The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence

5. Combat Theory: Anti-imperialist Analytics since Fanon

5 Combat Theory Anti-imperialist Analytics since Fanon
Proof for the United Nations In a pivotal scene from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 anticolonial epic The Battle of Algiers, Ali La Pointe, petty criminal-cum-revolutionary, ascends the stairs of one of the many safe houses of the Algerian quarter with Ben M’Hidi, a leader of the ALN forces (the armed wing of the FLN) in Algiers. It is the eve of a seven-day general strike organized by the Algerian National Liberation Front. la pointe: We can’t do anything for a week. m’hidi: What do you think of the Strike? la pointe: I think it’ll succeed. m’hidi: I think so, too. It’s been well organized. What will the French do? la pointe: Obviously, they’ll try everything to break it. m’hidi: They’ll do more than that, because we’ve given them an opportunity. You know what I mean? Now they’ll no longer be groping in the dark. Every striker will be a recognizable enemy, a certified criminal. The French will take the offensive. Understand what I mean? la pointe: Yes. m’hidi: Jaffar says you weren’t in favor of the strike. la pointe: No, I wasn’t. m’hidi: Why not? la pointe: Because we were ordered not to use arms. m’hidi: Acts of violence don’t win wars; neither wars nor revolutions . Terrorism is useful as a start. But then, the people themselves must act. That’s the rationale behind this strike, to mobilize all Algerians, to assess our strength. la pointe: To prove it to the UN? 94 Combat Theory 95 m’hidi: Yes, to prove it to the UN. It may not do any good, but at least the UN will be able to gauge our strength. The contradictions in the FLN strategy of trying to access the structures of international recognition and enter the universal realm of humanity in the midst of a revolutionary war proved to be catastrophic in the film as it had in reality. In the year leading up to the call for a general strike in January 1957, the FLN had intensified its urban guerrilla war against the French occupation of Algeria in an attempt to bring the longstanding resistance in the countryside to the capital city with its one million pieds-noirs. In January alone, the ALN executed more than one hundred attacks in the capital itself (although the primary fight remained in rural areas with more than four thousand attacks around the country during the same month). The success of the hit-and-run operations, coupled with the recent expansion of the United Nations General Assembly with seventeen states mostly from the Eastern bloc or Afro-Asia gaining membership in 1955, and the Cold War maneuverings of the United States, catapulted “the Algerian Question” onto the international stage. In an attempt to leverage the UN debate, the leadership of the FLN decided that they needed to demonstrate the falsity of the French claim that the militants “represented nobody” and were simply “a bunch of terrorists.”1 As Pontecorvo’s film narrates the battle, however, the decision to try to carry the struggle to an international arena carries grave consequences for both the organization and many thousands of its civilian supporters. As M’Hidi fears in his exchange with Ali la Pointe, the French seize upon this opportunity to crush the militant cadres. Upon hearing the news of the strike, “Colonel Mathieu,” the French commander in The Battle of Algiers, says: “Now we can lick them. They have made their first bad move.” In the twelve-day period encompassing the strike and its immediate aftermath, some seventy-seven thousand people were tortured in the city of Algiers, as the counterinsurgency identified and destroyed cell after cell. The distinguished theorist and consultant to the film Eqbal Ahmad argues that the idea of the general strike, which since the late 1800s and the early 1900s had been a very effective proletarian tactic in Russia and throughout parts of Europe (as Luxemburg theorized), was misguidedly superimposed on the situation of revolutionary warfare in Algeria. Revolutionary warfare , Ahmad contends, differs from conventional warfare insofar 96 Combat Theory as the mass of the population must “officially remain neutral” and cannot be seen as taking sides. In order to protect people, “revolutionaries must maintain the fiction of popular neutrality”; “good...