Federal Republic of Algeria

The Federal Republic of Algeria is a federal parliamentary republic of sixteen provinces on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, extending from the coast across the Atlas ranges into the central Sahara. Its population is approximately fifty-two million. Its government sits at Algiers and its legislature and its highest court at Constantine, four hundred kilometres inland, an arrangement made on purpose and by people who had watched one capital hold everything.

Algeria was French for a hundred and twenty-eight years, longer than any other French possession, and it left the French Empire in 1958 without a war. Independence was negotiated, under a trusteeship agreement that France entered voluntarily and the League supervised, and it was carried in Algeria by referendum and ratified in France by a narrower and angrier one. France calls it the one colonial exit it got right. Algeria does not use that phrase and has never found a phrase of its own.

The absence of a war is the fact from which everything else in this article follows, and the largest of its consequences is that the Europeans did not leave. Something near a million settlers were living in Algeria in 1958. A majority of them voted against the settlement, were outvoted, and stayed. Their descendants are perhaps five or six per cent of the population, concentrated in Algiers and Oran, and they call themselves pieds-noirs, a name that elsewhere belongs to an exiled community and here belongs to a resident one. A state containing both the colonised and the colonisers could not be a unitary Arab republic, and was not. The federation is the price of their staying, and the Berbers of Kabylia and the Aurès, who had claims of their own, were accommodated by the same instrument.

The republic then lost itself. Tayeb Benhabiles, the Constantine lawyer who negotiated independence and became the first President, served his two terms and left when the constitution said to, in 1968. Within months his own defence minister took the state with tanks and dressed it afterwards in a referendum, and the Algerian Democratic Union, the party of independence, made itself the state by statute and held it for thirty years. It was authoritarian rather than murderous. It censored, detained, exiled, rigged and watched, and killed in hundreds rather than in tens of thousands, and it built dams, universities and a health service, and it took the oil concessions back when they expired, and no honest account of it can leave either column out.

It ended in 1998, when the army removed it, handed the state to a civilian convention and returned to barracks, which is the second of the two occasions on which the Algerian army has intervened in politics and the second on which it has declined to govern. The constitution written that year keeps the federation of 1958 and adds everything the thirty years taught.

What the country argues about now is whether a freedom that was handed over in 1958 and taken back by force in 1998 is the same freedom, and which of the two foundings was the real one.

The name

Algeria is the European form of the Arabic al-Jazair, the islands, from Madinat al-Jazair, the city of the islands, which was the name of the settlement that became Algiers. The islands were a chain of rocky islets in the bay, joined to the shore by a mole in the sixteenth century and now built over entirely, so that the country is named for a feature of its capital’s harbour that has not existed for four hundred years.

The country is al-Jazair in Arabic and Dzayer in the Algerian vernacular, which is also what Algerians call the capital, so that in ordinary speech the name of the state and the name of the city are the same word and the distinction is made by context. In Tamazight it is Dzayer likewise, and the federal usage prints all three on the seal.

The formal style is the Federal Republic of Algeria, al-Jumhuriyya al-Jaza’iriyya al-Ittihadiyya, Tagduda Tadzayrit Tafidiralit, Republique federale d’Algerie. The word federal was fought over at the convention of 1958 and was insisted on by the settler delegations, which wanted the structure named in the title so that it could not later be described as a matter of administration. Their opponents conceded the word and have had the better of the argument since: it is now claimed with some pride by the people who did not want it.

History

Before the French

The coast is Berber and has been inhabited and contested for three thousand years. Numidia was a Roman province and produced Augustine of Hippo; the Vandals came and the Byzantines followed; the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries brought Islam and Arabic, which spread unevenly and never displaced Tamazight in the mountains. The Fatimids, the Almoravids, the Almohads, the Zayyanids and the Hafsids governed parts of it. From the sixteenth century the coast was Ottoman, under a Regency at Algiers that paid formal allegiance to Constantinople and conducted its own wars, treaties and corsairing, and that the European powers treated as a state when it suited them and as a nest of pirates when it did not.

The Regency’s authority was real on the coast, partial in the Tell, and nominal in the Sahara, where the oases and the Tuareg answered to nobody in particular. This is the first appearance of a division that runs through the whole of Algerian history and is still visible in its politics: the north is governed and the south is administered.

The conquest, 1830 to the 1870s

France invaded in 1830 on a pretext about a debt and a fly-whisk, took Algiers within three weeks, and then spent forty years taking the rest.

The resistance of Abd al-Qadir held much of the west for fifteen years and ended in 1847. The Kabyle mountains were not subdued until 1857 and rose again in 1871, in the largest rising of the century, which was crushed and answered with mass land confiscation. The conquest was conducted with razzias against civilian populations, the burning of villages and crops, and the smoking of refugees in caves, which was reported at the time, debated in the Chamber in Paris and continued.

The demographic cost is contested and was enormous. The Algerian population fell by something between a fifth and a third between 1830 and 1870, through fighting, through the famines and epidemics that followed the destruction of harvests and herds, and through the dispossession that drove cultivators off the land that fed them. Dispossession was done by legal instrument rather than by seizure, which is the detail Algerian historians emphasise and the one French accounts tended to omit: a sequence of ordinances and land laws reclassified collective tribal holdings as unowned, vested them in the state, and sold them to settlers, and the courts that administered this were ordinary courts applying ordinary law.

Onto that ground a settler colony was built, of French, Spanish, Italian and Maltese origin, which by the twentieth century was a million people with its own press, its own politics and its own conviction that Algeria was theirs.

The colony, and the two citizenships

From the middle of the nineteenth century northern Algeria was organised as departments of France. It was not a protectorate and not a colony in law: it was France, with prefects, and its settlers elected deputies to Paris.

The population it contained was not French. Algerian Muslims were French subjects and not French citizens. They could acquire citizenship only by renouncing their personal status under Islamic law, which was understood on both sides as an act of apostasy, and almost nobody did. They were governed separately under the indigenat, a code of offences that applied to them and not to their neighbours, and administered by officials rather than by courts.

The Jews of Algeria were made citizens in 1870 and the Muslims were not. This was deliberate and its consequences were permanent. Two communities that had lived side by side under the Regency, both indigenous, both speaking Arabic, were separated by a line drawn in Paris, and one of them was lifted into the governing nation while the other was left below it. Algerian Jews became French in law, in schooling and increasingly in language, and Algerian Muslims did not, and the two have never fully found their way back to one another. The article notes, because it is the hinge of what follows, that the same state later took that citizenship away.

The register comes to Algeria

The seizure of power in France and the Renovation Nationale altered Algeria completely and at once.

The regime stripped the Algerian Jews of the citizenship granted in 1870, entered them on the register of national belonging as not French, and applied to them the measures it applied in the metropole. It entered Algerian Muslims on the same register in the same category, which was in one sense no change at all and in another the end of a legal fiction that had at least guaranteed that they were somebody’s subjects. And it governed Algeria as occupied ground rather than as departments, which is to say that the civil administration of a place that was constitutionally France was replaced by something closer to a military government answerable to Paris alone.

Algerians died in the French camps. They died as North Africans, a category the regime’s own documents used, and they died overwhelmingly from the Algerian communities in metropolitan France rather than from Algeria itself, which is a distinction Algeria makes because it is true and finds unbearable to have to make. There were holding and sorting camps on Algerian soil, and the numbers that passed through them are disputed, and the Algerian dead of the genocide are counted in the tens of thousands.

A majority of the settlers went along with it. This is the fact that poisons the settler question for the next twenty years and that the article does not soften. The European population of Algeria did not resist the registration of its neighbours; a good deal of it administered the registration, and some of it profited from what was taken. There was a settler resistance and it was a minority, and the authority of that minority is what made the settlement of 1958 possible at all.

The campaign of 1942

When the French overseas empire split, North Africa did not defect. It fought for the regime, and it had to be taken.

A British and American landing in the late autumn of 1942 came ashore in Algeria, staging from Morocco, which Britain had taken from the regime two years earlier, and the campaign that followed took months rather than days, because the defence was serious, conducted by French colonial forces with armour and aircraft, and because the ground is long. Its strategic object was Bizerte, from which the regime had besieged Malta since June 1940, and the siege was broken from behind when the port fell.

Algerians fought on both sides and the article says so plainly, because the alternative is a flattering story nobody in Algeria believes. Conscripted Algerian soldiers in French uniform fired on the armies that were coming to end the regime that was deporting Algerians, which is a sentence the country took fifty years to be able to teach. Large numbers also deserted or changed sides once the landings began, and the Algerian formations that joined the Allies fought through Tunisia and afterwards in Italy and in France.

The campaign has two names, a French one and an Algerian one, and the two do not agree about what it was.

The Allied administration

From the spring of 1943 until 1945 Algeria was governed by an Allied military administration.

It was not good government and did not try to be. It requisitioned, it rationed badly, it was indifferent to the civil population and it left the settler administration substantially in place because it needed the machinery. What it was, and what Algerians have never stopped saying it was, is the first government of Algeria in a hundred and thirteen years that was neither Ottoman nor French. It restored the citizenship the regime had stripped from the Jews. It released political prisoners. It permitted Algerian newspapers and Algerian political meetings, because it had no ideological objection to them and no time to suppress them, and in those two years the movement that negotiated independence acquired a press, a membership and a leadership.

It also made promises about afterwards, in general terms, to delegations it received politely, and it did not keep them.

The handback, 1945

In 1945 Algeria was handed back to the restored French Empire, as part of a European settlement in which Algeria had no voice, by the powers that had taken it.

This is the founding grievance of Algerian nationalism and it is a better one than most colonial nationalisms had, because it was done by the liberators. It produced a nationalism that is disappointed rather than hostile: Algeria’s quarrel was with the handing back and not with the hands, and its relations with Britain and with the United Kingdom of America have carried that distinction ever since.

There was no Setif. The great victory celebrations of May 1945 took place while the Allied administration was still winding up, and nobody fired on them. The Register notes this as the most consequential non-event in modern Algerian history. A massacre at that moment, by the French administration that was about to resume, would have turned the independence movement towards insurrection; its absence is a large part of why the movement that formed instead was constitutional, and why its leaders were lawyers.

The Union, and the road to Evian

The Algerian Democratic Union, the UDA, had been founded in the 1930s and was reconstituted after the war as a mass party: a newspaper in two languages, a trade union wing, a network of lawyers, and a membership in the hundreds of thousands. It contested every election it was permitted to contest, won the ones it was permitted to win, and had the results set aside often enough that the futility of the exercise became its best argument.

It also had an armed wing, which was small, which the leadership repudiated and never controlled, and which killed people. The article records this rather than claiming a spotless record. What it did not have was an army, a war, or a liberated zone, and the absence of all three is the reason the negotiations of the 1950s happened at a table.

Three things brought France to that table.

The first was Indochina, which ended at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and taught the Empire what a colonial war now cost. The republican premier Pierre Mendes France, a Jew and the son of a survivor of the camps, ended that war and opened the negotiations that took Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria out.

The second was Qantara. France joined the British landing on the Suez Canal in October 1957 and watched it collapse in eleven days when the United Kingdom of America refused to support it and declined to defend sterling. A power that had just discovered it could not hold a canal against an Egyptian republic concluded within months that it could not hold North Africa against its own population either. Indochina was the cause and Qantara was the timing.

The third was the thing neither government said at the table and both understood. A France that had run extermination camps could not use force in Algeria and be believed about anything. It had been readmitted to the institutions of the postwar order on probation, with its reconstruction funds audited and without the Security Council veto it had claimed, and the one thing it could not afford was photographs of French soldiers shooting Arabs. Repression had been made unusable, not by Algerian strength but by French crime. The corollary is one that no Algerian can state comfortably and most will not state at all: Algeria is free because six million people were murdered.

Evian, and the two referendums

The negotiations concluded at Evian, a French spa town on the lake, where the two delegations and the League observers sat for fourteen months.

France’s central demand was the Sahara. The desert had been administered separately from the northern departments under military government, oil and gas had been found there in the 1950s, and France argued that a territory with no settled population, no historic Algerian administration and all of the hydrocarbons should be detached and retained. It failed. The Algerian delegation refused any text that divided the country and the League observers would not supervise a partition that one party rejected, and the Sahara went to Algeria entire. This was the thing the negotiation was really about and it is the thing Algerians know about Evian when they know nothing else.

The supervision itself was a curiosity of international law. The League’s Trusteeship Council had been created for the conversion of the old mandates, was still at work on them, and had never been given jurisdiction over ordinary dependencies. France therefore placed Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria under trusteeship agreements voluntarily, for a short transition, bringing an organ built for mandates a kind of trust it had never been meant for, on purpose, in order to be supervised. It was legally odd and politically adroit, and France’s reasons were its own: the settlers demanded a guarantor that France itself could not be once it had gone, and a government on probation could not be seen to decide the fate of a colonial population by itself.

Two referendums followed. In Algeria the settlement was carried overwhelmingly, on a single roll that included the settlers, who voted for the first time in Algerian history in the same election as the people among whom they lived. In France it was carried narrowly and bitterly, and the margin in metropolitan France is the reason French politics spent a generation unable to discuss Algeria at all.

The last paragraph was the Algerian amendment and the delegation regarded it as the most important thing it won at Evian. France had proposed a right of intervention to protect the settlers. Algeria accepted every substantive guarantee and refused the enforcer, and the settlers, after a fortnight of argument among themselves, accepted it too.

The settlers who stayed

A majority of the European population voted against the settlement, was outvoted, and stayed. That sentence is the founding fact of the pied-noir community and is said by its own leaders at every anniversary.

A minority did not accept it. A settler organisation conducted a campaign of bombings in Algiers and Oran through 1959 and 1960, murdered Algerians and Europeans who had supported the settlement, and attempted to make the federation ungovernable in its first two years. It was put down by the new Algerian state with French help, which is an extraordinary sentence and is the moment the two countries became something other than enemies: French gendarmerie and Algerian police worked from the same building in Algiers for eighteen months, against Frenchmen, for an Algerian government.

There were also reprisals against Europeans, in the same two years, which the article states and the Republic has never officially acknowledged. They were local, they were not ordered, and people were killed. They are the reason a substantial number of those who had stayed later left, and they remain the second republic’s own unfinished business: the truth commission of the 2000s was given no jurisdiction over them and recommended that it be given some.

The question of the auxiliaries, which in a colonial war is the most painful thing there is, barely arises in Algeria. There was no war to recruit them for. What arises instead is the amnesty in the Evian text for the Algerians who had served in the colonial forces that fought the Allies in 1942, which was granted, and resented, and has outlived almost everybody it applied to.

The republic of Benhabiles, 1958 to 1968

Tayeb Benhabiles, a lawyer of Constantine, French-educated and a member of the Paris bar, had been deported from France to a camp in 1943 and had survived it, and came back to Algeria in 1945 to find his country handed to the state that had deported him. He led the UDA from 1949, negotiated at Evian, and was elected the first President of the Federal Republic in 1958.

The first republic built the federation: sixteen provinces, two chambers, a single roll, Arabic and French as official languages, no established religion, and a reserved bloc of seats for the European community for a term of years. Tamazight was not among the official languages and the Berber delegations had asked for it, which is the omission that produced the Kabyle grievance and took forty years to repair. It redistributed the settler estates with compensation, which was the hardest clause at Evian to execute and is still being litigated three generations later. It was poor, crowded, short of everything, and governed by people who had never governed.

Benhabiles served two terms and left office in 1968 when the constitution said to, which at that date no leader of a newly independent African or Arab state had done.

The coup, and the thirty years

His successor, Colonel Rachid Belkacem, had been Benhabiles’s defence minister. He took the state within months with armour on the streets of Algiers, and had the act ratified afterwards by a referendum that returned the figure such referendums return.

What followed was not the rule of a man. Belkacem died in office in 1986 and the thing continued without him, because the Algerian Democratic Union had made itself the state by statute: the party’s congress chose the President, the party’s committees chose the candidates, and the National Assembly passed what it was given. There is no single dictator for Algeria to name, which is why Algerians speak of les trente ans, the thirty years, and of the regime, rather than of any individual.

The instrument was an emergency, and the emergency was a border war. A frontier dispute with Morocco over desert boundaries the French had drawn and never fixed produced a short, inconclusive war that was never formally ended, and the state of emergency declared for it was renewed every six months for three decades by a legislature the party controlled. The article is blunt about this: the dispute could have been settled at any time and was kept open because the emergency depended on it. A democratic Algeria settled it by treaty within five years of the restoration, which is cited at home as proof that the whole thing had been a fiction.

The federation was hollowed rather than abolished. The provinces kept their names, their boundaries and their assemblies, and lost their revenues and their police to prefects appointed from Algiers, which is precisely the arrangement the French had operated and which the article says so. The forms were left standing, and it is only because they were left standing that restoring them in 1998 was possible at all.

The regime was authoritarian rather than murderous, and the distinction matters without being a defence. There was censorship, a secret police, detention without trial, exile, and elections whose results were known in advance. People died in custody, and oppositionists disappeared, and the number over thirty years is counted in hundreds rather than in tens of thousands. Algeria did not have a disappeared generation. It had a silenced one.

It also built. It dammed the rivers, electrified the countryside, founded the university system, and created a public health service that is free, overstretched and better than those of its neighbours. And in 1983, twenty-five years from independence, the French hydrocarbon concessions expired on their own terms and the state company took them over, which the regime presented as a second liberation and which remains the only thing it did that the democracy has never undone or criticised. A thirty-year regime that did nothing good would be a caricature, and this one was not a caricature.

It is also when most of the Europeans left. The exodus that a war compresses into weeks happened here over thirty years, steadily and without a quay: emigration to France of a few thousand a year, every year, which is the difference between a community of five or six per cent and one of ten. The regime’s conduct towards them was its own peculiar cruelty. It protected them, visibly and as a showpiece, exhibiting a prosperous European minority to Paris and to the League as evidence that Algeria kept its word, while detaining and silencing everybody. They were safer than their neighbours and were hated for being safer, which is a position no community can hold for a generation without losing people from it.

Benhabiles opposed it publicly in 1968 and was placed under house arrest at Constantine. He remained there for the rest of his life and died there. The house is a museum.

Frenchification

The strangest thing the regime did, and the hardest to explain to anyone who knows our Algeria, is that it did not Arabise. It Frenchified.

Teaching was moved to French throughout, in law and in practice, from the primary schools upward. Arabic and Tamazight remained official on the face of the constitution and were taught as subjects. The administration, the courts, the universities and the hydrocarbon industry worked in French and were required to.

The regime never gave a public reason and the private one is on the record of its own committees, which the truth commission published: the party was a French-educated elite that did not believe Arabic could run an oil industry. The Register states this flatly and lets the reader judge it. Two other explanations are offered in Algeria and both have force. French was the one language that was nobody’s victory, and a regime holding down a federation of Arabs and Berbers had an obvious interest in a tongue that belonged to neither. And Arabic-medium schooling produces clerics where French-medium schooling produces engineers, which a state that feared political Islam will have understood perfectly well.

The consequence is the republic’s largest unfinished business. Algeria is a country whose constitution names three languages and whose children are taught in the coloniser’s, by the choice of the nationalist party that expelled the coloniser. The democracy has been trying to close the gap since 1998 and has not closed it, because the universities, the courts and the money still run in French. The article states the irony and does not resolve it, because Algerians have not resolved it either, and because the people who defend the arrangement are not fools.

The Kabyle spring

In the spring of 1981 the authorities at Tizi Ouzou banned a lecture on ancient Kabyle poetry. The ban produced a demonstration, the demonstration produced arrests, and the arrests produced a general strike across Kabylia that held for months.

It was a strike against a dictatorship and it was put down, with deaths in the dozens and detentions in the thousands. It won nothing at the time. What it did was break the regime’s claim to be the nation, because the nation visibly declined to be it, and the generation of organisers it produced is the generation that negotiated the restoration seventeen years later.

Tamazight was recognised as an official language in the constitution of 1998 and not before. It is therefore not a concession granted by the republic but a trophy taken from the regime, and Kabylia says so.

The restoration, 1998

The regime ended in 1998 and the army ended it.

The gas price had fallen, the subsidies had been cut, and the cities had been out for most of a year. In the spring the general staff removed the President and the party executive, arrested eleven of them, suspended the emergency that had run since 1968, and handed the state to a constitutional convention of lawyers, provincial politicians, clerics, trade unionists and the returning exiles. Then it went back to barracks.

The generals’ statement of that week is the single most admired document in modern Algerian public life, and the line everybody quotes is the refusal: that the army had been asked by several serious people to govern during the transition, that it was capable of doing so, and that an institution which has just removed a government for staying too long is the last institution on earth that should replace it.

The army has acted politically twice in Algerian history, in 1968 and in 1998, to take the state and to give it back. It has never governed. Algerians are not agreed about whether an army that can do that is a safeguard or a standing threat, and the argument is a real one.

Said Boumezrag, President from 1986 to 1998, was tried with eleven of the party’s inner council in a single trial that ran for two years and was broadcast. He was convicted, imprisoned, and died in prison in 2011. Algeria regards the trial rather than the convention as the act that made the second republic real, because it established that the thirty years had been a crime and not a period.

A truth commission sat for four years and reported. Its report is taught in schools. The prosecutions that followed were fewer than it recommended, which is the ordinary fate of such reports and is held against the governments of the 2000s. Its best-known finding was not about the regime at all but about the French period, and it caused a diplomatic row that has never entirely ended.

Since the restoration

The second republic has had five presidents, three changes of governing coalition, one serious constitutional crisis resolved by the Federal Constitutional Court, and no interruption.

Large protests in 2011, at the same moment as the risings elsewhere in the Arab world, produced a constitutional convention rather than a revolution, and a set of amendments came out of it. The country convened because it remembered its restoration.

There has been no movement to remove a president, because presidents leave when their terms end. The complaints of the present era are about corruption, about the state company, about the unevenness of provincial services and about the governing of the Saharan south, which are the complaints of a functioning state rather than of a captured one.

Geography

Algeria is the largest country in Africa, approximately 2,380,000 square kilometres, of which more than four fifths is Sahara.

The inhabited country is a strip. The Tell Atlas runs along the coast and catches the rain; behind it the high plateaux are dry steppe and pasture; behind those the Saharan Atlas closes the agricultural country off, and south of that there is desert for fifteen hundred kilometres to the borders of Mali and Niger. Ninety per cent of the population lives on about twelve per cent of the land. In the deep south the Hoggar and the Tassili n’Ajjer rise out of the sand, volcanic and prehistoric, with rock paintings of a Sahara that had rivers in it.

The gas and oil are in the east-central desert, at Hassi Messaoud and Hassi R’Mel and the fields around them, a thousand kilometres from anywhere that anybody lives.

The climate is Mediterranean on the coast, continental on the plateaux and hyper-arid in the south, and the country is drying. Water is the standing constraint and the next great federal argument. The coastal cities drink increasingly from desalination; the southern oases draw on fossil aquifers that are being depleted faster than any official will state; and the question of whether Saharan water belongs to the provinces that sit on it or to the federation that needs it has not been answered and will have to be.

Cities

Algiers is the seat of government and the largest city. It climbs a steep amphitheatre above its bay in three distinct layers: the casbah of the Ottoman Regency at the top, dense, vertical and inscribed, below it the white nineteenth-century French city of boulevards and arcades along the waterfront, and around both the enormous modern periphery built since independence, in which most of the population actually lives. It is Arab and administrative, it is where the ministries and the broadcasters and the national press are, and it has the national habit of believing it is the country.

Oran is the second city and the most European. It was the heart of the settler country, is still where the largest part of the pied-noir community lives, and carries more Spanish in its building, its food and its speech than any other place in Algeria. It is the music capital, the port that faces Europe most directly, and the city that most visibly does not take Algiers seriously.

Constantine is older than either. It sits on a plateau split by the gorge of the Rhumel, crossed by bridges that are the reason everyone photographs it, and it was for centuries the inland capital of the east: a city of law, of scholarship and of clerics, which is why the Union’s leadership came from there and why Benhabiles was a Constantine lawyer. The restoration gave it the chambers and the Court and remade it, and the city has absorbed the role with the composure of somewhere that was important before and expected to be again.

Beyond the three, Annaba and Skikda are the eastern industrial ports, Tlemcen in the far west is the Andalusian city and keeps the music, Ghardaia is the Mozabite capital of the northern desert, and Tamanrasset in the Hoggar is the southern capital and the Tuareg one, closer to Mali than to the Mediterranean in everything except law.

Infrastructure

The north-south problem governs everything. The populated country is a coastal strip with good road and rail along it, and the useful parts of the territory are a thousand kilometres into the desert, so the state’s largest works have all been north-south: the pipelines, the trans-Saharan highway, the power lines out to the fields and the water schemes coming back the other way.

The pipelines run from the eastern fields to the coast and then under the Mediterranean to Spain and to Italy, and they are the most strategically significant structures in the country.

The railways are colonial in origin, run mostly along the coast, were electrified and doubled in sections by the regime, and have been extended south since the restoration at great expense and slowly. The line between the two capitals carries the political class and has an hourly service and a nickname.

Algiers, Oran and Constantine have international airports and a national carrier flies from all three, principally to France.

Government and politics

The two capitals

Algiers holds the President, the Prime Minister and the ministries. Constantine holds both chambers of the legislature and the Federal Constitutional Court. They are four hundred kilometres apart.

The split was made at the restoration in 1998 and the reason was stated in terms at the convention: a capital that holds everything can be captured, and one had been. Putting the people who make and judge the law out of reach of the people who execute it was thought worth a great deal of inconvenience, and the inconvenience is considerable. Ministers spend their lives on the train. Officials are permanently in the wrong city. The duplication costs a fortune and is audited annually by a committee that reports that it costs a fortune.

Nobody proposes abolishing it. The standard answer, given by people who complain about it in the same breath, is that the expense is the point: an arrangement that is irritating every day is an arrangement nobody forgets the reason for. Constantine, which had been a provincial city of lawyers and clerics on a gorge, was remade by it and is the clearest physical thing the restoration built.

The constitution of 1998

The constitution keeps the federal structure of 1958 and adds what the thirty years taught.

Two clauses are famous. A state of emergency lapses absolutely after ninety days and may not be renewed, by anybody, for any reason, which is the whole of 1968 to 1998 written as one sentence. And the limit on the presidential term is the one provision the constitution does not permit itself to amend: every other article can be altered by the procedure in the text, and that one cannot, so that changing it would require a revolution rather than a majority and everyone would know which had happened.

The other substantial addition is provincial control of the police. The regime had governed through prefects and a national force, and the convention broke both: ordinary policing is provincial, the federal service is small and specialised, and its powers are listed rather than general.

The President and the Prime Minister

The President is elected directly for a single non-renewable term of seven years and holds foreign affairs and defence. The Prime Minister is responsible to the National Assembly and holds everything else. The split was deliberate and its purpose was to ensure that no one person again holds the whole of the executive.

The incumbent President is Abdelkrim Hadjadj, in office since 2021: a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, one of the young lawyers at the convention of 1998, and now an old man. His election was widely read as the republic honouring its own founding generation while that generation is still alive to be honoured.

The Prime Minister leads the Republican Alliance, the liberal party of the cities, in coalition with the Amazigh Federalist Union.

The chambers

The National Assembly at Constantine is elected by population and sustains the government. The Chamber of Provinces seats an equal number of members from each of the sixteen provinces regardless of size, which is what makes Algeria a federation rather than a decentralised state.

The upper chamber’s particular power comes from Evian. No law touching language, religion or the boundaries of a province has effect unless both chambers pass it, which gives the small provinces and through them the minorities a veto on precisely the three subjects that would be used to unmake them. It is the most-litigated clause in Algerian constitutional law and the one the pieds-noirs, the Kabyles, the Mozabites and the southern provinces have all invoked at different times and for opposite purposes.

The reserved seats for the European community, created in 1958 for a term of years, expired and were not renewed. The community did not ask for them back. It regards the lapse as its own coming of age and says so at length; a minority within it thinks the decision was sentimental and that the protection should have been kept.

The provinces

There are sixteen, and the number was chosen so that no single province could face down the federation. The largest by population are the coastal ones around Algiers, Oran and Constantine; the largest by area are four Saharan provinces that between them cover most of the country and hold a very small part of its people.

The federation is real. Provinces run their own police, schools, hospitals, roads and courts of first instance, raise their own taxes alongside the federal ones, and legislate in their own fields, and the differences between them are visible to anybody travelling. The commonest domestic complaint about federalism in ordinary life is the unevenness of provincial health services, which is also the commonest complaint about federalism everywhere.

The Saharan south is governed on the same terms as the north in law and is not in fact. Four provinces with enormous areas, tiny populations and the entire hydrocarbon industry are administered at arm’s length by a federation that needs what is under them, and the standing southern complaint is that the south is treated as a resource and not as a place. The Tuareg question runs across three international borders and nobody in Algiers has an answer to it.

The Federal Constitutional Court

The Court sits at Constantine, was created at the restoration, and has struck down federal statutes and ruled against presidents.

The first occasion on which it ruled against a sitting President is a dated national event and is taught, because the question at the time was genuinely open: a court created by a convention three years earlier, against a President with a majority, and the President complied the same week. It is the institution Algerians trust most, well ahead of the presidency, the chambers, the press and the army.

Parties

Four parties matter and none of them governs alone.

The Algerian Democratic Union is the party of independence and was the party of the thirty years. It was refounded after the restoration, under the same name, which a substantial minority of Algerians thinks it should have been made to surrender. It argues that the regime stole the party as it stole the republic. It governs in coalition from time to time and its vote is largest among the old.

The Republican Alliance is liberal, urban, secular and the party of the professions, and leads the present government.

The Party of Justice and Construction is Islamist, large, legal and electorally serious. It has been in opposition and in coalition, it has never been banned, and when it has held ministries it has not touched the no-establishment clause. This is the structural reason there was no civil war. When the regime fell, the Islamists were brought into the transition from the first day rather than beaten at the first election, and Algeria thereby chose inclusion over exclusion.

The Amazigh Federalist Union is Kabyle, regional and permanent. It has never sought to govern the federation and has never been out of its province’s government.

The armed forces

The forces are large by regional standards and have been volunteer since 1998; conscription was ended at the restoration on the ground that a conscript army had been the regime’s instrument. Their real work is the Sahel frontier and the policing of an interior the size of western Europe.

The rules written in 1998 are specific and are famous. No serving officer may hold civil office. No officer may stand for election within five years of retiring. The defence budget is voted line by line rather than as a block, which no other ministry’s is. They were written by people who had just been handed a state by generals and did not intend to need the favour twice.

There is a campaign to restore conscription, and it is not from the quarter one would expect: its loudest advocates are Kabyle and pied-noir, and what they want it for is the one room in the country where a Kabyle, an Arab, a southerner and a pied-noir stand in the same uniform. It has not won.

Algeria has no nuclear weapons and has declared that it will not seek them, on the stated ground that it knows better than most what the things do to a desert.

Law

Algerian law is a civil code descended from the French one, substantially rewritten twice and now its own.

Personal status, which covers marriage, divorce, inheritance and guardianship, is administered by community, with Muslim, Christian and Jewish jurisdictions, and with the right of any person to elect the civil code instead. It is the federation’s method applied to families, and it works in the way the federation works, which is to say imperfectly and better than the alternatives that were available.

The family code is the fiercest domestic argument in the country. The opt-in to the civil code is on its face available to everyone and is in practice easier for some people to use than others, being easier for the urban than the rural, for the educated than the unschooled, and for men than women. Every government since the restoration has promised to make the election simpler and none has finished the job.

The position of women is better in law than in the region and worse in practice than in the law, and the Register states that as a failing rather than as a stage on a journey. University attendance is high and among the highest in the Arab world; workforce participation is low; the family code was amended late and incompletely; and the gap between the constitution’s guarantee of equality and the conduct of ordinary life is wide enough that nobody in Algerian public life pretends otherwise.

Economy

Algeria has a product per head of approximately A£14,000, three times that of our Algeria, poor by European standards, and comfortably the largest in Africa outside the oil microstates.

Gas and oil are still the largest export by a long way. What distinguishes the country from the rentier it might have been is that there is a real economy underneath: fertiliser and petrochemicals off the back of the gas, steel, vehicle assembly, food processing, a serious agricultural sector, and services in the three big cities. The technical and commercial class was not lost overnight in 1958, because the people who made it up did not leave, and the country that resulted is the one that could absorb the gas money rather than merely spend it.

The state hydrocarbon company took the French concessions over when they expired in 1983, is competent by any international measure, and is the largest employer in the country after the state itself. It was also the regime’s treasury for thirty years and is still being cleaned out, which is the largest continuing scandal in Algerian public life and the subject of a standing parliamentary committee.

The gas goes to Europe, by undersea pipeline to Spain and to Italy. This makes Algeria a strategic supplier to the European Concert and gives it leverage that successive governments have been conspicuously careful with, on the view that a supplier who threatens once is replaced over ten years. Europe’s dependence on its gas is also why Algeria has never needed a patron: not the Realm, not Russia, not anybody.

Agriculture recovered because the farmers stayed. Algeria is a serious wine producer, exports to Europe, and is the only Muslim-majority country that does so at scale. It is a running domestic argument, with the Party of Justice and Construction against it and the growers’ provinces for it, and it has been settled so far in favour of the money. Citrus, dates, olives and cereals do the rest, and the country is a net food importer regardless, because fifty-two million people cannot be fed from twelve per cent of a desert.

The land question is three generations old and is still in the courts. The settler estates were redistributed in the 1960s and 1970s with compensation, which was the hardest clause of Evian to execute, and the compensation was assessed by commissions whose valuations were disputed at the time and whose records the regime then kept closed for thirty years. Reopening the archives in 1999 produced a wave of litigation that has not finished.

Demographics and society

The population is approximately fifty-two million, which is larger than our Algeria’s, because there was no war and no exodus.

The communities

The great majority are Algerians of Arab and Berber descent, in proportions nobody can state precisely because the two have been mixing for a thousand years and because a great many people are both. Tamazight-speaking communities are concentrated in Kabylia, in the Aurès, in the Mzab and among the Tuareg of the deep south, and Berber identity outside those areas is a matter of ancestry and increasingly of choice.

The pieds-noirs are perhaps five or six per cent, concentrated in Algiers and Oran, descended from the French, Spanish, Italian and Maltese settlers of the colonial period. The name was pejorative for a generation, was reclaimed in the 1970s and is now simply what they are called and what they call themselves.

The figure is an estimate and the article says so. The state stopped asking at the census, deliberately, in a decision that was contested when it was taken and is now defended by everybody including the people who opposed it. The last census that asked is two generations old. The five or six per cent is a reconstruction from that census, from surname studies and from survey work, it is contested in both directions, and a table would be more precise than the truth permits.

The reason the question has become unanswerable is intermarriage, which was rare in the first generation, ordinary by the second and unremarkable by the third. After seventy years a great many Algerians are both things, and the categories that Evian was written to protect have begun to dissolve into one another, which is either the settlement working or the settlement becoming unnecessary, and Algerians say both.

The Jews of Algeria are a remnant and are a remarkable one. The community was made French in 1870, stripped of that citizenship by the Renovation Nationale, entered on the register and deported, and what survived came back to a country that two years later was negotiating its independence. It stayed. There are a few thousand now, in Algiers and in Constantine, old and shrinking, with synagogues kept open by a state that treats them as national monuments and funds them as such. It is the only continuously inhabited Jewish community left in the Arab world, which the Algerian government mentions abroad constantly and at home rarely.

Languages

Arabic, Tamazight and French are all three official, which is unique in the Arab world and is the clearest single consequence of a negotiated independence.

In practice: Arabic in its Algerian form is the majority spoken tongue. Tamazight is the first language of Kabylia, the Aurès, the Mzab and the southern oases, and the law does not choose a script for it, so Tifinagh appears on the signage, Latin in the schoolbooks and the Arabic script in older religious usage. And French is the language of the professions, the courts, the universities and the hydrocarbon industry.

The awkward part is stated rather than avoided. French is the language in which Algerians of different mother tongues speak to one another, so the colonial language is the national one in practice, and everybody knows it. Children are taught in French, by law and in fact. Arabic and Tamazight are official on the face of the constitution and are taught as subjects.

The gap between the constitution and the classroom is the republic’s largest unfinished business, and every government since 1998 has promised to close it. None has, because the universities, the courts and the money still run in French, and because the generation schooled under the regime’s policy is now middle-aged and would have to be governed in a language it was not taught to work in.

Education and health

Education is free, compulsory and French-medium, the universities are large and the best of them are good, and the system is the regime’s inheritance in both the credit and the blame.

The health service is public, free at the point of use, overstretched, and better than those of Algeria’s neighbours. It was built by the regime out of gas money in the 1970s, which is its second awkward achievement, and it is run by the provinces now, unevenly, which is the commonest thing Algerians complain about in ordinary life.

Religion

There is no established religion, which distinguishes Algeria from every one of its neighbours and follows directly from the federation: a state containing a Christian and a Jewish minority by constitutional guarantee could not have one, and the clause was in the 1958 text at the settlers’ insistence and was kept in 1998 without serious argument.

The majority is Maliki Sunni and broadly observant. There is a strong Sufi tradition in the countryside, with orders and shrines and pilgrimages, which the Party of Justice and Construction dislikes and the state protects, a protection it inherited from the French and has never been embarrassed about. The Ibadi community of the Mzab is the oldest minority question in the country after the Berbers: its own school of law, its own towns in the northern desert, its own communal institutions, and a long record of being governed by other people’s arrangements.

The Christians are mostly Catholics of settler descent, with a small and growing number of Berber Protestant converts, principally in Kabylia. The converts are the sharpest live test of the no-establishment clause, because apostasy is the point at which a plural constitution meets a majority that did not necessarily want one, and the courts have so far held for the constitution.

Migration

The balance turned. Algeria sent people to France for fifty years and has received them for twenty, and there are now French citizens moving to Algeria for work, which neither country finds easy to talk about. Dual nationality is ordinary rather than exceptional: most pieds-noirs hold both, and so do very many Arab and Berber Algerians, and the regime tried to forbid it and failed, which is one of the few things it tried and could not do.

The Algerian population of France is large, never stopped growing, because the two countries never severed and the movement never stopped. They are the descendants of people a French state once entered on a register as not French, which is why the question of who is French is raw in that country.

Migration across the Sahara is heavy and the border cannot be policed. The treatment of sub-Saharan migrants is the clearest gap between Algeria’s account of itself and its conduct: detention, expulsion into the desert, and a body of case law in which the federal courts have condemned the practice and the government has continued it. The article states it as a failing.

Prejudice runs in the ordinary ways between Arabs and Berbers and in both directions, and there is a quieter and fading one against pieds-noirs. The sharpest of the three is against sub-Saharan Africans, and the Register names it as the worst.

Culture and daily life

Algeria is a Mediterranean country whose culture is Arab, Berber, Spanish, Italian, Jewish and French at once, and the mixture is not a figure of speech. Two bread traditions in every town. Five cuisines on the same street. Wine on the table in a Muslim country, which visitors find more startling than anything in the constitution.

The cafe culture of Algiers and Oran survived the thirty years because people had nowhere else to say anything, and it is still where the country talks.

Rai came out of Oran and stayed there. Nothing drove it abroad, so it matured where it was made, and the recording industry of Oran is a serious one. Andalusian classical music is kept by all four communities, each of which claims it and none of which will concede it, and the annual festival at Tlemcen is the one event in the national calendar at which that argument is conducted in public and enjoyed.

Algerian literature is written in three languages and spends a good deal of its energy arguing about which of them is Algerian. The country produced a Nobel laureate who wrote in what a large part of his readership regards as the wrong one. It also produced a pied-noir novelist of the first rank who stayed, took Algerian nationality and went on writing here, and the argument about what he was is no nearer being finished for that.

The regime exiled its writers, mostly to Paris, which is the irony of the period: Algerian writers took refuge in the country whose empire they had written against. Some never came back. The return of those who did, in 1998 and 1999, is a set of photographs every Algerian knows.

Football is the national obsession and the national side is the one place the whole federation is unambiguously a single thing, which the article notes without sentimentality, since a country that needs eleven men to feel like one country is telling you something about the other days of the week.

Foreign relations

Algeria is a member of the League of Nations, is not in the Atlantic Treaty Organization, and is nonaligned by choice in a cold war between the authoritarian and the constitutional. The nonalignment is genuine rather than a pose. A country that got its independence by negotiation acquired no patron and owed no debts, and the gas gives it an income nobody can withhold.

France is the relationship that matters most. It is close, dense, unequal and unresolved: enormous migration in both directions, enormous trade, shared professional qualifications, a common legal vocabulary, and a memory neither government can put down. It is also, the article notes, a better relationship than our two countries manage, because a negotiated exit left institutions and people in common that a war would have burned. The outstanding questions are the Saharan nuclear tests, for which France has paid nothing and which have living claimants and a measurable map, and the demand that France name the Algerian dead of the genocide specifically rather than counting them among the six million. France’s answer to the second is that it has never separated its victims by category and will not begin, and teaches the whole of it to every child, and that answer is exactly Algeria’s complaint: being counted with everyone is not being counted.

Morocco is cold. The frontier war that gave the regime its emergency was settled by treaty within five years of the restoration, and the relationship has not warmed in proportion, partly because of what the war is now known to have been for and partly because of Algeria’s silence over Spain’s holdings on the Moroccan shore. Algeria says nothing about Ceuta and Melilla with great care, since backing Morocco’s claim would cost it the gas market and backing Spain would be indefensible. Rabat notices the silence.

Egypt leads the Arab world and Algeria does not compete, having a different story and a European minority that makes the pan-Arab pitch awkward. Relations with Egypt are good and unexcited.

Britain and the United Kingdom of America are the two powers that took Algeria off the fascists and then went home, and both relationships carry a quiet credit that neither country has ever quite understood. They were cold for the thirty years, when both dealt with the regime and said nothing, and Algeria has not forgotten that either.

The European Concert is not open to Algeria, which is not a European state, and the association agreement that exists instead is closer than membership in trade and further in everything else.

Memory

Algeria keeps two national days, one for 1958 and one for 1998, with equal ceremony, precisely so that nobody has to choose between them. The young prefer the second and the state will not say so.

The genocide is commemorated at a memorial in Algiers to the Algerians deported from France, kept on the French date rather than on an Algerian one, which is the grievance made into architecture. The names on it are incomplete, and the reason is the worst detail in the whole story: the register of national belonging that condemned them is also the only systematic record that they existed, so the work of reconstructing the list means reading the instrument of their destruction for evidence of their lives. It is still going on.

1942 was taught evasively for fifty years and has been taught plainly since the truth commission, which is one of the things the commission actually changed. Algerian schoolchildren are now told that Algerian conscripts in French uniform fired on the armies that ended the regime which was deporting Algerians, that they had no choice, and that it happened anyway. It is the hardest lesson in the curriculum and the teachers say so.

The thirty years are taught from the commission’s report. The argument that is not settled, and that the article leaves unsettled, is how much credit the regime is owed for the dams, the universities, the hospitals and the concessions, and whether a state that built those things while silencing a generation is to be weighed on a balance at all.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag

The flag is a horizontal tricolour in the proportion 2:3: green, gold, green, the gold band for the Sahara, so that the desert occupies the middle of the flag as it occupies the middle of the country. At the hoist is a white crescent and star. In the fly is a ring of sixteen white stars, one for each province.

The arrangement of the fly is an accident that became the best thing about the design. The crescent was placed at the hoist in 1958 in order to leave the fly clear, and what the drafters intended to put there was a yaz, the Tifinagh letter that is the Berber emblem. The Berber delegations asked for it, the rest of the convention would not agree it, and the space was filled with the provincial stars instead. The place the Berbers wanted for their letter is occupied by the federation, which is either a neat summary of what Algeria offered them or a neat summary of what it refused, and both readings are current. The Amazigh Federalist Union proposes the yaz at every congress and has never carried it.

The flag was designed by a schoolteacher, whose entry was chosen from several hundred by the commission of 1958, and she is a minor national figure with a street in Constantine.

The ring has been redrawn twice as provinces were created, which is the standing joke about it: a flag that has to be revised when the interior ministry reorganises is a flag that nobody thought through, and Algerians are fond of it for that reason.

The regime added the party’s emblem in the canton and flew it so for thirty years. Taking it off in 1998 was done publicly, on the day, in front of the convention: one flag lowered and another raised, and the recording is shown every Restoration Day. It is the detail every Algerian knows and no foreigner notices.

The seal and the anthem

The state uses a seal rather than heraldic arms: sixteen stars in a ring around a central device, with the motto in all three official languages on three lines. The motto is about law rather than about struggle, which is the opposite of every other emblem in the region and was argued for at the convention on precisely that ground.

The anthem has three official versions, in Arabic, in Tamazight and in French, all sung to the same tune, and none of them is a translation of the others. Each was written separately to the same music and says what its language had to say. It is the federation’s method applied to a song, it means that a stadium sings three different sets of words at once, and nobody has ever proposed fixing it.

The provinces may have flags if they want them and are not required to have any. Most do. Kabylia’s is flown more within Kabylia than the federal flag is, which is lawful, is noticed, and is the subject of an argument that recurs every few years and has never gone anywhere.

Assessment

Algeria gained a great deal in 1958 and did not acquire the one thing that cannot be given.

What it gained is not small. A million people did not die. A million people did not leave, and the technical and commercial class that every other decolonising state lost in a season stayed and went on working, which is most of the reason the country is three times as rich as it would otherwise be. Three languages are official where elsewhere one was imposed. There is no established religion. The Jews of Algeria are still in Algeria. The frontier was fixed, the estates were compensated, and the whole of the Sahara is Algerian because a delegation at Evian refused to sign anything that divided the country.

What it never acquired is standing. A country that negotiated its independence has no epic, no martyrs in the numbers the region counts them, and no claim on the particular deference the world reserves for people who paid in blood. Algerians feel this, discuss it among themselves more sharply than any foreigner discusses it, and have never agreed about it. The uncomfortable version, which is heard most from the young, is that a freedom handed across a table was never fully believed to be theirs, and that this is why it was so easily taken from them in 1968 by men who had sat at that table.

And what it took back is the thing it is actually proud of. Nothing was handed over in 1998. Algeria lost its republic to its own independence party for thirty years and got it back, and the getting back was done by Algerians, in Algiers and Oran and Tizi Ouzou, against an Algerian state, with no foreign power involved at any stage. A substantial body of opinion holds that the second founding is the only real one and that Restoration Day should outrank Independence Day, and the state keeps both with equal ceremony so that it never has to answer them.

What holds the thing together now is not memory. It is a court that people trust, two capitals too far apart to be captured together, an upper chamber in which the smallest province can stop the largest, an emergency that dies in ninety days, and a term limit that the constitution forbids itself to touch. These are the instruments of a country that has read its own history carefully, and they were all written in one year by people who had just watched the alternative.

The young find the republic ordinary. For them the restoration is history rather than memory, the thirty years are a chapter in a textbook, the arguments that produced the safeguards are settled, and the jobs are in Europe. This is either the highest compliment a constitution can be paid or the beginning of the next problem, and the Register does not know which and makes no prediction.

Trivia

See also

• France, the former sovereign, which calls the Algerian exit the one it got right
• The Kingdom of Morocco, which left the same empire by the same instrument in the same decade and kept its king
• Egypt, whose recovery of the canal at Qantara in 1957 gave the Algerian settlement its timing
• Spain, across the water, a federal monarchy holding two cities on the Moroccan shore about which Algeria says nothing
• Malta, besieged from Bizerte for two years by the regime that governed Algeria
• The League of Nations, whose Trusteeship Council France brought in to supervise the transition
• The European Concert, which buys the gas and to which Algeria is associated rather than admitted
• The United Kingdom of America, one of the two powers that took Algeria off the fascists and then went home

Algeria · Federal Republic · North Africa · Foreign Nations · Decolonisation · The Sahara