"You Cannot Continually Inflict": An Interview with Saadi Yacef

The Battle of Algiers (DZ/IT, 1966) remains one of the most powerful films ever made on war, colonialism, and imperialism. The film, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and scripted by Franco Solinas, was inspired by the book written by Saadi Yacef, Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger. It depicts a grim and brutal episode in a war that resulted in between 300,000 to 1.5 million Algerian and 18,000 French deaths. The war uprooted and turned into refugees over two million people out of a total of nearly nine million. In contrast, the current war in Iraq has turned into refugees about four million out of a population of twenty million. The issues raised by the film are as relevant today as they were in 1966 when the film was released: among these are the brutal effects of counterinsurgency. The use of torture dominates the headlines today as it did during the Algerian War. As the composite figure of Colonel Matthieu, the French paratroop colonel, says in the film in response to a question about the use of torture at a press conference, "I'll ask you a question myself: Should France stay in Algeria? If the answer is still yes, you'll have to accept all the necessary consequences." The international uproar over renditions, Abu Ghraib, and the legal arguments inside the Bush administration since 9/11 justifying torture will see disturbing parallels with the issues raised more than forty years ago in The Battle of Algiers.

Saadi Yacef joined the national liberation movement, Front de Libération Nationale, in 1945 and by 1956 was the FLN's military chief of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers. He was captured by French troops during the Battle of Algiers, which was waged from January to October 1957. His capture and whether he broke under torture, revealing vital information to the French, remains a source of controversy to this day. A senior French officer, Paul Aussaresses, created an international political firestorm in 2001 when he asserted in Le Monde that the use of torture was sanctioned by the French government. Furthermore, Aussaresses said that then Minister of Justice, François Mitterand, had full knowledge and colluded with the French military during the Battle of Algiers to ward off criticism of their brutal methods.

As today with the Bush administration's deliberate policy to ignore the application of the Geneva Convention protecting belligerents as regards Al Qaeda and others in the "Global War on Terror," the French military did not regard the combatants of the Algerian Liberation Movement as combatants deserving the protection of the Geneva Convention that prohibited the use of torture. In a fashion familiar to us today after 9/11, they were considered "terrorists" and deprived of the rights accorded to belligerents in war. The war was marked by the systematic use of torture, illegal executions, and disappearances by the French military in an effort to break the will of the Algerian Liberation movement. Aussaresses admitted in his 2001 memoir, Services spéciaux, Algérie, 1955–1957 that he ordered his men to hang Larbi Ben M'Hidi and give out the story that he had committed suicide. He also said that he ordered an Algerian nationalist, Ali Boumendjel, to be thrown out of a building. Suicide was also offered as the alibi.

All these issues made the release in 2004 of a new print of The Battle of Algiers in the United States timely in the midst of an increasingly difficult and bitter war in Iraq and Afghanistan for the United States and its allies. While much was made of an August 2003 screening by the Pentagon of the film, it should not be imagined that this was something new for the U.S. military. To the contrary, The Battle of Algiers had been known and seen by members of the U.S. military and defense intelligentsia for years. What was different with this release was that the creator and active participant in the making of the film (he plays himself in the movie), Saadi Yacef came to the United States in...