by Professor William Gallois, University of Exeter
The question as to whether a genocide took place in nineteenth-century Algeria has always been viewed with suspicion by western scholars. By contrast, it has tended to be accepted as a given in many Algerian accounts of the past, expressed both in conversation and in published works. This divergence has arguably been grounded in the manner in which the prevailing means of framing and defining genocide has varied wildly between these two literatures. Curiously, Algerian texts, even when they are ‚popular‘ rather than ‚academic,‘ lie closer to the spirit and terms of reference of the scholarly field of Genocide Studies, whereas academic works in the Anglophone and Francophone traditions have tended to operate from remarkably unscholarly and emotive starting points (generally so as to claim that the term ‘genocide’ should not be applied to the Algerian case).
Looked at comparatively, the violence of imperial Algeria shares remarkable affinities with both the exterminatory impulses and outcomes of other settler colonies (such as Australia, Canada and America) as well as other instances of European incursions into the Arabo-Islamic world, especially in Algeria’s north African neighbours Morocco and Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. Lemkin’s diagnostics of genocide certainly seem to map onto the organised system of massacres perpetrated in nineteenth-century Algeria, the general desire to cause harm to ‘recalcitrant’ groups en masse, the belief in the merits of a Maghrebi tabula rasa, and the ’slow violence‘ of the destruction of particular indigenous groups, communities and identities, alongside limited attempts to forcibly transfer and convert indigenous children in missions.
The relative absence of Algeria from this domain of scholarly scrutiny seems surprising for two reasons. First, because the scale of French violence directed towards the groups they collectively described as ‘Indigènes’, and their subsequent demographic decline, was considerable and certainly comparable with other instances of colonial genocide. Second, because Algeria was central to twentieth-century studies of colonial violence. This was chiefly a result of Frantz’s Fanon’s experiences and his theorization of the innate violence of relations between the colonizer and the colonized founded on his work in Algeria, but also because of the manner in which debates on torture, atrocities and war in Algeria were central to French culture at a moment when Francophone moral and intellectual debates were seen as having global significance in both the First and the Third Worlds.
If historical accounts of the conquest of Algeria have tended to reject any association with the idea of genocide or the field of Genocide Studies, this has tended to be based much more on a set of unexamined assumptions than any detailed knowledge of that latter sub-field. Many French scholars, in particular, have chosen to view this period through the eyes of their forebears and the records which they left behind, working on the commonsensical assumption that wars, empire-building and conquests inevitably generate considerable bloodshed, with most of the human losses inflicted on the defeated parties. The asymmetrical qualities of the effects of violence, and the degree to which these effects were felt solely by soldiers on one side and largely by civilians on the other, have not generally been thought to have been of any great import. Indeed, such outcomes have tended to be viewed as evidence of the substitution of one (inferior) culture by another (superior) society, in what might be seen to be one of many moral forms of reinscription of the mindset of early-nineteenth-century French colonists.
If, on the other hand, the colonial wars of the 1830s and ‘40s are seen to be exercises in which a huge European army (up to 100,000 men) struggled to assert absolute forms of dominance over a diverse series of territories which were then corralled into the idea of an Algerian nation-state, the normal definitions of genocide and extermination which are found in specialist literatures would seem to come into play.
Taking, for instance, the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Algerian case would certainly seem to meet its bar in terms of the availability of evidence that the French committed acts ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. The clause ‘in part’ matters a great deal with regard to Algeria, for beyond the visions of exterminatory ideologues who envisioned an Algeria without Algerians, there is no real claim that the French sought to eliminate complete populations.
What also matters are the particularities of the ‘groups’ whom the French encountered in the Maghreb, for while Europeans may have read these entities in national, ethnic, racial or religious ways, these categories do not map particularly well onto the mosaics of north African culture which preceded the arrival of the French forces in 1830. Religious and place-based forms of identity did matter a great deal to indigenous peoples, but their own understandings of these ideas came to be subsumed within the genealogies of knowledge of the imperial state.
Of the diagnostic “acts” of genocide described in the 1948 Convention, the Algerian case certainly included ‘Killing members of the group’, ‘Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’, ‘Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’ (to a limited degree), and, most especially, ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ In other words: the preponderance of distinct forms of behaviour identified by the UN definition may be seen in the historic Algerian case.