The Brothers
The Brothers (See Cover) About 1,300 years ago, when in the words of the chroniclers, "blood flowed across the earth like the waves of the sea," a Joan of Arc named Daia the Prophetess rallied the Berbers of Algeria against an Arab invasion and briefly formed the scattered tribes into a nation. At the reputed age of 127, while still beautiful and still amorous, Daia died sword in hand on the field of battle.
Today, for the first time since Daia, Algeria again stands on the brink of nationhood--and again the event was preceded by waves of blood.
The drive for independence began Nov. 1, 1954, All Saints' Day, when scattered bands of Algerian Moslems struck at 30 different points across the land, killing four French soldiers and two policemen.
Paris casually dismissed the revolt as an outbreak of "banditry." But as farmhouses of European settlers went up in flames, troop convoys were ambushed in the deep valleys of the Aures range, and guerrillas were trained and organized in the inaccessible crags of Kabylia, the French struck back. They blew up Moslem villages, made wholesale arrests, created empty regions known as zones interdites, where anything that moved was shot.
Before long, the "bandits" and the French were engaged in a full-scale war that, in 7 1/2 years of desperate fighting, cost the lives of 20,000 French soldiers and more than 350,000 Moslems. It sparked two mutinies in the French army, destroyed the French Fourth Republic, brought to power the Fifth Republic of President Charles de Gaulle, and gravely threatened his regime, too. Last week the war was virtually over. At his headquarters in Tunis, Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda of the Algerian F.L.N. (Front de Liberation Nationale) declared: "It is now possible to say that the Algerian revolution has triumphed and has attained the aims for which it fought." Despite these words, there was little sense of triumph beneath the outward forms of jubilation. The big fact about the Algerian cease-fire is moderation--a moderation resulting from exhaustion.
The Sad Peace. Both sides had withdrawn from previously "final" positions --partly in fear of General Raoul Salan's fanatical Secret Army Organization and its indiscriminate terror. Specifically, the French agreed to recognize the F.L.N. as 1) speaking for Algeria's 9,000,000 Moslems; 2) having sovereign power over all Algeria, even the oil-rich Sahara; 3) an honorable foe whose 5,000 captured troops will be treated as prisoners of war, not criminals.
For its part, the F.L.N. agreed to: 1) a three-year transition period during which the French army will gradually withdraw from Algeria; 2) lease special bases to France, e.g., the naval port of Mers-el-Kebir, the Reggan nuclear test site in the Sahara; 3) accept as Algerian citizens those Europeans who make that choice.
In short, the F.L.N. has recognized that even after independence it will have to live with France. In Algeria, F.L.N. responsables were doing a remarkable job of keeping the mobs from violent reprisals against the colons. The F.L.N. even found it necessary to issue a reassuring press release pointing out that the Moslem side was really gaining advantages in the terms of what is already called the "sad peace." Skyward Guns. In the deserted summer resort of Evian-les-Bains on the Franco-Swiss border, the last details of the sad peace were being worked out.
France's De Gaulle sent a delegation headed by his trusted Algerian Affairs Minister, Louis Joxe. The F.L.N. delegation was headed by Vice Premier Belkacem Krim, a former French army noncom. As the delegates met in Evian's cream-colored Hotel du Pare, they had only to look out the window for evidence that Salan's S.A.O.* was still desperately trying to sabotage peace. French security forces prowled the town, armed motorboats guarded the water approaches over Lake Geneva, army halftracks along the esplanade pointed the snouts of antiaircraft guns skyward. In Paris, the S.A.O. struck massively by exploding a booby-trapped car on a crowded suburban street. Before signing the closely detailed, 100-page peace treaty, the F.L.N. demanded a guarantee that De Gaulle's government be ready and willing to crush the S.A.O. Failing that, the F.L.N. wanted explicit permission to do the job itself.
It would not be an easy job. In Algeria, the S.A.O. was obviously ready to blow up the truce if it possibly could. The European quarters of Algiers and Oran, the two biggest cities, were solidly in S.A.O. hands. Algiers, with 800,000 people, resounded night and day to the thud of plastic bombs and the rattle of submachine guns; the staccato European war cry of Al-ge-rie Fran-c,aise! was answered by the shrill Moslem incantation of "Yn! Yu! Yu!" Oran, a city facing the sea but turned inward on itself like a snail, was once called "the capital of boredom." Now its 400,000 people (half European, half Moslem) were bored only with mutual slaughter. The Oran prefect was hiding at the center of a labyrinth of locked doors and guarded hallways; the entire civil administration of Algiers has fled 40 miles away to an armed camp at Rocher Noir.
Beyond the Cease-Fire. De Gaulle has not yet put the 450,000-man French army in Algeria to its severest test. Its conscripts are strongly Gaullist but its officers are tortured by the dilemma that to smash the S.A.O. will mean opening fire on brother officers who have either deserted to the S.A.O. or come from retirement to join the terrorists. De Gaulle has kept the army confined to encampments outside the cities, intending to use it as a strategic reserve at the critical moment of the signing of the cease-fire agreement.
In the final days before the cease-fife, the French and Algerians were fighting an artillery and air battle along the Tunisian border. Probable reason: the F.L.N. wanted to show that it was fighting to the last.
But amid all the violence, the drift to peace continued.
After the cease-fire is signed between France and the F.L.N.. temporary power goes to the French-Moslem members of a provisional Executive for Algeria which, however, will include no top members of the F.L.N. The Executive's specific tasks will be 1) to set up and command a 45,000-member (mostly Moslem) Force Locale that will maintain law and order, and 2) to organize the referendum by which Moslems and Europeans in Algeria will answer yes or no to the question: "Do you approve of Algerian independence and cooperation with France?" An overwhelmingly affirmative response is expected, especially since most Europeans, in sympathy with the S.A.O., will probably abstain.
The Organization. On winning the referendum, the F.L.N. will take over in Algiers. Probably never before in history has a revolutionary group been better organized or more prepared to take power.
In anticipation of independence day, the F.L.N. built an embryo administration in Tunisia whose civil servants deal with everything from the issuance of passports (31 nations, including nine of the Communist bloc, already recognize the F.L.N.
as sovereign in Algeria) to medical care for wounded soldiers. In Tunis. F.L.N.
ministries are bursting with stenographers, clerks, sub-secretaries, military guards and --already--an amplitude of red tape.
F.L.N. diplomatic representatives and propagandists cover the world.
The government maintains an efficient 35,000-man army on the Tunisian and Moroccan frontiers and 15,000 guerrilla fighters inside Algeria. Its budget of an estimated $72 million supports a first-class radio communications system, a news agency, schools and hospitals. There is a twelve-man Cabinet, headed by Premier Benkhedda, a 54-man National Revolutionary Council, a flood of alphabetical agencies, a green-white-and-red national flag, and a stirring national anthem called Kassaman (We Swear), which sounds like a cross between the Russian song Meadowlands and the U.S. Civil War favorite. When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Sample lyrics:
The cry of the fatherland rises from the fields of battle,
Hark, and answer the call.
Write it in the blood of martyrs,
Tell it to the future generations.
We have given you our hand, O Glory,
And we have sworn to die that Algeria may live.
Give witness! Give witness!
Give witness!
The Problems. Dying that Algeria may live is not enough. The tasks of peace may be harder than the sacrifices of war. To outsiders, the country's economic problems seem insoluble. Algeria is four times the size of France, but France has three times as much cultivated land. Algeria's 10 million people are too many for its backward rural economy, and too few and unskilled for a prosperous industrialized nation. Algeria is advanced compared to other Arab countries--about 1,000,000 Moslems have something like Western standards of living. Two million more live on about the level of the masses in South America. The rest are in wretched poverty. Since 1954 the countryside has been decimated: 2,000,000 peasants have been uprooted by the French and crowded into regroupment centers, another 500,000 have fled to bidonvilles (shantytowns) on the outskirts of the big cities.
Unable to find work at home, 400,000 Algerian Moslems have emigrated to France and help keep their families from starvation by sending home $25 million a year from their factory wages. An independent Algeria must find a solution to the vicious circle of capital formation that plagues all underdeveloped countries: capital is in short supply because savings are small; savings are small because wages are low; wages are low because productivity is deficient. But to increase productivity requires capital.
When the rebellion began. Moslem nationalists were convinced that Algeria was a land of untold riches that France was picking clean. To their distress, many now see that France was sitting atop a poor country, not a rich one.
Accordingly, what the Moslem peasants want is relatively modest: work instead of unemployment; schools instead of illiteracy; decent homes instead of huts built of cow dung and grass; above all, "an end to the bad old times." And if there is any clear F.L.N. policy for the future, it is in favor of these aims.
Mao Tse-tung built his revolution in China on the peasants, then crushed them. Cuba's Castro still pays lip service to a peasant ideal, but little else. Asked if they can do better, the F.L.N. leaders grimly answer that they must. F.L.N.
technicians have drawn up a "breviary of errors" made in the name of land reform in other emergent countries. But knowing what not to do is no guarantee of knowing what should be done. So far, the F.L.N.
has not progressed beyond such generali ties as "the absorption of unemployment will take precedence over the rule of maxi mum profit." Pushed into a corner, F.L.N.
officials say defiantly: "We demand the right to govern ourselves poorly." Mr. Everybody. For the near future, at least, a vast share of these problems will be the burden of Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda. Many observers feel that Benkhedda may not last as Premier, may be replaced by someone with a greater popular following or a stronger gift for political intrigue. One possible candidate: suave, wily Mohammed ben Bella, the F.L.N. 's "iron man," who is scheduled to be released from five years of French imprisonment at the ceasefire, along with four other F.L.N. leaders. But for a tran sition period at least, Benkhedda is the man in charge.
TIME Correspondent Israel Schenker last week called on the Premier, who lives with his wife, a medically trained midwife, and their two-year-old son Salim in a small, white, two-story house in a quiet residential district of Tunis. An F.L.N. .guard was at the door; inside the hall lay a child's Teddy bear. In an era of flamboyant revolutionary figures such as Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito and Indonesia's mercurial Sukarno, Benkhedda is something of a surprise. Of medium height and medium age (42), diffident in manner, ascetic in habits, with his voice emotionlessly level and his expression forever veiled by dark glasses, Benkhedda resembles his nickname of M'sieu Tout le Monde (Mr. Every body). No flag-waving Moslem mob has ever ecstatically screamed his name. Ben khedda came up through the ranks of the F.L.N. as a machine-minded organizer.
He is optimistic about the eventual downfall of the S.A.O. Its strength, he feels, comes from a small fraction of the French army that feeds it with arms, munitions and men. If De Gaulle is correct in believing that the army will obey his orders, the S.A.O. will wither away. If De Gaulle is wrong and the French army does not respect the ceasefire, then, says Benkhedda, the F.L.N. is ready to resume the struggle. Some F.L.N. leaders believe that the S.A.O. cannot be liquidated for several years and plan to organize virtually the entire Moslem population into a home guard to hold it in check.
Middle of the Ford. The F.L.N. is not a monolithic party but a popular front, including young intellectuals who have read of freedom abroad and hunger for it passionately at home, terrorists who have found a psychological outlet in violent struggle, trade unionists, students studying engineering, medicine and physics in U.S., Egyptian and Russian universities.
At bottom, and the rock on which the F.L.N. stands, is the mass of peasants.
The soil in which the F.L.N. grew was provided by French rule in Algeria. The great French civilizing mission brought many good things: an end to cholera, typhus and malaria, the elimination of tribal wars and devastating famines, the beginnings of industrialization. But France also took away the best lands the tribes had owned, and, as the Moslem population rocketed upward, the remaining flocks and inefficient farms could not keep pace.
The frantic determination of the piedsnoirs* not to give up a single privilege or accept a single political gain on the part of the Moslems frustrated every French government effort at amelioration. Perfectly reasonable laws for Moslem "partnership" that might have prevented the war went on the books in Paris, but were never applied in Algeria. A few tame Moslems, known as beni-oui-ouis (yes-men), were allowed to participate in the government, but elections were so frankly rigged that even in France itself, "les elections algeriennes" was a phrase to describe stuffing the ballot box. An old Berber once complained to Ethnologist Germaine Tillion: "You've led us to the middle of the ford, and there you've left us."
The Moslems had nothing to lose in seeking a way across the ford by following Benkhedda and other F.L.N. leaders. The leaders were drawn mostly from the privileged Moslem families and felt themselves equal as men to the French, but forced into social and economic inferiority. French rule, and later the war itself, provided the unity that the Moslems had lacked so long.
On the Beach. Benkhedda's family was of Turkish origin, and both his father and grandfather were respected cadis, a sort of combined judge, solicitor and arbitrator who, under Moslem law, performs marriages, settles civil litigation and mediates property disputes. The cadis, of course, were "good friends of France" and in their home town of Blida, a street leading off the main square is named in honor of Benyoussef's grandfather.
Born in 1920, Benyoussef was considered a shy and self-contained child, and easily won a scholarship to the Blida lycee. He had only to look around him in school for evidence of discrimination. Though Blida was 80% Moslem, 27 of the 30 students in his class were European. One Moslem classmate was Saad Dahlab, now F.L.N. Foreign Minister and often called the "theorist of the revolution." A grade or two below was M'ham-med Yazid, now F.L.N. Information Minister. Benkhedda pored over books on modern revolutions--French, American and Russian. He recalls wanting to cry out in protest when his history teacher duly noted that Algeria had never been independent--that when the French took it over in 1830, it was only a Turkish colony.--Graduating from the lycee, Benkhedda went on to study pharmacy--as did ex-Premier Ferhat Abbas--at the University of Algiers. He read incendiary tracts by Voltaire and Rousseau about human dignity, liberty and the rights of man--a reminder that the Algerian Revolution, like most colonial independence movements, really grew out of Western ideals. Benkhedda argued the night through with friends over how the Moslem masses could be raised from misery to prosperity.
But he also spent a lot of time swimming at the nearby beaches, going to the theater and movies, and confessed to a friend that "Algiers is fatal even to the most single-minded student." In 1945, at the end of World War II, Moslems staging an independence celebration in Setif clashed with the police and Europeans. Some 5,000 Moslems were killed, and the French began arresting everyone in sight, including Benkhedda and his fellow committee members on the Moslem Students Union. He spent six months in grim Barberousse prison--which the F.L.N. promises to raze and replace with a park in memory of the dead of the revolution.
Returning to Blida a convinced nationalist, Benkhedda wrote patriotic pamphlets and organized a group to paint the town red with slogans for Algerian independence. He vividly recalls being surprised by the police one night. He and his friends just barely managed to conceal their brushes and paint cans beneath their flowing djellabas. The police took it for granted that the freshly painted signs could not be the work of the supposedly illiterate and frightened Moslems who stood before them.
Into the Valley. When the F.L.N. rebellion broke out in 1954, Benkhedda was once more jailed by the police as a likely nationalist suspect. When he was freed in May 1955--without having been charged or tried--he went at once into the F.L.N.
underground. Becoming one of les freres, the brothers, as fighting members of the F.L.N. call themselves, Benkhedda served as editor of El Moudjahid, the official F.L.N. organ that then appeared monthly in French and Arabic, and was a delegate to the famed 1956 conference of 250 F.L.N. leaders held in Soummam Valley under the nose of the French army. Here Denkhedda was elected to both the F.L.N.
"Parliament'' and "Cabinet," and given a new assignment: control of the "military zone" of Algiers.
So far, the revolution had been largely limited to the bled, the countryside; the coastal cities were untouched by war.
Benkhedda moved in with a top team of terrorists: his old classmate, Saad Dahlab; tough Belkacem Krim, who was three times sentenced to death in absentia by the French; a hard-nosed gunman named Ramdane Abbane (who has since mysteriously died } ; a political gangster named Yacef. One of Benkhedda's couriers was an attractive girl, Salima Haffaf, whom he later married.
After a French bomb killed 53 Moslems, Benkhedda's group began planting bombs in dance halls and cafeterias, in corner lampposts and along boulevards.
A Moslem friend thinks that Benkhedda's nature was "too sensitive" for terrorism and says that he aged considerably with in months. The gunman, Abbane. would try to end Benkhedda's melancholy by roaring, "You're behaving like a French left-wing intellectual!" To deal with the terror, the French brought General Jacques Massu's paratroop division into Algiers. Benkhedda was the city's "most wanted man,'' and Massu kept a picture of him on his desk.
Civil rights were suspended and the paras swept through the casbah like a flash fire, using any methods they thought might be effective in questioning suspects. Ben hedda's future wife was jailed; so was Yacef. The organization fell apart. "What saved me was to pass unnoticed,'' said Benkhedda later, alluding to his incon spicuous appearance. Carrying a briefcase and sporting a mustache, he spent most of his time in European cafes, called himself Pierre Georges. He was often hidden and helped by European sympathizers, some of them Communists. "We owe more to these people," he told his brother, "than to thousands of Algerian militants." Damned of the Earth. In the spring of 1957, Benkhedda fled Algiers, made his way on foot to the Tunisian frontier to report failure to the F.L.N. high command. He had failed twice: by not winning the Battle of Algiers, and by unleashing French counterterror against his own.
Benkhedda was dropped from the F.L.N. Cabinet. For a year, he was in eclipse and accepted it with the cool resilience that has led the brothers to call him " le pere tranquil'' (the quiet fellow). He spent his time reading, drawing up plans for a Socialist Algeria, and talking with Dr. Frantz Fanon, a Negro psychiatrist from Martinique.
Fanon, who died last year of leukemia, wrote a passionate book called The Damned of the Earth that recommended destruction of all colonial settlers and even the native "intellectuals." The country should be turned over, he said, to "those who have nothing to lose, the landless peasants who provide the bulk of the fighters and for whom the struggle means only two things--land and bread." Increasingly, this became Benkhedda's philosophy. He made the customary F.L.N. tours, once to Russia, twice to Red China (where the Communists had considerable difficulty understanding why the F.L.N. government was in Tunis and not in Algeria, where it belonged). At home. Benkhedda played the critic's role, charged the F.L.N. with drift and "incoherence." Policy, he said in 1960, was diluted--neither all-out negotiations nor all-out war.
For a time, this tough, doctrinaire stand was more than the F.L.N. wanted.
But paradoxically, it helped Benkhedda to power just as the F.L.N. finally concluded that a negotiated solution must somehow be found. Reason: only a recognized tough "revolutionary" would have the prestige to carry out a relatively soft policy. In August 1961. the National Council named Benkhedda Premier, to succeed Ferhat Abbas. As a man of known revolutionary fervor. Benkhedda has been able to make concessions to the French that the milder Ferhat Abbas could never have made.
The New Men. The degree of future compromise possible with the French will largely determine the country's fate. Moslems living in bidonvilles or cooped up in the casbahs of Algiers and Oran want the Europeans cleared out, whatever the cost. They still live in fear that they will die in the rubble of their bombed tenements or be machine-gunned on a corner by passing S.A.O. cars. "We want to go to work in the morning with the certainty of returning at night," said one. "We want to be able to walk freely in the streets of Algiers--in all its streets." Growled another: "The pieds-noirs have two choices: either stop behaving as though in a conquered country, or get out." There is hardly a Moslem family one of whose men was not killed or imprisoned in the war with the French. Despite this legacy of hate, hundreds of thousands of educated Moslems, ranging from doctors and lawyers to small shopkeepers and mailmen, are still Western in outlook and temperament. The more sophisticated of them realize that a massive departure of the Europeans would be an economic catastrophe, since the Europeans are responsible for nine-tenths of all exports and four-fifths of all employment.
In the towns back from the Europeanized coast, a new administration is taking over with the appointment by the French of dozens of Moslem subprefects. These new men. totally different from the prewar beni-oui-ouis, are mostly in their 20s, university graduates picked for their ability, and mostly nationalists--either by conviction or self-interest. They see their role as a holding operation until the F.L.N. takes over, and many obviously will stay on.
Despite the war and the hazards of daily life, many Moslems experienced relative prosperity over the past seven years.
In the forced draft of revolution--and with belated French aid--Moslem society has changed more than in centuries. In many traditional, pious families, the daughter of the house has changed from a flowing Jiaik and face veil to blue jeans, and from the harem to the underground. These young Moslem women are not prepared to go back to a social order where it is easier for a husband to divorce a wife--and deprive her of her children--than it is for Westerners to fire a servant.
How Red? Will the new Algeria go Communist, as the S.A.O. insists? There is much that pushed the F.L.N. toward Communism. When the rebellion began, the French army tried to crush it with U.S. weapons supplied under the NATO pact. U.S. planes manned by French pilots rained down U.S. bombs on Moslem villages. Guns captured by the F.L.N. had U.S. markings; so did unexploded grenades and shells, and the wrecked helicopter that had ferried French troops over the rough terrain. The only aid that the F.L.N. received was from the Arab states and the Communist bloc. F.L.N.
guerrillas are equipped with Red Chinese mortars and antiaircraft guns; they eat jam from Communist Bulgaria; they train Moslem orphans to be carpenters and welders on machines from the Soviet Union.
Hundreds of Algerian students are enrolled in Iron Curtain universities. One returned raving about the glories of life in drab East Germany. An F.L.N. leader said apologetically: "Of course, it looked good to him. He was, say, 13, at the beginning of the rebellion, and has spent the last five years either as a rebel in the hills or in a refugee camp. Why shouldn't even East Germany look wonderful?" Benkhedda himself, although he distrusts Soviet-policy, has occasionally spouted Red cliches. He has compared Algeria's struggle with France to Latin America's struggle against "North American imperialism." As for Cuba, "the Americans cannot pardon Fidel Castro for having thrown off the yoke of Yankee trusts and monopolies." If the F.L.N. pushes its promised land reforms and its collective approach to the task of. rebuilding and industrializing the country, independent Algeria will demand of its people the kind of discipline and sacrifices that only a Communist regime can maintain. Observers who spend time with the F.L.N. are often struck by the resemblance it bears to Communism--the same bureaucratic approach and strict obedience to the "party" line, the same fear of taking action that might displease superiors, the same reliance on slogans and indoctrination, and above all, the same infuriating sense of superiority and invulnerability due to their adhering to "revolutionary" rules. A government run by "the brothers" of the F.L.N. may have many doctrinal differences with Communism, but it will be uncomfortably close.
Westward Neutral. And yet, seven years of hard fighting and difficult diplomatic maneuvering have made relatively sophisticated men of the F.L.N. political leaders. They know that the Soviet Union's longtime reluctance to recognize their government stemmed from Nikita Khrushchev's fear of offending De Gaulle, whom he hoped to use to split the NATO alliance. They are aware that Red Chinese aid was given more to embarrass the West than to help the F.L.N. Even fiery anticolonialist Dr. Frantz Fanon said contemptuously: "If the Communist powers really cared, they would have made a major effort to help us, not just make propaganda with a trickle of aid." Internationally, the F.L.N.'s Algeria is not likely to be subservient to either Moscow or Peking; most probably it will follow a "neutralist" line similar to Egypt or Yugoslavia. France takes Algerian neutralism for granted, but feels that it has the three-year transitional period to make Algeria "neutral toward the West," not the East. During the three years, it will also be up to France to weave a tissue of economic ties that will survive. Already France has conceded that Algeria may buy wheat at domestic French prices while undertaking, in turn, to continue to buy the Algerian wine surplus. The continuation of French aid to Algeria is expected to run to $700 million a year. In this mutual binding of wounds, the Moslem anger toward France and, indirectly, toward all the West, may prove as transient as did the Allies' anti-German and anti-Japanese feelings after World War II.
As they stood on the threshold of independence, Algeria's Moslems could feel like men who had broken through a time barrier. The F.L.N.'s first Premier and grand old man Ferhat Abbas wrote despairingly in 1934: "If I had discovered an Algerian nation I would be a nationalist. Men who die for a patriotic ideal are honored and respected. But I would not die for an Algerian fatherland because such a fatherland does not exist. I cannot find it. I questioned history. I questioned the living and the dead. I searched through the cemeteries. Nobody could speak to me of it. You cannot build on air."
But last week, most of Algeria's Moslems felt that they had built their own fatherland in seven years of life-and-death struggle. Said an F.L.N. leader: "We now have a history, a nation, even our own myths, our songs and our legendary heroes." One thing the F.L.N. has not done: it has not conquered its new fatherland. The Moslems never beat the French army as it was beaten in Indo-China at Dien-bienphu. Rather, by tenacity, courage and discipline, the F.L.N. finally forced the French to give up the embattled country. For the future, this military stand-off may hold more hope and less bitterness than a clear-cut victory. The "sad peace" concluded at Evian may yet turn into the kind of "association" that De Gaulle had earlier hoped for, and had linked with "the peace of the brave."
* Or, in French, O.A.S., for Organization de lArmee Secrete, not to be confused with two other O.A.S.s, the Organization of American States and the forthcoming Organization of African States.
*"Black feet," the nickname for Europeans, so called because most of their ancestors arrived in Algeria barefoot.
*The indigenous Berber population of what is now Algeria has been there since history be gan. A stockily built, brown-haired, light-eyed people, they have bitterly opposed successive conquerors -- Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks and French. They always lost and always for the same reason: an almost Celtic inability to unite against a common foe. When the French landed in 1830, the Arab-Berbers of Algeria were as divided as ever, and the French found willing allies among the tribes. Even so, it took 40 years of hard fighting to subdue the country.
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