by Annie Hawes
Not so the Moroccan police, though. Morocco, still keen to curry economic favour with Europe, has agreed to join the battle to keep its borders secure. The royal forces of law and order will begin raiding immigrant communities as far away as the city of Rabat, rounding people up at random, throwing them at gunpoint into convoys of buses and driving them through the night to Oujda, crossing the border secretly, at this very spot, and dumping their prisoners many miles inside Algeria, on the fringes of the desert. On Christmas Eve 2006, at least 450 men, women and children were driven across this field and on illegally into Algeria, where they were abandoned in the wilderness without food or water.
The good citizens of Oujda had been horrified on various earlier occasions to find numbers of starving, badly dehydrated victims of this treatment coming stumbling into their city, but this was the worst case so far. There had already been an unknown number of deaths on the Ceuta frontier: shooting sprees by both Spanish and Moroccan forces. Unknown numbers, because the victims’ bodies can so easily slip into the Mediterranean, never to be seen again. Their families and friends back home won’t be raising any hue and cry, either: they weren’t expecting to hear from them any time soon.
There has been a massive outcry among Moroccans who do not wish to see their country doing Europe’s dirty work. How could the victimless crime of trying to cross a border deserve the death penalty? And in the Oujda case, a long, slow death penalty, by thirst and starvation in the desert. With the help of Médecins sans Frontières, international opinion was aroused – for a while, at any rate – over these Oujda events, and hopefully the cruel dumping has stopped.
Meanwhile, the Ceuta authorities have recently begun digging some sort of massive trench around their city. Who knows what the future will hold? If they dig deep enough, they may perhaps manage to detach Ceuta from its African moorings and drag it right off across the Mediterranean to safety.
At the Algerian frontier, we fill in rather a lot of forms asking all sorts of insanely irrelevant questions. I am already nervous about crossing this border, what with all the rumours about violence and tales of Islamist guerrillas attacking border posts. Nervous and bored at the same time is, as I may have mentioned, a bad combination for me. Finally, when I am asked the full names of both my parents, I become seriously exasperated. What on earth has that got to do with anything?
But Gérard and Guy don’t seem to think it’s particularly odd. You often get asked that in France, too, on official documents, they say.
Well, you can certainly tell whose colony Algeria used to be, then.
Escaping from the form-filling bureaucrats in their booths at long last, we take in a good, long, deep breath of fresh Algerian air. But the freedom is not to last. I am now selected by a young female border guard in immaculately tailored uniform, very modern and Western-looking compared to any female outfits I’ve seen since we got off the ferry, to be taken off and searched.
She’s obviously not an Islamist, at any rate. But what if the opposition launches an attack at this very moment? I have gone from nervous to extremely nervous now. Why on earth didn’t we take Ahmed’s advice? Once we reach the privacy of the shiny steel cabin in which the search is to take place, though, I discover that the true object of my captor’s interest is not the putative drugs, arms, or wads of illicit money that I may be trying to smuggle into her country; not religion or politics; but the contents of my toilet bag. In fact, she is about the only person we will meet in the whole of Algeria who says not a word about suspended elections, armies or arrests.
Instead, together we go minutely through my every toiletry, examining and testing my deodorant and my cleansing wipes, my tinted lip salve and my almost-dried-up mascara. We admire my stripy toothpaste, squeeze a bit out to make sure it really does come out in stripes, and – intimates by now – discuss the use of interdental floss and its raison d’être.
There is nothing like this to be had in Algeria, she says eventually, wistfully caressing the double-ended two-shades-of-metallic-green eye pencil she’s found right down at the bottom of the bag, while I stand there twitching, fearing that we are about to move on to a full-body search.
Nothing here, she adds, but boring old traditional kohl! How she would love to own such a beautiful thing!
I have never, ever used this eye-pencil since the day I bought it. It was a terrible mistake, and I didn’t even know I had it with me. What can I do but make it a gift? I wonder for a moment whether to add the toothpaste, which was clearly a big hit, but then I would have to find some Algerian toothpaste before tonight. Can I bear to make my life that complicated? I needn’t have worried. We’re about to go through the rest of my luggage, anyway. Plenty of time to discover that there are no stretch lace bras to be had in Algeria, nor matching knickers either . . .
Twenty minutes later, having thoroughly corrupted this flower of Algerian womanhood with my degenerate Western trinkets, and without having removed so much as a stitch of clothing – though I have, naturally enough, been given a friendly prod in the bosom area – I emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, arm in arm with my new best mate. Gérard and Guy, who have been biting their nails and fearing the worst all this time, are flabbergasted.
Soon we are waiting for the bus towards the city of Tlemcen – first stop on the road towards Algiers. A bus which everyone at the border post agrees definitely exists, but about whose exact timetable very little, it seems, is known.
Guy, uttering a cry of joy, pulls the now dog-eared Little Cunning guide to Morocco from Gérard’s back pocket and hurls it into a handy bush to biodegrade. Its day is done. Time for our first Algerian travel lesson.
We stand here in the warm spring sunshine for about three-quarters of an hour, during which time less than a dozen vehicles pass – this is obviously not a nation of car-owners – but every single one of them pulls in to see if we need a lift. Most of them are only going a few miles, so we just thank them and pass the time of day – where are we from, where are we going, nice weather, yes, but what a pity it didn’t rain more this spring. Obviously Algerians just have more time to take an interest in one another than most people in Europe, with the possible exception of Ireland, where I recall having experienced something very similar.
Now comes a car so tightly packed with passengers that nobody else could possibly fit in. The driver stops anyway, to apologize for not being able to give us a lift. A granny in the back seat is wearing a small triangular half-a-hanky veil over her nose and mouth, an item so ferociously starched and folded that it sticks out like a strange white lace-edged beak. I do my best not to stare, but it’s hard work.
Gérard, meanwhile, seizes this great opportunity to do some research into Algerian public opinion, asking everyone who stops – once we have covered such essentials as our destinations, our provenance, and recent local weather conditions – what they think about the cancelled elections and the Islamist arrests. At last, he says, he is free to collect his own news reports – which nobody at all can make him throw in a bin!
He has been very heartened to hear that a certain Mohammed Boudiaf is about to take over the leadership of the emergency government. Boudiaf, he says, really is a man of principle, and one of the old heroes of the war against the French, too, which might do something to reunite the country. He left Algeria – and the Front for National Liberation – in disgust, not long after it had won the war. He said that the organization should be disbanded right away, that their country needed a freely elected government to run it now, not an unelected revolutionary army and its political wing. Boudiaf has certainly been proven right about the corruption that would overtake his country if that was not done. He’s lived in exile ever since. The FLN and their army must be pretty desperate to have asked him to come back, since he’s always argued for their destruction! But if he’s really agreed to come, he may be the saving of Algeria.
Gérard’s roadside opinion poll has come up with four people who voted for the Islamic Front, four who don�
��t want to say, and three who voted loyally for the FLN, which has run the country for the last thirty years. Not one of the passing car-loads agrees with the arrests of the Islamists, and Gérard finds this very cheering, too.
Personally, I don’t know why he cares if they’re locked up. They sound like a horrible lot. Why are they so obsessed with women, anyway? No schools for women, no jobs for women, no divorce for women unless the man wants it, no property rights for women, go around in a big black bag or a daft white beak of you’re a woman . . . is there no other content to their politics? There doesn’t seem to be.
Gérard doesn’t think it’s really about women, though. It’s about family life. The only part of people’s identity that the colonizers didn’t manage to mess about with. The only vestige of self-respect they managed to keep. That, and their religion. That’s why the two things are so inextricably linked, whenever people here talk of resisting the encroachments of the West.
I don’t know why Gérard thinks their family lives haven’t been messed about with. Look at Latifa and Naima not seeing their husbands from one year to the next. Or Youssouf’s town, where you can’t afford to get married unless you emigrate first. But I suppose he’ll just tell me that that’s post-colonial.
Anyway, I say, it all comes down to picking on women in the end – whatever the motives behind it.
Well, all right, maybe they are horrible, says Gérard, but you still don’t want to just arrest them and lock them up. That turns them into martyrs. A terrible mistake. You want to beat them in open, democratic debate.
Really? I think my preferred method of beating them would be round the head with a large cast-iron frying-pan.
No wonder nobody’s too bothered about the details of the bus timetable round here. The point of standing at a bus stop here in Algeria, we finally grasp, is not necessarily to catch a bus at all. You are just signalling to any passer-by, in any vehicle, that you are trying to go somewhere and need some transport. So there’s no point fussily waiting for an actual bus when we’ll obviously get to Tlemcen, only sixty-odd miles away, with or without one – though maybe in a lot of small steps. We accept the next offer of a lift. Ali will drop us at a crossroads further on, he says, where another Tlemcen-bound bus joins this road, thus doubling our chances of coming across one. Sounds good. We climb in, Guy at the front, Gérard in the back with me. As we travel, Gérard begins fishing around in his rucksack; with a conspiratorial nod in Guy’s direction, he sneaks something out of it, which he holds low on his lap for my inspection, giving me a surreptitious wink. Oh, no. The Little Cunning guide to Algeria.
The Sahara may start only sixty-odd miles to the south, but heading east towards Tlemcen, still running parallel to the Mediterranean, we are soon driving through tree-lined country roads, across a broad and fertile plain of undulating fields and endless serried vineyards. Surely we are back in some region of southern France? Have we fallen through some hole in the space-time continuum? Long, straight highways are shaded by trees evenly spaced along their verges, boles painted white, midi-style; out beyond the avenues of trees stretch the endless rows of vines coming into leaf; there are small country towns of ochre-and-yellow French provincial architecture, with leafy squares and pavement cafés at their centres. The stone-built farms and big vineyard estates all look weirdly familiar, amid fields of potatoes and beans, orchards of apples, pears and apricots. We even pass a shuttered and lost-looking French-provincial church. It is tragically obvious that the builders and owners of all this bucolic charm had no notion that one day they would suddenly have to up sticks and leave it all behind, abandon their whole lives and start over . . .
I sneak a look at Guy. If it’s making me feel nostalgic on their behalf, what effect can all this pied-noir legacy be having on him?
What we need are a few bracing statistics. Here goes. In 1960, after 130 years of French rule, two-thirds of Algerians – six million of them – no longer owned the traditional crops and livestock with which they had once fed themselves. When the French arrived, literacy levels in Algeria had been similar to those of France itself. By now, only four per cent of Algerians could read and write. And French social-scientists had come up with the perfect technical term to describe the effects of their nation’s policies on the Algerian people: clochardisation. Beggar-ization. Down-and-out-ization. How had this come about?
Guy says that when his nation arrived here, most of Algeria, beyond its few sophisticated merchant cities, was a land of self-governing tribes, with a complex and ecologically balanced economy, developed over the millennia. The settled, farming clans of the fertile lowlands grew the grain, fruit and vegetables the country needed. Meanwhile the nomads, wandering the highlands with their flocks and herds, produced the country’s wool, meat and dairy goods, and brought their livestock down to graze upon, and fertilize, the grain-lands at fallow times of year. Their camel- and mule-trains provided the country’s transport system. Any surplus went to fund the mosques and zawiyas which provided for education and spiritual needs, and trained the country’s lawyers and teachers.
But to the European colonizers, this low-key economy of mutual exchange appeared as: no economy at all. To businesslike French eyes, the Algerian lowlands, ripe for intensive commercial exploitation, were being used in an insanely lackadaisical manner. Clearly, they must be taken in hand. According to the prevalent European world-view – horribly similar to the received wisdom of our own era – a free market was the solution to all evils. Land, like everything else, must have a commercial value. But if land was owned collectively, by a whole clan, who could buy or sell it? Nobody. Ergo, tribal lands must be privatized – into competent French hands. Guy’s compatriots simply sequestered vast swathes of Algeria’s best farmland, destroying at a stroke the delicate balance between nomad and settlement, and, combining force and cunning, dismantled the traditional systems of land tenure, along with the Islamic legal framework that safeguarded them.
Naturally, this involved seizing all property owned by Islamic institutions. No more schooling for Algerians, and no more lawyers to protect their rights. Guy says the Algerians were declared French subjects, like it or not, but they could claim no legal rights as French citizens – unless they abandoned their religion.
The Christian persecution, begun so long ago in el-Andalus, had moved on inland from the Mediterranean coastal strip, it seemed, and arrived, victorious, in the heartlands of the Maghreb, which were soon covered in good, profitable vineyards and modern, mechanized wheatfields – no nomad grazing allowed here, thank you – while Algerian peasant families were left to scrape a living from the marginal lands of no interest to commercial developers.
Ironically enough, by the time France decided to provide some education for Algerians – an educated elite, they now hoped, would replace the old clan leaders they had destroyed, and form a soothing bridge between colonizers and colonized, while a chance to better themselves might calm the rebellious masses – it was too late. The new French-educated Algerians simply took the lessons of the French Revolution to heart, turned on the hand that fed them, and joined the fight for Liberty and Equality along with the illiterate and the dispossessed of the villages.
And now, Guy says, things got even worse. His country began emptying out, at gunpoint, every village suspected of sheltering the rebels. Three million country people were driven from their homes. You can even see film of it, too, he says, because, as they burnt the roofs off thatched cottages throughout the land, the French army proudly recorded its progress on camera. Now for the finishing touch: herding the peasant farmers into the regroupement camps, where those thousands of nomads already languished pasture-less, amid the barbed wire, no longer in any position to supply our friend Mohammed the father with the customary cargoes of figs, dates and camel-hair burnouses.
No wonder Guy described Algeria under French tutelage as a hell on earth.
The south of France mirage is soon broken, anyway. Here come two straw-hatted shepherds in ho
oded jellabas, leading a flock of sheep and new-born lambs: much more Joseph of Arimathea than Jean de Florette. Amidst orchards of apple, pear, and cherry, the domed, whitewashed tomb of a marabout appears. Outlined against the rolling green acres, a huge stork’s nest balances atop the minaret of a mosque. The old men lounging companionably in the street cafés in the next Place de la Mairie, shaded by tightly pollarded plane trees, are not dressed in berets and bleus de travail, but in burnous and chèche.
Further on, the early fruits of this generous countryside’s abundance are being sold by the side of the road. Ali stops the car to buy a sack of potatoes; other vendors are hawking loaves of freshly baked bread, strings of red onions, huge bags of freshly caught snails – at a bargain price, too, according to Gérard and Guy. What a pity we have nowhere to cook them, n’est-ce pas?
Back in the car, we’re soon on the hot topic of the constitutional crisis and the Islamic Front. Ali says that the arrests of the leaders and the real troublemakers, the city mobs, was right. But arresting properly elected representatives – the Islamic Front candidates who were voted in to the town halls last year – is absurd. There may be a few bad apples among them, but many of them are good, pious men. The Pouvoir, the powers-that-be, have foisted their own men on the local authorities to replace them. Some of these new town hall usurpers have already been shot at. The Mouvement Islamique Armée is re-forming. And Ali is sure they won’t have much trouble recruiting. What do the Pouvoir expect? Anyone would think they were doing it on purpose. Why set up a multi-party system, go on about democracy and choice and then laugh in everyone’s face? This country has a tradition of fighting back when it has no other outlet.