by Zoulikha Rezki
Mentor: Monica Malfatti
Translation from Italian by Giorgia Zappa
In 1960, shortly after the start of the Algerian Revolution on November 1st 1954, a report, “Algerians at War“, by Dominique Darbois and Philippe Vigenau, was published. Through a comprehensive documentation project and a collection of testimonies, the work’s goal was to preserve and then share the historical truth about what was happening in Algeria and to Algerian people.
Historical background to the “Algerians at War”
The Second World War was a watershed moment. The West was trying to rebuild a new moral credibility, destroyed by the Holocaust. However, it soon became clear that this attempt of “conscience cleaning” had an hypocritical and self-serving nature: even when Europe was sentencing the Nazis’ crimes, it was systematically betraying those very values of freedom, equality and justice it claimed to uphold in its colonies.
Algeria became a prime example of this. After 130 years of occupation and colonial violence, it witnessed the birth of the radical resistance, the FLN (National Liberation Front) as a reaction to an oppressive and imperialist system. This demonstrates that the West’s moral compass had always been based on economic and geopolitical interests, rather than on a genuine legal ethic.
From this background, the militant report of Darbois and Vigenau comes to life. It takes a diametrically opposed stance to this double standard, by documenting horrors that are tragically similar to those that occurred in Europe just a few years earlier.
The concentration camps in Algeria
The report begins by describing the concentration camps in Algeria. There is the testimonial of a 50 years old Algerian woman, who miraculously succeeded in escaping from the concentration camp of Ain Zana. When she is asked about the reason behind her broken teeth, she says that the soldiers beat her after she tried to resist the rape of her niece, that was happening right in front of her eyes. She adds that it was common practice for the settlers to group the Algerian men in a corner and rape women.
Life in a concentration camp is described as hell on earth. Prisoners were systematically tortured, exploited, isolated, and destroyed. Those who escaped were considered privileged. But escaping often meant being killed at the borders. Unless you were killed, there were two options: exile or expatriation.
Resistance from the ground up
In the second part of Vigneau and Darbois’ report, they analyse the more technical and organisational aspects of the revolution. What emerges is a popular movement, organised from the bottom up, able to mobilise an entire nation.
For decades, the French propaganda had pictured the Algerians as a “lazy and a thief” Arab, condemning them to a social and psychological stagnation. Resistance thus became the treatment for the historical trauma. It is a process through which the colonised denied their status as such, but reaffirmed their dignity and their existence as politically active subjects.
Those who didn’t take part in the FLN, participated in the revolution in other ways, driven by the imperative “surviving, triumphing and preparing for the future”. Preparing for the future meant emancipating oneself culturally. Education became a new battleground. The report documents many educational projects that often emerged in hostile conditions, which aimed to form a generation ready to govern the independent Algeria.
The responsibility to know
Through their images, Darbois and Vigenau document all aspects of the Algerian fight: from its anatomy and composition, to its key stages, passing by the legitimacy of the resistance – usually criticised by those that Vigenau calls “theoretical anticolonialists”. Lastly, they expose the manipulation of colonial propaganda which claimed that the Algerians did not identify with the FLN. As seen before, there is also, the description of life in the concentration camps, the refugee camps and of the emancipation of the Algerian people thanks to education projects.
It is not only about documenting, but also providing a counter-narrative so that no one can hide behind a “comfortable ignorance”, as happened for the Germans regarding the Nazis. Knowledge is a moral responsibility for everyone. Vigenau wrote in one of his passages:
“Those who accept, those who pretend not to notice, or those who hide behind specious arguments, objectively become accomplices of the executioners and assassins. Failure to report criminals is punishable under every legal code in the world.”
This is why the report gives pause for thought about the contemporary world. It is hard not to see a connection between what is happening, in Palestine today: from the open-air prisons in Gaza, to the genocide, the tortures, the administrative detentions, the media manipulations, and the unrecognised nature of armed resistance in occupied territory.
The responsibility to know – and today we are more informed, also thanks to social media – is an ethical and moral responsibility which determines what kind of world we live in and what kind of world we want to build.