Algeria's history: independence won by an army that still decides

Who held the land before any central state

Stone tools and cut-marked bones from Ain Boucherit are estimated at about 1.9 million years old, and artefacts from nearby Ain Hanech at about 1.8 million. Much later, from about 30,000 BC, came the Aterian tool industry, named after Bir el Ater south of Tebessa. Neolithic herding and farming spread across the Saharan and Mediterranean Maghreb, and the rock paintings of the Tassili n'Ajjer record that life.

The people who coalesced out of these populations are the Berbers, the indigenous inhabitants of northern Africa. By 600 BC Carthage had trading posts on the coast, among them Icosium, where Algiers stands, and Hippo Regius at modern Annaba. The Carthaginians took tribute and traded in metals and avoided conquering the tribes of the interior.

The ground explains why. The coastal plain was marshy and malarial, while the Tell Atlas behind it had reliable rain, olives, wheat and livestock. Mountain communities lived as self-sufficient enclaves, ruled by village councils of male family heads who settled feuds under customary law. Arab writers later named the division Bled el Makhzen, the lands of government, against Bled es Siba, the lands of dissidence, and the mountains kept that role as a refuge from outside power into the twentieth century.

How Numidia and Rome divided the north

By the third century BC two Berber kingdoms held the north: the Masaesyli in the west and the Massyli in the east. Masinissa of the Massyli sided with Rome in the Second Punic War, fought at Zama in 202 BC and united both halves into the Kingdom of Numidia, with its capital at Cirta, today's Constantine. He built an army and a navy and promoted farming. After his death in 148 BC the succession split the kingdom, and his grandson Jugurtha, who reunited it by force, was captured by Rome in 106 BC.

Rome then ruled through client kings. Juba I backed Pompey and lost at Thapsus in 46 BC; Juba II, installed by Augustus, governed Mauretania from 25 BC until about AD 23. When Caligula executed his son Ptolemy in AD 40 and a revolt followed, Rome abolished the client kingdoms and made provinces of the land.

Roman Africa was integrated at the top. The emperor Macrinus was born at Caesarea, modern Cherchell, around AD 165, and at one point 90 of 600 senators came from North Africa. Augustine was bishop of Hippo Regius. Inland, much of the country became grain estates, and Berber communities pushed into the hinterland resisted for generations. Three Roman towns, Tipasa, Djémila and Timgad, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1982.

The Vandals ended Roman control in 429. Byzantine forces returned in 533, held only part of the old provinces and fortified what they held, and the governor Solomon was killed in battle near Tebessa in 543.

Which Berber dynasties ruled the central Maghreb

The Arab conquest of the Maghreb ran from 647 to 709. The Berber leader Kusayla ambushed and killed the Arab commander Oqba ibn Nafi at Tahouda in 683, and a Berber queen remembered as Kahina, or Dihya, defeated an Arab army in the Aurès before she was killed at the end of the seventh century.

Islam spread, and so did revolt against Umayyad taxation. In 778 Abdel Rahman Ibn Rustam founded a Kharijite imamate at Tahert, whose rule reached at its height from Tlemcen to Tripoli. The Fatimids destroyed it in 909, and the Ibadi community withdrew to the M'zab valley, which UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1982.

The Fatimid movement itself began among the Kutama Berbers near Sétif, where a missionary arrived around 900 and raised the army that took Kairouan. When the Fatimids moved to Egypt in 971 they left the Sanhaja leader Buluggin ibn Ziri as governor. He founded Algiers, Médéa and Miliana. A branch of his family, the Hammadids, ruled central Algeria from 1018 to 1152, first from Qal'at Bani Hammad and then from Béjaïa.

The Almohads ended the Hammadids in 1152 and briefly held the whole Maghreb. When they broke up, Yaghmurasen ibn Zayyan founded a Zenata dynasty at Tlemcen that lasted from 1236 to 1550 through 27 rulers. Tlemcen grew rich on trans-Saharan trade and built mosques and madrasas, and the historian Ibn Khaldun wrote much of what is known of it. Squeezed between the Marinids of Morocco and the Hafsids of Ifriqiya, its last rulers ended as vassals, first of Spain and then of the Ottomans.

How the Regency of Algiers drew the borders

After Granada fell in 1492, Spain seized positions along the North African coast. In 1516 the corsair brothers Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa took Algiers with local support and placed it under Ottoman protection. The Regency of Algiers that followed was loyal to the sultan in name and ran its own affairs in practice. Beylerbeys sent from Istanbul gave way to pashas and aghas, and from 1671 to deys, who governed by bargaining with the janissary corps and the captains of the corsair fleet. Historians have called it a military republic.

Algiers lived on privateering, ransom and tribute. Its fleets raided shipping across the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, and Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and later the United States paid or signed treaties to keep their ships free. Charles V's attack on the city failed in 1541. The Casbah dates from this period and was inscribed by UNESCO in 1992.

Power stayed with the Turkish military elite. Algerians paid the taxes, served as soldiers and staffed the religious offices, and friction with the janissaries and with the Kouloughlis, people of mixed Turkish and Algerian descent, produced revolts. The Regency nonetheless drew a territory. Contemporaries called the land Watan al-Jazāʾir, the country of Algiers, and the modern state took its name and much of its outline from it. The historian Abou el-Kacem Saadallah calls the period the Algerian Ancien Régime, and Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani calls it the first Algerian state.

Decline came with European naval power, the Barbary Wars and repeated bombardment in the early nineteenth century. In 1827, in a dispute over debts for grain, Dey Hussein struck the French consul with a fly whisk. France used the insult as its pretext.

What French rule took from Algerians

The French army took Algiers in 1830, and on 5 July 1830 the dey signed the capitulation. Conquering the interior took decades. Ahmed Bey held Constantine until 1837, and in the west Emir Abdelkader organised a state of his own, fought the French at the Macta in 1835 and fought on until he surrendered in 1847. Kabylia rose in the 1850s and again in 1871 under Muḥammad al-Muqrānī, and each defeat was followed by confiscation of land.

The human cost is measured in two ways that do not agree exactly. Britannica gives the most reliable estimates as a fall of nearly one-third in the native population between the invasion and the mid-1870s. The historian Ben Kiernan put the dead at about 825,000 Algerians by 1875.

In 1848 the former Ottoman provinces became French departments, and settlers arrived from France, Spain, Italy and Malta. There were more than 100,000 Europeans in 1848 and 244,600 by 1872, and from the late nineteenth century until independence they made up roughly a tenth of the population. Under Napoleon III most Algerians were governed by army officers in Arab Bureaus; the emperor called the territory "not a French province but an Arab country, a European colony, and a French camp". Settler rule came with the Third Republic after 1870. A decree of 1863, the sénatus-consulte, broke up tribal land and let settlers acquire it, and peasants moved onto marginal ground.

Algerians had primary schooling in the towns and little beyond it. Some 200,000 fought for France in the First World War, in which about 25,000 died, and 70,000 stayed on in France afterwards, sending money home.

Why Algerians took up arms against France

How the nationalist movement formed

Three currents fed Algerian nationalism. The French-educated Young Algerians, Ferhat Abbas among them, asked for equal rights inside France. The Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, founded in 1931 under Abdelhamid Ben Badis, built a Muslim and Arabic national identity. Messali Hadj, organising Algerian workers in France from the 1920s, asked for independence outright. The Blum-Viollette proposal of 1936, which would have given full citizenship to a small number of Algerians, met such settler opposition that it never reached a vote.

In May 1945 French authorities fired on demonstrators carrying nationalist flags at Sétif. An uprising followed in which 84 European settlers were killed, and the repression killed about 8,000 Muslims by French count and as many as 45,000 by Algerian count. The statute of 1947 then gave Algeria an assembly of two colleges of 60 members each, one for about 1.5 million Europeans and one for 9 million Muslims. In March 1954 young militants formed the Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action, and on 1 November 1954 its successor, the National Liberation Front (FLN), opened the war.

What the war of independence cost

The hardest fighting was in and around the capital, in the Battle of Algiers of 1956 and 1957, which French paratroopers won with the use of torture. French troop numbers rose to 500,000. The army destroyed more than 8,000 villages and moved more than 2 million people into camps. The FLN formed a provisional government in 1958, and in 1959 Charles de Gaulle accepted that Algerians could decide their own future. Generals opposed to that tried a putsch in April 1961, and the Secret Army Organisation (OAS), which some of the putsch leaders later joined, turned to bombing.

A ceasefire was signed at Évian on 18 March 1962. On 1 July 1962, 5,992,115 voters approved independence and 16,534 voted against. France recognised it on 3 July, and the provisional executive chose 5 July as independence day.

The count of the dead remains disputed. Britannica gives French military losses of about 27,000 and European civilian losses of 5,000 to 6,000. For Algerians, French sources give 300,000 to 500,000 and Algerian sources as many as 1.5 million; the historian Alistair Horne estimated about 700,000. More than 900,000 pieds-noirs left between 1962 and 1964, and between 30,000 and 150,000 harkis, Algerians who had served with the French, and their dependents were killed after the ceasefire.

How the army came to decide succession

The FLN split in the summer of 1962. Houari Boumedienne's frontier army, based in Tunisia and Morocco during the war, backed Ahmed Ben Bella against the provisional government and marched on Algiers, and street demonstrations by a population exhausted by eight years of war stopped the factions short of open fighting. An assembly list drawn up by Ben Bella's Political Bureau was ratified in September 1962. The army put down an armed rebellion in Great Kabylia, and in 1963 it fought a short border war with Morocco.

In June 1965 Boumedienne removed Ben Bella. His government ran on army loyalty and state ownership: an agrarian reform in 1971, the nationalisation of French oil and gas interests the same year, and industry financed by oil revenue after the price rise of 1973, with Sonatrach at its centre. The FLN was the only legal party, and elections to the National People's Assembly were first held in 1977. When Boumedienne died in December 1978, the army and the party chose Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, confirmed by referendum in February 1979.

The oil price fell in the mid-1980s, and with it the money that paid the state's wages. Foreign debt rose, and in October 1988 riots broke out in Algiers, Annaba and Oran, in which security forces killed hundreds. The constitution of February 1989 dropped socialism and ended the one-party state. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won most provincial and municipal councils in 1990.

What the civil war of the nineties cost

In the first round of the legislative election in December 1991 the FIS won 188 seats. On 11 January 1992, with a majority in view for the second round, Bendjedid resigned and the army cancelled the vote. A High Council of State took over and banned the FIS, and its first chairman, Mohamed Boudiaf, was assassinated at Annaba in June 1992.

Armed Islamist groups, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) above all, waged a campaign of massacres against civilians. Britannica notes that later evidence placed much of the violence with elements of the state's own security services, and the question of who killed whom in the worst years is still argued. Britannica puts the dead at some 100,000 civilians by the start of the 2000s. The GIA declared a ceasefire in October 1997.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected unopposed in April 1999 after the other candidates withdrew. His Civil Concord, approved by referendum, exempted several thousand members of armed groups from prosecution, and the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, approved by referendum in September 2005, extended an amnesty to armed groups and to the security forces and limited public criticism of their conduct. Victims' families and international human rights groups objected that it denied justice. A splinter group took the name al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2007, and in January 2013 militants seized the gas plant at In Amenas, where 38 foreign workers and an Algerian guard were killed.

How the Hirak forced a president out

Parliament abolished presidential term limits in November 2008, and Bouteflika won a third term in 2009 and a fourth in April 2014, a year after a stroke that kept him almost entirely out of public view. The state of emergency in force since 1992 was lifted on 24 February 2011, during the regional protests of that year. Amendments of February 2016 restored term limits and made Amazigh an official language.

When his candidacy for a fifth term was announced, the protests known as the Hirak began on 16 February 2019 and brought crowds out every Friday. On 11 March more than 1,000 judges said they would not supervise an election in which he stood. On 27 March the army chief of staff called for him to be declared unfit, and he resigned on 2 April 2019.

The marches went on, now against the whole governing establishment, known in Algeria as le pouvoir. The army pressed ahead with a presidential election on 12 December 2019, in which just under 40% of the electorate voted. A revised constitution was approved in November 2020 with three-quarters of voters staying away, and turnout in the legislative election of June 2021 was under one-third. Algeria: politics covers the institutions that came out of those votes.