For Unit III, read the article on Algeria, History of at www.britannica.com.
You may follow the link under the "Links to Other Websites" icon on our Course Materials page.  Or, you may just read it here--below is a pasted-in version of the same article.

I highly recommend that you print out this article and bring it to class.
 

Algeria, history of

history of the country from the time of the French conquest in the 19th century to the
post-independence period. For an account of earlier history, see North Africa, history of.

Algerian history before Ottoman rule reveals a country of which the western part was often
closely associated with Morocco and the eastern part with Tunisia. Few extensive or long-lived
Muslim dynasties originated or were based in Algeria. Geographically, Algeria is a difficult
country to rule, with the Tell and Saharan Atlas mountain chains impeding easy north-south
communication and the few good natural harbours having access to limited hinterlands. That a
significant minority of Algerians were native Berber speakers (and many remain so to this day)
indicates the greater resistance to Arabization in Algeria as contrasted with neighbouring Tunisia,
not to mention Libya and Egypt. Nor was Ottoman Algeria in the early years of the 19th century
nearly so developed in its "nationalization" of politics and government as Tunisia.

Never an easy country to rule or to hold together, Algeria is today very much a nation-state.
Much of the present-day sense of nationhood is the result of Algeria's history since 1830.
Apologists for French rule in Algeria were wont to assert that France made Algeria. They were,
at best, half right. It was the dialectic of colonial confrontation between the two communities on
opposite sides of the Mediterranean that fostered Algerian nationalism. Modern Algeria must be
viewed in light of its century and a half of colonial rule and confrontation with the West to be
understood.

The 19th century

It is customary to begin the story of the French conquest of Algeria in April 1827 when the dey
of Algiers angrily struck the French consul with a fly whisk. Three years later the French
conquest of Algeria began. In those intervening years, the French government had attempted
several tactics to establish control over the region: they tried unsuccessfully to induce
Muhammad 'Ali, the pasha of Egypt, to send his army against the Deylik (Muhammad 'Ali was
willing but only provided he kept full control of Algeria), and they instituted a naval blockade
against Algeria that was ultimately found to be ineffective. Finally, in early 1830, they decided to
invade the country.

The government of the dey, temporizing in the traditional way of confronting European demands
and trusting that intervention from other European powers or from Istanbul might save the day,
proved no match for the French army that landed on July 5, 1830--Husayn, the last dey of
Algiers, surrendered. He and other top officials accepted the French offer of exile. Their
departure marked the end of a three-century-long period of Algerian history as an autonomous
province of the Ottoman Empire. Only one important Ottoman Algerian leader, Ahmad Bey,
managed to hold out a few years longer, but he ruled from Constantine, an interior city far
removed from Algiers and the sea, which France easily controlled.

The French government had decided to invade in the belief that a quick victory abroad might
earn it sufficient popularity at home to win the coming elections. Instead, only days after the
French victory in Algeria, the July Revolution in France forced the reactionary King Charles X
from the throne and ushered in the rule of Louis-Philippe as king of France.

In Algeria a period of vacillation ensued. Although those who achieved the July Revolution in
France had cynically dismissed the campaign in Algeria as foreign adventurism to cover
oppression at home, they were reluctant to simply withdraw. Various alternatives were
considered, including an early ill-fated plan to establish princes of the Tunisian beylical family in
parts of Algeria as rulers under French patronage. Efforts to rule through local clients proved
equally ineffective, the French realizing too late that such an option might have been better
achieved by recruiting the officers of the defeated dey. Another idea was to hold only coastal
areas that could be secured easily and economically by French naval power. These first few
years of colonial rule were characterized as well by numerous changes of French command.
Even in these early years of French indecisiveness a number of French settlers began to arrive.
They would soon constitute an ever-growing interest group bent on seeing that France remained
in Algeria.

There also were efforts to reach settlements with the two principal resistance leaders who
emerged after 1830, Ahmad Bey in Constantine and a native tribal and Sufi brotherhood leader,
Abdelkader ('Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhyi ad-Din), in western Algeria. Ahmad Bey repulsed a
French attempt on Constantine in 1836, but was driven from the city the following year. The
French signed two different agreements with Abdelkader (1834 and 1837), but after the French
moved through territory claimed by him later, he countered with a major attack in 1839, driving
the French back to Algiers and the coast.

France decided thereafter on all-out war. Led by General (later Marshal) Thomas-Robert
Bugeaud, the campaign of conquest eventually brought one-third of the total French army
strength (more than 100,000 men) to Algeria and lasted until Abdelkader, using hit-and-run
tactics of tribal combat, was forced to surrender in 1847. Earlier Abdelkader, seeking refuge
and recruits in Morocco, had forced a reluctant Sultan Abd ar-Rahman to take a stand against
French incursions. This resulted in the disastrous defeat of Moroccan forces at the Battle of Isly
in 1844.

Abdelkader, exiled to France, was later permitted to settle with his family in Damascus, Syria,
where he and his followers saved the lives of many Christians during the 1860 massacres there.
Respected even by his opponents, Abdelkader became, and has remained, the personification of
Algerian national resistance to foreign domination. (L.C.Br.)

Abdelkader's defeat marked the end of what might be called resistance on a national scale, but
smaller operations continued, such as the occupation of the Saharan oases (Zaatcha in 1849,
Nara in 1850, and Ouargla in 1852). The eastern Kabylie region was subdued only in 1857,
while the final great Kabylie rising of Muhammad al-Moqrani was suppressed in 1871. The
Saharan regions of Touat and Gourara, theretofore Moroccan spheres of influence, were
occupied in 1900; the Tindouf area, previously regarded as Moroccan rather than Algerian, was
only attached to the latter region after the French occupation of the Anti-Atlas in 1934.

French Algeria

The manner in which French rule was established in Algeria during the years 1830-47 laid the
groundwork for a pattern of rule that French Algeria would thereafter maintain in its essentials. It
was characterized by a tradition of violence and mutual incomprehension between rulers and
ruled, by the relative absence of well-established native interlocutors between the French rulers
and the great mass of the population, and by an ever-growing French settler population (the
colons) demanding the privileges of a ruling minority in the name of French democracy. That
Algeria eventually became juridically a part of France added to the power of the colons, who
sent delegates to the French parliament. From the late 19th century until the end of French rule,
the settlers accounted for roughly 10 percent of the total population.

Settler domination of Algeria was not, however, secured until the fall of Napoleon III in 1870
and the rise of the Third Republic in France. Until then, Algeria remained largely under military
administration. The governor-general of Algeria (a title first given to Bugeaud in 1845, replacing
the earlier title "governor-general of the French possessions in Africa") was almost invariably a
military officer until the 1880s, and most Algerians--but not the settlers--were subject to rule by
military officers organized in the famous Arab Bureaus (Bureaux Arabes), whose members
(officers with an intimate knowledge of local affairs and of the language of the people), having no
direct financial interest in the colony, often sympathized with the outlook of the people they
administered rather than with the demands of the European colonists. The seeming paradox of
French Algeria was that despotic and military rule offered the native Algerians a better situation
than did civilian and democratic government.

A large-scale confiscation of cultivable land, following the crushing of resistance, made
colonization possible. Settler colonization was of mixed European origin (mainly Spanish in and
around Oran; French, Italian, and Maltese in the centre and east). For long the presence of the
non-French settlers was officially regarded with alarm; but, with time, the influence of French
education, of the Muslim environment, and of the Algerian climate created in the non-French a
European-Algerian, subnational sentiment. This would probably have resulted, in time, in a
movement to create an independent state if Algeria had been situated farther away from Paris
and if the settlers had not feared the potential strength of the Muslim majority.

On the overthrow of Louis-Philippe's regime in 1848, the settlers succeeded in having the
territory declared French and the three former Turkish provinces converted into departments on
the French model, while colonization was developed with renewed energy. On the establishment
of the French Second Empire in 1852, responsibility for Algeria was at first transferred from
Algiers to a minister in Paris. Soon, however, the emperor reversed this disposition. While
expressing the hope that an increased number of settlers would forever keep Algeria French, he
also declared that France's first duty was to the three million Arabs. With considerable accuracy
he declared that Algeria was "not a French province but an Arab country, a European colony,
and a French camp."

This attitude aroused certain hopes in Arab minds, but they were destroyed by the emperor's
downfall in 1870. The French defeat in the Franco-German War gave impetus to the last great
Kabylie rising (1871) under Muhammad al-Moqrani. Its suppression by French forces was
followed by the sequestration of another 11 million acres (4.5 million hectares) of land and the
imposition of an indemnity of 36.5 million francs; these measures together provided land for
refugees from Alsace and capital with which to exploit the land.

During the 50 years that followed, the European population felt free to establish political,
economic, and social domination over the country and its native inhabitants. At the same time,
new communications, the installation of hospitals and medical services, and modern
education--dispensed to a very limited extent and in French to the Muslims, while generally
available to the Europeans--created a minority of better-off Algerians.

For Algerians, service in the army and in the factories of France during World War I was
another eye-opening experience. When peace returned, some 70,000 Algerians remained in
France, and by living with extreme economy they were able to support many thousands of their
relations in Algeria.

Nationalist movement

The development of Algerian nationalism can be described in terms of three separate tendencies.
First, there was the small group of Algerians who had gained access to French education and
earned their living in the modernized French sector. Many of this group, called "assimilationists,"
were prepared to consider permanent union with France, provided the rights of Frenchmen were
extended to native Algerians. Such was the case with the loosely organized "Young Algerians" in
the period before World War I, or even to a considerable extent with Khaled Ben Hachemi
("Emir Khaled"), the grandson of Abdelkader, in the 1920s, or with Ferhat Abbas, who later
became first premier of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria, as late as the
1930s. All of this group were prepared to accept gradualist, reformist tactics, eschewing illegal
actions. They were the Algerian equivalents of the political class who led their countries to
independence in most former European colonial territories. They had no such chance in Algeria,
for their roots in Algerian society were too shallow and the colons of French Algeria resisted
even small reformist measures that might have led, however slowly, to piecemeal liberation.

The second tendency was a Muslim reformist group inspired by the religious Salafiya movement
founded earlier in Egypt by Sheikh Muhammad 'Abduh. Organized in 1931 as the Association of
Algerian Muslim Ulama (AUMA) under the leadership of Sheikh Abd al-Hamid ben Badis, this
group was not a political party as such. As religious reformers primarily, they were instead
important in engendering among the masses of Algerians a strong sense of Muslim Algerian
nationality. They also stymied any possible effort on the part of the assimilationist tendency to
move toward more accommodating positions with France in the hope of gaining some
concessions.

The third tendency was more proletarian and radical in orientation. It took organizational form
among Algerian workers in France in the 1920s under the leadership of Messali Hadj, later
gaining wide support in Algeria as well. Preaching a nationalism without nuance, Messali Hadj
brought a message that was bound to appeal to Algerians who fully realized their deprivation
vis-à-vis the minority French community. Messali Hadj's message, or for that matter the more
muted message of Ben Badis, could have been resisted by the gradualist reformers, led since the
early 1930s by Ferhat Abbas, only if they had been able to show that step-by-step
decolonization was possible. This they were never able to demonstrate. Several efforts to
liberalize the treatment of native Algerians promoted by French reformist groups in collaboration
with the Algerian reformists both before and after World War I, during the 1930s, and after
World War II all proved to be too little and too late.

At the time of the Popular Front government in France (1936-37), for example, the
Blum-Viollette proposal (so named for the French premier and the former governor-general of
Algeria) would have provided for a very small number of Algerians to obtain full French
citizenship without being obliged to relinquish their right to be judged by Muslim law on matters
of personal status (e.g., marriage, inheritance, divorce, and child custody). This had long been
the sticking point shrewdly exploited by the settler population. To all but a few Algerians,
abandoning the right to have personal status judged by Muslim law was tantamount to apostasy.
Blum-Viollette was thus a potential breakthrough. The small number of Algerians (including the
educated, veterans of French military service, and other narrowly defined groups) brought into
full French citizenship could then have been gradually increased in later years. Colon opposition
to the measure was so fierce that the project was never even brought to a vote in the French
Chamber of Deputies. The characteristics of colonial rule in Algeria virtually ruled out any
nationalist option other than one based on organized violence. The group that inherited this
mission, the National Liberation Front (FLN), not surprisingly grew out of Messali Hadj's
organization, later absorbing many adherents of the other two nationalist tendencies. (L.C.Br.)

World War II and the independence movement

World War II brought with it the collapse of France and, in 1942, the Anglo-American
occupation of North Africa. The occupation forces were to some extent automatically agents of
emancipation, while broadcasts in Arabic both from Allied and Axis stations began to compete,
with promises of a brave new world for formerly subject peoples. The effect was heightened by
the promise of the emancipation of Syria and Lebanon, given in June 1941 by the Free French
and backed by the British authorities in the Middle East.

In December 1942 the former assimilationist leader Ferhat Abbas drafted an Algerian Manifesto
for presentation to the Allied as well as to French authorities, seeking recognition of the political
autonomy of Algeria as a sovereign nation. In December 1943 General Charles de Gaulle
declared that, because of loyalty shown, France was under an obligation to the Muslims of
North Africa, and in March 1944 French citizenship was extended to certain categories of
Muslims. This was by then, however, far from enough to satisfy Muslim opinion. A display of
Algerian nationalist flags at Sétif in May 1945 led to an unorganized rising, in which 84 European
settlers were massacred. The suppression that followed was indiscriminate, and it resulted,
according to a French committee of inquiry, in not fewer than 1,800 deaths.

On Sept. 20, 1947, a statute of Algeria was finally voted by the French Assembly, defining the
country as "a group of departments endowed with a civic personality, financial autonomy, and a
special organization." The statute created an Algerian Assembly of 120 deputies, elected in equal
numbers by two electoral colleges--one composed of 370,000 Europeans and 60,000
assimilated Muslims and the other of 1,300,000 Muslims. After lengthy debates the statute was
passed by a small majority, with 15 Muslim members abstaining. Muslims were at last to be
considered as full French citizens with the right to keep their personal Qur'anic status and were
granted the right to work in France without further formalities. The military territories of the south
were to be abolished, and Arabic was to be taught in schools at all levels.

Unfortunately, the implementation of this law was poor and the subsequent elections were
"managed" by the administration, while most of the reforms laid down by the statute remained a
dead letter. In spite of this, Algeria remained quiet. The principal change had been the fact that
some 350,000 Algerian workers--five times as many as in the post-World War I period--were
able to establish themselves in France and remit money to Algeria.

The Algerian War

Signs of the approaching storm, however, were only too apparent. In 1950 the French police
discovered that a robbery of the Oran post office had been the work of the nationalist Special
Organization (OS), an offshoot of the party led by Messali Hadj, which had taken the name of
the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD). The leader in the robbery was
Ahmed Ben Bella, who had been highly commended during the fighting in Italy with the Free
French. In 1952 Ferhat Abbas, when tried for a trivial offense, was defended by three
lawyers--one Muslim, one Christian, and one Jewish; they combined to deliver an impressive
attack on the administration. About the same time, Ahmed Mezerna, acting head of the MTLD,
took the unprecedented step of personally seeking support in Egypt. The head of the
Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama toured the Arab East and secured scholarships from the
Arab governments for Algerians who wished to pursue their studies in Arabic.

The storm burst on the night of Oct. 31, 1954. It was organized by a few young men who,
dissatisfied with Messali Hadj's leadership, had decided that justice for Algeria could only be
realized by open rebellion. The movement took the title of the National Liberation Front (FLN)
and issued a leaflet stating that its aim was the restoration of a sovereign Algerian state. It
advocated social democracy within an Islamic framework and citizenship for any resident in
Algeria, with the same rights and duties as other citizens. A preamble recognized that Algeria had
fallen behind the other Arab states in emancipating itself socially and nationally, but it claimed that
this could be remedied by a difficult and prolonged struggle. Two weapons would be
used--guerrilla warfare at home and diplomatic activity abroad, particularly at the United
Nations, where the support of the Arab countries and other states would be invaluable. The
FLN military objective was to make the position of the administration untenable by sudden raids,
ambushes, and sabotage.

Though the first outbreak, which occurred in the region of Batna and the Aurès, was ineffective
militarily, it led to the arrest of some 2,000 members of the MTLD, who had not in fact been in
favour of open rebellion. In mid-February 1955 Jacques Soustelle arrived in Algiers as
governor-general; in June he announced a new plan, which, however, was once again to prove
too little and too late. On August 20 a new rising at Aïn Abid and at the mine of Al-Alia near
Philippeville (now Skikda) degenerated into another massacre of Europeans, followed by
summary executions of Muslims. In January 1956 the electoral victory of the Republican Front in
France and the premiership of Guy Mollet led to the appointment of the moderate and
experienced General Georges Catroux as governor-general. When Mollet personally visited
Algiers, however, to prepare the way for the new governor-general, he was bombarded with
tomatoes by the European populace. Yielding to this pressure, he allowed Catroux to withdraw
and named in his place the pugnacious Socialist Robert Lacoste as resident minister. Lacoste's
policy was described as pacification, but was in fact forcible suppression.

A French army of 500,000 men was sent to Algeria to counter the control that the rebels had
managed to establish in the more out-of-the-way portions of the country while collecting money
for their cause and taking reprisals against fellow Muslims who would not cooperate with them.
By May the rebels had won over the majority of previously noncommitted political leaders, and
Ferhat Abbas and Tawfiq al-Madani, of the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, had joined
FLN leaders in Cairo.

Externally, the major event of 1956 was the French decision to grant full independence to
Morocco and Tunisia and to concentrate on retaining "French Algeria." The rulers of the newly
independent states--the Moroccan sultan and Premier Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia--hoping also
to find an acceptable solution to the Algerian problem, prepared to hold a meeting in Tunis with
five principal Algerian leaders who had been guests of the sultan in Rabat. French intelligence
officers, however, managed to divert to Algiers the plane chartered by the Moroccan
government to fly the Algerians to Tunis. The Algerian leaders were then arrested and confined
in prison in France for the next six years. Far from decapitating the rising, this act provoked an
outbreak in Meknès that cost the lives of 40 French settlers before the newly independent
Moroccan government could restore order.

In the next year, 1957, the rebels attempted to paralyze the administration of Algiers by
terrorism. This was defeated by French parachute troops, who used torture to extract
information. The French also cut Algeria off from independent Tunisia and Morocco by barbed
wire fences, illuminated at night by searchlights; this separated the resistance bands within Algeria
from some 30,000 Algerian armed forces who occupied positions between the fortified fences
and the actual frontiers of Tunisia and Morocco, from which they drew supplies. These troops
had the advantage of a friendly people and government as a base; they could not, however,
penetrate into Algeria proper but could only harass the French line.

Provoked by these assaults, the French air force in February 1958 bombed the Tunisian frontier
village of Saqiyat Sidi Yusuf, killing a number of civilians, including children from the local school.
This led to an Anglo-American mediation mission, which negotiated the withdrawal of French
troops from various districts of Tunisia and their concentration in the naval base of Bizerte
(Banzart).

A meeting--the Maghrib Unity Congress--was held in Tangier from April 27 to 30 under the
auspices of the Moroccan and Tunisian nationalist parties and the Algerian FLN. It
recommended the establishment of an Algerian government in exile and of a permanent
secretariat to promote Maghrib unity. The latter proposition had little permanent result, but a
government--the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA)--was set up on
September 19.

By then, however, conditions had been radically changed by events of May 13, 1958; these
began as a typical settler rising--thousands of European Algerians sacked the offices of the
governor-general and, with the tacit approval of the army officers, called for the integration of
Algeria with France and for the return of de Gaulle to power. The Muslims were clearly taken
aback, but soon there was a relatively friendly mixing of Muslim demonstrators with the
Europeans and a general hope of better times to come. In the crisis caused by this rising, de
Gaulle returned to power in France.

On June 4 de Gaulle visited Algiers amid scenes of great enthusiasm. He gave no clear
indication, however, that he shared the settlers' enthusiasm for integration, which, in their minds,
meant the submergence of the native Algerians in an enlarged France. All Muslims, however,
were now granted the full rights of French citizenship, and on October 30 de Gaulle announced
in Constantine a plan to provide adequate schools and medical services for the Muslim
population, to create employment for the vastly increasing Muslim masses, and to introduce
Muslims into the higher ranks of the public services.

In September 1959, de Gaulle, in anticipation of the opening of the United Nations General
Assembly, declared publicly that the Algerians had the right to determine their own future. From
this time it gradually became clear that he was prepared to go even to the length of granting
independence if peace could not be secured on any other terms. The agitation of the Europeans
now became extreme.

On Jan. 24, 1960, a fresh settler rising collapsed after nine days from lack of military support. A
year later, however, as the prospect of negotiations with the GPRA became more probable,
there was another rising, this time organized by four generals, of whom two--Raoul Salan and
Maurice Challe--had previously been commanders in chief in Algeria. De Gaulle remained
unshaken, and the rising, lacking substantial support from the army, collapsed after only three
days.

In May 1961, negotiations were opened in France with representatives of the GPRA. This body
had by now long been recognized by the Arab and communist states, from which it received aid,
though it had never been able to establish itself on Algerian soil. Negotiations were broken off in
July, after which the veteran Ferhat Abbas was replaced as premier by the much younger Ben
Youssef Ben Khedda. Settler opposition was meanwhile organized by a body calling itself the
Secret Army Organization (OAS), which began to employ terrorism as brutal as that sometimes
used by the rebels.

On March 8, 1962, negotiations were resumed, and on the 18th agreement was finally reached.
Algeria would thenceforth be independent, provided only that a referendum, to be held in Algeria
by a provisional government, confirmed the desire for it. In case of approval, French aid would
continue; Europeans could depart, remain as foreigners, or take Algerian citizenship, as they
preferred. This announcement produced a violent outburst of terrorism and attempted resistance
by the OAS; but in May the terror subsided as its futility became obvious. On July 1, 1962, the
referendum in Algeria recorded some 6,000,000 votes in favour and only 16,000 against. After
three days of unbounded Muslim rejoicing, the GPRA entered Algiers in triumph, while the
departure of the Europeans assumed mass proportions.

Meanwhile, however, the GPRA was itself torn by dissensions, and its authority was challenged
by Colonel Houari Boumedienne, who commanded the Algerian army on the Tunisian side. In
this he was supported, after some hesitation, by Ben Bella, now released from captivity in
France, and by Muhammad Khidr, secretary general of the FLN. It was not until three months
later that the small-scale civil war that ensued was finally settled by the recognition of Ben Bella
as premier, Boumedienne as chief of staff, and Khidr as head of the party organization.

Independent Algeria (from 1962)

The Europeans who abandoned the country included the overwhelming majority of senior
administrators and managerial and technical experts. The chief exception was a group of some
10,000 French schoolteachers who remained, with great courage, often in very isolated posts.

During the six previous years some 10,000 French troops and officers and possibly as many as
250,000 Muslims had lost their lives in the fighting; scores of villages had been destroyed, and
2,000,000 peasants had been moved to new sites. Nevertheless, many public services such as
the post office and the railways continued to work remarkably well. On farms and in factories,
however, management had largely vanished. Production fell, while unemployment and
underemployment reached extreme levels.

Ben Bella's personal style of government and his reckless promises of support for revolutionary
movements were not conducive to orderly administration. On the other hand, the revenue from
the extensive oil and natural gas fields that had recently been discovered and exploited in the
Sahara was of very great assistance.

A serious problem was presented in April 1963 by the resignation of Muhammad Khidr and by
his subsequent departure abroad, taking with him the funds of the FLN. He was later
assassinated in Madrid. Little by little, the gradual elimination of other dissident leaders appeared
to leave control securely in the hands of Ben Bella and the army under Boumedienne. What
appeared to be Ben Bella's plans for a complete political takeover, removing Boumedienne and
his supporters, were foiled on June 19, 1965, when Boumedienne and the army moved first. Ben
Bella's erratic political style and poor administrative record made his removal acceptable to
Algerians, but the Boumedienne regime began with little popular support.

In the following years Boumedienne moved undramatically but effectively to consolidate his
power, with army loyalty remaining the basic element. Efforts to reorganize the FLN met with
some success. The cautious and deliberate Boumedienne approach was seen in constitutional
developments: communal elections were held in 1967, provincial (wilayah) elections in 1969.
Elections for the National Assembly, however, did not take place until 1977. In the previous
November, a new constitution had been adopted following wide public debate and referenda.

On Dec. 27, 1978, Boumedienne died. Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, nominated by the FLN to
succeed him, was confirmed as president in a referendum in February 1979. The release of Ben
Bella later that year from house arrest indicated that the new president felt confident in his
authority and served as a symbol that, 17 years after independence, many old disputes were no
longer relevant.

Independent Algeria was committed to a socialist, centrally directed economy and society. The
mass exodus of the French at the time of independence left the new government with vast
abandoned lands. These and the remaining French estates (all French land being nationalized by
1963) were turned into state farms run by workers' committees. In 1971 Boumedienne had
inaugurated an agrarian reform aimed at breaking up larger Algerian-owned farms and creating
small holdings organized into cooperatives. Subsequent steps continued to break up large
holdings and redistribute land to landless peasants.

Economic plans stressed developing a state-run industrial core, and Algeria's important oil and
gas industry came to be controlled by a government company, Sonatrach. Algeria's economic
difficulties were eased by the export of oil and gas as well as by the remittances from the nearly
850,000 Algerians living abroad (mostly in France). In 1976 Algeria signed a trade agreement
with the European Community (EC); yet unemployment and underemployment have remained
major problems.

In October 1988 serious riots in Algiers, Annaba, and Oran (leaving an unofficially estimated
500 dead) rocked the regime. Bendjedid, reelected for his third five-year term as president in
December 1988, moved to liberalize the system and challenge the FLN political monopoly. The
new constitution, approved in February 1988, initiated political plurality and dropped all
references to socialism. In the 1990 local elections the Muslim fundamentalist Islamic Salvation
Front (Front Islamique du Salut; FIS), led by Abbasi al-Madani, captured clear majorities in the
provincial and municipal councils, winning roughly double the number of seats taken by the FLN.
The first round of balloting for the National Assembly, held in December 1991, produced an
even more striking victory for the FIS, which won 188 seats, just 28 short of a simple majority
and 99 short of the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution. There seemed little
doubt that the FIS would achieve a majority in the second balloting scheduled for Jan. 15, 1992.
Instead, the Algerian government and army intervened on January 12 to cancel the elections,
President Bendjedid having resigned the previous day. Mohammed Boudiaf, a former FLN
dissident, was sworn in as president of a ruling Supreme State Council. Boudiaf was
assassinated five months later on June 29 by an alleged FIS gunman while giving a speech in
Annaba, as dissension between fundamentalists and the government continued unabated.

In the realm of foreign relations, Algeria's policy is revolutionary in word but pragmatic in deed.
Immediately after independence Algeria was a haven for Third World guerrilla and revolutionary
movements, but this has largely passed. Algerian spokesmen continue to press for strong
positions on the Palestine problem, decolonization in Africa, and economic ties between the
developed and underdeveloped worlds, but at the same time the government has supported
commercial ventures with private American companies. In addition, the Algerian government
played a major role in mediating the release, in January 1981, of U.S. hostages held in Iran.

With neighbouring Morocco, relations have not been smooth. A short border war that broke out
in the autumn of 1963 (the area in dispute being rich in iron-ore deposits) was brought to a halt
through intervention of the Organization of African Unity. The rapprochement achieved in
1969-70 later broke down again over Morocco's efforts to absorb Western Sahara (formerly
Spanish Sahara). Algeria supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and
Río de Oro (Polisario Front) in resisting Morocco. Then in May 1987 Bendjedid and
Morocco's King Hassan met to resolve differences. Subsequent progress toward a possible
resolution of the Western Sahara issue has eased tensions between the two states significantly,
and diplomatic relations were restored in 1988. The establishment in 1989 of the Arab Maghrib
Union also signaled better relations among the Maghrib states, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Relations with France have been marked by hard bargaining. The disputes over Algerian
expropriation of abandoned French property (1963) and nationalization of French oil interests
(1971) were mitigated by generous French cultural and technical aid. The large number of
Algerians living and working in France (at the bottom of the economic scale and subject to racial
prejudice), although a major economic asset for Algeria, continues to be an explosive social
issue. French trade with independent Algeria remains important but no longer dominant, Algeria's
trade with other Western nations being of major importance as well. (N.B.) (L.C.Br.)

© 1999-2000 Britannica.com and Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.