hesitate to use the most brutal methods imaginable. An Australian government could never take that path. This performance dates from the early 1990s. It was, says Fellag, an “alarm”. Do we recognise the “alarms” sounding in our multi­racial suburbs?