Algeria

Frantz Fanon was only 36 when he died but in his short life he wrote one of the classic anti-colonial works of all time. The Wretched of the Earth became one of the best-known revolutionary texts of that stormy decade. It was first published in France in 1961: an extract in May, exactly 60 years ago, in the magazine Les Temps Modernes, then the whole book in December. Fanon was born into a relatively privileged background in the French colony of Martinique in the Caribbean. He left, aged 18, to join the Free French forces towards the end of World War 2 and went on to study medicine and...

This article by the Algerian socialist-feminist Marieme Helie Lucas, responding to the beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist assailant on 16 October, was first published on the Feminist Dissent website. We republish it, with the author's permission, to promote discussion. Assassinations by decapitation or by the sword – which are highly symbolic of all Muslim extreme-right organisations (Al Qaeda, the Taliban, GIA, al-Shabab, Daesh, Boko Haram, etc.) – are not a new phenomenon in France. Several cases have already happened in recent years. It points at the will of the...

Whilst the mythos surrounding the independence struggle in Algeria of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the subsequent canonization of its central revolutionary party, the FLN, remains strong; less attention is paid by sections of the so-called “anti-imperialist” or ‘Third Worldist” left to the deficiencies of the clique that assumed power following independence. The remnants of the independence generation now represent a stuffy gerontocracy composed of the military in alliance with unelected members of the political-bureaucratic class and the business elite, known as “Le Pouvoir.” The challenges of a...

The Plague (La Peste), written by the French-Algerian Albert Camus in 1947, has, unsurprisingly, undergone a surge in sales in recent months (up 1,000 per cent). It was his best-selling novel, and is considered by some to be an allegory of the wartime occupation of France by the Nazis. It is set in the Algerian port of Oran where, at some unspecified time in the 1940s, there is an outbreak of bubonic plague. The disease spreads rapidly despite the efforts of Doctor Rieux (the main character) and a team of helpers. Eventually, after many months, thousands of deaths and severe quarantine...

Louisa Hanoune, leader of the Workers’ Party in Algeria, linked to the “Lambertist” left group in France, has been sentenced to 15 years in jail. On 25 September a military court sentenced her for “plotting against the state and undermining the army”. Also sentenced to 15 years were Said Bouteflika, brother of former president Abdulaziz Bouteflika, now pushed aside by the military regime as it seeks to hold on to power, and two former state intelligence bosses, Mohamed Mediene and Bachir Tartag. The prosecutors based their case on reports of a meeting of the four. They tried to discredit...

Left-wingers mostly around the SWP have launched a statement for solidarity with the popular revolts in Sudan and Algeria. The statement has been posted on the website of the Sudanese Professionals’ Association, a grouping of trade unions in Sudan based among “professional” workers (teachers, doctors, lawyers, vets, pharmacists, journalists, accountants…) which has been leading the mobilisations there. It calls for “greetings to trade unionists in Algeria and Sudan who are mobilising support for the popular uprisings’ demands through strikes, protests and sit-ins, and fighting to create...

Algerian socialist Kamel Aïssat, from the Trotskyist group PST, explains the political crisis in Algeria. He spoke with Sam Wahch and Antoine Larrache of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party, in France]. Translation by Michael Elms. The PST will mobilise with all its forces to try to broadcast our ideas, in particular about a Constituent Assembly, which is in the interests of the majority of the Algerian people, that is, workers, the unemployed, women, all those excluded by the capitalist system, whose demands must be worked into the new constitution. The mobilisation will be very big, perhaps...

Algeria is full of surprises: Bouteflika has nominated the general who wanted to sack him as a minister... just before announcing his own resignation, set for 28 April (the legal end date of his term in office). Kamel Aïssat, an activist with the Algerian Parti Socialiste des Travailleurs [Socialist Workers' Party or PST], was at a Paris meeting of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] and explained the situation and the people's reactions. [Army chief] Gaïd Salah announced on [30 March] that he was asking for Articles 102, 7 and 8 of the Constitution. Articles 7 and 8 don't fit with article 102...