Annonce

**absente** · 11 mai 2011, 09h18

quelle analogie !

**Bebbers** · 11 mai 2011, 09h34

Hayla...notamment le monde parallèle; j'ai toujours eu cette impression. Nous n'avons plus les mêmes références et les mêmes normes que les autres terriens.

Un Anglais parle de nous autres DZiens:
Algeria: Cry the benighted country

A third of Algerians are under 15 - inheritors of a brutal legacy of ancient and modern hatreds. Their country has suffered through civil war, terrorism and Islamic extremism. Is this uneasy peace what post-fundamentalism looks like?

AA Gill
Is this your first time in Algeria?” everyone I meet asks me. It’s a polite inquiry, a courtesy veiling an admonishment, an accusation. “Where were you? Why did you take so long?” And with a weedy smile I reply, in geographic mitigation, that this isn’t my first time in the Maghreb. “Morocco,” they’d sigh. Yes, Morocco. “Ah, Morocco,” they’d repeat with a curl of the lip. “Disneyland.” And, compared to Algiers, it is.
Nobody’s been to Algeria for a decade unless they had a very pressing reason and some very secure connections. The last photographer I knew who tried to do a story here never got out of his hotel room. He went straight back to the airport, thoroughly scared. There were precious few news teams or foreign journalists — 11 years of civil war have been unforgivingly diligent and murderous and terrifying. Threats in Algeria are never empty. They come replete and fatty with promise, dripping with a brutal, dark efficiency.
“Zidane,” I say — Zinédine Zidane is the only contemporary Algerian anyone’s heard of. “Zidane,” they reply, “everyone was following him, looked to him for pride, for a sign.” Pity about the last match, though, that final head-butt in the 2006 World Cup. “What do you mean?” a man exploded at me, waving his hands. “We loved that! That moment! All his life Zidane was acquiescent, silent, a brown Frenchman, and then finally at the last he did something properly, authentically Algerian.”
Algiers curls like a sun-bleached spine around a great natural harbour. It is a city of lairs, of shadows. Up front is the icing, the promenade: unmistakably, vauntingly French. Tall white apartment blocks with beautiful Algiers-blue shutters and awnings hanging above shaded arcades of shops and deep, dark bars. There are broad, curving boulevards edged with ficus trees that have been pollarded and topiaried into a suspended, undulating green sunshade. It has that faded and dusty decrepitude that so suits colonial architecture, that lends a nostalgia to the bourgeois snobbery and imposed racism. The French city looks out across the Mediterranean towards Marseilles, its mirror.

**Bebbers** · 11 mai 2011, 09h35

The French gave themselves the sea view. Behind them, creeping up the hill in a series of zigzag alleys, is the old Ottoman kasbah and the bey’s keep. It’s a crumbling, collapsed, graffitied squalor of tunnels, blind corners and burrows — other, African, sinuous, secret and guarded. It was the home of resistance, of an old anger. Stamped above both cities are the rigour and clumsy thud of communist architecture, the direct beauty of function, the dwarfing blocks of social cleansing. Architectural cod-liver oil. Our hotel is a monument to collective socialist hospitality, a holiday barrack containing the cafeteria to unknown heroes. Its decoration is caught in a moment of Algerian optimism, the exuberance of the 1970s, textured concrete, knobbly glass screens, plastic furniture and rubber plants. It’s an interior that would have the style editor of Wallpaper* sucking his thumb with excitement.
There is, though, one small ergonomic hiccup. There is no entrance. They’ve done away with the welcome. You get in circuitously, nervously, your car checked for guns and bombs by soldiers with Kalashnikovs. Algiers is shell-shocked with a weary fear. There are policemen and soldiers, astonishingly camp motorbike cops in head-to-toe leather on every street, every corner and junction. At night the roadblocks are constant, checks are relentless, a contact stutter, a practised repetition of security for the chronically insecure, the reassurance of a shared terror. All cars drive with their interior lights on so that the occupants can be seen. You slow down. A shadowy, nervous indentured boy from some Berber village peers into the wan yellow light, his knuckles white on the barrel. My driver tells me that he’d been to England for three months as a student. He returned to the city and forgot to switch on the vanity light. Soldiers stopped him at cocked gunpoint, hauled him out of the car. “We could have shot you,” an officer said. “Why are you driving in the dark?” The man apologised and said he’d been in London. “Yes, right,” said the soldier, “and they don’t have checkpoints in London?”
It’s hard to credit that there are global security wonks and think-tank nerds who hold up Algeria as a model of a workable, acceptable, doable Arab republic, a possible poster boy for Iraq, now that the horrors of its civil war have dulled the edge of Islamic fundamentalism. There may even be somewhere in this place to interest the Middle East peace process. Seen from 20 storeys up and 10,000 miles away, in the air-conditioned and neon-lit offices, on a pie chart on a screen, Algeria’s mixture of a socialist, military, secular state with a Muslim population — a westernish Arab country that wears Nike and drinks beer and wants to sell stuff and buy things — looks like a good bet, a possible way forward. But down here on the street, without the benefit of the graph, the figures, the briefings and overviews, it seems astonishingly mad. The idea that Algeria could be anyone’s role model raises only a humourless snigger.
Algeria is a butcher’s shop of fury and fundamentalism, violence and vengeance and unresolved injustice. It was the home port of Barbarossa and his Barbary corsairs, who for more than 300 years robbed ships in the Mediterranean, sacked ports, kidnapped more than a million Christian Europeans as slaves from as far away as Iceland. They made the southern coasts of Spain and Sicily virtually uninhabitable. The pirates were finally defeated by one of the first-ever multinational task forces. The American marines’ hymn that starts
“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” refers to this action.
In the great Islamic expansion the original population of Berbers was overlaid by the Arabs, then the Ottomans, and then the area became home to displaced Moors and Jews. Finally, when it had become exhausted and bloatedly corrupt, the French arrived, in 1830, fired barely a shot, and the beys departed.
Despite its unrelentingly vicious history, the French took North Africa to their hearts. Algeria was a colony for more than 130 years. That’s longer than any other country in Africa apart from South Africa and Mozambique. The French didn’t just use Algeria for what they could get out of it; they did something far more damaging, far darker. The French fell in love, like an old man besotted by a young girl in a hot climate. The French imagined that with the power of their culture, their charm, their romance and a specially formed army of criminals they named the Foreign Legion, they could woo Algeria to become an exotic member of the family. It wasn’t simply a chattel, it was adopted and made part of France. Algerians voted in French elections, had deputies in Paris. More whites moved to Algeria than to any other African country. There were over a million French pieds noirs. They farmed a large percentage of the motherland’s fresh produce. They took the Bedouins as mistresses and occasionally wives. When the time came for the divorce, it was cruel and desperate. Fanned by great self-righteous self-pity, Algeria broke France’s heart and the French behaved like cuckolds. There was no sense of giving the nation back. This was the servants stealing the silver — a national humiliation, an act of betrayal.

**Bebbers** · 11 mai 2011, 09h35

Albert Camus, the existentialist who won the Nobel prize for literature and played in goal for Algeria in the World Cup, said famously that, forced to choose between his country and his mother, he chose his mother. The war of independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, cost a million Algerian lives; the French were finally driven out in an orgy of impotent and spiteful destruction. The war caused the collapse of the Fourth Republic, split the French army, instigated internal terrorism and confronted France with its own perfidy and torture. It also left it with one of the largest immigrant populations in Europe. African countries are marked by the moment and manner of their independence. Algeria’s was particularly brutal and divisive. Apart from the casualties, 1.5m Algerians emigrated; all were forced to leave. Mostly they were professionals, the educated: doctors and teachers and lawyers.
And then there was the terrible score-settling with those who would work for or with the French. The traitors were executed in the streets. The French, of course, refused to protect or take in Algerians who had trusted them, or who’d been forced or bribed to do their bidding. The final reckoning of the war was a cathartic internecine settling up, and it left Algeria with a terrible anger. Sooner or later, every Algerian I meet tells me with a furious emphasis that they won the war, they beat the French — twice Algerian armies have defeated Europeans, once with Hannibal, once with the FLN (National Liberation Front). “We beat them, but where is the victory?” a left-wing intellectual says to me (all intellectuals here are left-wing). “It doesn’t feel like victory. We never got our justice.” He sounds like a petulant, thwarted child.
Algeria won its independence in July 1962. It became a 1960s beacon for Africa, a socialist republic that was armed and proud, an inspiration to other resistance movements. For a silly moment, it was the cool country for left-wing European professors of politics, agitprop journalists and people with black polo necks. Ahmed Ben Bella, the proto-Mandela of the Sahara, enthusiastically played to the international conference stage. At home he became autocratic and reclusive and disengaged. Algeria sank under the weight of its problems, the president’s friend General Boumedienne forced a coup, and there followed the seesaw of military and socialist government until finally, in late 1991, the first round of elections was won by the extreme fundamentalist Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS).
With the encouragement of the Americans and the ever-present French, the army once again stepped in to prevent their taking power, forming instead another military government. There followed a civil war quite as brutal as the one fought with the French. Indeed, it drew its lessons from the independence struggle. Muslim jihadists slaughtered villagers. The army did the same. Both sides used roadblocks, torture and the dark to instil competing visions of terror. Journalists didn’t come here, foreigners didn’t come. Algiers was a fortress of fear.
“You could wake up and find that your immediate neighbourhood, your neighbours, would have had their throats cut in the night,” I am told by a man who closed his business on a whispered threat. Everyone lost someone — a cousin, a brother, a school friend. The countryside was a medieval curse of retribution, and in the middle of all this there was a Berber rebellion and someone had the bright idea of setting up the Saharan wing of al-Qaeda.
Recently, the violence seems to have stalled, sated itself. It’s not peace, it’s the absence of war — an exhausted and shocked truce. There are still murders, still roads that aren’t safe after dark. The army are still everywhere, but it seems better. There have been new elections, but still there is the tight, hard kernel of anger.
I walk in a street with a man who suddenly grows incandescent at the sight of another man in a djellaba, wearing the white cap of a hajji. He’s walking with a veiled woman. “Look at that!” says my companion. “That’s not part of my culture. Algerians have never dressed like that. When I was a child we never saw men with those beards, women didn’t have to wear those ridiculous blankets on their heads. It’s all imported. Some people, they went to fight in the first Afghan war and came back with this extremism, this religion, and…” he searches for the word, “this intolerance.”
Algeria is the eye of a perfect storm of intolerance, the tsunami of postcolonial trauma coupled with the most nihilistic of 1960s -isms, Third World socialism, as well as authoritarian, reactive military juntas and Wahhabi sharia, all competing in a swamp of mass unemployment. It has a resentfully youthful population — almost a third are under 15. They hang out on corners, huddle and plot, race past on secret missions, mooch in gangs in the kasbah looking like greyhounds waiting for the white rabbit of no good to spin past. The boys are malevolently handsome, often strikingly beautiful, and they are the only people on earth who can make shopping-mall sports kit look chic and elegant. The names of the European football clubs on their backs mock the cul-de-sacs of their lives. On every spot of dusty land they kick balls, do press-ups, hang out with pit bulls on chains, tug at their own balls, smoke, have mock fights and wait for something to turn up.
“They’re waiting for the Australian boat,” someone tells me. It’s a euphemism. In the 1960s there was a rumour that a big ship from Australia was going to come to the port to take away thousands of men for work and a better life. Every morning men would go to await its arrival. They’d come with their bags and their papers, they’d discuss the rumour of its approach in inexhaustible detail. Officials said it was just over the horizon. The boat became the great, sorry parable for all the groundless hope and unfulfilled promise of Algiers.
The irony of all this, if Algeria really needs irony, is that it is potentially one of the richest countries. There are lakes of oil, mountains of minerals and enough natural gas to inflate a Europe that’s desperate for an alternative to the blackmail of Gazprom. But it never seems to happen, or, if it does, to make a difference. Politics, security, intransigence and orthodoxy get in the way. “Where does the money go?” an intellectual woman in a bookshop asks me. “Where is the investment for jobs?” You look around and think, it’s probably all in security or the military: the old story of a bulky military glutton that eats Third World riches. The nation that used to be France’s greengrocer now barely exports olive oil. Mind you, it still has salt mines.
This city feels like a setting waiting for Graham Greene to drop by — beguiling and beautiful, bypassed by the march of international trade and politics. Cathedrals sit beside mosques and synagogues. The Jews, who lived here for 3,000 years and were so much a part of Maghreb life, have now all gone. They sided with the French during the civil war. There are small parks where maudlin lovers sit with serious fervour, illicit and fearful, holding covert hands. Each bench holds a tragic little operetta of thwarted desire and hapless yearning. You can still sense that this was once a bright and sybaritic city: sophisticated and brilliant, erotic and dangerous, rich and romantic. It was here that the music and mischief of Arabia, Africa and Europe met. But now it takes its entertainment in careful sips behind closed doors.
Yet just along the coast is a little satellite town called La Madrague. There’s a marina with yachts, and houses with electric gates, and Mercedes. This is where the small middle class come back to after working abroad. They build with convertible currency. On the beach are busy fish restaurants under awnings, little white tables that could almost be Juan-les-Pins. There are bars with girls and western pop videos on plasma screens. In one bar a sign commemorates a visit by Brigitte Bardot, and there are clubs with bouncers on the door: tough, sweaty men with lumpy faces and skittling eyes.
Inside, other tough and sweaty men in tight suits entertain girls who look like the prostitutes from Brassaï photographs — so sadly decked out in the gaudy uniform of their calling, eating expensive western steaks, drinking imported wine. There is something both dangerous and pathetic about all this. It is the imitation of a tacky good time that’s being had somewhere else. The Australian ship of nightclubs. I’m taken to a cabaret bar where a general entertains his prostitute. A group of oil workers back from six months’ manual labour blow the lot on vodka. A group of shrieking gay men drink themselves into a camp slur. It’s dark and atmospheric. Singers take turns to do sets with a radio mic and an electronic organ. They sing traditional, syrupy Arabic love songs. And then the oddest thing: the audience wave money and call them over, and pay to have songs sung about themselves. The chanteuses make up these praise ditties with quavering voices, about oil workers and the general and his dead-eyed companion. The audience become intoxicated with the sound of their own fame. They pay more and more to hear their names and their jobs, and the names and jobs of their friends, sung to the accompaniment of a Hammond organ. My host pays to have me praised. “Here is our esteemed friend, visiting Algeria from England. We welcome you, Adrian.” So it goes on for hours; hundreds and hundreds of dollars are paid for these nursery rhymes. Everyone claps. The girls with needy thighs sit at the bar and wait and watch the mutual moments of affirmation. It is the most bizarre nightclub I’ve ever been in. It has a psychotic and depressive sense of cutting to the chase of every night out — you just want to feel good about yourself, be loved and respected by strangers, hear your name in the mouth of a man in a silver blazer and two-tone winkle-pickers.
Along the seafront in the evening, there is a funfair — galloping horses, fire engines and spinning teacups, the chunter of coins and airguns, balloons, candyfloss and great chains of families, the toddlers dressed in bright frocks and bows, eating ice cream, jigging to the tinkly music that always sounds spooky. Fathers shoulder their sons, gaggles of girls look for gangs of boys. The penniless stand at the sea wall, dangling hooks into the surf, and stare out at the oil tankers queuing up in the bay. It’s warm, and it smells of sweat and sugar and sewage. This is the carousel at the northern edge of a dark continent. The sky bleeds puce and carmine, and I’m being shadowed by secret policemen. I can pick them out in the crowd. Behind me, a voice whispers: “Look out to sea, sir, you can take pictures of the sea.” Across this bay, the great municipal pond of civilisations. “But must not turn round. Please, sir, don’t look back.”

**Zacmako** · 11 mai 2011, 09h56

Se soulever contre des dictatures est un rêve que tous les peuples caressent, mais pour l'instant, les 2 révolutions (Tunisienne et Egyptienne) n'ont engendré que l'insécurité en Tunisie et les conflits inter-ethniques en Egypte.
Perso, j'espère qu'elles apporteront autre chose que le chaos...

**kaiser** · 11 mai 2011, 10h10

Se soulever contre des dictatures est un rêve que tous les peuples caressent, mais pour l'instant, les 2 révolutions (Tunisienne et Egyptienne) n'ont engendré que l'insécurité en Tunisie et les conflits inter-ethniques en Egypte.
Perso, j'espère qu'elles apporteront autre chose que le chaos...

ce sont des moments difficile transitoires ! mais a long terme ca aboutira sur quelque de chose de positif! j en suis persuadé

**Lenasia** · 11 mai 2011, 10h11

Bebbers, tu peux indiquer ta source s'il te plait ?

**absent** · 11 mai 2011, 10h19

@ Zackmako:
Ca fait au moins 20 ans qu'il existe des affrontements entre coptes et musulmans en Egypte, rien de nouveau sous le soleil. Pour l'insecurite en Tunisie, c'est malheureusement le prix a payer, c'est commun a toutes les phases transitoires mais ca vaut le coup. En tout cas, c'est toujours mieux que ce qui s'est passe en Algerie, nous on a eu l'insecurite (euphemisme du siecle) sans renversement de rien du tout.

**Bebbers** · 11 mai 2011, 10h21

@lanasia http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6954016.ece

**tiare** · 11 mai 2011, 14h31

bonjour

Ces gros blocs ne me donnent pas du tout envie de lire...on ne vous a jamais appris à l'école qu'il faut aérer votre écrit pour donner aux autres envie de lire?

Annonce

Le best of des pays «arabes».

Le best of des pays «arabes».

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