Although it was barely articulated, there was also a colonial dimension to this struggle. In colonial Algeria, to be Muslim and a French citizen was almost a contradiction in terms. Before 1946 only a thin stratum of Arabs who set aside their Muslim ‘personal status’ and accepted the Code Civil became citizens. After 1946 Muslim men were given the vote but treated like second-class citizens in a separate electoral college. Muslim women were not given the vote until 1958 when, as we have seen, they were also pressured to remove their veils. This was seen to be a precondition of their integration but it was also the violence of the coloniser over the colonised. As Frantz Fanon had observed in 1959, ‘The occupier sees in each Algerian woman newly unveiled an Algerian society whose defence systems are being dislocated, opened, kicked in.’48 The insistence that young Muslim women remove the veil was arguably a repetition of the same gesture, thirty years on.
The Return of the Algerian War
The veil controversy reignited conflicts that could be traced back to the Algerian War. Some politicians held that thirty years was enough time to get over the Algerian War. Centrist François Bayrou claimed that ‘the conflict no longer had any significance today’, while right-wing Nicolas Sarkozy thought that the legacy of the war had been ‘rapidly digested’ and did not have a lasting political impact on French political life.49 Against this, however, Benjamin Stora, an Algerian of Jewish origin who had left Constantine aged eleven in 1962, argued in La Gangrène et l’oubli (1991) that the traumas of the Algerian War had not been forgotten but merely repressed. They were made manifest by the presence of first- and second-generation immigrants who in 1999 made up 17 per cent of the French population, nearly 28 per cent of whom were of North African origin.50 The Right, argued Stora, could not endure the presence of Algerian Muslims on French territory. This ‘intrusion’ constantly reminded them of their colonial defeat and yet persuaded them that the colonial regime in Algeria was the natural order of things:
The intrusion of the former colonised person in the metropolis is experienced as a ghastly inversion, seen as him colonising the territory of ‘civilized’ people […] Far from inducing a sense of failure the loss of Algeria produces a pride and certainty that the French were right during the colonial period. This narcissistic scar is evident in the will to keep replaying, repeating and reviving the war years, perpetuating the disappointment that the war was lost.51
The pain of the Algerian War years was replayed in a very dramatic way in 1991, the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre of pro-FLN Algerians in Paris on the orders of police chief Maurice Papon. To commemorate this, a director of Algerian origin, Mehdi Lallaoui, made a film about the massacre, Le silence du fleuve. On 17 October 1991 a procession of 10,000 marched from the Canal Saint-Martin, where so many Algerians had been drowned in racist attacks, to the Rex cinema, where the film was screened.52 The story of the massacre was also publicised by radical historian Jean-Luc Einaudi in his La Bataille de Paris, 17 October 1961.53 He explored the connections between the repressive actions of Maurice Papon – from deporting Jews under Vichy and firing on Algerian demonstrators in Paris on 14 July 1953 to ordering torture and summary executions as super-prefect in Algeria in 1956 – and the 1961 massacre for which he was responsible as Paris prefect of police.
In 1997 Maurice Papon was brought to trial. This was not for his role in the 1961 massacre, because the amnesty laws passed in the 1960s prevented prosecutions for acts committed during the Algerian War. Instead he was tried for deporting Jews from Occupied France. The trauma of the Algerian War was nevertheless stirred up again by the trial. Einaudi took the opportunity to denounce Papon for the massacre. Papon sued for libel, but lost. Then, on 10 June 1999, the French National Assembly officially recognised that what had taken place in Algeria for eight years was not an internal police problem but war. A debate was reopened about the use of torture against Algerian rebels by the French security services. On 31 October 2000 twelve former French resisters from the 1940s and actors in the campaign against torture in the 1950s and early 1960s appealed to President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin in the Communist daily L’Humanité to condemn the torture that had been undertaken in the government’s name.54 One of the signatories was Simone de Bollardière, whose soldier husband Jacques had been cashiered and imprisoned for his opposition to torture in Algeria. She explained that ‘the army is like the Church, you don’t criticise it. It is la grande muette. It does what it wants but you must not say so.’55 Meanwhile the historical evidence for torture in Algeria was provided by Raphaëlle Branche, the book of whose thesis, La Torture et l’Armée pendant la Guerre d’Algerie, was published in December 2001 and attracted very wide reviews.
It might be imagined that the evils of torture and massacre committed during the Algerian War would now be universally condemned. But this was far from the case. Airtime was given to General Paul Aussaresses who, with a patch over one eye, boasted about having personally tortured to death twenty Algerians.56 The Jospin government attempted to pass a law dedicating the date of the 1962 ceasefire, 19 March, to the memory of all victims of the Algerian War. This, however, was opposed by a ‘Manifesto of the Generals’ signed by 521 generals who had served in Algeria. They argued that they had themselves fought ‘with honour and dignity’ against ‘all forms of torture, murder and crimes that were ideologically inspired and methodically organised’. The dilemma they occasionally faced, they claimed, was either ‘to dirty their hands by harshly interrogating those who really were guilty or to accept the certain death of innocent people’.57 In this way, not only were the battles of the Algerian War still being fought but the partisans of French Algeria and the conduct of the French forces in that bloody war had not given up the fight.
Together, the rise of global Islamism and the resurgence of the colonial past challenged attempts to build a contemporary multicultural society. Nationalist and even extreme nationalist movements gained ground. The French governments, like the British, clamped down on immigration and defined more closely who was French and who was not. In March 1993 the socialist government lost the election to the right-wing and tough Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, who ordered sweeping arrests in banlieues of Algerian immigrants thought to favour the GIA.58 Measures were taken to tighten immigration controls and immigrants without proper documentation – the so-called sans-papiers – faced arrest and deportation. In August 1996 a group of sans-papiers under threat undertook a hunger strike in the church of Saint-Bernard, in the Goutte d’Or, but police used axes to smash the doors of the church and arrest and deport them. Meanwhile, the government implemented the recommendation of the Long Commission that the acquisition of French nationality by French-born children of immigrants should not be automatic. As a result the Beur generation which had marched for equality in 1983 now faced the possibility of not being granted French nationality.
A powerful reason for firm action by the government was the rise of the Front National. In 1995 the presidential election was won by Jacques Chirac, and Jean-Marie Le Pen won 15 per cent of the vote. The Front National made breakthroughs in towns along the Mediterranean coast from the Pyrenees to the Côte d’Azur together with the deindustrialised towns of northern and eastern France. Much of this was explained by the ongoing battles of the Algerian War and by the influx of immigrants from North Africa. The link between the Algerian War and the Front National was clear. Le Pen had fought and allegedly tortured rebel suspects in Algeria; he was one of the few politicians to publicly support the pieds noirs. Former leaders of the OAS ran for the Front National: Pierre Sergent was a deputy in the Pyrénées Orientales in 1986–8, Jean-Jacques Susini stood in elections in Marseille 1997, although without success. The pieds noirs had settled along the Mediterranean coast, opposite their old homeland, and supported those who had fought to defend French Algeria. A survey of 2002 showed that 90 per cent of pieds noirs and their children who voted for the Front National still preferred to have held on to French Algeria.59 The pieds noirs
nevertheless made up only a small proportion of the Front National vote. In the formerly industrialised towns of the Nord Pas-de-Calais and Lorraine, where pieds noirs did not live, the white working-class electorate had traditionally voted communist but now switched to the extreme Right. The main reason was their opposition to North African immigrants who were portrayed by the Front National as the scapegoat for all France’s ills: unemployment, crime, drugs and national decline. Political scientists had to find new terms for this and variously called it ‘Left Le Penism’, ‘Labour Le Penism’ or ‘social nationalism’.60
As French national identity became more restrictive so young people of North African origin defined themselves more sharply as Algerian and Muslim. There was an enthusiasm for Raï music which contested both French colonialism and conservative Islam. Raï came from the bars and bordellos of the port city of Oran in Algeria, appealing to a deracinated population exposed to many influences. A new generation of singers in the 1980s such as Cheb Khaled, born in Oran in 1960, appealed to the Beurs of the banlieues of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Banned as dissolute by the FIS, the singers exiled themselves to France although one of them, Cheb Hasni, was murdered in Oran by Islamist extremists in 1994. More aggressive were rappers such as Malek Brahimi, known as Malek Sultan and later Freeman, born to an Algerian family in Marseille, who joined the rap group IAM with musicians of Neapolitan and Malgache origin and infused Arab heritage with black consciousness.61
Those who committed to young Muslim movements were a minority, but no less influential. A Union of Muslim Youth (UJM) was founded in Lyon in 1987 by Yamin Makri, born in Lyon in 1963 and in charge of a small publishing outfit, Tawhid, denoting the oneness of the faith. The Young Muslims of France (JMF), founded in 1993, was particularly strong in Marseille and Nice. Of North African origin but born and educated in France, they did not attend traditional mosques where Arab was spoken by their elders, and they wanted to move beyond what they called the ‘tribalism’ of neighbourhoods in a more universal project.62 Increasingly, young Muslims identified with the global community (ummah) of Islam, whose militants challenged first the global reach of Soviet communism through the mujahideen in Afghanistan, then US imperialism in Iraq, and finally the pro-Western governments through the activities of Groupes Islamiques Armés.
As in Britain, youths who combined French and Algerian identities might prefer to espouse the latter and then buy into the violence of the Algerian civil war. One extreme individual was was Khaled Kelkal, born in Algeria in 1971, brought up in the Lyon suburb of Vaux-en-Velin, and imprisoned as a petty criminal in 1990–2. In prison he was radicalised into Islam and learned Arabic. In July 1995 he exploded a bomb at the Saint-Michel Metro station, killing eight and wounding 117. Shot by police in October 1996, he was vilified in the press as a ‘young delinquent from Vaux-et-Velin’ and ‘an Islamic terrorist born in Mostaganem in Algeria’. What was significant, however, was precisely how a young immigrant with some delinquent tendencies from a Lyon banlieue could be radicalised as what was now called a Muslim terrorist.63
A Multicultural Moment?
In spite of the reach of global Islamism and the retreat to monocultural nationalism there were still moments when French and British societies seemed to be open to more multicultural solutions. Ethnic minorities were treated more equally and religious and cultural diversity was celebrated. Unfortunately there were limits to such shifts in thinking. French intellectuals and politicians never accepted the concept of multiculturalism, which they regarded as ‘Anglo-Saxon’. A national identity, they argued, could not be forged from a melting pot of different ethnic communities. In Britain, there were more serious attempts to bring in multicultural policies and attitudes. Repeatedly, however, these collided with the unspoken assumption that there were colonial hierarchies which had existed ‘out there’ and were now reproduced ‘back here’.
Between 1997 and 2002 France was under the socialist government of Lionel Jospin. It gave some thought to bringing back the principle that immigrants born on French soil should automatically become French when they reached their majority, but decided that the stigmatisation of ‘paper French people’ was too strong and the danger of socialists weakening national identity too great.64 The great achievement of multicultural France was the 1998 World Cup victory of a French team that included a Beur, Zidane, a Senegalese, Patrick Vieira, a Kalmuk, Youri Djorkaeff, an Armenian, Alain Boghossian, and a Kanak from New Caledonia, Christian Karembeu. This was widely praised as the black-blanc-beur team which reflected contemporary France. The Swiss daily, Le Temps, said that while France had lost an empire she had ‘regained her rank on another field’.65 This diversity was not, however, to all French people’s taste. Alain Finkielkraut, a passionate supporter of the principle of laïcité, regretted that commentators were constantly referring to the footballers’ origins whereas what mattered was that they were all French. ‘This obsession with ethnicity distances us from the republican ideal and takes us closer to multicultural America. The message now is metissage, diversity replaces culture.’66 For most French intellectuals, multiculturalism was never a goal, and French culture must prevail.
There was a brief multicultural moment in Britain after the murder of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 at a bus stop in Eltham, south London. Stephen’s parents had come to Britain from Jamaica in the 1960s, and one of his five white assailants asked him ‘what, what, nigger?’, before stabbing him to death. The police failed to arrest any suspects for two weeks and a court case against them collapsed for lack of evidence. Stuart Hall, Jamaican-born professor of sociology at the Open University, provided evidence to the Macpherson inquiry set up by the Labour government in 1997. His distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ variants of British racism fed into the ultimate report which indicted the Metropolitan Police for its ‘institutional racism’. In 1997 Hall sat on a Runnymede Trust commission on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, which demanded that all forms of racism be addressed and put equality and diversity at the centre of the public agenda. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, gave his blessing to the commission, but when its recommendations were greeted by ‘comprehensive outrage’, said Hall, Straw ‘publicly rubbished our work’ and ‘went scurrying back to the writings of George Orwell – containing a sort of love letter to a certain version of Englishness – in order to establish the virtues of English nationalism’.67
Journalist and writer Yasmin Alibhai Brown commented forcefully on the structural defects in the British imagination. She argued that it was not ‘catching up with a globalized world’ but was ‘still locked into an imperial past’. She criticised both the ‘white Oxbridge men’ who staffed the Foreign Office and the 15-year-old British National Party supporter who declared, ‘This is a white country. We ruled these monkeys before they came here with their horrible smells.’ The British, she said, should pay more attention to the perspectives of the people they once ruled.
This country could learn so much from the diverse people who now live here. For centuries, we, the colonized peoples of the world and those who came to stay and lay their claim on their mother country, have been told that we have everything to learn from and nothing to teach our ex-masters. That in spite of decolonization – maybe in revenge for it – that power relationship of cultural dominance can never be shed by either side.68
Racial conflicts still racked British towns, but at the turn of the century the new dynamics of global Islamism changed their meaning. The riots that broke out in Bradford on 7 July 2001 began as a conventional fight by Pakistani youths joining an anti-Nazi march to defend their neighbourhood against a National Front rally. Those who remained on the street were surrounded by the police in riot gear and began to throw missiles at them. Hundreds of arrests were made and of 144 charged, 107, overwhelmingly Asian Muslims, with a few Afro-Caribbeans, were given harsh prison sentences for riot. Although their parents’ generation had taken part in the burning of the Satanic Verses in 1991, these youth
s were keen to hit back with force against discrimination and humiliation. ‘In those days people used to call ’em monkeys or raisins. Me dad used to tell me how it used to be, even me mum’, said one youth in prison. ‘This country is a very racist country. Now the Asian people, Jamaicans, won’t stand for it, know worra mean?’69
What began as a conventional race riot, however, became for some a laboratory of Muslim extremism. Offenders claimed that they been sentenced for up to ten years for the more serious offence of riot, instead of violent disorder, ‘because of the colour of their skin’, said one prisoner. British Asians were still being treated by the police, courts and popular press as colonial subjects. The experience of prison caused some of the youth to convert to Islam. They grew beards and were mocked by prison guards as ‘Taliban’. The riots happened before 9/11 but the global jihadism that provoked the attack and the subsequent War on Terror were keenly felt in prison. ‘I watch the news, Muslims getting’ killed all over the world’, one young prisoner complained, ‘no one gives a toss’.70
Empires of the Mind Page 22