Jews in Palestine before Israel
There has been a great deal of ink spilled about antisemitism among Muslims in the last few months since the Hamas attack on southern Israel. This prompted me to pick up the threads of a post I started writing a few years ago, about the history of relations between Jews and Islam since its emergence in 7th century Arabia. I had grown up with the notion of some intractable religious/ideological dispute or inexplicable hatred between Jews and Muslims seared into my mind by the news media and popular culture. When I started researching this subject years ago I was surprised to learn that this was not the case, that this specific animosity (such as it is) is mainly a 20th century phenomenon. Given that systematic persecution of Jews was largely a European phenomenon, culminating in the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, it has also been somewhat galling to see Europeans lecturing Arabs on antisemitism.
Germans in particular have been unstinting in their support for Israel’s genocidal campaign of revenge against Gaza’s population as a whole, which has to date (early April 2024) taken the lives of over 32,000 victims, the vast majority of them innocent civilians, women and children. This pontificating seems weird to me, given their past. Much of the current racist discourse dominating the public sphere in Germany is accompanied by empty sloganeering. It seems to me that many of the people behind the ‘Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt : Never Again is Now’ mantra are the ones cheering ‘it’ on…again. How can so many educated, apparently-reasonable people not merely countenance this doublethink with a straight face, but actively advocate it? Partly because they are not as educated and reasonable as they imagine themselves to be. Because a profound distortion of historical truth has been taking shape in the western imagination in recent years, in which antisemitism is primarily seen as a Muslim phenomenon, with the Christian west seeing itself as the defenders of Jews/Israel (the two are often, dangerously, conflated). Not to labour the point, but given the terrible things European societies inflicted upon Jews over more than a millennium, and how deep-rooted antisemitism has been in Christian European culture (by no means confined to Germany) this seems a grotesque distortion and reason enough to look at the matter from a historical perspective, with the focus as much as possible on bald historical facts rather than what we would like to believe.
I also thought it would be good to combine a more general short history of Jews as a minority in Muslim lands with a more focused, local study of Jews in Palestine up until the eve of Israel’s creation. You can find a lot of work written about the history of ancient Israel and Judea up to the time of the Roman occupation, but from the early middle ages onwards, when Jews became a minority in Palestine, I have noticed it is not all that easy to find decent, concise accounts of these centuries in which they were, demographically, barely hanging on, up until the arrival of the first Zionist colonists at the end of the 19th century. So the focus will be on this, less well-known period for the most part. There will be an emphasis on comparisons with the fate of Jews in Europe in what follows. This is partly because comparisons can be generally instructive, but also because I want to examine the thesis that there is some particular enmity between Jews and Muslims stretching back centuries or that Islam has been particularly hostile to Judaism, compared to Christianity.
The first mention of a population identifying as ‘Israel’ is in an ancient Egyptian inscription known as the Merneptah Stele (c.1207 BCE). It is still unclear in what way this community distinguished itself from the other Canaanite peoples that had long inhabited the highland area centered around Jerusalem. It may have been primarily ethnic in nature, or religious, but there is insufficient evidence one way or another to say for sure. Nor is there any evidence that indicates the existence of an organised state until later on. Traditionally, the first state of Israel was believed to have been the so-called ‘United Monarchy’ which was postulated to have lasted from the mid-eleventh to mid-tenth centuries B.C. It should be noted, however, that there is no conclusive archaeological evidence for the existence of such a kingdom during this time, nor are there any references to it in contemporary sources outside the Bible. Even less-attested is the Biblical origin-story of the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah, their sons Isaac and Jacob (later called Israel) and so on, once believed to have been historical figures who lived in the second millennium. Consensus now is that these were stories—the elements of a national foundation myth—that their origins a thousand years later.
This points to a danger in relying too heavily on the Bible as a historical source. As Paula McNutt has put it, this risks ‘engaging in a kind of circular reasoning—that is, generating a cultural and historical “reality” from a text and then turning around and trying to understand the same text in relation to the background that was reconstructed from it’. (McNutt 3) So, if we’re talking about solid evidence, the first Jewish states were the southern Kingdom of Judah and a northern Kingdom of Israel, both of which were in existence by around 930 BCE. In ridiculously-broad strokes, the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, while Judah suffered the same fate at the hands of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE. This event involved the exile to Babylon of a significant portion of the population, in particular of priests and ruling elite figures. The following period of Babylonian captivity was seminal for the history of the Jews and their religion. The exiled community was responsible for important sections and elements of the Bible and the experience strengthened and solidified Jewish identity-formation with respect to other peoples.
Babylon was conquered by the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great in 538 BCE and the Jews were allowed to return to Judah. The area remained under Persian rule for the following two centuries, until the conquests of Alexander the Great rolled into town, ushering in a period in which the Jews inhabited the frontier between the Seleucid Empire on the one hand and Ptolemaic Egypt on the other, both Hellenistic successor states of the empire Alexander founded. While Seleucid rulers were initially tolerant of the Jews’ religious traditions, tensions eventually emerged which led to the Maccabean Revolt of 167–160 BCE resulting in the establishment of a dynasty of indigenous rulers, the Hasmonean dynasty. This was gradually brought into the sphere of Roman influence to the point where Judea became a Roman vassal state. The Roman Senate eventually appointed a new ruler in 40 BCE, Herod the Great, who oversaw the further erosion of Judean autonomy until the point at which it became a Roman province in 6 CE. The crushing of Jewish revolt against Roman rule (66–70 CE) was an important chapter in the destruction of a coherent Jewsish polity and religious organisation in the area. Jews nevertheless probably remained in the majority until the period of Byzantine rule, beginning in the 4th century, after which Palestine was part of the Eastern Roman Empire. An increasingly-intolerant Christian community imposed harsher and harsher restrictions on Jews during this period. This, added to increased Christian immigration to the area, meant that Jews probably numbered less than 20% of the population on the eve of the Arab conquest of the 7th century.
Okay, so that’s almost two millenia of Jewish history summed up in a couple of paragraphs. The Muslim Arabs began their conquest of Byzantine Levant in 634, just two years after the death of Muhammad. The region was primarily Christian at the time, but Islam had already come into contact with Judaism during the Prophet’s lifetime. The conflicts that occured in Medina between his followers and the Jewish community are sometimes cited as setting the tone for a future history of enmity between the two religions, but this is deeply misleading. What really occured after the Hijra (Muhammad’s departure from Mecca to settle in Medina) was that he sought support from influential Jewish tribes against his enemies in Mecca. An alliance was made, but this broke down in successive stages, leading to bitterness and hostility as some of the Jews he had allied with went over to his enemies’ side. The frustration of these diplomatic ambitions were allied to the frustration of hopes that the Jews (as monotheists awaiting a prophet) would accept Muhammad as the real deal. When this failed to transpire, the tone of condemnation grows more apparent in the Qur’an and expulsion and (in at least one case) massacre was the fate awaiting those Jews who failed to help the Muslims as they gathered adherents in their fight against Mecca and pagans generally. These events need to be seen in their historic context, however, as reflecting the politics of a particular historical moment rather than reflective of some intractable hostility towards Judaism grounded in Islamic theology.
As Mark Cohen has noted, the harsh treatment of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe for example, far from representing a turn from initial toleration to hostility towards the Jews, actually did not represent a precedent. (Cohen in Meddeb and Stora 61) If anything, the early history of relations between the two religions speaks to a state of affairs which, if it cannot be described as ‘tolerance’ in the modern sense of the word, represented a kind of contract between the dominant religious community and non-Muslims, in which the latter’s subjugated status was regulated, but at the same time many of their rights in terms of personal safety/property and freedom of belief were guaranteed. Jews, Christians and all other people ‘of the book’ (i.e. monotheists; pagans were beyond the pale) were known as dhimmi or ‘protected people’ and the normal course of affairs throughout the middle ages and the early-modern period was for these dhimmi to be guaranteed protection from arbitrary oppression and forced conversion if they accepted the formal impositions imposed on them, such as the payment of a tax imposed on non-Muslims, the jizya, and restrictions on the building of places of worship.
This was pretty much as close as the middle ages came to ‘toleration’, and far closer to toleration than the situation of Jews in Christendom. It should also be noted for historical perspective that the idea of ‘tolerance’ as a virtuous trait is a fairly recent invention. Any self-respecting Christian or Muslim until the modern period generally viewed tolerance of other faiths as a neglect of their duty to propagate their own. Criticism of other religions was based on the premise that its tenets were false, not that its adherents were intolerant. (Lewis 3-4) Any talk of ‘toleration’ in that sense must therefore be tempered by an recognition that this is not what was being aspired to. Glaring differences are nevertheless apparent in the lot of Jews in Christian Europe and the Dar al-Islam. There was nothing in the Islamic world analogous to the specific law targeting Jews that were enacted in many European countries. (Cohen in Meddeb and Stora 65) It has been argued that conquest by Islam may have been relatively less onerous for Jews compared to Christians and Zoroastrians. While these had enjoyed a privileged status in the Byzantine empire and Sasanian Iran respectively, Jews had lived as a minority in these realms already; domination by an overbearing religious community was just more of the same for them. (Rustow in Meddeb and Stora 77)
Either way, in Islam, Jews were just another group of dhimmi, subjected to generalised discriminatory legislation as non-Muslims, but not as Jews. The converse—that in many parts of Europe, Jews were the only significant religious minority—may partly explain why Christian Europe was comparatively less tolerant. There are other factors that plausibly explain this difference (Meddeb and Stora 30-32) of course, among them the proselytising impulse in Christianity that could not fully accept Jews until they had converted to Christianity. Whereas the dhimmi system allotted a place (albeit an inferior one) to non-Muslims within Islamic society and left them to it, there was simply no place for non-Christians in a Christian society until ideas of secularism and religious freedom began to take root in the 18th century. Islam on the other hand, contained injunctions against compelling others to convert in the text of the Qur’an itself (Sura 2:256), although once again this should not be mistaken for ‘tolerance’ of other faiths, but was merely a warning against compelling an insincere or superficial conversion.
Ultimately, judging two religions in some kind of competition for who was more ‘tolerant’ is a bit silly and not an exercise in serious history. Any black and white depiction of a tolerant Islam contrasted with an intolerant Christendom would be a simplification. Both in time and place, conditions deviated from any generalisation. There were periods of persecution under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (996–1021) and by the Almohads in North Africa in the 1140s, in which thousands of Jews and Christians were killed and thousands subjected to forced conversion. But again it must be noted that these atrocities were inflicted upon all non-Muslims, not directed specifically at Jews. The Almohads, indeed, persecuted Muslims they regarded as insufficiently zealous. Even these dark periods cannot be interpreted, therefore, as instances of hatred towards Jews as Jews or inchoate antisemitism.
What about Palestine then? As noted above, Jews were likely already a minority in Palestine by the coming of Islam, at which time the Christianity of the eastern Byzantine empire was ascendant and the area divided up into the provinces of Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and (later) Palaestina Tertia (see map above), these in turn being a part of the larger ‘Diocese of the East’, which stretched from modern-day Turkey, through the Levant and all the way to Egypt. The position of Judaism in early Christianity was ambiguous, and the degree of persecution which they suffered ebbed and flowed over time as political exigencies, religious fervour and the state’s ability to enforce its will waxed and waned. While not as systematic and relentless as that meted out to pagans, Jews were excluded from government service and subject to periods of forced conversion, destruction of synagogues and other forms of persecution, especially under Justinian I (527-565). On the other hand, they enjoyed certain legal guarantees during some periods at least, that were not unlike the dhimmi system in Islam. One curious feature of Christian thought was that the Jews should be kept around as a living reminder of the punishment God imposed on those who refused to acknowledge Jesus as their messiah.
That the Jews of Palestine chafed under the yoke of Byzantine power is suggested by the fact that they took advantage of the empire’s war during the reign of Heraclius (610-641) with the neighbouring Sasanian Empire (Iran) in 613 to join forces with the invaders in an attempt to carve out some kind of autonomous polity for themselves. Under Persian occupation, the Jews were reportedly given control over Jerusalem from 614 to 617, but this ended badly when the Persians changed policy and abandoned their allies. When Heraclius recaptured Palestine in 628, despite promises of a pardon, a general massacre of Jews occurred at the instigation of his priests and monks. Legend records was that Heraclius’ astrologers freaked him out with predictions that his empire would fall to a nation of circumcised people. Mistakenly believing this meant the Jews, the emperor unleashed a campaign of forced conversion to forestall the danger, not realising the prophesised danger was incubating to the south, in Arabia. (Falk 353-4)
It would not be surprising then to find that the Muslim conquest of Palestine was welcomed by the Jews. Evidence for the response of the population is thin on the ground. The Hebrew scholar David ben Abraham al-Fasi (who lived in a later period) is sometimes cited as noting that the Muslims allowed the Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, a practice that had been forbidden them under Christian rule, indicating some improvement in conditions. It seems likely in any case that Jews had been forbidden from settling permanently in Jerusalem under Christian rule, a prohibition which would eventually be lifted under Islamic rule. (Rustow in Meddeb and Stora 82) At the same time, however, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (685–705) undertook major building projects on sites that had been sacred to the Jews, most notably the Dome of the Rock, situated on the Temple Mount. Any perceived toleration of the Jews’ presence, therefore, must incorporate the fact that the Muslims clearly saw their own faith as having superseded Judaism.
On the whole it may be that—beyond the imposition of the jizya and the fact that the Christians joined the ranks of the non-privileged—Muslim rule in the early period at least did not bring any immediate revolutionary changes for the indigenous population. Lacking traditions of highly-developed state institutions and urban development, the Arabs retained the existing Byzantine civil service and its personnel, and Greek would remain the language of administration for decades after nominal Arab conquest. A willingness to assimilate and incorporate the culture and personnel of the conquered extended to entrusting positions of high office to Jews in various Islamic states. This was particularly true in al-Andalus, the areas of Iberia conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate in the early 8th century. Often described as a Golden Age of Jewish culture, historians debate the extent to which Muslim Spain was an inter-faith utopia, but at the very least it can be said that Jews enjoyed a freedom to practice their faith and advance socially in a way that was unthinkable in the other medieval kingdoms of Europe.
This is attested to by the migration of Jews from around Europe to al-Andalus and by the prominence of Jewish individuals in trade, art and politics. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, for example, was a Jew who rose to the rank of vizier (a high-ranking advisor somewhat analogous to a prime minister) to Abd al-Rahman III, Umayyad Emir and then Caliph of Córdoba in the 10th century. Samuel ibn Naghrillah, likewise held a similar position in the kingdom of Granada in the next century, as did his son, although the latter’s success provoked such jealously and suspicion from the population that he was assassinated, followed by a general massacre of the Jews in 1066. Maimonides (1138–1204), a Sephardic rabbi and philosopher, could likewise be cited as an example of the prominence and status of Jews in this period. He was, however, expelled from Córdoba by the puritanical Almoravids for refusing to convert to Islam, symptomatic of a decline in tolerance that signalled the end of the Golden Age.
This period also witnessed a deterioration in the position of Jews in Christendom. Even under Justinian, whose legal code saw an intensification of repression, Judaism had at least been recognised as a religion, albeit an inferior one, and its subordination regulated in a manner not dissimilar in principle to Islam. As the middle ages progressed, however, the reality as opposed to the legal theory became harsher for Jews (and Muslims) as religious minorities in Europe. This is partly a result of the ideological impulse to convert non-Christians, but also a result of political tensions resulting from the conflicts between Christendom and Islam in the Reconquista and the Crusades. This also resulted in a worsening of the position of the dhimmi under Muslim rule, but, as Bernard Lewis has pointed out, as a general rule ‘Islamic practice on the whole turned out to be gentler than Islamic precept—the reverse of the situation in Christendom’. (Lewis 24)
Lewis incidentally, who I have criticised previously on this blog, could never be accused on painting Islam in a rosy or uncritical light; quite the contrary, he was described on his death a few years ago as ‘a notorious Islamophobe who spent a long life studying Islam in order to demonise Muslims’, someone who had spent ‘a lifetime studying people he loathes’. (Dabashi 2018) So, not someone inclined to soft pedal its record towards minorities in any period. The scathing critique cited above is essentially correct; Lewis was a bit of a bigot, and he seemed to get worse as he aged, and yet I found his 1984 book The Jews of Islam to be fairly well-balanced and faithful to its sources.
Discussion of the Crusades provides a good opportunity to return the focus to Palestine. Jerusalem was, after all, the ultimate goal and focal point of Christian military campaigns set in train by Pope Urban II in 1095 against a background of reformist zealotry in the west and a request for military aid from Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who was facing a serious military threat from the Seljuk Turks in the east. There were other, less altruistic, motives driving Western Christendom to launch this massive movement of men and arms against the eastern Mediterranean, the first of many such attacks staged every few decades throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. This is not the place for an in-depth narrative of the Crusades, however. The salient point for us is that the Crusaders succeeded in their aim of capturing Jerusalem in 1099. The city and surrounding country had been disputed for decades between two rival Muslim powers, the Fatimids—a Shia dynasty of North African origin who had made Cairo their capital—and the aforementioned Sunni Seljuk Turks. While the latter had captured the city in 1071, the Fatimids took it back on the eve of the Crusades. The crusaders conquest of the city inaugurated a period of almost a century of Christian rule under a ‘King of Jerusalem’, until re-taken by the Seljuks under Saladin in 1187. The Kingdom of Jerusalem as a polity lasted until 1291, although its capital moved north to Acre.
It did not bode well for the Jews of Palestine that the Crusaders had, en route to the ‘Holy Land’, massacred Jews they encountered in Germany in 1096. By this time, the centre of Jewish population in the region had moved to Tyre (Frenkel in Meddeb and Stora 156), but the number of Jews in Jerusalem was still significant enough to be mentioned in accounts of its defence against the Crusaders. Jews fought alongside Muslims and, in defeat, suffered similar atrocities at the hands of the invaders. Concrete figures are difficult to come by, but the Crusaders appear to have gone on an indiscriminate killing spree against all non-Christians, man, woman and child. The eyewitness Raymond of Aguilers wrote of soldiers riding in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Many Jews fled into their synagogue, whereupon it was burned to the ground by the Christians. Approximately 40,000 souls were murdered in the taking of Jerusalem. (Kostick)
Once things had settled down, a kind of dhimmi system was imposed by the Crusaders on the conquered population. The reality of this dispensation perhaps bears out Lewis’ observation above that Christian practice tended to be harsher than precept. The rape of women, enslavement, arbitrary violence at the hands of Christian rulers and the landed gentry they imported continued to be a reality of life for some time after the conquest. The old Byzantine prohibition against Jews living in Jerusalem was re-introduced. Orthodox Christians native to the area were classed alongside Jews and Muslims as a second-class untermensch. By the time the Jewish-Iberian traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited Jerusalem in 1173, there were only 200 Jews (possibly only 4, depending on how you reading the Hebrew characters in his account) living in Jerusalem, mainly associated with the business of dyeing cloth. Little more than a decade later, the city was reconquered by Saladin’s forces and the Sultan issued a proclamation inviting all Jews to return and settle in Jerusalem.
The return of Muslim control over Palestine brought a recovery of sorts in the Jewish population. It is difficult to quantify this recovery; some sources claim it began more or less immediately after the Muslims retook control, others that it did not really occur until the 1260s, when Moses ben Nachman, a rabbi and scholar who had been forced to leave Spain in his old age by the persecution of the Dominicans, settled in the country. Nachmanides as he is more-commonly known, is a figure often closely associated with this refounding of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, where he founded a synagogue in 1267 and settled in Acre, dying there three years later. This theme—of the Jews seeking refuge from Christian persecution in the Muslim lands—is one that looms large in the centuries ahead, especially as the Spanish Christian conquest of al-Andalus known as the Reconquista intensified. This final push to expel all Muslim taifas from the Iberian peninsula was in reality a long drawn-out process that took centuries, culminating in the fall of the Granada emirate in 1492. Of relevance for our story is the fact that this process was accompanied by an intensification of religious intolerance, directed not only against Muslims but the Jews. A particular low point was the year 1391, in which untold thousands of Jews were murdered across Castile and Aragon. It is estimated that about half of the survivors converted to Catholicism to avoid a similar fate.
The Golden Age was a distant memory by this stage. The persecution reached its peak in the same year Granada fell, as the ‘Catholic Monarchs’ Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon issued the Alhambra Decree ordering the expulsion from their kingdoms of all practising Jews. In its wake, over 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism to avoid leaving and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled. Over the following centuries a sustained migration took place of Jews from not only Spain, but all over Europe. Some went to the nearby Maghreb (where a significant Jewish population would remain until the 20th century), others went to those parts of the eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman control. Some, of course, went to Palestine, which at the time of the expulsion was under the control of the Egypt-based Mamluk dynasty. By 1517, however, it has been conquered by the expanding Ottomans who had conquered Constantinople in 1453. This confluence of events—Spanish expulsion of Jews and Ottoman rule—would provide the backdrop for the following four centuries of Jewish life in Palestine.
In the Ottoman lands generally Jews were—and the word is used by numerous historians—welcomed by the regime. This welcome may well have been motivated by pragmatism as much as tolerance and goodwill, but nevertheless it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the leading Muslim power in the early-modern world was, in effect, a refuge for Jews against Christian persecution. We do not need to portray the Ottoman Empire as some kind of liberal utopia concerned with human rights to explain this. The Sultan in Constantinople saw the Jews as an educated, enterprising group who brought skills and in some cases capital with them to his domains. This utilitarian view of Jewish immigration is supported by the way the Ottoman regime occasionally took it upon themselves to resettle Jews from one part of the empire in another as a kind of social engineering. (Veinstein in Meddeb and Stora 179)
It nevertheless remains the case that, just as in medieval al-Andalus, it was possible for Jews to advance high up the social and professional ladder in the Ottoman empire. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the Nasi family, particularly Joseph Nasi and his aunt/mother-in-law Gracia Mendes Nasi, who had fled Spain first to Portugal and finally ended up in the Ottoman domains in the 1550s. Joseph became a wealthy trader and powerful diplomat under the Sultan Selim II, being given the title Duke of Naxos. Salomon Aben Yaesh (born Alvaro Mendes in Portugal) was another hugely wealthy and influential Jewish trader who moved to Thessaloniki (one of the most popular destinations for Jewish immigrants in the Ottoman Empire) to practice his religion freely. He used his contacts all over Europe to gather important intelligence for Sultan Murad III and was made Duke of Lesbos.
It may be useful at this point to define a few distinctions that will become important going forward. Those that left Spain (ספרד or Sefarad in Hebrew) came to be known as Sephardic Jews. They brought with them their own skills and culture to their new home, where they preserved their form of Castilian Spanish which would become known as Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, which is still spoken today by a minority (mostly older people) in Israel. In Palestine, they tended to integrate and intermarry with the pre-existing Arabic-speaking Jewish population and with other Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, often referred to as Mizrahi (of the Orient) Jews. These groups tend to be defined in contrast to Ashkenazi Jews, those of central and eastern European origin, the word ‘Ashkenaz’ referring in medieval Jewish tradition to the region along the Rhine River. The origins of this community are debated but, in broad strokes, emerged from migration into Germany from the same dispersion out of Iberia and other Medditerranean lands, later re-settling all over eastern Europe. By the late 18th century Russia and Poland were home to about half of the world’s Jews. (Dowty 44)
Like the Sephardic Jews, the Ashkenazi developed their own language, Yiddish, a variant of High German with Hebrew influences. The treatment of the Ashkenazi in many European lands was far harsher than that of Jews in Muslim countries, however, and they were subject to frequent state-sponsored persecution. Most Jews in the Russian empire lived in areas like Poland and Ukraine that had been annexed, and were forbidden to live outside this ‘Pale of Settlement’. Within this area, they were mostly kept in grinding poverty and subjected to intermittent pogroms. The word ‘pogrom’ itself is a loan-word from Russian and found its way west after a wave of antisemitic riots swept through this area in 1881-84 after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. This violence is also said to have convinced many Russian Jews that any hope of assimilation into Russian society was futile and that emigration was the only option. Most fled to the United States, but a few chose the relatively-novel idea of emigration to Ottoman Palestine.
This idea of Jewish settlement into the area where the Jewish states of antiquity happend to have been situated was one that had never completely died out, and sporadic attempts had been made to lead groups of Jews from Europe and other parts of the Ottoman empire to settle in Palestine (by among others the aforementioned Nasi family). It was only in the late 19th century, however, that an ideology of constituting a Jewish homeland in the area and practical plans to bring this about, were developed. A group known as Hibat-Tsion (Lovers of Zion) was founded in 1884 by a Russian doctor, Leon Pinsker, who had been disabused of the idea of assimilation into Russian society by the aforementioned pogroms. This pre-dated the more-famous Zionist Organization of Theodor Herzl by more than a decade. This wave of Jewish immigration in the 1880s-90s, known as the First Aliyah, was mostly economically motivated and individualistic in its objectives. It is often distinguished from the Second Aliyah (1904-1914) which was more ideologically cohesive and conscious of their settlement being the precursor to the establishment of a Jewish state at some point in the future.
The idea must have seemed far-fetched at the time. By the time the Ottomans conquered Palestine in 1517 it was a backwater. If a motorway had existed between Egypt and Syria in those days, it was the kind of place they’d have built a bypass around. Urban populations had declined, the population was mostly rural and poor, the area’s only fame attached to its sites of religious interest. The centre of Jewish life in Palestine was actually Safed in Galilee, only later being superseded by Jerusalem at some point in the 17th century. Few were induced to settle in the region. A notion of Palestine as the ‘Holy Land’ developed during the Ottoman period, not necessarily as a place to live but as a place to be cherished in the imagination, a place in which the small Jewish population clinging on prayed for their co-religionists out in the diaspora and were in return supported by charity from the latter. As Yaron Ben Naeh has put it, Palestine had become, by the early 19th century ‘a faraway ideal rather than a tangible reality […] more than an inhabitable space, it was rather the land of holy places in which elderly believers came to live out their last days.’ (Ben Naeh in Meddeb and Stora 208)
Many visitors to the region in the 19th century—not least the first Zionist settlers—were struck by the wretched poverty of the indigenous Jewish community. Given the examples of Jewish success in the early-modern period cited above, this begs the question: what happened? This decline reflects a broader decline in the Ottoman empire as a whole. Lewis argued that an important factor in Jewish success originally had been their European contacts and knowledge, language skills etc. that had made them useful to the Ottomans. As time passed and contact with their countries of origin faded, these were lost and, moreover, such skills were acquired by other minorities such as the Greeks and Armenians. The rising power of European nation states was another factor. Christians in the Ottoman empire enjoyed their support, while Jews did not. (Lewis 141-143) In Palestine specifically, another reason that has been suggested is that, as time when by, Jewish immigration changed in complexion. An influx of older Jews arriving to spend their last years in the Holy Land has already been mentioned. Also of importance was the demographic shift within the Jewish community towards Ashkenazi Jews.
The first known Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem dates from 1687, shortly followed by a significant influx of settlers from Poland led by a preacher known as Judah the Pious, who brought a group of over 500 people to settle in Palestine in 1700. Unlike the pre-existing Jewish population that had integrated comfortably into Ottoman society, however, European Jews tended to resist acculturation, choosing to remain European in culture or even adopt Ottoman citizenship. Unlike Sephardic Jews, they kept the Arab population at arms length and resisted integration to the local economy. Tensions followed, not only with the local Arab population and Turkish authorities, but also with their Sephardic co-religionists. In 1720 a mob stormed the Ashkenazi quarter in Jerusalem and shortly afterwards European Jews were forbidden from entering Jerusalem, a ban which would only be lifted in the early 19th century. (Dowty 29) It was from around that time that the Ashkenazi proportion of the population in Palestine began to swell.
Ashkenazi failure to integrate in the economy has already been mentioned. Unfamiliar with the local language and customs, lacking the skills needed to thrive in it, the fate of many European Jews in Palestine at this time was to be supported by charity from the diaspora. (Ben Naeh in Meddeb and Stora 207) It might be imagined that the series of reforms instituted by the Ottomans in the mid-19th century would alleviate these problems. These measures known as the Tanzimat were a series of constitutional reforms intended to modernise the Ottoman state and, among other things, inculcate a sense of Ottoman national identity in order to stem the tide of nationalism among its non-Turkish subjects. In theory, they gave Jews and other non-Muslims the same rights as Muslims, making them citizens equal under the law. This meant the end of the jizya, but at the same time introduced obligations to the state that they hadn’t had before, a duty to serve in the army for example. The Ottomans meanwhile recognised the status of non-Muslim religious groups as millets (communities of the empire), giving groups like the Jews a significant degree of autonomy to administer tax collection, education, legal and religious affairs of their own communities.
Other developments of the period, however, undermined any good these enlightened reforms might have made. The Tanzimat was partly an attempt to halt the decline of the Ottoman state, which had fallen behind the nation states of Europe by the mid-19th century when it earned the epithet ‘the sick man of Europe’. This is not the place for a detailed explanation of how this came about (economic and technological stagnation, military defeat, nationalism in the regions) but one of the consequences was the ‘capitulations’, contracts the Ottomans made with the big European powers which gave citizens of the latter extensive rights and privileges in Ottoman territory.
These agreements had originally been made when the Ottomans were powerful, and were designed to entice European trade and investment, somewhat like Special economic zones in China. By the 19th century, however, the balance of power had changed dramatically and the capitulations had become an instrument for European powers to exert influence in Ottoman territory and undermine the latter’s sovereignty. European citizens were, by the capitulations, often exempt from local prosecution, taxation, conscription and many other obligations borne by other residents. The upshot of all this for the Jewish community was that many Ashkenazi Jews chose to avail of these rights as European citizens, settling in Palestine but benefiting from the protection of their countries of origin. This accentuated the sense of separation between them and everyone else around them, including other Jews. This went so far that in 1867 Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem asked the Ottoman government to recognize them as a separate sect from the Sephardic community, allowing them complete autonomy from the latter’s institutions. (Campos 18)
The capitulations generally, and European championing of certain groups’ rights, can be seen as a method by which western powers got their tentacles into Palestine, just as Egypt, the Balkans, North Africa were also subject to European encroachment at this time. Palestine was being prising away from Ottoman control…and into someone else’s control, in a process which, as Ilan Pappé has noted, has often been presented by historians as synonymous with ‘modernisation’. (Pappé 2006, 2) That this was done under the guise of protecting religious minorities is rather ironic and frankly cynical, when you consider the antisemitism of Europe itself. Even Tsarist Russia—probably the worst place to be a Jew—got in on the act as a means of augmenting their influence in the region. They were late to the game, however. In 1848, the regime had told Russian Jews seeking its protection to look elsewhere. The British consul was happy to oblige, having few British Jewish immigrants in the area to take advantage of—ahem—protect. It was not until 1890 that the Russians realised the strategic utility of defending Russian Jews in Palestine (the largest group of foreign Jewish citizens resident there)…while persecuting them mercilessly at home, and reclaimed its jurisdiction over Russian Jews on Ottoman territory. (Dowty 33)
While in some ways, European society was becoming more liberal and tolerant in the early to mid 19th century, in others it was becoming more antisemitic. This period saw the legal emancipation of Jews in many European states, but at the same time a ‘new antisemitism’ was emerging in reaction to these liberalising developments, a hatred ‘based less on religious and more on racial grounds’. (Dowty 53) This new strain of hostility against Jews built upon earlier prejudices but, unlike earlier anti-Jewish sentiment, was unwilling to accept even those Jews who had converted to Christianity. It posited an indelible stain of racial Jewishness that could never be assimilated, in keeping with pseudoscientific theories of the time, and argued that the most assimilated Jews were in fact the most dangerous as a potential fifth column, feigning loyalty to the nation but really serving other masters.
These new antisemites in fact were the ones who came up with the term ‘antisemitism’, believing it gave off an aura of scientific respectability, and organised the First International Anti-Semitic Congress in 1882 in Dresden. Other events such as the Dreyfus affair (1894-1906), the success of the antisemite Karl Lueger as Mayor of Vienna from 1897-1910 and of course the rise of the Nazis, fascism and the Holocaust, are testament to the worst that was was still to come for European Jews. This new antisemitism was therefore a strong push factor in the emerging movement for a ‘return’ to the land of Israel which would coalesce in the Zionist movement at the end of the century. It was an idea welcomed both by those Jews who perceived they would never be accepted as equals by Europe’s antisemites, and by the same antisemites, who wished to be rid of the Jews. Another push factor was the efforts of evangelical Christians who believed the ‘return’ of the Jews to Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem were prerequisites for the second coming of Jesus Christ. These Christian Zionists were increasingly putting their (frankly bonkers) ideas into practice, raising money to purchase land and fund settlers to establish Jewish communities. One of the most prominent of these was a Tory politician, the 7th earl of Shaftesbury, whose interest in the Jewish people is expressed succinctly in the following extract from an article he wrote in 1839, combining as it does his casual antisemitism with the desire to pack the Jews off to Palestine in a couple of sentences:
…the Jews must be encouraged to return in yet greater numbers and become once more the husbandman of Judea and Galilee … though admittedly a stiff-necked, dark hearted people, and sunk in moral degradation, obduracy, and ignorance of the Gospel, [they are] not only worthy of salvation but also vital to Christianity’s hope of salvation.
Given that part of the plan was for these Jews to convert to Christianity and usher in the end times, it seems unlikely that concern or love for Jews motivated people like Shaftesbury, nor does it motivate the many Christian fundamentalists in America today who support Israel so staunchly for the same reason.
The problem with all these plans was, of course, that Palestine wasn’t empty. It almost escaped my mind to mention the narrative, promoted by the Israeli state and education system and some Americans, that Palestine was a barren desert before Zionism. This fantasy is frankly beneath contempt and I won’t even discuss it here, but for a thorough debunking of it, based on excellent Israeli scholarship, see Ilan Pappé’s, Ten Myths About Israel which when I checked last was being given away for free as an ebook by Verso Books.
As can be seen below, Jews were still a small minority in 1900 even after the initial wave of immigration after the Russian pogroms.
| Estimated population of Palestine by religious group, based on work by Sergio Della Pergola | |||
| Jews | Christians | Muslims | |
| 1800 | 7,000 (2%) | 22,000 (8%) | 246,000 (89%) |
| 1890 | 43,000 (8%) | 57,000 (10%) | 432,000 (81%) |
| 1914 | 94,000 (13%) | 70,000 (10%) | 525,000 (76%) |
The main purpose of this post, however, has been to look at the Jewish community in Palestine before the Zionists came, the so-called ‘Old Yishuv’, and to examine the notion of an age-old hostility between Jews and Muslims. It will also hopefully have become abundantly clear by this stage that this is a myth. Even with the influx of an Ashkenazi community less amenable to integration, by the early 20th century the picture that emerges from first-hand accounts of the time is one of Jews and Muslims sharing each others daily life, living and working together, learning each others languages and customs. What tensions there were, were largely between Jews and Christians, who tended to avoid shared living spaces and occasionally came to blows around religious holidays such as Easter/Passover. Another fact worth mentioning is that while Sephardic Jews lived cheek by jowl with Muslims, they and their Ashkenazi co-religionists spoke different languages, went to different synagogues and schools and lived in different neighborhoods. (Campos 18 and Al-Jubeh in Meddeb and Stora 214)
It would be misleading, however, to portray this time and place as some interfaith utopia. Conflict between Muslims and Jews undoubtedly occurred, but sentiments that can legitimately be called antisemitic did not appear until the late 19th century, and when they did they were transmitted to the Arab world from their European source, at first through mostly French texts, while British diplomats did their part by spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish masonic schemes and involvement in the Young Turks movement. These sentiments were no doubt fueled by fears of increased Jewish settlement and talk of founding their own state, and antisemitism provided a readymade fund of tropes to draw on. Crucial to remember, however, is that the looming conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews that would intensify in the following decades was political in nature, not a matter of hatred but a specific material conflict between two groups of people both claiming the same piece of land. (Lewis 173, 184-5, 189)
The possibility that the vast majority of the population might object to being pushed off their land never seemed to occur to many early Zionist settlers. Not that no-one was aware. The young Russian Jewish socialist, Ilia Rubanovich, wrote critically of Zionism in 1886:
What is to be done with the Arabs? Would the Jews expect to be strangers among the Arabs or would they want to make the Arabs strangers among themselves? . . . The Arabs have exactly the same historical right and it will be unfortunate for you if . . . you make the peaceful Arabs defend their right. They will answer tears with blood and bury your diplomatic documents in the ashes of your own homes. (translated in Dowty 83)
But the New Yishuv was different from the old, different in its sense of purpose, its determination to adopt agriculture and ‘redeem the land’, as well as its unwillingness to fraternise with not only the other religious groups already inhabiting Palestine, but even with the existing Jewish population. The Zionist movement gave the impression of being uninterested in or even downright hostile to the Old Yishuv. Its representative in Istanbul, Victor Jacobsohn, did not think they would be ‘useful’ to the cause. Other Zionist officials expressed the opinion that Palestine’s Jewish community should stay out of internal Zionist affairs, as Michelle Campos has put it: ‘in effect disenfranchising them from the very movement which sought to speak and act in their name.’ (Campos 206-7)
The project of Israel was not for these Jews. It was a European project, run by and for European Jews. Inded it is worth pausing for a moment to examine the whole idea that those Zionists settling in Palestine from the late 19th century on were ‘returning’ in any meaningful sense. It has been claimed by some that these were not descended from those Jews exiled from their homeland in antiquity; it has furthermore sometimes been claimed that the real descendants of these original Jews never left but converted to Christianity, then Islam, and are the Palestinians themselves. It must be stressed here that this argument is referring solely to genetic descent, not to people’s sense of belonging to one or other identity in a cultural sense, which to me seems to only real sense in which identity actually exists. Personally, I am not sure how this argument could even be settled one way or the other. It seems to me as plausible to say that the Palestinian Arab population are the descendants of the Jews of antiquity, as saying that the Poles, Americans, Australians etc. settling in Palestine are their descendants. Given the amount of intermixing, etc. it is questionable how meaningful the question is especially when talking about dispersed diasporic populations. Those interested in this debate can look at the work of Shlomo Sand and those who have both tried to debunk and corroborate it. On the whole, I think it the idea is a red herring and neither particularly relevant as a critique of Israeli settler colonialism, nor credible to back up the pretence you are ‘returning’ to a land somd distant answer may possibly have inhabited.
The impression that Israel was a project not for Jews, but for European (and by extension Euroamerican) Jews is strengthened by subsequent developments after the establishment of Israel, which would be dominated by Ashkenazi Jews. Their disdain for the pre-existing Sephardic and Maghrebi Jewish communities was carried over post-1948 into a contempt for those Mizrahi Jews who had come from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq and other places—often Arabic in language and culture—and their establishment as a second-class citizenry in the new state. In this light, those who characterise Israel as a European colony in the Middle East seem to have a point. The efforts of outside powers to bolster Israel also take on a different complexion to their professed concern for the Jewish people when examined more closely. Allusion has already been made above to the cynical use Tsarist Russia and Christian Zionists in Britain made during the 19th century of protecting Jews in Palestine as a pretext to attain foreign policy goals. It is hard to avoid seeing echoes of this in the United States’ obdurate support for Israel over the last 70 years.
Evidence certainly suggests that concern for the welfare of the Jewish people was not a primary factor motivating the Americans. At least until 1944, the U.S. government imposed restrictive immigration policies that severely limited the number of Jews from central and eastern Europe who could obtain refuge there. Even when the Nazis’ mass murder was underway, officials within the Department of State worked to prevent assistance to Jewish refugees and obscure information about the Holocaust. Nor was the United States massively committed to Israel until it was already a fait accompli. As late as March 1948, the administration was getting cold feet about support for a Jewish homeland, advocating at the UN for an international trusteeship over Palestine in its stead. (Pappé 2006, 120) Only when they realised the usefulness of a staunch ally in the oil-rich Middle East—and one that was almost-entirely dependent on them for military aid—did the Americans fully commit themselves to backing Israel, what US Secretary of State General Alexander Haig described in 1981 as ‘the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk’. The idea was echoed by a Senator for Delaware in 1986, Joe Biden: ‘Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region’. We see likewise a growing advocacy among Europe’s far-right for Israel, an admiration that stems more from its current prioritising of hatred towards Muslims over its traditional hatred of Jews, but one that has nonetheless attempted to present itself as being motivated by concern about rising antisemitism.
So that’s where we are now, in March 2024, with Nazis professing concern about rising antisemitism and those concerned about genocide being roundly condemned as antisemites. The world has, in other words, gone mad. But this blog was meant to be a contemporary history of the Muslim world, and I now realise I’ve spent 8000 words writing about non-Muslims and covering a space of 2000 years ending around 1900. Not particularly contemporary or maybe—like all history—it is, if you think about it in a certain way. Anyway, as recompense the plan is to get real contemporary in the next post and pick up the story where we left off in part 11, in Afghanistan in 1996, when a shadowy band of Pashtun Islamic fundamentalists seized power. If possible, I would like to try and take on the challenge of encapsulating the next two and half decades of Afghanistan’s history in one post, taking in 9-11, the U.S. invasion and western-backed government under Karzai and Ghani, up to 2021…when a shadowy band of Pashtun Islamic fundamentalists seized power.
Bibliography
Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers : Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2020)
Hamid Dabashi, ‘Alas, poor Bernard Lewis, a fellow of infinite jest: On Bernard Lewis and ‘his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong’. (Al Jazeera, 28 May 2018)
Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2021)
Avner Falk, A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1996)
Conor Kostick, The Siege of Jerusalem: Crusade and Conquest in 1099 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011)
Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1984)
Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds.), A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton University Press, 2013)
Paula McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel (SPCK Westminster John Knox Press, London, 2000)
Ilan Pappé, A history of modern Palestine: one land, two peoples (Cambridge University Press (2006)
Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel (Verso Books, 2017)
Sergio Della Pergola, Demography in Israel/Palestine: Trends, Prospects, Policy Implications (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2001)
Featured image above: A detail from ‘Shiviti’ by Moshe Ganbash (1838/39), a map depicting holy sites of importance to the Jews in Palestine. A clickable version is available on Wikimedia commons.
Controlling the narrative
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been just over three years since I posted anything on this blog. I received a couple of emails over the last year asking if it’s dead and buried. The short answer is no, but other committments have unfortunately left me with little time and/or energy to devote to it. Something reminded me last week, however, of the reasons that spurred me to create this blog in the first place, almost eight years ago. It seemed to me, and still seems, that a process of distorting recent history, of suppressing key parts and overemphasising others, has been going on over the last thirty years or so in relation to Muslims and the Islamic world. This started as an eccentric interpretation of events back in the 1990s, grew to become one possible interpretation of them, and after 9-11 went into overdrive to become at this stage, more or less the standard framework in which conflicts in the Muslim world are understood in the western imagination.
It’s all about changing our common narrative of the past in order to suit the version of events our governments and elites find more conjenial to their current policy objectives. Of course, history—the narrative which we construct of the past out of the bits and pieces of evidence at our disposal—changes all the time, as it should. New evidence comes to light, new interpretive frameworks emerge, blind spots and prejudices disappear (and new ones appear) changing our shared understanding of the past. This is different, however. The process I’m referring to here is not just about interpretation, it’s about subtracting from our knowledge of the past, the store of evidence on which we draw, to make us less aware of what went on in the past, and the not-very distant past at that.
Almost two weeks ago, the Guardian removed a letter from its website written by Osama Bin Laden, his well-known ‘Letter to America’ which had first appeared in November 2002 on a Saudi website linked to al-Qaeda and was then translated into English and posted on the Observer and Guardian websites. The letter was standard al-Qaeda stuff, criticising American foreign policy, justifying attacks on the United States and its allies by their attacks on Muslims in places as far afield as Somalia and Kashmir. A markedly-large proportion of the text was concerned with Palestine, and the injustices suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of Israel and, by extension, their American backers.
Whatever you think of bin Laden and his ideas, this is a key historical document. It gave a coherent and articulate account of the grievances of the al-Qaeda movement and what was driving their campaign of violence against the west. It made apparent how central the open sore of Palestine was, and still is. So why was it removed on the 15 November 2023 and replaced by the following statement:
There are chilling Orwellian overtones here. As Frederick Joseph, an American author on racism and social justice, explained in a video about the removal on TikTok:
This is a really good example of narrative control and censorship. It started going viral, not because people were necessarily agreeing with Osama Bin Laden’s actions or his moral clarity, but rather because the letter offered perspective into the hypocrisy of America, the hypocrisy of settler colonial nations, so on and so forth, and discussing the atrocities people in the Middle East have faced. They’re afraid of people having information so they decided to take it down.
Joseph’s video has itself since been removed from TikTok, but I couldn’t have put it better myself. To take the Guardian’s article that allegedly contextualises the letter first: it doesn’t. It tells you practically nothing except the channels through which the letter was transmitted. Perhaps that’s the point. A big part of the corporate news media’s agenda seems to be about making people ignorant of the historic context in which events occur. It led to the absurd spectacle of people reacting as if Hamas’ attack on Israel last month was the beginning of the conflict instead of something that had been going on for seventy years.
Secondly, where does the Guardian get off telling us in what context documents like this should be read? Do they see themselves as the ‘Guardians Of The Context’ itself? How do they know in what context (more likely contexts) people have been sharing the letter online? Claims have been made that the letter (or rather videos by people who had read the letter) was trending—going viral as they say—on TikTok, claims which TikTok denies and which, it has been argued elsewhere, are a gross exaggeration. TikTok has nevertheless felt compelled to release a statement that it is ‘proactively and aggressively removing this content’ which it (rather obscurely) claimed constituted ‘promoting this letter’ and supporting terrorism.1 Having seen a fair few of these videos, I can confidently state that practically none of them agreed with its sentiments or the justifications therein. What was an eye-opener, especially to many younger readers who don’t remember 9-11 personally, was that there were reasons behind the rage of bin Laden and his followers, that it wasn’t rooted in some inexplicable, irrational religious fanaticism but in a litany of atrocities comitted by the West against Muslim countries to which the jihadists were reacting.
Thanks to resources like the Wayback Machine, this ability to retrospectively change the past is not as easy for our elites as it was for the Ministry of Truth in 1984. You can, for example, look at the last cached version of the page on the Guardian’s website before it disappeared here.
Any sane person should reject al-Qaeda’s (and Israel’s, the United States, Russia’s, whoever’s) indiscriminate targeting of civilians, their collective punishment of entire populations because of the actions of their elites and governments, but you are forced, when confronted with the historical source, to admit that there was a causality and a logic to this conflict. And this is precisely what the Guardian (and most other mainstream media outlets) are uncomfortable with: the idea that people—especially young people—might have unmediated access to the facts and start thinking for themselves instead of having the context (as opposed to a fabricated context) spoonfed to them, and that they might start realising the conflict is explicable. It threatens elite control of the narrative.
Hearing so much nonsense about Muslims and Islam and why the current conflict has arisen was my main motivation for starting this blog in the first place. It also forced me to look into the origins of the ‘alternative facts’ that are peddled by right-wing politicians and commentators these days. For want of a better word you might call this the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ narrative. Samuel P. Huntington did not invent the idea or use it primarily to refer to a clash between the west and Islam specifically. In fact, the phrase was used by Bernard Lewis years earlier, in a 1990 article, to outline what he saw as ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’.
This was the title of Lewis’ article, and the most noteworthy thing about ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ is that it studiously ignores the roots of Muslim rage. He could not be said to have blind spots, because Lewis was clearly aware of western imperialism as a potential source of that rage, but he dismissed it in less than two pages. Instead, he put it down to a mixture of jealousy and resentment inherent in Muslim culture (as if such a thing was uniform from Mauritania to Afghanistan), an intolerance of other religions which he contrasts with the tolerance and secularism of the West.2 This view sees history primarily as the interaction of ideas, with humans as mere ciphers for mystical cultural processes. It is a man lost in books, wilfully (and that is important to acknowledge) lost in an academic understanding of the Muslim world as it appears in texts rather than outside his window. It is as if people don’t primarily respond to things like their houses being bombed and their food supply destroyed, but are instead manifestations of the Manichean dualities inherent in Islam, blah blah.
America’s support for repressive and reactionary governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, its unconditional backing for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, it is as if none of this was worth taking into account. You can imagine an impressionable Tony Blair or Bush Jr. reading this nonsense:
…we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations— the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both…
There’s that phrase again. This was 1990, before they got around to waging war on Iraq twice and Afghanistan once (for twenty years). In light of that, there is a grim irony to the sentence that follows:
It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.
Oops.
The mindset articulated here is, of course, almost-completely useless as an explanation for the conflict between the Muslim world and the West that has been intensifying for the last half century and more. It leads to people like Blair (who was so ignorant about Iran he had never heard of Mohammad Mosaddegh) or Bush explaining the violence of Al-Qaeda with vacuous nonsense such as: ‘they hate us for our freedoms‘. Imagine starving and bombing a people for years and when they finally retaliate, claiming it’s because they hate your ‘freedoms’.
To believe that some kind of intellectual/cultural crisis within Islam led to an otherwise-inexplicable upsurge in anti-western feeling and violence from around the 1970s onwards requires a staggeringly degree of historical ignorance and arrogance. Certainly, Islam as a worldview acted as a means of articulating and acting on that rage, but it is unbelievably wrongheaded (wilfully so in some cases, in others not) to insist that that was its source. This fantasy robs the present of context. It allowed Americans to be baffled when they were attacked in 2001, it allowed some to claim with a straight face that the Hamas attacks of 7 October on Israel were somehow ‘unprovoked’.
It confuses effect for cause, turning history on its head so that it seems like the current period of crisis was incited by Muslims against us. It conveniently ignores decades of western aggression towards the Middle East, Iran and Afghanistan, cynical meddling that intensified during the Cold War, largely stemming from the West’s growing reliance on petroleum and the importance of controlling its price. The rise of political Islam was a consequence of this, and a force that was as often backed by the west rather than against it, as the United States sought to undermine secular, Soviet-aligned movements. Listening to some of its ideologues, you would imagine that there had been a clear trend of the west encouraging democracy, secularism, tolerance, women’s rights etc. in the Middle East for the last century, only for these progressive ideals to be thrown back in its face. If anything, the opposite is the case. The existence of a secular, left-leaning movement in the Muslim world is the great missing piece of the puzzle and is being written out of history because it doesn’t fit with fantasies about a West fighting fundamentalist Islam.
Palestine is a perfect example of this. We have seen in recent weeks the promotion of a completely made-up account of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict as one rooted in Hamas’ intractable hatred of Israel/Jews, that this is somehow the cause of the conflict. Even a passing familiarity with recent history will tell you that this simply isn’t the case. This is not a question of interpretation or perspective or opinion, it’s simply factually untrue. As awful as Hamas is, they are clearly symptom rather than cause: a consequence of decades of a brutal occupation by Israel, indiscriminate killing of civilians, the nihilistic despair engendered by an abandoned peace process etc. What is being erased from the story is that the Palestinian cause was led until the 1990s by the secularist, socialist PLO (of which Fatah is a constituent party), but failure to make headway in the peace proces (not to mention corruption) undermined these forces.
It should also be said that the undermining of that peace process was largely the work of the Israeli right led by Netanyahu (and lavishly funded by the US right). It was Netanyahu, after all, who led the opposition to Yitzhak Rabin, who engaged in peace negotiations with the PLO. It was Netanyahu who marched in front of a mock funeral for the latter, his supporters chanting ‘Death to Rabin’, burning an effigy of him dressed in a Nazi uniform. When Rabin was assassinated on November 4 1995, his widow, Lehea, reflected that Netanyahu and his supporters had played a role in her husband’s murder.3 The murder of the peace process (Ariel Sharon played a central role too) could be added to his list of victims.
The point of this narrative is, of course, to create the illusion of an Israel acting as some kind of bastion of ‘western values’ (whatever they might be…bombing maternity wards?) against a barbaric, hate-filled Islamist enemy who ‘hate us for our freedoms’. Again, the facts tell a different story. If anything, you could argue that Hamas was effectively nurtured by Israel during its formative years in the 1980s and 1990s. This is well documented. Avner Cohen, Israel’s head of religious affairs in Gaza at the time of Hamas’s emergence, has admitted as much.4 During this period, Israel and Hamas shared a common enemy: Palestine’s secularist political establishment. The Israel authorities officially registered the Islamist group as a charity, allowing its members to spread its message and develop a network of institutions.5 Only later, when the monster it had helped create became the preeminent political force in Gaza, did Israel suddenly start pretending they had been battling Islamists all along.
In some ways this is reminiscent of the United States’ assistance to the fundamentalist Mujahideen in Afghanistan (and all that spawned) when they were a convenient ally against the Soviet Union, only to have it blow up in its face when the Jihadists turned their attention to the ‘Great Satan’ itself. But there are differences. Israel has certainly had to come to terms with the fact that it helped create a massive security problem in Hamas, but it has continued to nurture it as a useful means of dividing and weakening the Palestinian resistance. As recently as March 2019, for example, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues:
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
So there you have it, straight from the horses mouth (with apologies to horses).
This is just one more instance of the underlying point I set out to make with this blog: that this supposed conflict between Islam and The West is not rooted in some ancient ideological struggle between the two as people as Bernard Lewis and others have argued. It may seem like that at this stage, but this was a narrative made up in the not-too-distant past to explain tensions arising in the 20th century. These tensions arose from assaults and interventions in the Middle East by outside actors—not only the United States but also the Soviet Union—that caused untold suffering to ordinary people in countries as far afield as Afghanistan and Egypt. From propping up repressive regimes in Egypt or Iran to direct military intervention in Afghanistan or Iraq, not to mention the establishment of what is effectively a European cololony in the Levant with Israel or as US Secretary of State Alexander Haig described it: ‘the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk’.
These horrors have been inflicted upon the people of the region in the interests of western elites’ greed and lust for power. They have aroused considerable rage among those same people, and their reaction has convinced a lot of people in the West lacking knowledge of the historical context, that Muslims ‘hate us’ for some obscure reason. It no doubt appears perfectly plausible to many people in Muslim countries that people in the West hate them. I am still of the opinion that hate isn’t the main problem. Hate there is no doubt, but it is a consequence of ignorance, ignorance of the past, the recent past, and the only way to wake up from this nightmare is knowledge. This clarity got lost a bit as this blog became a more detailed history of the Muslim World in the last century, but I hope to kickstart it again soon.
- https://twitter.com/TikTokPolicy/status/1725198557936852994?s=20 ↩︎
- The West is, incidentally, absolved of all blame on the imperialism front; indeed, it gets a pat on the back for developing its own critiques of imperialism, although Lewis confusingly disparages these same critiques from the left as ‘the new mystique of Third Worldism’ and dismisses it as romantic nonsense based on fantasies of ‘the goodness and purity of the East and the wickedness of the West’. ↩︎
- https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/israels-final-solution-for-the-palestinians?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web ↩︎
- https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/ ↩︎
- https://www.analystnews.org/posts/how-israel-helped-prop-up-hamas-for-decades ↩︎
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 22: Kosovo #2
Picking up where we left off in the post before last, in April 1987 the President of Serbia, Ivan Stamboliç, sent a party functionary, Slobodan Milošević, to Kosovo in an attempt to try and ease tensions building up in the province between ethnic Albanians and Serbs. The latter claimed (and their claims were believed by many in Serbia) that they were being systematically driven out and oppressed by the Albanians in the autonomous province. Milošević instead took the Serbs side in the conflict and his conduct on the visit was widely reported in the Belgrade media, turning him almost overnight into an enormously popular figure among ethnic Serbs throughout Yugoslavia (and these were many in number outside the borders of Serbia itself, not only in Kosovo, but also in Bosnia and Croatia).
While playing up to and exploiting such fears had been a strict no-no under Tito, as Communism began to falter and collapse around Europe towards the end of the 1980s, playing the nationalist card suddenly became possible, and figures emerged who were willing to do so to further their political career. The month’s that followed Milošević’s shenanigans in Kosovo saw serious maneuvering backstage by him and his allies to remove rivals for power. Stamboliç and his allies were forced to resign under accusations of being ‘soft’ on Albanian radicals and abusing their power. This paved the way for Milošević to become President of Serbia and embark on what he called his ‘Anti-bureaucratic revolution’, which essentially meant him and his cronies organising what appeared to be a spontaneous series of street protests (which often descended into violence) of Serbs, who were often shipped in from Kosovo. These were staged in various parts of Yugoslavia, effectively forcing the collapse of regional governments in Vojvodina and Montenegro and their replacement with compliant Milošević allies. These (along with Kosovo, which we’ll get to in a minute) created a solid ‘Serbian bloc’ in the state presidency which could at the very least block any motions made by Serbia’s opponents and (depending on Macedonia which often sided with the Serbs, fearing their own significant Albanian minority) could often outvote the others (Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia).
It was denied by the Serbs (yes, not all Serbs supported Milošević it should be remembered) that this ‘revolution’ was driven by nationalism, but everyone knew it was. There was another aspect to this drive towards ‘centralisation’ however, which I have mentioned in a previous post, and this was Milošević’s eagerness to implement free-market reforms in order to get his hands on IMF loans to bail the country out. A part of this was showing potential lenders that the central government had a firm grip on Yugoslavia as a whole, something which had been far from self-evident in the highly decentralised system that emerged in the 1970s.
Exerting control over the governments of Vojvodina and Montenegro had been straightforward enough for Milošević. Kosovo was a different story. Here, where Albanians heavily outnumbered the Serbs, they had more or less taken over the local Communist party. In addition to this, while Milošević could always mobilise Serbian mobs in other places where the rest of the population were hardly likely to get out on the streets to support moribund communist apparatchicks, in Kosovo, the Albanian politicians had their own foot soldiers prepared to fight to prevent a re-imposition of Serbian dominance. One of the most important of these groups were the miners in Trepça, a huge mine just north of Mitrovica which constituted one of Yugoslavia’s biggest enterprises. Miners in the communist world enjoyed a special position of moral authority and were not easily ignored, due to their ability to cripple a country by going on strike.
The initial salvo came with moves to revise the constitution in 1988, which provoked protest from Albanian leaders. When Milošević moved to remove those who stood in his way, the miners of Trepça went out on strike. Their man, Azem Vlassi (above left), was returned to power as head of the local Communist Party. Further pressure was exerted, however, and in May Vlassi was demoted and replaced by Kaqusha Jashari (above right) who, while not an ally of Miloseviç, was expected to be easier to intimidate. She wasn’t. By now it was becoming obvious that the extinction of Kosovo’s autonomy and full integration back into Serbia was the aim of Milošević and his people. Jashari publicly opposed the draft constitution that was published in June and pointed out that, despite all their rhetoric about preserving the integrity of Yugoslavia, it was Milošević and his campaign that was driven by nationalism and threatened the status quo. She too was removed in November 1988. In defense of their leaders, the miners of Trepça led a huge march to Pristina (500,000 are reported to have attended) carrying pictures of Tito to demonstrate their loyalty to the status quo and not (as their enemies alleged) their commitment to separatism. Within months, the miners’ protests had escalated into hunger strikes.
It was all to no avail. In February 1989, Milošević got the State Council and the Yugoslav president to grant him special powers in Kosovo. It should be pointed out that this decision took place as Belgrade was filling up with Milošević supporters, some of them Kosovan Serbs brought in for the occasion, others riled up by a pro-Milošević TV channel that got them out on the streets and surrounding the building in which the decisions were being made. Those hesitating about handing over power in Kosovo to Milošević were reportedly afraid they would never be allowed to leave the building alive if they didn’t.
The next day, Yugoslav army tanks rolled into Kosovo, Vlassi was arrested and imprisoned and protests met with relentless repression. The members of the provincial parliament were intimidated by Serbian police into voting yes to amendments to the constitution which nullified Kosovo’s autonomy. For a while, the pretense of being half-conciliatory towards the Albanians was kept up, but the indiscriminate beating (and worse) of Albanians by the police and army spiraled out of control. Even the local official pushed to the fore by Milošević’s campaign showed unease at the speed with which Kosovo was being transformed into a subordinate of Serbia. Tomislav Sekulić, a local Serb who counseled restraint by the security services, was shunted aside for his moderation. Rrahman Morina, widely seen as a pro-Serb Albanian police chief with a history of leading repression against his own people, had been appointed as local party head in early 1989 but wound up dead under suspicious circumstances the following year. By then the Serbs had done away with the pretense of treating Kosovo as an equal and had appointed (June 1990) a kind of governor. The following month, the provincial assembly was closed down and the building sealed off. A new Serbian constitution formally ended any last vestiges of autonomy. Albanians were systematically dismissed from public sector jobs and Albanian-language education put to an end. Albanian street names in Pristina were changed to Serb ones in 1992.
By this stage, of course, things were kicking off in the rest of Yugoslavia, as Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June 1991, with Bosnia’s descent into war the following year. As the world’s attention gets diverted, there is often the impression that Kosovo goes ‘quiet’ at this point. To outward appearances, it does. All resistance and overt protest towards the Serb takeover was crushed, but something else happened in this period in Kosovo which, in a way, I find the most interesting part of the story. It made few headlines and even the Serbs took their eye off the situation, busy as they were elsewhere and thinking they had cowed the Albanians into submission for good. Increasingly marginalised and excluded from public life in Serbian-run Kosovo, the Albanians responded to their oppression by ignoring many of Serbia’s institutions and creating an underground, parallel civic society of their own.
Central to this development was the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) and its leader Ibrahim Rugova (below). The League had been founded at the time Kosovo was having its autonomy stripped away in 1989. It was a broad church, encompassing Kosova Albanians from across the political spectrum, who were all broadly agreed two things: firstly, the necessity of resisting Serbian domination and secondly, that their only hope of doing this (given the completely dominant position of the Yugoslav army and police) was by non-violent means. Unlike other groups in Yugoslavia (the Croats for example), the Kosovars had no means of arming themselves, and knew that if it came to a fight, the Serbs would likely use the opportunity to either wipe them all out or expel them. Events such as Srebrenica would prove such fears well grounded. On the 21 September 1991, therefore, the Albanians under Rugova declared independence as the Republic of Kosova, soon to be ratified by 99% of those who participated in a referendum, organised in defiance of the Serbian authorities, who deemed it illegal.
From here on, then, two parallel administrations existed, both claiming sovereignty over the territory, the aforementioned Albanian-run republic, and the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia. The Kosovar Albanians organised elections to their own parallel institutions in May 1992 and began to organise the infrastructure of a state: education, basic social services, the administration of justice, simply ignoring the Serbian state apparatus in their land. There was no shortage of teachers, administrators, etc. given the fact that many Albanians had been dismissed from their jobs in the Serb takeover, or asked to sign ‘loyalty oaths’ which was impossible for them to do without being ostracised from their own community. These people slotted neatly into the new underground state run by Rugova and the LDK.
Rugova himself would come to be seen as the father of the nation by Kosovar Albanians, but he was an odd fit for this role in many ways. He had studied in Paris under the avant-garde philosopher and literary theorist, Roland Barthes, and became a professor of literature back in Kosovo, later head of the writers’ union. He was appointed leader of the LDK after another prominent figure refused the role, and to prevent someone else who no-one liked from getting it. He was (according to Tim Judah) ‘extraordinarily boring to talk to’ (Judah 2008, 72) and appears to have possessed little of the charm and personal magnetism normally associated with leaders of nascent nations. Nonetheless, he steered his people through these dangerous years with sagacity and caution, arguing that armed insurrection against the Serbs was hopeless and that passive resistance was the way to go.
All of this took place with little or no interference from the Serb authorities which, given their brutality elsewhere in Yugoslavia, seems strange at first glance. On closer reflection, however, it made sense from a Serbian perspective to let the Kosovars get on with it, so long as they kept their resistance passive. For starters, Serb forces were busy enough fighting in Croatia and Bosnia in these years. But there was also a complex realpolitik at play here, a weird (if temporary) modus vivendi between the Albanians and Serbs. In the 1992 Yugoslav elections, for example, it has been noted that the Albanian Kosovars’ votes (around 17% of the population) would have been enough to deny Miloseviç victory if they had made common cause with the more-conciliatory and liberal Serb opposition. The fact that the LDK boycotted these elections, however, meant Miloseviç prevailed. This might seem counterproductive to the Albanians. While it might appear to make sense to try and influence the vote in Serbia to promote the interests of parties more sympathetic to their cause (with a view, say, to having their autonomy restored) the Kosovars were by now committed to independence and nothing less.
Despite all the brutality and harassment Albanians experienced at the hands of the Serb police and army (it would be misleading to portray this period of one of untrammeled peace; there was violent repression), to have a more moderate Serb leadership restore their civil rights (and Serbia viewed more favourably by the international community as a result) would have damaged their cause for complete separation. It has, furthermore, been suggested by some commentators that Miloseviç rewarded this passive support by tolerating the growth of parallel Kosovar institutions. (Dejan Guzina, ‘Kosovo or Kosova-Could It Be Both? The Case of Interlocking Serbian and Albanian Nationalisms’, in Bieber and Daskalovski 2009, 40; Vickers 1998, 268 has also discussed this angle)
So this was the situation in the first half of the 1990s, while the rest of the world was watching Croatia and Bosnia and paying little attention to Kosovo. The obvious next question is: what changed? Well, for starters, the war in Bosnia came to an end in 1995 with the Dayton accords (see last post). The status of Kosovo was completely ignored in these negotiations and undermined the idea behind Rugova’s policy of passive resistance, that if Kosovo’s Albanians behaved themselves nicely the international community would reward them by supporting their cause. (Ker-Lindsay 2009, 11) In fact, it just seemed to have made Kosovo easier to ignore, and the obvious implication of this was that only an armed uprising would make them difficult to ignore. Thus, support began to grow for the relatively-small Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, in Albanian: Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës or UÇK) which had been advocating insurrection against the Serbs since the early 1990s but numbered no more than 200 members.
In the spring of 1996, the KLA began to attack Serb police and Serbs who had moved into Kosovo from other parts of the former Yugoslavia where they weren’t welcome anymore. At first, these attacks were relatively small scale but, as often happens in cases such as this, the over-reaction of the Serb authorities to the KLA’s attacks turned many ordinary Kosovo Albanians, hitherto bystanders or supporters of Rugova’s passive resistance, into active supporters of the KLA. 1997 was a crucial year. In the spring of that year, an almost-total collapse of government in neighbouring Albania occurred, as the chaotic changeover from communism to capitalism caused a proliferation of unsound financial schemes that bankrupted much of the population and turned them against the ruling party. The army and police abandoned their posts and much of the country fell under the control of criminal gangs. An upshot of all this was that a huge number of military-grade weapons disappeared and were sold off to the insurgents in neighbouring Kosovo. The KLA were suddenly very well armed indeed, and were not slow to use their newfound arsenal.
The region of Drenica in central Kosovo was a particular stronghold of the KLA, and for long periods was regarded almost as a no-go area for Serb police. The KLA’s leader in this area was Adem Jashari (below), a figure who has subsequently come to be seen as a figurehead for Kosovar resistance. Jashari and his followers were accused to killing Serb policemen in 1997 and tried in absentia (because they couldn’t get their hands on him) on terrorism charges. Numerous attempts to storm Jashari’s farm/compound in early 1998 failed and led to counterattacks from the KLA, all of which represented a significant escalation of the conflict from isolated guerrilla attacks to something resembling all-out gun battles. Finally, on 5 March, the Serb police, Yugoslav army and a ‘Special Anti-Terrorist Unit’ launched a full-on mortar and gun attack on the compound, killing not only Jashari but sixty family members as well, men, women and children.
There are some who argue that Jashari and his supporters were given ample time to surrender, and that they prevented people inside who wanted to surrender from giving themselves up. It is claimed, on the other hand, that the Serb forces made little or no attempt to arrest or apprehend the KLA members they claimed to be looking for, and seemed intent on killing everyone inside. I can’t pass judgement one way or the other. What can be said is it was a terrible loss of life, that the political fallout was decisive for the Kosovo Albanians, and that it marked the beginning of all-out war.
Prior to this, western governments had shown disdain for the KLA, the United States describing it as a ‘terrorist organisation’, and criticism of Serb actions in the region had been muted. Milošević, meanwhile, was riding high. The Dayton agreement had allowed him to present himself as an international diplomat and statesman of consequence to his own people, and he won the 1997 presidential election with ease. Western disdain for the KLA had led the Serb leader to believe he was implicitly being given a more or less free hand to clamp down in Kosovo.
But he was wrong.
Intensified fighting followed the killings at Jashari’s compound, and western governments, who had been busy basking smugly in the glow of their achievements at Dayton, began to sit up and take notice to what was going on in Kosovo. Richard Holbrooke, who had been so central to the Dayton talks, visited Kosovo in May 1998 and was photographed meeting KLA members (below), not necessarily an endorsement but a significant step away from branding them terrorists beyond the pale. There is a lot of literature around alleging KLA’s funding by organised crime among the Albanian diaspora, of western intelligence services (German and American especially) training and funding KLA recruits, etc. I am not going to go down that rabbit hole here. Some of it may be exaggerated but a lot of it does not look too far-fetched. There is no doubting there was a considerable about-turn taking place among western diplomats at this time in their attitude towards the fighters, while their numbers were swollen by new recruits both from inside Kosovo and among Kosovars returning home from abroad.
The Russians, always instrumental in convincing the Serbs to do anything, got them to sit down with representatives of the more quiescent Albanians in May, and Rugova went to Belgrade to meet Milošević for the first time. The Russian initiative paved the war for a group of around 50 diplomats and observers to establish a mission to observe what was happening on the ground and ensure that the Serb authorities were maintaining basic human rights standards in their treatment of the Albanian population. They weren’t. But then again, neither were the KLA, but more of that later. Although the KLA were making impressive gains throughout the country in the summer of 1998 and causing massive problems for the Serb police and army (they killed around 80 police and 60 civilians over the summer) what caught the west’s attention at this juncture was almost exclusively the crimes of the Serbs.
It must be recalled that this was only a couple of years after the west’s inaction had allowed the Srebrenica massacre, among other horrors, to occur, and there was an acute sense of shame at the dithering which had given the Serbs free-rein to ethnically-cleanse large parts of Bosnia and claim it as their own in subsequent negotiations. There was also widespread resentment towards the Milošević regime for the ruthless brand of realpolitik it practiced, and for what can only really be described as his diplomatic outmaneuvring of western governments during the crisis. The observers who went to Kosovo in July 1998 reported numerous human rights violations, culminating in the execution of 21 villagers near the village of Gornje Obrinje in September 1998, which was documented by Human Rights Watch and journalists. This event spurred the UN to issue a Security Council Resolution (1203) the following month, which condemned such actions and once again called on both sides to eschew violence in the pursuit of their ends. The arms embargo which had been lifted Dayton was had been reimposed in March of 1998, and the reimposition of further trade sanctions were threatened if the Serbs continued attacking civilians in Kosovo.
The UN resolution also provided for a new organisaton, the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), larger and more extensive than its predecessor, to keep an eye on developments and ensure both sides were keeping to commitments they had made previously. In practice, sympathy abroad had swung decisively in favour of the KLA at this stage and it was almost-exclusively the Serbs who were being watched for evidence of war crimes. Unfortunately, there were more horrors to come, but before we get to them, it’s worth taking a moment to look more closely at the KLA and their strategy, and the way they conducted the war. Having started out as a guerrilla army carrying out intermittent attacks on police and army personnel, the KLA, realising they could never win a conventional military conflict with the Serb forces (setbacks throughout the late summer), had by the end of 1998 shifted their strategy to deliberately provoke the Serbs into committing atrocities in the hope that it would force the international community to intervene. Only intervention from outside, it was reasoned, could help them achieve their goal of independence, and everything was done to get the west (the Americans particularly) on their side.
One of their senior political advisors, Xhavit Haliti (below left), would later recall the KLA removing any symbolism relating to communism in their uniforms, shaving their beards so they wouldn’t look too Islamic, changing from the fist salute to the flat-handed version, all to make themselves more appealing to the Americans. Haliti is widely regarded as one of those instrumental in the founding of the KLA in the early 1990s, an astute strategist who spent many years in exile collecting donations for the cause. Forced to flee abroad for their political activities inside Yugoslavia, exile was a common experience for many of the KLA’s activists in their youth, and many of this group became known as the ‘Planners in Exile’, in contrast to Rugova’s pacifist group that stayed in Kosovo. Another of these planners in exile was Hashim Thaçi (below middle), who had grown up in the same Drenica region where Jashari had lived and died. He fled to escape arrest and studied in Switzerland for several years, during which he slipped back and forward across the border into Kosovo to prepare his allies there for what he saw as the inevitable battle ahead.
Activists like Haliti and Thaçi who had spent much time in exile knew that winning independence from the Serbs was as much about raising funds and winning influence abroad as it was about winning battles on the ground in Kosovo. Another group within the KLA, represented by Ramush Haradinaj (above right) is characterised by Henry Perritt as leading a faction he calls the ‘defenders at home’. (Perritt 2008, 17-18) This distinction is perhaps overstated by Perritt (Haradinaj, after all, spent much to the 1990s in Switzerland as well) but is useful in stressing a difference between those who were concerned with broader political strategising on the one hand, and those like Haradinaj, who focused more on the military logistics of physically defending their people from the Serbs.
All of these men have been accused of involvement in organised crime and for being involved in the perpetration of war crimes. Western military intelligence has been aware of links between KLA and the Albanian mafia for years, alleging that Thaçi and Haliti have been at the heart of a “mafia-like” network responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs during and after the war. The KLA is widely reported (by Human Rights Watch for example) to have carried out killings of Serb civilians and Albanians they considered to be collaborators with the Serbs. A special court was established in the Hague in 2017 to charge those responsible for war crimes and, at the time of writing (September 2020), Thaçi himself (now president) has just been indicted. A few individuals were also indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. These included the aforementioned Ramush Haradinaj, who had to resign his post as Prime Minister of Kosovo in 2005 to face charges of war crimes. He was acquitted and would later serve another term (2017-2020) Many of these trials and acquittals have been surrounded by controversy concerning intimidation and claims that Kosovo’s post war leaders have made it almost impossible for prosecutors to find witnesses willing to testify against senior figures in the KLA, many of whom went on to hold senior positions in the government.
Fear is not the only factor at issue. The disconnect between the perception of such figures in the eyes of international law as criminals on the one hand, and their reputation back home among their own people, as national heroes, is evident. When Haradin Bala, for example, one of the few KLA members convicted by the ICTY for the killing of Serb civilians, died in prison in 2018, the Kosovo parliament held a minute’s silence. This phenomenon is noticeable, incidentally, in many former Yugoslav republics. There is no doubting that Serb civilians were killed and mistreated, but for one reason or another this received far less attention in the west than the atrocities the Serbs committed against the Albanians. These continued even with the presence of the Verification Mission in Kosovo. Milan Milutinović, the President of Serbia at the time, being interviewed by British television, made what must be one of the great understatements of all time:
What ‘too far’ meant in practice was brought home with awful brutality in the middle of January 1999 when the village of Račak in southern Kosovo, an area of KLA activity, was attacked by Serbian special forces. After initial difficulties gaining access to the area, the international monitors managed to reach the village on 16 January, finding the bodies of 45 civilians (including a 12-year-old boy and three women) many of whom appeared to have been shot at point blank range. The American head of the KVM wasted no time in calling a press conference to castigate the Serbs for what he described as ‘an unspeakable atrocity’ and ‘a crime very much against humanity’. The Serbs claimed that the dead had been KLA members, and their uniforms and insignia removed after their death and replaced with civilian clothes to fool the world. A forensic examination by a Finnish team on behalf of the EU found no evidence for this.
The political fallout was ultimately decisive. The UN Security Council condemned what happened at Račak as a ‘massacre’. Public opinion in the west (already unsympathetic to the suffering of Serb civilians) swung even more decisively behind the Kosovo Albanians. NATO began to threaten Yugoslavia with air-strikes and ground troops in Kosovo. These threats compelled the Serbs to attend a series of negotiations at the Château de Rambouillet outside Paris in February, at which all the leading Kosovar Albanians attended (from both the KLA and Rugova’s faction), although Milošević stayed away, sending instead the more junior Milutinović in his stead. From the very start, negotiating positions seemed to preclude a deal. The Albanians refused to remain under the thumb of the Serbs while the Serbs would not countenance the presence of any outside troops in what they regarded as their sovereign territory.
It is fairly clear in retrospect that a great deal of ill will had accumulated towards the Serbs by this point. The United States, the UK and Germany in particular (although less so France) clearly leaned towards the Albanian side in the negotiations, and it was essentially a process of bending the Serb leadership to their will. The Albanians too, had to make concessions, but in this Thaçi emerged as a pivotal figure, representing a bridge in the eyes of western diplomats between the hardliners in the KLA who would accept nothing less than full independence, and those willing to settle for a more limited form of autonomy. The talks went on far longer than planned in an effort to bring both sides together, but in the end the proposals for a NATO-administered Kosovo (still within Yugoslavia but mainly only in theory) and a force of 30,000 NATO troops in the area and legal immunity for these troops, were rejected by the Yugoslav government, who were backed up by Russia.
Which, when you think about it, isn’t strange. While no doubt something had to be done to prevent further bloodshed in Kosovo, the Rambouillet (dis)agreement was formulated in such a way that it is hard to imagine any country accepting it. Certainly the demands being made of the Serbs, to allow foreign troops into their territory, would never be countenanced by the British in Northern Ireland or the Spanish in the Basque Country or Catalonia (it interesting to note that it was a Spaniard, Javier Solana, who was leading the sabre-rattling against Serbia). There is also the fact that threatening to punish a country in the way Serbia was threatened by NATO if it didn’t sign Rambouillet, would have rendered the said agreement void under the Vienna Convention in any case.
The conditions insisted upon by NATO were in fact so onerous that it has been suggested by many commentators that they were made deliberately unacceptable so as to force the Serbs to reject them and provide a justification for NATO to bomb Yugoslavia. Bill Clinton himself is reported to have commented at the time that, if he had been in Milošević’s shoes, he probably wouldn’t have signed the agreement either. This begs the question then: why was NATO so keen now to bomb the Serbs when the west had dithered so long over intervening in Bosnia a few years earlier? The welfare of civilians in Kosovo is not a credible explanation, given the relative indifference to civilians in Bosnia, not to mention the civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq the same countries would soon be massacring by the thousands. The aforementioned resentment at having being diplomatically outdone by the Milošević regime no doubt played a role. The fact that Yugoslavia was the last (besides Belarus) state in Eastern Europe that had not been brought into the neo-liberal fold of American hegemony has also been cited by Noam Chomsky as a factor in motivating the attack. Either way, he states, ‘the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians’. (Chomsky 2006)
Events moved fast in the aftermath of Rambouillet. Within days, international observers were withdrawn and NATO started bombing Yugoslavia on 24 March, within a week of the failure of the talks. This campaign of bombardment would go on for ten weeks. Its ostensible goal was to induce the Serbs to accept a settlement similar to that agreed with the Albanians at Rambouillet, in other words, to get the Serb forces to leave and prepare the ground for UN troops to move in and administer Kosovo separately from the rest of Yugoslavia. The U.S. and its lapdogs (sorry, allies) expected Yugoslavia to capitulate to these demands quickly, but Milošević did not. It is hard to know what he was thinking at this stage. Were the Serbs hoping the Russians would step in to help them? They had been implacably opposed to the air-strikes and (along with the Chinese) had voted against a Security Council resolution to authorise it, but Russia at this stage in the late 1990s (before Putin took over in 2000 and started to beef it up again) was a shadow of its former Soviet self, militarily, financially and diplomatically in no fit state to take on the west. It has been speculated that Milošević was hoping that the west’s resolve would falter if he stood out long enough without agreeing to an outside. The air-strikes, after all, were a sign that the Americans especially were very very reluctant to send ground troops in and take Kosovo by force. Perhaps the Serbs thought they could, as they had succeeded in doing so many times in Bosnia, win a game of chicken and extract a much more favourable settlement in the process. But it was ordinary Serbs, of course, who had to pay the price for this risky strategy.
As noted above, two members of the UN Security Council voted against NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia. This made it illegal. This is not to say that the world should have shrugged its shoulders and done nothing, but international law (the UN charter in this case) expressly prohibits the use of force by UN member states to resolve disputes unless the Security Council authorises it or a country is acting in self defence. Neither of these conditions applied in this case, and NATO’s decision to just ignore the UN because it didn’t suit their objectives was an appalling destructive act, the consequences of which we still live with today. NATO’s ‘New Strategic Concept’, which essentially meant fatally undermining the whole system of checks and balances at the United Nations that had prevented conflict between the world’s largest military powers for a half century.
Certainly these could be unwieldy and rendered effective response to crises difficult at times (Bosnia being a perfect example, Rwanda another) but a dangerous new world was entered with NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, in which there was no longer any agreed-upon framework for preventing the militarily-strongest countries from invading whatever countries they liked and justifying it on whatever spurious grounds they liked. This would be seen again in the United States’ attack on Iraq in 2003 (again, without a Security Council resolution) on the grounds that they had weapons of mass destruction and were somehow involved in 9-11. And of course, seeing the United States doing whatever it liked with more or less impunity, states like Russian and China lost confidence in the idea that any legal framework could restrain them, and accordingly started to flex their own muscles. No wonder North Korea feel they have to have nukes.
In the case of Yugoslavia, the justification was that, even if bombing was illegal, it was morally justified in order to prevent a humanitarian disaster. You could of course justify almost any military action (or indeed any illegal action whatsoever) on these grounds if your logic is twisted enough. This is not to dismiss the idea of humanitarian intervention out of hand, but simply to argue that such intervention should emerge from a consensus at the UN. Another problem with the ‘humanitarian intervention’ argument is that the bombing campaign itself caused a humanitarian disaster. According to Human Rights Watch, who have backed up their statements with detailed evidence, between 489 and 528 Yugoslav civilians were killed by the campaign, around 60% of these in Kosovo. Nor were all of these Serbs. NATO aircraft bombed a column of Albanian refugees near Koriša in the south of Kosovo in May, killing 87.
Some of the targets were hardly military targets at all. The television station in Belgrade was bombed, killing sixteen civilians. Amnesty International have described this as a war crime. It was justified by NATO on the grounds that it was broadcasting propaganda, by which logic you could justify bombing most television stations in the west. Meanwhile in Kosovo, the NATO campaign led to a huge exodus of Serbs who, as we have seen in the last post, were already dwindling as a proportion of Kosovo’s population. Human Rights Watch have estimated that at least 150,000 fled in the six weeks after the NATO-led ground troops, Kosovo Force (KFOR), entered Kosovo on 11 June. Most of the Serbs that stayed behind were internally displaced into a few enclaves, especially in the north close to the Serbian border.
There is, incidentally, no contradiction in noting all of these depredations while also thinking that the Serbs actions were also appalling. I don’t want to fall into banal platitudes about ‘all sides being equally bad’ (which are so common among people that just couldn’t be bothered to learn the intricacies of a conflict) and this doesn’t imply any weighing-up or comparison of atrocities, but really all sides (including NATO) conducted themselves reprehensibly.
As noted above, KFOR entered in June and the Yugoslav forces withdrew, Milošević having finally thrown in the towel in early June, realising that the west meant business and that the Russians were not going to offer anything more than moral support. A UN resolution was finally adopted authorising KFOR and creating a civilian administration, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) which still exists to this day, albeit with much more limited areas of responsibilities than it had in the years after the war, when it took over the running of Kosovo from Belgrade. In this way, Kosovo became a de-facto separate state from the rest of Yugoslavia, which would itself split up and soon become Serbia. Although the UN resolution (still legally binding in theory) recognised Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo, the ‘Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija’ as it is still described in the Serb constitution, has in practice gone its own way, declaring independence in 2008 (recognised by around 100 other countries) and enjoying most of the trappings of a fully-independent state since then.
I hope to look at the post-war history of Kosovo more closely in a future post, the activities of the leaders (we have briefly examined the head honchos) who have dominated this period and the ongoing controversies surrounding the legacy of the war and crimes committed by both sides. But a post on this blog wouldn’t be complete without some cursory examination at least of the role played by religion and political Islam in the Kosovo conflict. This will be cursory because that role (even more so than Bosnia, where it didn’t play as big a role as Serb propaganda claimed) was very minor indeed. Similar to Albania, Islam in Kosovo has played very little role in identity formation. The part played by the Orthodox church in Serb nationalism of the 1980s and 1990s offers a stark contrast. This relative unimportance of Islam is reflected in the fact that the small number of Serbian and Roma Muslims in Kosovo were just as likely to be targeted by the Albanians for harassment during and after the war as their Orthodox peers. (Bieber and Daskalovski 2009, 185)
While political Islam offered a potential source of support and money in the 1990s (as it had in Bosnia to a limited extent), both the LDK and the KLA were profoundly wary of aligning themselves with these forces. Bujar Bukoshi, a close ally of Rugova and Prime Minister of the parallel state that the LDK ran from 1991 to 2000 remarked:
We knew that accepting help from Iran or Saudi Arabia would be the death knell of our effort to engage the West. I had an offer from Iran when things were so desperate that “we were seeking help from Eskimos and penguins.” I refused, because I knew it was a trap . . . Serbia was rubbing its hands in anticipation that fundamentalists would become involved in the Kosovo struggle. From the beginning, Serbia had always argued to the West, “We protect you from the Muslim hordes—the atheists who will extinguish Christianity.” We did not want to fulfill Serbian dreams. (Perritt 2008, 144-5)
The KLA likewise, had its roots in small Marxist groups of the 1980s and by the beginning of military activity against the Serbs in 1997 had jettisoned even this to focus almost exclusively on nationalism as an ideology. Volunteers came from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries in the spring of 1998. By the summer there were around 40 of these, in addition to some local Albanian fighters who also identified themselves as mujahideen. Initially willing to accept help from any source whatsoever, the KLA asked these Islamist fighters to leave when the CIA warned them that they must disassociate themselves from them. This contingent was largely put paid to in the early morning hours of July 18 when the Yugoslav army ambushed a column of KLA and mujahideen trying to cross the mountainous border region between Albania and Kosovo, killing 24 foreign fighters, mostly from Saudi Arabia. Human Rights Watch have suggested that the jihadists were deliberately led into a trap by the KLA to get rid of them, having already refused to leave at the behest of the leadership. Survivors later told of the KLA leading the group into an ambush and then fleeing. (Abrahams 2015, 262-3) So much for the Kosovan jihad.
There have of course been attacks on Serb Orthodox churches and other symbols, such as the Visoki Dečani Monastery (quite close to the aforementioned ambush in fact), which Albanian mobs have thrown molotov cocktails and hand grenades at over the years, and which is under 24 hour guard by KFOR. While these might appear motivated by religious ideology on the face of it, they have more to do with an identification with the Serbian church as potent symbols of the Serbian nation, and their attempted destruction an attempt to erase every trace of a Serbian presence in the area. This is one of the saddest aspects of the Kosovo story really, that no possibility of coexistence seems to emerge. There is no sense in which NATO’s intervention resolved the conflict really. It simply reinforced the idea that it was a zero sum game, that whatever one ‘side’ gained must of necessity be at the expense of the other. Either the Serbs banished all the Albanians, or vice versa.
STOP PRESS:
A month after the publication of this post, Hashim Thaçi resigned as president of Kosovo to face war crimes charges in The Hague. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/05/hashim-thaci-kosovos-president-resigns-to-face-war-crimes-charges-in-the-hague
FURTHER READING:
Fred Abrahams, Modern Albania : From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe (New York University Press, 2015)
Florian Bieber and Židas Daskalovski, Understanding the war in Kosovo (London: Routledge, 2009)
Noam Chomsky, ‘On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia’, interviewed by Danilo Mandic, RTS Online, April 25, 2006. https://chomsky.info/20060425/
Tim Judah, Kosovo : What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2008)
James Ker-Lindsay, Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans (London: IB Tauris, 2009)
Henry Perritt, Kosovo Liberation Army : The Inside Story of an Insurgency (University of Illinois Press, 2008)
Miranda Vickers, The Albanians : a Modern History (London: IB Tauris, 1995)
Miranda Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian : a history of Kosovo (London : Hurst & Co., 1998)
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 21: Bosnia #2
As I publish this it’s twenty-five years since the events of Srebrenica in July 1995 and seems an apposite time to look back at the Bosnian war. Many people remember the wars in Yugoslavia as starting in the early 1990, but there is a good argument to be made that the beginning of the end came earlier, in Kosovo, around 1987, with the events discussed at the end of the last post. I had planned to look at events in both Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s in a single post, but far too much happened to fit it all in, so instead we will look at events in Kosovo after the visit of a certain Serb technocrat in 1987 in the next post, and focus here on the crisis that developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina following the secession of Slovenia and Croatia in June 1991 and the two wars those new countries fought against the rump Yugoslav state (in effect, the Serbs). One of these (the Slovenian) was relatively short (ten days, 75 casualties) while the other (in Croatia) was far more drawn-out and bloody, lasting over four years (although most intense in the summers of 1991 and 1995) and killed over 20,000 soldiers and civilians.
The events that we will examine in Kosovo played a part, especially in the Slovenians’ growing unease at the high-handedness of the Miloseviç regime, Kosovo acting as a sort of grim salutary reminder of what might befall them if they didn’t get out from under Belgrade’s thumb. Croatia was no less eager, and harboured a well-organised and passionate nationalist movement waiting in the wings for their opportunity. This came with the first multi-party elections in the summer of 1990, won by the Croatian Democratic Union, the HDZ (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica) under the leadership of its founder Franjo Tuđman, who immediately set about preparing for independence.
Whereas leaders like Tuđman had long held independence as the objective, and the Yugoslav crisis offering a way of achieving this goal, things were somewhat different in Bosnia following their elections of 1990. Firstly, the republic, with its complex ethnic makeup, was governed using a different system. Voters chose seven members of a presidium, with two places each being reserved for Muslims, Serbs and Croats respectively, while the seventh represented ‘others’. The Muslims’ ‘Party of Democratic Action’, the SDA (Stranka Demokratske Akcije) won most seats in the assembly and its leader, Alija Izetbegović, who we saw in the post before last being released from prison the year before, became president of the presidium.
In the polarising elections of this time, other members of the presidium invariably represented those factions among the Serbs and Croats who wanted either to remain part of Yugoslavia or secede to the new Croat state. Nor was the Muslim party unambiguously committed to independence itself. Izetbegović led a broad church, attempting to keep together different groups who often identified themselves as Bosnian Muslims only in the ethnic, secular sense we discussed two posts back. Conservative religious Muslims did make up a portion of the SDA but only a portion, and Izetbegović found himself in the unenviable position of trying to balance the interests and demands of these competing groups with often incompatible objectives. To characterise the Muslim faction as uniformly seeking independence for a Bosnian state to be dominated in some sense by Islam is wholly inaccurate. There were no doubt some who wanted this, but they were far from prevalent.
Even Izetbegović, who had been imprisoned a decade earlier for his Islamic Declaration, which seemed to advocate an intrusion of Islam in the political realm, by this time placed far less emphasis on religion and, by his actions and statements, genuinely appears to have sought arrangements that would reflect the aspirations of the three different ethnic groups in the country. Ambiguity remains, however, about the extent to which he envisaged the future Bosnian state being an Islamic one. He seems to have laid stress on different aspects depending on his audience; for western journalists, the emphasis was on democracy and pluralism, while he could speak with great passion of the need for a Muslim state when speaking to Muslim audiences.
He faced a number of rival factions within his party and clearly a part of his strategy of being all things to all men was aimed at keeping these disparate interest groups together. One the one hand there were those who thought him too coy about the his ambitions for Bosnia’s Muslims, and that they should explicitly work towards an independent state that was, if not exclusively, then primarily intended for the Muslims as a homeland. This current (with its implicit corollary of expelling non-Muslims from large swatches of the country’s territory) gained currency in the early stages of the war especially, in response to atrocities committed against Muslims. Its adherents were sometimes known as the ‘Sandžak faction’ because many of them came from that region with a high concentration of Muslims in Serbia and Montenegro, sandwiched in between Bosnia and Kosovo. Its leading figures were Ejup Ganić and Sefer Halilović (below), the latter being placed in the charge of the army in the first years of the war, and more of whom later.
While influential for a time, this aspiration to an explicitly Muslim state was never dominant in the SDA and seems to have subsided after 1993, especially with the appointment as prime minister of Haris Silajdžić (below). Silajdžić, a close ally of Izetbegović and his first minister of foreign affairs, lobbied hard for a multiethnic, secular vision of a future Bosnia.
While arguing for a more explicitly Muslim state, it should not be understood that the aforementioned nationalist faction were Islamists or interested in a confessional state of any kind. Two posts back I explained the notion of ‘Muslim’ as an ethnic identifier, a national identity, rather than a religious one, and that is what is meant here. Indeed, Bosnian Muslims were on the whole generally secular. A poll in 1985 found that only 17% described themselves as believers in Islam. (Sandowski 1995, 13) This no doubt rose throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s; nevertheless support for the kind of fundamentalist or Islamist ideology that Serbian propaganda presented as widespread, was in fact very limited. To the extent that it existed, it will be examined below.
Izetbegović also faced a rival faction of what might be called ‘liberal nationalists’, led by Adil Zulfikarpašić and Muhamed Filipović (below), who were more open to trying to rescue some semblance of Yugoslavia as a confederation. In the summer of 1991, they had med with representatives of the Bosnian Serbs’ party, the SDS and their leader Radovan Karadžić (more of whom below), and agreed an arrangement whereby Bosnia would remain in a Yugoslav confederation with Serbia and Montenegro, in return for which the Serb areas of Bosnia would not break away and large parts of the Sandžak would be given to Bosnia as well. Such a plan was not as disadvantageous to the Bosnians as might first appear. While it might risk domination by the Serbs, it did mean remaining in a unitary state with the Muslims of the Sandžak and Kosovo, giving them proportionally greater influence with the departure of the Slovenians and Croats.
The plan received the consent of Milošević himself, but events in Croatia, where war broke out in March 1991, rendered much of the negotiating and manoeuvering of Bosnia’s Muslims moot. While Izetbegović had initially backed the plan for some kind of loose association with the rest of Yugoslavia, the brutality with which the Serbs attempted to keep Croatia in the federation by force led to a growing realisation that remaining in a truncated Yugoslavia would involve being a puppet state totally dominated by the Serbs. Opposition to the plan hardened and Izetbegović was forced to abandon it. Plans, supported by the Macedonians, for a union of independent states (whatever that might mean) likewise came to nothing. These pressures pushed Izetbegović more unambiguously in the direction of full independence for Bosnia and generally empowered the more conservative Muslim elements within the SDA. Zulfikarpašić and Filipović, meanwhile, would stand by Izetbegović and participate in his government during the coming war, but left the SDA and founded their own party, the MBO (Muslim Bosniak Organisation) to cater to more secular, liberal Muslims.
The reality for Bosnia was that they were in a situation of reacting to circumstances created elsewhere, of making the best of a rapidly changing situation that the Serbs and Croats were driving forward. As the Croat war unfolded, the situation in Bosnia only became more and more foreboding. Even multi-party elections were not greeted with any great enthusiasm, given that most Bosnians knew that the party system which emerged would be one organised along ethnic lines (even if new rules forbid parties using ethnic identifiers in their names) and would likely bring paralysis and instability. In the words of Viktor Meier:
The politicians and populations of all three nationalities would have preferred it if there had still been a modestly authoritarian but “liveable” Yugoslavia, which would cover up national antagonisms and render difficult decisions unnecessary. (Meier 2014, 191)
There seems to have been a failure by many on the Muslim side to realise just how committed to war—and carving out enclaves by force of arms—the Serbian side already were. Meier again notes that even now Izetbegović seemed to believe that the Yugoslav army would act to keep the peace in Bosnia, rather than taking sides. (Meier 2014, 200) By the end of the 1991, however, it became obvious that the army was moving into position to defend the Bosnian Serbs and placing heavy weapons around the major towns and cities. Instead of waiting to see what arrangements might emerge from political processes in Bosnia, the now Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army was clearly acting to make sure Bosnia could not achieve independence.
The spring of 1992 was fateful. The international community recognised Croatian independence in January. There wasn’t much of a Yugoslavia left to remain part of by this stage and the inevitability of war had dawned on Bosnia’s Muslims as large swathes of the republic’s territory were now under de facto Serb control. It is an open secret that Tudjman and Milošević had secretly agreed at a meeting the previous year to carve up Bosnia between them. Izetbegović remarked that having to choose sides between them was like having to choose between leukaemia and a brain tumour. The priority for Bosnia’s Muslim leaders became putting off war for as long as possible while they tried to purchase arms and prepare to defend themselves against the coming onslaught. While the Serbs and had been arming themselves for some time, the Muslims had neglected to prepare militarily in any meaningful way. They were hampered in their efforts by an arms embargo imposed by the UN in September which was applied to all sides, which effectively favoured the Serbs, who were already armed to the teeth, and prevented the Muslims from (at least legally) obtaining the weapons to defend themselves.
It should likewise be remembered that, while people throughout Bosnia were rapidly dividing into camps, driven largely by fear and the onrush of events, there were many, especially in a big city like Sarajevo, who weren’t clambering for war but out protesting for their politicians to sit down and get their heads together to prevent one. Just before the war began, there were plenty of Serbs and Croats who supported Bosnia’s government and Izetbegović. The conflict was not purely ethnic, which makes sense when you consider how many people had overlapping identities, a legacy of post-war Yugoslavia when for many people religion and ethnicity didn’t matter all that much and 30-40% of all marriages in urban Bosnia were mixed. (Pinson 1996, 1-2) Non-nationalist parties (mostly former communists and assorted liberals) actually won around 25% of the vote in the 1990 elections, but because of the system adopted, ended up with very little power. (Burg and Shoup 1999, 50-51)
The above photo is from the massive demonstrations on the 5-6 April 1992, when over 100,000 of all nationalities marched for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. On the second day, the protesters were marching past the Holiday Inn, where the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić held court, when they were fired on by snipers from somewhere on the top floors of the hotel. Two women, Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić were killed, and are often cited as the first victims of the Bosnian war, although even in this the other side have their own version of events. Serbs regard Nikola Gardović, killed by Muslims at the wedding of his son on the 1 March, as its first victim. Either way, things quickly spiraled out of control. Large sections of Sarajevo had already been taken over and barricaded by armed Serb militias in the wake of the wedding shooting, which had taken place at the same time as a referendum was held by the authorities, boycotted by the Serbs who saw it as a hostile act, voted to declare independence, which they did on the 3 March.
Demanding that the authorities do something about the barricades and armed militias that were taking over their city had been among the protesters’ main reasons for gathering. Some seemed to live under the delusion that Izetbegović’s government had the capacity to do this, or even that the Yugoslav army would intervene to remove them. The reality was that, by the start of 1992, large parts of Bosnia’s territory had already passed out of the control of the government in Sarajevo into the hands of the Bosnian Serbs.
While Bosnia’s Muslims may have been continued to delude themselves that war could be avoided and divided over what kind of arrangements they would seek in the new order, there was a sense of clarity among the Serbs led by Radovan Karadžić (below), who had very decided ideas of what they would and would not accept in a future state. Karadžić, a sports psychologist, environmentalist and poet before his metamorphosis into an extremist Serb nationalist, had also dabbled in embezzlement and fraud and was sentenced to a couple of years in prison for this in the 1980s before forming the SDS (Serb Democratic Party/Srpska demokratska stranka) in the autumn of 1990. It led the establishment of the so-called Serb Autonomous Oblasts (SAOs) from the autumn of 1991 onwards, establishing a separate Serb Assembly in October.
Although this is a blog about Muslims in recent history, a word must be said here about the Bosnian Serbs, who are often painted as the bad guys of the wars in Yugoslavia, almost homicidal maniacs who just wanted to kill Muslims for the sake of it. Like all such explanations, this is trite and simplistic. Certainly the Serbs were disproportionately responsible for atrocities and war crimes in the wars, but not exclusively by any means, and indeed Serb civilians were the victims of atrocities by both the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. No doubt there were some psychopaths on the Serb side who just wanted to kill Muslims out of bigotry and hatred, but a lot of the antipathy towards the other side was based on fear. Just like everyone else, Bosnian Serbs were afraid, and instead of having responsible leaders who allayed these fears and protected them from the real threats they faced, they had irresponsible demagogues who stoked these fears and exaggerated the threats in order to bolster their own power.
The Serbs made up the peasant element in the social structure of Bosnia, while the Muslims were mainly educated townspeople. Like their kin in Kosovo, the Serbs were backwoodsmen, easy meat for nationalist demagogues like Radovan Karadziç and Miloseviç, who milked the ideology of the peasant ‘folk’, offering them paternalistic reassurance that they had not been forgotten. (Benson 2014, 144)
Throughout the spring of 1992, the Yugoslav authorities quietly transferred into the army in Bosnia Serbs of Bosnian extraction and transferred out those who weren’t. One lesson that had been learned from the war in Croatia was that Serbs from Serbia proper were less committed to the fight, whereas those who either came from or had family among the Serb communities in these other republics had a personal interest in the conflict and tended to fight accordingly. In addition to these professional soldiers, there were a number of paramilitaries that had sprung up and grown with the tacit support of the Milošević regime. The most notorious of these were of course the ‘Tigers’ who invaded the country from the east and started massacring Muslim civilians there even before the official outbreak of war on April 6. But the less said about them here the better. If a picture says a thousand words, these photographs taken by the American photojournalist Ron Haviv, who accompanied Arkan’s militia and promised not to photograph them killing (but did anyway) say it all in the most shocking and depressing fashion.
And so, to war. There are many good blow-by-blow accounts. I will give here the broadest outline of events only.
The European Community (today the EU) recognised Bosnia’s independence on the same day the snipers fired on the crowds in Sarajevo. The United States extended recognition the next day. The Serbs had warned that recognising an independent Bosnia before profound changes had been made to its organisation to safeguard their rights, would be seen as a declaration of war. They were as good as their word. Eastern Bosnia was invaded, not only by the aforementioned Serbian paramilitary groups, but also by Yugoslav army reservists. The Yugoslav army followed within days and in May it discharged 80,000 of its Bosnian Serb troops, who were allowed to keep their weapons and formally constituted the ‘Army of Republika Srpska’.
The shelling of Sarajevo began on the 6 April, while Serb government officials fled the city at the exhortation of the SDS. The help of the Yugoslav army was critical in these early stages, as the Bosnian Serbs overran Muslim areas in the east of Bosnia fairly quickly. Any faint hope that a ceasefire might be arranged to allow negotiations towards a political settlement were ended by a series of events on the 2-3 May, when it looked like the Serbs might take Sarajevo, but they were fought back and then encircled by various Bosnian Muslim forces, who took many Serb prisoners. The Yugoslav army then kidnapped Izetbegović at the airport where he was on his way back from negotiations in Lisbon, demanding the release of the Serb prisoners in return for him. A deal was reached whereby the Serbs would be allowed to depart in a Yugoslav army convoy the following day, accompanied by Izetbegović’s release. The whole sequence of almost unbelievable events is narrated very well here (around 28 minutes in), including the negotiations for the president’s release basically taking place on live television.
Izetbegović was duly released, but when the Serb convoy attempted to leave, it was attacked by Bosnian forces, arguably in violation of the agreement (although the Bosnians said that they had only agreed to let the general and his aides go, not all the soldiers with their weapons). Several soldiers were killed dead and many captured, but the rest escaped and the president got home. Militarily, the incident had little significance, but politically it was a disaster which deepened the ill will and distrust on both sides and made any reconciliation almost unattainable. Having failed to take the city, the Serbs settled into a long siege and bombardment of Sarajevo. This film is a compilation of home videos filmed during the siege, and gives a very atmospheric feel of what it must have been like to live through this horrific episode:
The bombardment of civilians and other atrocities led to the UN to impose sanctions on Yugoslavia at the end of May 1992. This is as good a place as any to discuss the role played by the international community’s actions (or rather inactions) in the whole conflict. It is easy in hindsight to say that the west should have gone in with all guns blazing to protect the Muslims against the Serbs. This might, as many argued at the time, have simply made things worse; maybe not. Doing very little didn’t work very well either. This was just one of several strategic blunders were made on the diplomatic front by the ‘great powers’ who engaged in the Yugoslav crisis, primarily: the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia. A major problem was that the west’s response was almost always reactive, impelled by crises and particularly atrocious episodes to do be seen to be doing something to exert pressure on the Serbs, but without getting involved too deeply. Then, when the war had retreated from the front pages of the newspapers for a while, to lapse back into complacency and inaction.
Basically, the west saw the conflict in Yugoslavia as not threatening their interests either militarily or economically (it was wryly noted by observers that the Bosnian Muslims, unlike the Kuwaitis for whose sovereignty the west had supposedly recently gone to war in Iraq, did not possess oil). The United States’ reluctance to contribute troops to any initiative was a major factor. At the same time it frequently urged more decisive military action, using other countries’ troops, limiting their own contribution to air strikes. Those European nations who did contribute troops were afraid to expand their role or risk bombing the Serbs for fears that the Serbs would take revenge on their troops. The Serb on the other hand saw this weakness and were correspondingly bold, shockingly bold to observers, in the flagrancy with which they flouted ceasefires and agreements with the UN.
On the whole, international efforts to tackle the Yugoslav crisis can be characterised as incompetent rather than malicious, although for those bearing the brunt of it, it must have felt like malice at times. The sense of drift and empty threats would be fresh in the mind when it came to responding to Serb attacks in Kosovo a few years later, which we will get to in the next post. Among the many blunders made, one often noted at the outset of the conflict was Germany’s hasty recognition of Croatian independence. It is not the recognition per se that is criticised, but its timing, which did several things, all of which were inimical to creating an atmosphere in which calm negotiation might take place concerning Bosnia: firstly, it undermined the EU’s claims to impartiality, in the eyes of the Serbs at least; secondly, in giving Croatia the green light for independence, Izetbegović was left with little choice but to push for Bosnia’s independence, given the stated intention not to be left alone in a confederation with Serbia; thirdly, it made the recognition of Bosnia by the international community more or less inevitable as well, in turn convincing the Serbs that there was little point in negotiation and instead compelling them to step up their preparations for war. All of this, it is argued, could have been avoided if the Germans had held off recognising Croatia until the situation in Bosnia had been clarified somewhat.
Once war had started, efforts were ongoing to work out a peace plan. There were numerous initiatives which I don’t have space to go into here. Perhaps the closest anyone got to getting a deal was the UN Special Envoy Cyrus Vance and the EU’s representative David Owen, who proposed the division of a Bosnian state into ten semi-autonomous regions, each designated Muslim, Serb or Croat. The Vance-Owen negotiations have been criticised by Sabrina Ramet for example (Ramet 2018, 208) for recognising the Serb and Croat insurgents as equal to the Bosnian government, a sovereign government. This set the stage for a three-warring factions paradigm, each entitled to equal status in the negotiating process and to claim territorial changes, effectively rewarding Serbia’s aggression. This is Ramet’s interpretation which, while it makes sense, does beg the question: ‘what choice did they have under the circumstances?’ In order to negotiate peace, unpleasant compromises often need to be made, and this looks like one of them.
The Vance-Owen plan won the acceptance of Milošević, who then pressured the initially-reluctant Karadžić into accepting it at a conference in Athens, reportedly telling him he wouldn’t be going home if he didn’t sign. Karadžić signed, but insisted the deal would be subject to approval by the Bosnian Serb assembly back in Pale. Despite the attendance of Milošević in person, the Bosnian Serbs rejected the peace plan comprehensively in May 1993, first in their assembly and then in a referendum. Furious, Milošević said he would stop supporting them with arms and supplies, which he had denied doing up to that point.
It should be noted here that the image sometimes given of Milošević prepared to back the Serbs in Bosnia and the Krajina to the hilt no matter what, is inaccurate. In fact, he would show that he was only too willing to cut them loose and sacrifice their interests when it served his larger political purposes. He said explicitly to Milan Babić, leader of the Krajina Serbs in 1992 that it was not possible that all Serbs should be accommodated within the Serbian state, and that the Serbs outside Serbia proper could not hold those within the homeland to hostage. (Burg and Shoup 1999, 90) He became increasingly impatient with the refusal of Karadžić and his people to reach a compromise as the war dragged on and it became clear that the west, for all its reluctance to intervene, was not going to let them just keep whatever they had conquered by force. Nevertheless, despite his threats, the rift was soon healed and the Serbian government continued to support the Bosnian Serbs after the failure of the Vance-Owen plan.
In the end, the not-so-great powers managed to annoy both sides more or less equally. Ramet has suggested that the British, and even more so the French, were so opposed to lifting the arms embargo and helping the Muslims arm, and so opposed to substantive military action, that they were enacting an essentially pro-Serb policy. Relations between Bosnian government and the UN poor, with accusations that they were allowing their own people to suffer in order to gain sympathy and assistance from the west. (Burg and Shoup 1999, 161-162)
The Serbs, meanwhile, accused the west of effectively taking sides in the conflict, and argued that the welfare of Serbs outside Serbia was their own business. While war crimes are everyone’s business, and not to deny the rights of the component states to independence, but there does seem to be a whiff of double standards in the way the west created an ad-hoc legal framework for the breakup of Yugoslavia and the recognition of the new states when they would never countenance separatism at home. Those who wanted to keep Yugoslavia intact or at least negotiate redrawn borders, could be forgiven for remarking that the west has never shown a similar desire to facilitate the Scottish, Irish, Catalan, Basques or many other peoples in their desire for independence from Britain, Spain, etc. that they showed to Croats, Slovenes, Albanian Kosovars etc.
Anyway, back to the war.
At the end of June, Sarajevo airport re-opened under UN supervision. The Bosnian government (I may refer to them occasionally here as ‘the Muslims’ but in fact they included some Serbs and Croats who supported the idea of a multiethnic state) and the Croats forces made some successful counter-attacks at the end of the summer, but Sarajevo remained encircled and subject to indiscriminate shelling. Bosnia’s defence in this early period of the war was in the hands of a mixture of professional government troops, militias and criminal gangs, the last-mentioned being (in the early stages at least) probably the city’s most effective defenders.
The above-mentioned Sefer Halilović would emerge as the main military leader in these early years. He had formed the Patriotic League in March 1991 and by March the following year it had around 100,000 members, mostly Bosnian Muslims who were organising to defend their people in response to the obvious military preparations of the Serbs and Croats. There was a certain amount of organisational ambiguity in the early part of the war, and overlap between the league and the ‘Green Berets’, which is a term used for other paramilitaries formed in 1991 at the urging of the SDA. There is in turn a certain degree of overlap between these paramilitaries and the criminal gangs who mobilised to assist in the defense. While Halilović was a professional soldier (he had been a major in the Yugoslav army) he gave these gangs a great deal of latitude at the outset of the war. Bosnia needed all the help it could get, and the gangsters were particularly adept at urban warfare in Sarajevo, which the Serb forces were reluctant to get bogged down in.
Among these early defenders of Sarajevo were Jusuf Prazina (below), a feared debt-collector who had formed his own personal army at the start of the war that proved highly adept at keeping the Serbs out of the city. He cultivated a sort of Robin Hood cult around himself and became a popular hero of the city’s citizens. To the Bosnian authorities, his help had been vital but he also came to be seen as a threat as his power and popularity grew. His gangs did not cease their criminal activity and as Prazina demanded positions of power in the new country’s armed forces, plots were undertaken to have him arrested. He fled to the Croat side and then abroad. His corpse was found in the Belgian countryside in 1993, although it remains unclear who killed him. Death was also the fate of Mušan “Caco” Topalović, a black market kingpin who became notorious for picking people up from the street and forcing them to dig trenches. These people, if they were Serbs, often disappeared to face a grisly end, especially if his gang fancied taking their apartment. He is suspected of responsibility for a large number of killings of Serb civilians, many corpses being found in the so-called Kazani pit north of the city, where Caco’s men would bring their victims to kill them and dump their bodies. He was killed in a crackdown on gang leaders in October 1993, many suspecting that the government found it convenient not to take him alive as he had done much of their dirty work and any trial would be a major headache for Izetbegović and co.
Ismet “Ćelo” Bajramović (above right) was another gang leader who ran a thriving profiteering racket while running the military police and the prison during the siege. Unlike his aforementioned counterparts, he survived the war, although not unscathed, His shooting by a sniper in September 1993 created a crisis for the Bosnian government when his followers took over the local hospital where he was being treated, the bullet having lodged near his heart. They threatened to cause mayhem if he died and the authorities pulled strings to have him airlifted out to Italy where he was saved by emergency surgery. The injury continued to plague him with health problems, which were reportedly the reason for his suicide in 2008.
Taming the gangs was part of a process of regularising the Bosnian forces and incorporating them all into the new republic’s national army, the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnian: Armija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine or ARBiH). As part of this process, Halilović was replaced as commander in June 1993, seen as far too close to the criminal elements and having made several enemies in the higher echelons of Izetbegović’s government. It is even alleged that they orchestrated an assassination attempt against him in July of the same year, in which his wife and brother-in-law were killed by accident.
None of this meant that the war was turning in Bosnia’s favour. If anything, things deteriorated in January 1993 when they found themselves fighting the Croats. The HVO (Croatian Defence Council, in Croatian: Hrvatsko vijeće obrane) was the armed forces of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, which was the self-declared independent entity within Bosnia the Croats claimed, many of whom envisaged eventual absorption into the newly-independent Croatia next door. Hitherto allies, hostilities broke out between the Muslims and Croats because the latter were unhappy with the dispensation of land to them in the Vance-Owen plan. Ramet (2018, 211) also suggests that western failure to stand up to the Bosnian Serb’s aggression likely encouraged the Croats to think aggression and territorial gains made by force of arms would be rewarded.
The outbreak of hostilities between the HVO and Bosnia’s government only made a complicated situation even more complicated. Sometimes the Croats co-operated with the Serbs against the Bosnians, sometimes they fought them; sometimes the Muslims fought with the Serbs against the Croats. (Burg and Shoup 1999, 138) The fiercest fighting took place around the city of Mostar, about 75km southwest of Sarajevo, an area from which the Croats had driven the Serbs the year before in the latter’s first major defeat of the war. Mostar was roughly 40% Croat, 40% Muslim and 20% Serb before the war and in May 1993 the HVO began to shell the Muslim eastern part of the city incessantly, eventually destroying (on 9 November 1993) the city’s famed 427 year-old footbridge, the Stari Most, which crosses the Neretva River.
The following documentary was made by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen at the time of the siege, before the destruction of the bridge. It was subsequently shown at the war crimes tribunal and gives a good idea of what it was like to go through this hell. As is often the case, its the people who experience it directly who give the best sense of the reality of war, especially for people who have never experienced conflict directly and spout platitudes about it being caused by ‘hate’, expressing bewilderment as to why people shoot at each other. The guy talking around 9:50 gives a very succinct example of the reality, that people often have no choice but to fight in order to survive, that no-one else was prepared to help the Muslims and the alternative was being carved up between Croats and Serbs, i.e. extinction. They would keep up the fight long enough to force the west to finally intervene. His response to the final question I think says it all:
‘Where will you go if you lose?’
‘I don’t know’.
Meanwhile in Sarajevo, the city was almost completely cut off after the Serb capture of Trnovo just south of the city in the summer of 1993. But not entirely, and in fact the Serbs handed back some territory in August to UN troops. This is sometimes described as the failure to force the capitulation of Sarajevo, but it may also have been seen by the Serbs as a strategic mavoeuvure by which they got the UN to hold the territory it had won, preventing their enemy from re-occupying it. This was a tactic throughout the war by the Serbs: make what appeared to be concessions which were actually tactical retreats, compelling the UN to do the work of consolidating their redrawing of the ethnic map of Bosnia and strengthening their hand in eventual negotiations.
This strategy had its limitations, however. The shelling of the city continued, and was largely indiscriminate, a number of atrocities gradually hardening the outside world’s resolve to do something to stop them. The bombing of the Markale marketplace in February 1994 killed 68 people. The same location would again be hit in August of the following year, killing 44. In both cases the Serbs denied responsibility and in the first at least, their claims that the Bosnian army were bombing their own people to elicit sympathy from the international community were given credence by the UN observers on the scene. The consequences of the first massacre were that the UN proclaimed an ‘exclusion zone’ around Sarajevo from which the Serbs were told to move their heavy artillery. The consequences of the second massacre we will find out in due course.
The (temporary) retreat of heavy weapons from around Sarajevo was bad news for the town of Goražde, about 50km to the east, because that was where the Bosnian Serb army now focused their attentions. Goražde, which before the war was roughly 70% Muslim 30% Serb, had avoided the worst of the atrocities that had been witnessed in the early stages of the conflict, mainly thanks to a ‘Citizens Forum’ that that was formed to counter inter-ethnic violence. (Burg and Shoup 1999, 129) By March of 1994 this relative calm was shattered and the Serbs almost entirely surrounded the town, beginning to shell it into oblivion. In the week of 10 April the UN’s patience snapped and they began air strikes against Serb positions. In response the Serbs began firing at UN aircraft and helicopters and taking UN personnel hostage, as their general, Ratko Mladić, had warned they would. Another game of bluff ensued, in which the US seemed to think the Serbs might be intimidated by air strikes, but they didn’t seem to be, at least not the Bosnian Serbs. This is an important distinction, because at this stage it was becoming less and less clear that Milošević was willing to bring down the ire of the world on his country for the sake of what he clearly saw as a few stubborn backwoodsmen.
Finally the Serbs backed down, withdrew their heavy weapons and returned their hostages, then they went back on their promises, and slowly but surely the Americans got more and more fed up with their bad faith and began to side more openly with the Muslims. The French, British and Russians, however, remained steadfastly opposed to deepened involvement and Bosnian Serb attacks on UN troops increased towards the end of 1994. Morale was low and there was serious talk of UN withdrawal. This likely scared the Serbs, who had been manipulating the UN presence to consolidate military gains, not to mention skimming off a great deal of food and fuel supplies from the UN meant for the Muslims. They weren’t really keen, therefore, on the idea of the UN pulling out.
By the start of 1995, some commentators, especially in Britain and France, were declaring the war practically won by Serbia and that any action against them would be pointless and foolhardy. Those with inside knowledge, however, noted the Bosnian Serbs were running out of money, unable to even pay their officers, heavily dependent on stealing supplies from the UN, and generally low on morale themselves. Serbia itself, furthermore, had been heavily hit by the economic sanctions imposed on the country since 1992; its economy in terms of GDP contracted almost 60% between 1990 and 1993. You can always tell an economy is tanking when their banknotes are covered in zeros, and the hyperinflation experienced in Yugoslavia was one of most severe the world has ever seen, prices increasing more in an hour than they do in a year in many countries.
At the same time, Bosnian and Croat forces were becoming better armed and trained as a result of help from the US and Islamic countries. They had signed a cease-fire in February 1994 and the Croats had developed an efficient and productive arms industry to rival that of the Serbs. In the summer of 1995 the Croats launched a crushing offensive against the Serb-held areas in Croatia, the so-called Krajina, and integrated all of these areas into their national territory. The Croat victory was also a huge boost to the Bosnian Muslims’ cause now that the Croats were their allies and the operation put an end to the three year-long siege of the town of Bihać, a mainly Muslim-Croat town that had been hemmed in on both sides by the Bosnian and Krajina Serb armies and suffered terribly.
Then there was Srebrenica.
The town and area around Srebrenica was first captured by the Bosnian Serbs in April 1992 and retaken by the Muslims the next month. A lot of hard fighting was done in the area. The Bosnian government’s forces were led by Naser Orić (below), and used the area as a staging post for very effective and damaging attacks on the Serb forces who surrounded them, at one point enlarging the area under their control to almost 1000 square kilometres. The subsequent cruelty of the Serbs in Srebrenica is sometimes explained as revenge for the trouble Orić and his forces caused them in the area. But they never succeeded in taking back enough territory to link the area to the rest of the government-controlled area, and gradually the Serbs began to press them back into a smaller and smaller area around the town. By April 1993, when the Serbs launched a major offensive to finally take it, the town was an isolated enclave of Bosnian Muslim refugees, its population swollen to over 50,000 by those who had fled the surrounding villages and countryside.
Just as it seemed on the brink of being overrun by the Serbs, a visiting French UN General, Phillipe Morillon, visited the town at this juncture to accompany a food convoy that was being obstructed by the Serbs. Desperate to do something to avert the looming disaster (and prevented from leaving by the locals), he improvised a promise that the authority of the UN would protect the town. This pressurised/shamed his bosses New York to declare Srebrenica a ‘safe area’ on April 16 1993. A few weeks later, several other areas (including Sarajevo and Goražde) were added to the list. What did it mean? In theory, that the UN was mandated to use ‘all necessary means, including the use of force’ to protect these areas if attacked by the Serbs. In practice, it meant very little. Mladić knew the resolution was little more than words, but promised Morillon he wouldn’t attack the town if the Muslim surrendered their weapons. The UN convinced the Bosnian government to agree to the terms, although in reality the Muslim forces kept much of their weapons.
Srebrenica was ‘saved’, for the moment, but the Serbs remained ensconsed around it in complete control of access into and out of what was essentially an open air concentration camp with a few UN soldiers now keeping an eye on things for them. This state of affairs went on for almost two years, with the UN failing to successfully demilitarise the area or alleviate the suffering of the people there. The situation of the town deteriorated in the summer of 1995, as the Serbs suffered defeats elsewhere and decided to attack the ‘safe areas’, having treated the UN forces with contempt, kidnapping its soldiers, violating agreements, etc. while the UN did little or nothing, obstructed by the reluctance of the UK, France and Russia. On 11 July, the Bosnian Serb army took the town after five days of fighting. Threats of NATO air strikes came to nothing after the Serbs threatened to attack UN soldiers on the group there: poorly-equipped and poorly-led Dutch troops who had been given the more or less impossible task of ‘protecting’ Srebrenica.
The UN troops fled in the face of the Serb advance, retreating to the Dutchbat compound in Potočari just north of the town, housed in an old battery factory. Many Muslims followed them and hid out there, thinking it would provide some measure of safety. The Dutch troops, many of whom were fresh out of training school and had never seen anything resembling combat, were far too few and poorly equipped to offer any kind of protection. They attract much blame and anger for simply standing by and watching as the Serbs began to round up the men and boys and separate them from the women and girls, many of whom were allowed to leave the enclave on crowded buses. This is not before many women were raped, children killed in front of their parents, parents killed in front of their children, and then, in the days following, over 8000 of the men and boys were executed in cold blood and buried in mass graves. This horror show was subsequently ruled to be an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice.
Its more immediate consequences were that it contributed to jolting the French and British into finally assenting to serious air strikes on Serb positions. Many of those who had been against against action had obviously been hoping for a Serb victory, transfers of population with as little bloodshed as possible, all of which would make the work of redrawing the regions borders as straightforward as possible in the aftermath. But now it was becoming evident that the Serbs were not merely removing Muslims from parts of eastern Bosnia to other areas, but actually killing them en masse. Yet another shelling of Markale market on 28 August 1995 (this time killing forty-three people) was the final straw. The airstrikes on Serb military positions and infrastructure were the work of NATO, so the Russian veto on the UN Security council wasn’t able to prevent them. The Bosnian Serbs did not capitulate immediately; indeed they fired back at NATO’s warplanes and downed a French jet.
After a week of bombing, however, they agreed to withdraw their heavy artillery from the exclusion zones and by the 26 September, a real breakthrough had been made when Milošević summoned Karadžić to Belgrade and demanded that he sign a document authorising the Yugoslav president to enter peace negotiations on the Bosnian Serbs’ behalf. If he refused, Milošević made clear, he would abandon the Bosnian Serbs and cut off all aid to them, guaranteeing their rapid defeat by the Muslims and Croats. Karadžić signed, and an agreement to proceed with comprehensive peace negotiations was reached. These negotiations began at an air force base near the American city of Dayton, Ohio on 1 November 1995.
Three weeks of hard talking followed as the presidents of the three countries involved in the conflict hashed out the internal boundaries of a new Bosnian state that would include two ‘entities’ with a great deal of autonomy from one another: the the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with mostly Muslims and Croats, and the Republika Srpska, where mostly Serbs would live and run most of their own affairs. Sacrifices were made on all sides. The Serbs were forced to accept they wouldn’t get part of Sarajevo, and conceded a corridor of territory linking that city with Goražde. The Muslims had to leave Srebrenica and other enclaves in which they had been in a majority inside the borders of the Republika Srpska. The Croats, meanwhile, had to give up a considerable amount of territory they had recently taken from Serb forces. The end result was the territorial division seen in the map in the post before last. Notwithstanding many such painful decisions, the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed on 21 November 1995, with the final ratification taking place on 14 December 1995 in Paris, formally creating a new Bosnian state. Although many of the underlying tensions which led to war remain unresolved to this day, the peace established at Dayton has lasted to this day.
One much-cited claim that remains to be addressed is the idea that Bosnia became, during the war and after it, a hotbed of radical fundamentalist Islam close to the heart of Europe. In a way, this sounds plausible enough. After all, places like Algeria and Cechnia were kicking off at the same time. Afghanistan’s war against the USSR had just ended, supposedly sending out a wave of experienced jihadists around the world to put their newly-obtained military skills in the service of global conquest. In a previous post, we have already looked at some of the things these foreign fighters in Afghanistan got up to when the war against the Russians was over. One of the things we saw was that it wasn’t that straightforward. Many of those who fought in Afghanistan were not fighting a war to spread Islam, but a defensive battle against an army occupying a Muslim land. Others were more interested in taking the fight to their own secular and often-corrupt governments back home in places like Egypt and Algeria, and had less interest in taking the fight to the ‘distant enemy’ that patronised such governments (i.e. the US and the west in general).
If this blog has shown one thing so far, it is that many of the conflicts in the 1990s and after, which fantasists have attempted to fit into a narrative framework of a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the west and Islam, were in fact discrete national struggles with specific political and economic roots, which only some of those involved have tried to interpret as a ‘holy war’. For those who fought on the Bosnian government’s side (not all of whom were Muslims) this was a national struggle for survival against a Serb enemy that insisted on presenting the struggle in terms of Christian Serbs against bloodthirsty Islamic fundamentalists. This was propaganda. As we have already seen, most Bosnians were Muslim in ethnicity only, even those who might be described as ‘believers’ were of the moderate kind who wanted to build a modern secular state rather than an Islamic theocracy.
Nevertheless, the cause of Bosnia attracted some fighters from abroad who chose to view it through the prism of Islam versus Christianity. The neat narrative of global jihad has these spilling out from Afghanistan in their droves, ready to make Bosnia the next Afghanistan. Researchers who have looked closely at the type of Muslims who volunteered for the Bosnian government, however, have found that this wasn’t true and that the bulk were in fact Muslims already in Europe, many migrants from North Africa living in nearby Italy, who had seen at first hand the refugees arriving and heard their stories of suffering at Serb hands. A significant number of others were from Arab countries who had come to Yugoslavia as part of co-operation under the umbrella of the Non-Aligned Movement. (Li 2011) Many of these, while no doubt partly motivated by religious zeal, were also driven by humanitarian concerns and a desire to help their fellow Muslims rather than bringing jihad to Bosnia.
The image of crazed fanatics baying for Christian blood should, therefore, be tempered by facts. Their numbers are the subject of wild speculation, but they probably numbered somewhere between a 1000 and 2000. To put that in proportion, the Bosnian army’s total forces numbered around 110,000. There was a level of discipline among these foreign volunteers that belies the crazy jihadist image as well; in 1993 they were organised into a distinct unit called El Mudžahid under the auspices of the Bosnian state army. Although the ARBiH at times had trouble maintaining control over El Mudžahid, at the end of the war they disbanded peacefully at the request of the government. Of course, some of its members did their best to live up to the fanatic image. In the early phase of the war before their incorporation into the state army, groups of fundamentalists were active in taking over mosques, attempting to impose sharia law on locals; the area around Zeneca, a working class city north of Sarajevo became the focus of a group of around 200 Islamists who became particularly unruly and aggressive, setting up Qur’anic schools and bullying local clerics and women into adopting the veil.
This group turned its attentions to the local Croat population with the outbreak of hostilities between Muslim and Croat, and were involved in the massacre of 35 civilians at the village of Uzdol in September 1993. Perhaps more telling is the events that followed the capture of the Franciscan monastery and church in the village of Guča Gora, 15km west of Zenica. The mujahideen initially took the church and began vandalising and destroying its interior. They were stopped, however, by the regular Bosnian army commander when he arrived on the scene, and he threatened to attack them if they carried out their plan to blow the church up. The church was protected by the Bosnian army and while reports of its destruction circulated widely (used for propaganda purposes by the Croats and reported in western media) in fact local Muslims undertook to clean up the the graffiti and repair the damage under the supervision of Catholic clergy. (Walasek 2016, 135)
Notwithstanding these frightening, headline-catching and often exaggerated episodes, Islamic fundamentalism as a part of the Bosnian war was something of a damp squib. The actions of the mujahideen alienated locals for the most part, who had little interest in their puritanical brand of Islam. Early excesses led to the aforementioned formation of the foreign fighters’ unit under army control, being celebrated in the picture above. (Sadowski 1995, 12) As the atrocities during the war mounted, foreign observers predicted that Islamic fundamentalism would be fueled by the wrongs done Bosnia’s Muslims and was certain to grow, but this simply didn’t happen. The number of jihadist fighters remained relatively insignificant and the part they played in the war little more than a footnote. Enver Hadžihasanović, one of the Bosnian army’s top commanders, remarked in a BBC interview:
Mujahideen who came here to fight, in my opinion, had their own objectives and didn’t help Bosnia at all. On the contrary, I think they did Bosnia a disservice, because Bosnia didn’t need people, Bosnia needed weapons and ammunition. The army of Bosnia and Herzegovina had a sufficient number of people to fight that war.
(BBC documentary Our World: Bosnia, The Cradle of Modern Jihad? 2015)
As Hadžihasanović noted, what Bosnia really lacked was weapons, and it is perhaps in this respect—with their wallets—that the international Muslim community made more of a decisive intervention in the war. Even before the arms embargo was lifted, countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey were helping ship arms into Bosnia for the Muslim side, but even then this support was kept low key, the Muslim countries realising that any overt influence on the conflict from their part would simply give credence to Serbian propaganda about the conflict being something to do with Christianity against Islam.
In the present day (2020) it continues to be claimed by right-wing leaders in eastern Europe, and believed by American military analysts, that radical Islam has taken root to a dangerous extent in Bosnia. There is little evidence for this. For example, the country exported 200-300 fighters to the wars in Syria and Iraq which, while higher than the European average proportional to population (not susprisingly, given its large Muslim population) is paltry compared to the numbers of jihadists from France or the UK. There have a been a few minor attacks by Islamists on police and soldiers over the years, but small in scale and nowhere near the carnage unleashed, for example, in 2015-16 in France.
As noted above, the Dayton agreement still holds in 2020. This is not to say that Bosnia and Herzegovina is now a nation without problems. In many ways, the ethnic divisions set in stone at Dayton have, while preserving peace, led to a sense of paralysis and stagnation, as the legacy of the war weighs down efforts to develop the economy and society. The concerns of the generation who fought the war continue to outweigh the interests and concerns of the younger generation who don’t remember it, who continue to suffer high unemployment and limited prospects. Emigration is reaching crisis levels, with almost half the country’s population reported to be living abroad. Interestingly, widespread protests in 2014 against the status quo reportedly saw protesters for economic justice carrying the Bosnian, Croat and Serb flag side by side, explicitly rejecting the attempt to nationalist political elites to sow division in their ranks. How significant this is will have to wait for another day, another post in the future, when I hope to examine the fate of Bosnia’s Muslim in the years after the war. But for now we will leave Bosnia to lick its wounds and backtrack in the next post to what will be both precursor and denouement of the Yugoslav crisis: events in Kosovo after the Serbs crushed its autonomy and, ten years later, precipitated the intervention of NATO by their actions there.
FURTHER READING/LISTENING/WATCHING
Leslie Benson, Yugoslavia : a concise history (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Steven Burg and Paul Shoup, The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina : ethnic conflict and international intervention (New York: Armonk, 1999)
Alex Cruikshanks’ History of Yugoslavia podcast.
John Lampe, Yugoslavia as history : twice there was a country (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Darryl Li, ‘“Afghan Arabs,” Real and Imagined,’ Middle East Report 260 (2011) https://merip.org/2011/08/afghan-arabs-real-and-imagined/
Viktor Meier, Yugoslavia : a history of its demise (London : Routledge, 2014)
Mark Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina : their historic development from the Middle Ages to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, (Harvard University Press, 1996)
Sabrina Ramet, The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milosevic, Fourth Edition, (Boulder, Colorade : Routledge, 2018)
Yahya M. Sadowski, ‘Bosnia’s Muslims: A Fundamentalist Threat?’ The Brookings Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1995), pp. 10-15.
Helen Walasek (ed.), Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge, 2016)
The Death of Yugoslavia (BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995). Note the same filmmakers produced a series called The Fall of Milosevic. Just my opinion, but the latter was nowhere close to the standard of the former (excellent) series. It is far too uncritically accepting of the west’s acting in good faith in the Kosovo War and completely overlooks the possibility that there may have been ulterior motives and realpolitik at play.
Featured image above: Belongings of the inhabitants of Srebrenica lay strewn across the street a week after its seizure by Serb forces, 16 July 1995.
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 20: Kosovo #1
Kosovo has already been mentioned a few times in the previous post on Bosnia, but I feel it deserves a post of its own here because I didn’t just want to bracket it off as if it was a sideline to the ‘main’ conflict between Bosnia and the Serbs. It wasn’t. The conflict in Kosovo has its own dynamic and really needs to be examined discretely, while recognising the obvious connections between it and the other conflicts that have raged in the former Yugoslavia. One similarity with Bosnia is the obvious Serbian connection. Many of Bosnia’s problems during the breakup of Yugoslavia were a result of the complex ethnic composition of its population, specifically a large Serb minority scattered (if more concentrated) in the north and west of the state. Although ethnic cleansing simplified things in its own brutal way, the absence of clear geographic boundaries along which to draw borders created much of the chaos, uncertainty and fear that fueled the conflict. Kosovo too had its Serb minority. In the years leading up to the showdown of the 1990s, its fate was, if anything, loaded with even greater symbolism and meaning.
While this blog is supposed to be a history of Muslims peoples, and while I am focusing on the Muslims of south-east Europe at the moment, there is no getting around the fact that this story is going to be as much a story of Kosovo’s Serbs as it is of Kosovo’s Albanians. While Serbs are now a minority in Kosovo, this was not always so. More than this, as alluded to in the last post when discussing the Battle of Kosovo (1389), Kosovo holds a special place in the Serbian national imagination that has led to it being described as ‘the cradle of their civilization and their Jerusalem’. (Judah 2008, 18) This raises many questions: how can this be, if there are so few Serbs there now, and if there were many more in the past, what happened to them? None of the answers to these questions are undisputed, and I am treading into an area which many are likely to disagree (sometimes violently) on. So be it. All I can do is try and give a synthesis of what I think are the most reputable and unbiased accounts that are backed up by some kind of evidence.
The above chart lays out, in mundane-looking statistics, a fairly dramatic demographic shift in the ethnic balance of Kosovo’s population in less than 150 years. There seems to be broad agreement about the figures, but as regards the story behind it, almost nothing is agreed on. As we noted when discussing the 1389 battle, what people believed and believe happened in the past is, when it comes to Kosovo, as important was what actually did happen. Whatever that was.
To return to the fourteenth century, it has already been noted that the Serbs and their allies lost this famous battle against the Ottomans on Kosovo Field (Kosovo Polje, Косово Поље, in Serbian; Fushë Kosovë in Albanian), the ‘Field of Blackbirds’, just west of the modern-day capital of Pristina, but that this loss became the centrepiece of a story that became crucial to the Serbs sense of their own identity as a people. The loss at Kosovo, where the relatively-small Serbian-led forces gave one of the most powerful empires of their day a run for their money, became the subject of a powerful idea: that in losing the battle, the Serbs had heroically sacrificed the earthly kingdom for the heavenly one and were, as such, a sort of chosen people, that they would rather die honourably that live under the yoke of Ottoman rule, and that one day the Serbian nation would be redeemed and rise up again to take its place. What is important to remember though is that this idea only gained potency and agency in the nineteenth century, as the modern Serb state was beginning to define a sense of its own nationhood and free itself from Istanbul.
This does not necessarily mean this was a modern invention; it was clearly the subject of folklore and song for a long time before this, but it was in the nineteenth century that these stories were transcribed and given context by Vuk Karadžic, the philologist and folklorist who was instrumental in the codification of the modern Serbian language. What emerged is what its detractors call the ‘Kosovo Myth’, in which the modern Serbian nation was essentially born on Kosovo field and established its legitimacy there. Whether or not you subscribe to it, it is hard to ignore the fact that the modern Serbian nation established itself in leaps and bounds in the nineteenth century, and it had nothing to do—causally speaking—with a fourteenth-century battle. Modern Serbia fought its way to independence first with a revolution starting in 1804 which led to autonomy as the Principality of Serbia, which led in 1882 to full independence as the Kingdom of Serbia, which would last until 1918. The association of Kosovo with Serbian nationhood and honour reached fever-pitch at the 500th anniversary of the battle in 1889. But there two awkward facts that complicate matters here: firstly, Kosovo was not a part of Serbia at the time (it remained under Ottoman control) and secondly, this was precisely the period in which the biggest dip in Serbia’s share of the population in Kosovo occurred.
This was not the first exodus of Serbs in the face of Ottoman power. Earlier waves of emigration in the 1690s and 1730s have gone down as the ‘Great Migrations’ of the Serbs, occurring following periods of brief Habsburg occupation of areas which were then re-taken by the Ottomans. The 1690s purportedly saw the Habsburg emperor, Leopold I, invite the Serbian Orthodox patriarch to lead his people out of Ottoman-reoccupied areas such as Kosovo, and settle in areas under Austrian control, especially the area of northern Serbia today known as Vojvodina, and an area traversing the borders of modern-day Bosnia-Croatia-Serbia known as the Krajina (meaning ‘frontier’ or ‘march’), a term that will come back to haunt the region in the 1990s, but what at that time denoted the militarised borderlands between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, in which Christian Serbs and Croats were offered land by the emperor, in return for which they were obliged to fight for the Austrians and defend the area from the Turks, thus establishing a kind of buffer zone between the two empires.
The idea of a dramatic exodus of Serbs from Kosovo has not gone unchallenged, however. There is always some smartarse who says ‘ah but things are more complicated than that’, and it may very well be that they were. One of the foremost English-language specialists on Kosovo, Noel Malcolm, has argued that the simple story of Serbian flight in the face of Ottoman advance is misleading, and that things were more complicated: for example, that some Serbs fought on the Ottoman side, while some Muslims fought for the Habsburgs. Not only that, but large areas of Kosovo were already mainly Albanian/Muslim before this supposed migration, and that many of those Serbs who headed north came from other parts of Serbia. So this is debated, and I don’t consider myself qualified to adjudicate who is right or wrong, except to note that it continues to be disputed.
We are on firmer ground, though, when we come to the later nineteenth century and the period around which Serbia achieved recognition as an independent kingdom, following the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The same congress saw the creation of the Kosovo vilayet (a first-level administrative division of the Ottoman Empire), which became (with Serbia formally lost and Bosnia occupied by Austro-Hungarian troops) the Ottomans’ last redoubt in the Balkans. The Serbian–Ottoman War immediately preceding Berlin saw as many as 70,000 Muslim Albanians flee to Kosovo. Serbs were flooding out of the area at the same time, partly driven out by Albanians, but also encouraged to move to the newly-independent Serbian kingdom with the promise of safety and free land. It seems likely that it was some time in these years that the demographic balance in Kosovo tilted in favour of Albanian-speaking Muslims.
It is indeed high time something be said of the Albanians at this point. In a way, I feel I should go back and revise some of what I have written when I realise that I am nine paragraphs in and have hardly said a word of qualification about this nation and its people, their historical origins, and what they believe their historical origins to be. But on reflection, I think I will leave things as they are, because in a way it’s fitting that we arrive tardily at some kind of clarification, because the Albanians themselves were latecomers to the nationalist merry-go-round of nineteenth-century Europe. It is difficult to come to a definitive explanation as to why this is. It may be that, being mostly Muslim, the Albanians did not suffer the same disabilities under Ottoman rule that Christian subjects did. In the Ottoman system, a person’s ethnic and social identity was synonymous with their religion, so religion lent Muslim Albanians some degree of identity with their rulers. (Vickers 1995, 14) None of this, incidentally, is to imply centuries of peaceful quiescence under Ottoman rule in Albania; there were numerous famed rebellions against the Turks, especially those in the fifteenth century led by Skanderberg, who has become a national hero in Albania, but we don’t have time to go into all that. Perhaps in a separate post focusing specifically on Albania someday.
When modern Albanian nationalism did emerge—with a declaration made at Prizren in 1878 for greater autonomy within the empire—it was not conceived of as something novel by the Albanians, but as a ‘rebirth’ or ‘reawakening’ of the nation of Skanderberg. In reality, it was more as a reaction to Serbian and Montenegrin national movements than a chafing at the bounds of Ottoman control, and it was around language rather than religion that it crystalised. Modern Albania, unsurprisingly after a half century under Communist rule, is markedly secular in character and religion has really played little role in its modern history. Even in the pre-modern era, the form of Islam practiced in this area was generally a laidback Sufi brand of Sunni Islam. (Judah 2008, pp.8-9)
There is also the fact that, while Muslims have formed a majority since the sixteenth century, there have remained significant Catholic and Orthodox minorities. Living on the religious fault-line between Christendom and Ummah, Albanians seem to have been loose in their religious affiliations. Travelers in the nineteenth century recorded their impressions of Albanians hedging their bets, so to speak, and attending both the mosque on Fridays and church on Sundays, as well as whole villages changing their faith according to the prevailing political power. (Vickers 1995, 16) On the whole, Islam does not seem to have played as central a role in Albanian identity-formation as the Orthodox church did in Serbian, or Catholicism did in Croatia. This is important to bear in mind as we focus on the modern conflict in Kosovo, where Islam, and religious fundamentalism, have been insignificant as a factor in a conflict that has been fueled almost entirely by nationalism, language and ethnicity.
Perhaps at the end of the day, most Albanians’ primary focus of identification (at least among the rural population who were the vast majority) at this point in time was not a religion or nation or a language, but the fis or tribe/clan, with an elderly male at the head, existing in defiant independence of any higher authority. Add to this the difficult communications due to natural geographic barriers, it is not surprising it took some time to cohere into a national unit. What, you may ask, has all this to do with the modern conflict in Kosovo? We have already looked at Serb claims to Kosovo as the ‘heart’ of their nation, despite the scarcity of Serbs remaining there today. As Noel Malcolm has pointed out, many of the most important milestones on the road to Albanian independence took place in Kosovo, and their national story is important in understanding the Kosovar Albanians’ claims to the area. (Malcolm 1998, 217) Indeed, these claims go further back than the Ottoman era, ultimately being founded upon the view that the Albanians are descended from the people known, at the time of the Roman Empire, as the Illyrians.
The Illyrians’ presence in the area, before the Slavic people who migrated into the Balkans from the sixth century onwards, is a central part of the claim that Albanians inhabited Kosovo before the Serbs, and that even though they lost control of the area in the Middle Ages (never mind the fact that it had been conquered by the Bulgarians and the Greek Byzantine empire too), they had prior claim. The Albanian national movement of the late nineteenth century, therefore, included Kosovo in its claim to an Albanian nation, although initially, they limited their demands to autonomy within the Ottoman empire as a united vilayet. As we have already seen, Kosovo was already a separate vilayet, while the area that is now Albania (see above) was divided into several different vilayet: Shkodër, Manastir and Janina, where Albanian-speakers were mixed in with other ethnic groups. The Albanians’ hope was for a vilayet consolidating all of these regions, including Kosovo, and this was under negotiation in 1912 when the First Balkan War broke out.
James Ker-Lindsay is essentially correct in pointing out that, for all the heady symbolism of centuries-long battles with the Ottomans, the modern conflict over Kosovo has its more immediate roots in the First Balkan War of 1912-13. (Ker-Lindsay 2009, 8) This war changed facts on the ground, rendering Albanian nationalists’ more moderate demands redundant, and the push for full independence an imperative. Among these facts was the fact that Albania was only finding its feet as a coherent polity, and did not have the means to defend all of the territory it aspired to. Neither did the Turks. A key moment in the region’s modern history comes at the Battle of Kumanovo (23–24 October 1912) in Kosovo vilayet (but now in Macedonia), where the Serbs defeated the Ottoman army and conquered the area, dividing it up between them and the Montenegrins at the subsequent London conference.
When the dust had settled (there was a second Balkan war only a few months later), an independent Albania had been established. This happened, not because the Albanians had been able to make good their ambitions through force of arms, but because Austria-Hungary and Italy wanted a means of weakening Serbia, and an Albanian state prevented them from obtaining coastal territory and becoming an Adriatic sea power. But the new Albanian state did not include Kosovo which, as the Serbs saw it, had just been redeemed from centuries of ‘foreign’ domination. Somewhat ironically though, just as the Serbs finally conquered Kosovo, Serbs were becoming a minority in the area.
But this didn’t matter to them.
By this stage, Kosovo had come to occupy such a central part of the Serbian national narrative that the wishes of the majority actually living there mattered less than historical claims to precendence, national honour, destiny… And lest we think the Serbs are somehow uniquely guilty of placing romantic nationalistic notions above self-determination and democracy, let’s not kid ourselves; as we speak, for example, the Spanish government routinely denies the rights of its national minorities to exercise the right to secede, no matter what the will of the majority in Catalonia and the Basque Country, and they are not alone.
In any case, the Serbs had plans to rectify the demographic imbalance, as they saw it. While they may have failed to convince international diplomats to give them territory reaching to the sea by trying to establish majority status for Serbs in large swathes of territory, the effort involved took an enormous toll of Kosovo’s Albanian population. At least 20,000 Kosovar Albanians—women, children, men, noncombatants as well as combatants—were massacred, and a rampage of torture and forced conversion to Orthodoxy (of Catholics as well as Muslims) caused perhaps 100,000 to flee the area, many settling in Bosnia. Although journalists and foreign visitors were kept out (always a bad sign) some were perceptive enough to discern the systematic and organised nature of this campaign. It was not just a few thugs and rapists let off the leash. Leon Trotsky, then reporting for a Ukrainian newspaper, wrote:
The Serbs, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population.
Many westerners, however, cheered this on, believing that the Serbs would ‘civilise’ the region. (Malcolm 1998, 253) In our own era (this was especially the case in the 1990s when I was growing up) Serbia has been depicted almost as a caricature baddie and blamed in the west for almost everything bad that happens in the Balkans. It is easy to forget that a hundred years ago, Serbia’s image among the western powers was one of a plucky underdog who had taken on the might of the evil Ottomans, and was now standing up to the sabre-rattling Austrians. Serbia was, after all, the ally of Britain, France and Russia in the First World War, and when the country was attacked in July 1914, they surprised the world by holding off the mighty Austrian army for more than a year. A great deal of sympathy was elicited for the Serbs as the Austrians waged a ruthless campaign of extermination and indiscriminate atrocities against civilians, including murder, rape and the destruction of crops, even poisoning wells to discourage Serbs from returning to their lands. Overrun in 1915 by Austro-Hungary, Kosovo was divided up between the latter and Bulgaria, and the Austrians were welcomed as liberators by the Albanians.
The tables turned on them, bands of Albanian rebels known as kaçaks (from the Turkish for ‘fugitive, outlaw, bandit) who had been waging armed resistance against the Serbs for the last few years, now assisted the Austrian troops in harrasing the Serb army as they fled across northern Albania, trying to reach the coast where the British and French navies were waiting to rescue them. Thousands perished of cold and hunger on the arduous journey over the mountains, and there are numerous accounts of Albanians, no doubt bitter at their recent suffering at the hands of the Serbs, either refusing to help or attacking them. This horrendous experience did wonders for the Serbs’ image in the British and French media, where money was collected for the ‘Serbian martyrs’ and St. Vitus’ day (see the last post for the significance of this to Serbs) was celebrated in Britain as ‘Kossovo Day’ in 1916.
Despite initial optimism that Austrian occupation would lead to the unification of Albania with Kosovo, this never happened, and things soon soured, especially in the Bulgarian-occupied parts of eastern Kosovo around Prizren and Pristina, where the Albanians were treated almost as bad as the Serbs and soon began waging their own war against their erstwhile ‘liberators’. By the end of the war, with allied-assistance, Serbia reconquered Kosovo and attempted to repopulate the area with Serbian colonists. As usual, revenge was exacted, refugees shifted around, many Albanians left. You can see this dip in the chart above, although some accounts suggest it may have been more dramatic than illustrated here. Židas Daskalovski claims, for example, that at least 300,000 Albanians were expelled from Kosovo between 1912 and 1941, while 14,000 Serbian families settled in the region, suggesting that the Albanian element was as high as 90% in 1912, down to 70% in 1941. (Bieber and Daskalovski, 2009, 17)
The brutality of the reconquest provoked, of course, its own resurgence of kaçak resistance, which reached its peak of intensity in the first half of the 1920s. This kept large areas of Kosovo ungovernable for years, and its leaders urged Albanians to refuse to pay taxes to the Yugoslav government and serve its armed forces. Among the most celebrated of these leaders was husband and wife Azem Bejta (killed 1924) and Shote Galica (killed 1927). Azem, interestingly, started his career fighting the Austrians, with the Serbs, but once the war was over focused on leading the revolt against rule from Belgrade, along with his wife, who dressed as a man in order to gain acceptance as a resistance leader in a male-dominated society. (Malcolm 1998, p.262)
Perhaps as devastating for the Kosovars’ cause, the kaçaks found an enemy in the rising power in Albanian politics, Ahmet Muhtar Zogolli, better known as ‘Zog’, who they briefly helped oust from power in 1924, but who returned and exerted a firmer and firmer grip over the country until declaring himself King Zog I in 1928. Having attempted to aid Zog’s enemies, assistance from their fellow Albanians across the border was less and less forthcoming for the Kosovars, as Zog—who had decided to focus on building bridges with Yugoslavia in the face of the main threat to Albania from Italy—established a focus on protecting and strengthening Albania within its existing borders. The idea of a ‘Greater Albania’ including Kosovo was more or less abandoned in Tirana, not just in his reign (he was head of state until World War II) but even afterwards under communist rule.
By the end of the 1920s, resistance to Serb (ahem, Yugoslav) rule had been thoroughly broken. In the following years, Albanian language and culture was all-but banned in public life; certainly those Albanian-language schools and journals that had been established under the Austrian occupation disappeared. There was an element of vindictiveness as well, given that the Serbs had no problem granting such rights to other minorities (Hungarians, Turks, Czechs, Germans) living within their borders. Much of this discrimination took place unofficially, and was denied by the Yugoslav authorities when confronted with foreign criticism, often arguing that there were no Albanians in Kosovo, merely Albanian-speaking Serbs. (Malcolm 1998, 268) While large parts of Europe were ratcheting up the anti-semitism against Jews, in Yugoslavia (where the Jewish population was relatively small and anti-semitism was less marked than other countries at that time) it was instead the Muslims, and specifically the Kosovar Albanians, who were turned on and victimised. (Benson 2014, 66-7)
All of this meant, of course, that when World War came knocking again, the Albanians of Kosovo were ready recruits for whoever happened to be fighting the Serbs. On the one hand, Italy invaded and occupied Albania (in all but name), dividing up Kosovo between themselves (more precisely the puppet government under an Italian king that they had installed in Tirana) while leaving Germany (who had occupied Yugoslavia) and Bulgaria to carve out their own occupation zones. Once again the scales tipped the other way, as Serbs were attacked and fled. 70,000 Serb refugees were registered in Belgrade in 1942. (Judah 2008, 47) In the period 1941-5 perhaps as many as 10,000 Serbs and Montenegrins were killed in Kosovo, but it should be noted that the corresponding figure for Albanians is even higher, around 12,000. (Malcolm 1998, p.312) The Kosovar Albanians’ position was complicated. Some fought with the Partisans against the Nazis and Serb-nationalist Chetniks (long story-look them up!) while others saw the Axis conquest of Yugoslavia as offering them an opportunity to realise their long-cherished dream of belonging in a Greater Albania.
Kosovo’s Albanians were particularly uninterested in the Allied cause because it was made fairly clear that the area would be handed back to the Yugoslavian state in the event that they won. It is unsurprising then, that some chosen to actively collaborate with the Nazis, and indeed the SS set up a Kosovo Albanian division, known as the SS Skanderbeg, which attracted around 6000 recruits, sent almost 300 Jews to the gas chambers and engaged in widespread looting, raping and pillaging of the Kosovan Serbs. They achieved little of note beyond this. Often when there is any mention of Nazi collaboration, I feel I should add a word of caution about reading too much, ideologically, into it. Because they are pretty much the exemplar of evil from the twentieth century, assistance or collaboration with the Nazis is often used to blacken the name of a nation or cause, even when this assistance was largely opportunistic, as opposed to reflecting any convergence of ideology. The most extreme examples of this are the ludicrous claims that the Palestinians somehow gave the idea for the Holocaust to Hitler. The fact that the Nazis found willing collaborators in some Muslim populations which had suffered at the hands of countries who happened to be fighting Germany in the war, has been exploited by some commentators to suggest that these peoples or their struggles were somehow fascistic in nature. There isn’t much evidence for this.
We have our own analogy of this in Ireland, where the IRA’s attempts (amateurish and almost comical as they were) to collaborate with the Abwehr (the Nazis’ intelligence agency) have been used by the enemies of Irish republicanism to suggest there was some ideology affinity between the two organisations. This is nonsense, and the IRA were at that time actually leaning towards the left, many of its members having chosen to fight with the International Brigades against the fascists in Spain. None of this is to excuse these groups’ collaboration with the Nazis, even when the horrors of the Holocaust were becoming known, merely to say that we should be wary of reading too much into the SS-recruited Handschar and Skanderbeg divisions of Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims during the war. The willingness of these groups to work with the Germans reflects more their animosity towards the common Serb enemy than any real sympathy with the Nazis’ politics which, let it be remembered, viewed Arabs and Slavic peoples as a lower form of life along with Jews (and basically everyone else who wasn’t from northern Europe). Let it also be remembered that large numbers of French, Poles, etc. collaborated willingly with the Nazi occupiers, not to mention the the 20,000 members of the British Union of Fascists or the 25,000 members of the German American Bund.
As the Partizans under Tito gradually won Yugoslavia back, many Albanians who had been fighting the Germans or Italians returned to fighting the Serbs. When Kosovo was ‘liberated’ in February 1945, martial law was declared and later that year, the area was formally annexed to Serbia as an ‘autonomous region’, following a request by the local (unelected) Regional People’s Council whose 142 members included only thirty-three Albanians. (Judah 2008, 49) The name of this new entity was changed to Kosovo and Metohija (Kosmet for short) Metohija being the name of the western part of the whole area, and a name favoured by Serbs, redolent of its history as an important centre of Serbian Orthodox monasticism. Many Communists, including Tito, were reportedly open in theory to the idea of Kosovo’s inclusion in a future enlarged Albanian, or some kind of Communist Balkan federation that encompassed the entire region, but that’s not how it played out.
Keeping Kosovo in Serbia as an autonomous region, and Vojvodina as an ‘autonomous province’ (a higher grade of autonomy than Kosovo but the differences in practice escape me) was, however, a convenient means of addressing what was seen by some as a structural flaw in the Yugoslav federal structure of six republics: namely, that SR Serbia was twice the size in population terms of the next-largest republic (Croatia) and contained around 40% of Yugoslavia’s total population, as well as being the location of the federal capital, Belgrade. All this was problematic to the vision touted by Tito and his people, of a federation of equals, so giving Vojvodina and Kosovo some measure of autonomy could be seen as a way of addressing this imbalance, albeit in a way that was, initially at least, largely symbolic. What autonomy the region did enjoy was limited to proposing a budget (that Belgrade would get approval of), directing its economic and cultural development. (Malcolm 1998, 316)
Relations between Enver Hoxha’s Communist Albania and Tito’s Yugoslavia were initially warm and the border between Kosovo and Albania was, until 1948, practically invisible on the ground. Then Tito had his falling out with Stalin, Hoxha took Stalin’s side, and the border was hermetically sealed. This period had nevertheless boosted the proportion of Albanians in the population, particularly as many Serbs whose lands had been taken during the war were initially prevented from returning by a decree from Tito. When they protested, he adjusted this to allow some to return under specific conditions, which provoked protests from the Albanians. In other words, it was all a bit of a mess and left a lot of bitterness, with both sides blaming the authorities for screwing things up. (Malcolm 1998, 317-8) In Tito’s Yugoslavia, both the Serbs and Albanians of Kosovo were thus regarded as politically dodgy, having both demonstrated their support for the Communists’ enemies during the war.
The region was ruled with correspondingly harshness. Aleksandar Ranković (below), minister of the interior and head of Yugoslavia’s security services in Kosovo from the end of the war until 1966, was a renowned hard man who pursued a policy of centralising power in Belgrade that foreshadowed the later policies of Slobodan Milošević. While at that time this involved suppressing any manifestation of nationalism by any of the peoples in the federation, in practice, the Albanians were more ruthlessly suppressed than others, it being strongly suspected that separatist sympathies were very strong under the surface of outward conformity with ‘brotherhood and unity’. Any kind of agitation for unity with Albania was, therefore, strictly forbidden, which is not to say that people didn’t keep wishing for it in secret.
Once again, Kosovo was subject to the buffeting of outside forces, which this time played in the Albanians’ favour. Firstly, Tito took a turn against the centralising impulses of men like Ranković in the 1960s. His fall from grace was accompanied by a loosening of strictures on Kosovo and an easing back of repression. Already, in 1963, Kosovo was upgraded to an ‘autonomous province’, giving it equal status with Vojvodina, although this conferred few, if any, tangible advantages. In fact, as Malcolm has noted, the constitution of that year gave the individual republics the right to form such autonomous provinces (even if none did) on their own initiative, and in a sense changed Kosovo from being a federal unit to a ‘mere function of the internal arrangements of the republic of Serbia’. (Malcolm 1998, 324) Another change in the weather came with Albania’s rapprochement with Yugoslavia which followed its falling out with the USSR under Khrushchev in 1961. Hoxha, always a big fanboy of Stalin, didn’t like the ‘Secret Speech‘ and accompanying disparagement of Stalin that followed. Hoxha’s regime was thus increasingly drawn back into Tito’s orbit. Yugoslavia in turn needed all the friends it could get against the Soviets, especially in the wake of the invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). What better way to mend fences than to start treating the Albanians in Kosovo a bit better?
So the second half of the 1960s saw the beginning of a sort of renaissance for Kosovar Albanians. This was symbolised in several ways, firstly, by the dropping of the contentious Metohija part of the name in 1968. Secondly, amendments to the constitution gave Kosovo the right to their own flag and representation in all state organs, as well as the right to a seat on the rotating presidency of the republic. But too many symbols of improvement can also be a sign that things aren’t really changing all that much deep down, and for many Albanians, none of this was enough. That year saw violent protests calling for the upgrading of Kosovo to the status of republic. Why, it was asked, did 370,000 Montenegrins have their own republic but 1.2 million Albanians didn’t? The demand was flatly rejected by the Yugoslav top brass, because Albanians were regarded as a ‘nationality’ within Yugoslavia, not a ‘nation’. If you find this distinction confusing, join the club. As near as I can make out, the nations (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians, after 1971, Bosnian Muslims) were regarded as the nations that constituted Yugoslavia, whereas the Albanians and Hungarians in Vojvodina were minorities that had their own nation states outside the country.
So it went. The army was sent in to restore order, although the response was less authoritarian than in previous times (remember they were try to keep Enver Hoxha sweet) so some arrests and harassment, but also some more concessions: the establishment of the University of Pristina in 1969, where half the classes were to be taught in Albanian. In the following years, more substantive changes followed that went beyond a mere name change. 1974 saw yet another constitution, which gave Kosovo and Vojvodina practically all the legal rights of full republics, including its own assembly and constitution, full voting rights in the federal presidency, and an effective veto in a system that required unanimous decisions. This meant, of course, that Serbia’s power (now just one vote out of eight) was further diluted.
Although a demand for the status of republic in name eluded them, you might see this as the high watermark of what Kosovo Albanians achieved under the Yugoslav system. You might also, however, see it as the moment where the tide turns away from Serbs oppressing Albanians, to Serbs feeling they are the ones being oppressed. Whether they really were or not is debated. Certainly measures were put in place in the 1970s-80s to raise the economic and social prospects of Albanians generally. A kind of Yugoslavian version of affirmative action saw many administrative positions, both regional and federal, reserved for Albanians, (Bieber and Daskalovski, 2009, 31) while the local Communist party—once largely devoid of Albanians—was being taken over by them as the 1980s wore on. (Ramet 2002, 17) Likewise, the Albanian language which had once been largely banished from public life, was increasingly being used not just in education but public administration. All of this, combined with the sight of Albanian flags being flown openly (which would have been regarded as treason only a few years earlier) was creating a growing resentment and acrimony among Kosovan Serbs.
But whether Serbs were being actually oppressed is another question. We have to remember that much of this was the resentment of a previously-privileged group who were now having to contend with the Albanians as their equals, not inferiors. Heavily outnumbered, there is no doubt the Serbs felt threatened, but claims that they were being trod on seem reminiscent of the claims to victim status made by Ulster Unionists or white South Africans, i.e. that they were no longer able to lord it over their neighbours. Certainly the census results of 1981 confirmed Serb fears that they were being outbred, but it should be remembered that at the very time they claimed they were being marginalised and pushed out, Serbs and Montenegrins—who formed 15 per cent of the population—had 30 per cent of the jobs. (Malcolm 1998, 337)
In fact, the next great civil disturbance to hit Kosovo, in the Spring of 1981, was an uprising of Albanians once again demanding full republic status, although the protests, which went on for a month, seem to have started over social issues such as unemployment rather than an explicit planned campaign to push for the republic. The J-curve hypothesis of how revolutionary situations develop argues that populations become rebellious, not when at the rock bottom of oppression, but when a period of improvement in their conditions develops, raising expectations, following which this improvement either stalls or is perceived to not proceed fast enough. This seems to have been the mood among Kosovo Albanians in the early 1980s. Opinion is divided. Židas Daskalovski claims that ‘the secessionist tendencies of the Albanian population culminated in the so-called March riots’ (Bieber and Daskalovski, 2009, 14) but others, such as Tim Judah point out that the whole thing started as a protest over two-hour queues for meals at the university and spiraled out of control from there. (Judah 2008, 57-58) Here is some (fairly rare) footage of the protests. It starts peacefully enough. Then you can hear the police starting to get pissed off:
As the protests got out of control, the tanks were sent in to subdue the students, who were by now being characterised as ‘separatists’ by the authorities. Officially, 57 people were killed, but the real number likely ran into the hundreds. (Judah 2008, 58) In the wake of these events, repression intensified again, but it was a Yugoslav—not a Serb—repression. This is important to note. Up until 1989, Albanians remained in charge of most of the organs of regional government, and even though Albanian Kosovars were subject to heightened scrutiny and harrassment from the police and army, the feeling among Kosovan Serbs that they were being treated badly grew more and more acute. As the decade progressed, these claims developed from grumbling to open claims that the Serbs were being deliberately intimidated into leaving, murdered, women being raped, etc. This narrative took hold partly because it was increasingly tolerated by the authorities since the death of Tito. The Orthodox church played its part, as did cultural institutions, such as the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which issued its infamous ‘Memoradum’ in 1986 claiming that the the Serbian population faced a ‘physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide’ in Kosovo.
There was little evidence for any such planned expulsion of the Serbs at this time. As Leslie Benson has noted, the decline in Serb population had been going on for some time, and can as easily be explained by industrialisation and the attractions of northern Serbia. (Benson 2014, 143) But since when did facts matter? Serbs were convinced that they were destined to be wiped out. There was also their (not unfounded) resentment at the anomalous constitutional situation from 1974 which gave Kosovo delegates in the Serbian assembly, technically giving Kosovans a say in matters related to Serbia ‘proper’ (that part of Serbia excluding its autonomous provinces) while denying Serbians from outside Kosovo a corresponding say in Kosovo. There was talk in the highest echelons of government that this would need to be addressed, and the President of Serbia, Ivan Stamboliç, had become acutely aware by 1987 that something needed to be done to address tensions in the province.
At the same time, Kosovo was known as a quagmire, an intractable problem where any improvement in the lot of Serbs would, by definition, be seen as a diminution in the status of Albanians, and vice versa. In other words, a graveyard of careers. Before succeeding to the presidency, Stamboliç had pulled strings so that his long-time friend and protégé, Slobodan Milošević, be made his successor as Chairman of the League of Communists of Serbia. Trying to avoid the career-suicide that engaging with Kosovo entailed, Stamboliç sent Milošević to Kosovo to try and mediate between the two sides in April 1987. Things did not, to say the least, play out the way Stamboliç might have expected. Milošević was expected to meet with the mostly-Albanian party functionaries, but Serb crowds confronted him and demanded he meet with them too to discuss their grievances.
To everyone’s surprise, Milošević agreed, and that Friday a hall filled to the rafters with Serbs was given free rein to air every sort of claim related to the alleged ‘genocide’ in progress against them. Merely meeting the Serbs was a radical-enough step for a Communist politician, but what happened next was unheard of. Although local Albanian officials tried to explain that the Serb claims were gross exaggerations or outright lies, Milošević instead openly sided with the Serbs. Fighting broke out on the streets between the police and Serb protestors (there is good evidence that this sequence of events was not as spontaneous as it appeared) and Milošević went outside to urge calm. The standard playbook was for a grey-suited apparatchik to urge obedience towards the authorities and repeat blandishments about brotherhood and unity. Instead, confronted by Serbian protesters complaining about being beaten by the police, Milošević responded on camera: ‘You will not be beaten again’.
When these scenes were broadcast on the national news later that evening, the effect was electric among Serbs, not just in Kosovo but all over Serbia. Stamboliç had seen Milošević as someone he could trust, but also as someone who might be sacrificed as a scapegoat for the inevitable failure to mediate in Kosovo. Spoiler alert: he was wrong on both counts.
FURTHER READING/LISTENING/WATCHING
Leslie Benson, Yugoslavia : a concise history (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Florian Bieber and Židas Daskalovski, Understanding the war in Kosovo (London: Routledge, 2009)
Alex Cruikshanks’ History of Yugoslavia podcast, especially episodes 22 and 26
Tim Judah, Kosovo : What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2008)
James Ker-Lindsay, Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans (IB Tauris: London, 2009)
John Lampe, Yugoslavia as history : twice there was a country (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Noel Malcolm, Kosovo : a short story (New York University Press, 1998)
Sabrina Ramet, Balkan babel : the disintegration of Yugoslavia from the death of Tito to the war for Kosovo (Boulder, Colorado : Westview Press, 2002)
Miranda Vickers, The Albanians : a Modern History (IB Tauris: London, 1995)
The Death of Yugoslavia (BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995)
Featured image above: postcard from 1918 showing the main square of Mitrovica, Kosovo.
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 19: Bosnia #1
The ostensible purpose of this blog has always been to chronicle the growth and development of political and militant Islam in the last half century, and the 1990s saw the eruption of a series of wars across the world that appeared to many the first skirmishes in the kind of apocalyptic showdown between Islam and the west that fundamentalists in both camps believed was inevitable and seemed, to a greater or lesser extent, to welcome. It is for this reason that I devoted a great deal of attention to the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s in the last three posts, one of the most obvious theaters of this conflict. The Algerian conflict was often understood at the time, both domestically and internationally, as a conflict between secularism and fundamentalist Islam. The same could not be said of another war which dominated the headlines for much of the 1990s, that in the former Yugoslavia, and especially Bosnia. This is because the war there had many other facets beyond the conflict of Muslims versus Christians. The Croat-Serb antipathy was at least as vital a dynamic, not to mention the intra-Christian rivalry of Catholic against Orthodox, and Bosnia is where the ambitions of ‘Greater Serbia’ and ‘Greater Croatia’ clash (we’ll get to that).
The Bosnian war was, as often as not, represented in the western media at least as an ‘ethnic’ conflict, but this is not an entirely satisfying way of looking at it. Yes, the actors in it were trying to establish nation states within defensible borders along ethnic lives (this is the war that gave the sinister term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the world) but in Bosnia in particular, such trite explanations come up against some challenging questions. What is an ethnicity? What is a Bosnian? Is it something to do with language? Most people from the region can communicate with each other without difficulty and the area is characterised more by a continuum of dialects than separate languages. Indeed, when Yugoslavia existed, the language they spoke was considered a single one, called Serbo-Croatian, which today are regarded as several distinct one. Is it racial (whatever that means)? Hardly, since the people living in Bosnia today (even more so in urban areas like Sarajevo) are the product of generations of intermarriage and intermingling of Muslims, Serbs, Croats etc.
Furthermore, the Bosnian Muslims are indigenous to this part of Europe. We are familiar with a minority of Muslims in many European countries, like Turks in Germany or Algerians in France. Relatively recent arrivals, in most cases their presence dates to the period immediately after World War Two, and in many cases far more recently. That isn’t the case here. Muslims in this part of the Balkans have been there for centuries. In no sense (although attempts have been made to claim this) are they ‘intruders’ or somehow ‘outsiders’ to the area any more than anyone else. While differing in religion, they are Slavs who converted to Islam with the coming of the Ottomans (Pinson, 1996), ethnically similar to their neighbours, speaking what is essentially the same language, as long-established in their territory as any other population in Europe.
What about religion? Bosnian cannot be simply considered synonymous with Muslim. There are, after all, the Bosnian Serbs, not to mention Bosnian Croats. While some commentators during the war may have clumsily conflated Bosnia with Muslim, there were plenty of people living there at the outset who considered themselves Bosnian, who weren’t Muslim. As we will see below, there have been times in its history when the authorities of the day have tried either to make Muslim identity the basis of a Bosnian nationality, or to ‘force’ the Bosnians to choose between defining themselves as Serb or Croat, but by the time Yugoslavia began to split up, it could not be said that any of these efforts had decisively emerged triumphant. None of these definitions, therefore, is completely satisfying, which suggests that things are complicated in Bosnia, and we should be wary of choosing one single paradigm in which to view the conflict there.
Then there is Kosovo, a mainly Albanian-speaking, mainly Muslim, country which, on the eve of the breakup, probably would have been a more likely candidate than Bosnia for the main theater of the war. Ethnic tensions had already flared up there between the Albanians and Serbs in the 1980s and Milosovic basically launched his career as a nationalist there. Conflict has raged even more recently in Kosovo and remains unresolved as the Kosovo state is widely recognised by the international community which its Serb neighbour continues to claim it as a part of its territory. The plan is to set things up the eve of war in the 1990s, do the same in Kosovo in the next post, and combine events in both countries in a third part.
So, we are going to look at Muslims and Islam in what used to be Yugoslavia, not forgetting that Albania is almost 60% Muslim and Macedonia contains a large minority (33%) as well, but that we will focus on them in another post, someday. I should say from the outset that these posts make no pretension to being an overall history of the Yugoslav wars, or even the Bosnian/Kosovo war, but will focus on the place of Islam and Muslims in the region and especially the tragic events of the 1990s. If it gives the impression that religion was the only issue at stake in these conflicts, or that jihadist fighters constituted the majority of combatants on the Bosnian side, that would be a false impression. No doubt choosing to focus on merely one aspect is open to that danger, but I will try and maintain a sense of proportion and context within the broader picture as best I can.
So how did Islam end up establishing this peripheral presence in Europe? The short answer is: the Ottoman Empire. This massive and powerful polity rose to domination in the eastern Mediterrannean in the 14th century, reached its zenith at the end of the seventeenth and went into a slow decline, finally collapsing in 1922, after it found itself on the wrong side in World War One, losing what remained of its empire and transforming itself into the modern state of Turkey within much-reduced borders. This collapse overshadows much of the introductory matter to individual countries’ histories on this blog, but as we’re concerned about a modern history of Muslim lands, we haven’t looked at it directly. No doubt when I do a post on Turkey we will go into it in a bit more detail.
For our purposes, 1389 is a key date. In this year the Battle of Kosovo saw the advancing Ottomans defeat armies of the disintegrating Serbian empire. It essentially established Ottoman hegemony in the region for the next half millennium, but there are several important caveats to note with respect to this. Firstly, the Ottoman’s suffered heavy casualties (as did the Serbs), including their Sultan, Murad I, who had led the army into battle personally. The extent of these losses have been linked to a slowing down of what had been a rapid expansion into southeastern Europe at the time, and in fact the line of Ottoman control it established would have important long-term consequences for the South Slavic peoples. While Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina came under Ottoman rule, Croatia and Slovenia remained outside their empire, left to domination by the Christian Habsburg rulers. This attribute of Yugoslavia (yes, I’m going to use the term anachronistically throughout this) as a borderland between two vast empires—Habsburg and Ottoman—both of which collapses at the end of World War One, will be of immense importance in shaping the region’s history.
In modern times, perhaps as important as the fact and consequences of the battle has been its commemoration in the annals of Serb nationalism. Despite defeat, the heroic stand against the Ottomans, inflicting on them a Pyrrhic victory, became a source of pride and celebration for Serbs, and its date, St. Vitus’ day, became a key focus in the crystallisation of modern Serb identity. This is especially true since the late nineteenth century and for insights into this, I should credit Alex Cruikshanks and his excellent History of Yugoslavia podcast which I highly recommend. The date was somewhat insensitively (through sheer carelessness apparently), chosen for the visit of a certain Archduke Franz Ferdinand to visit Sarajevo in 1914, a fact which no doubt contributed to the determination of certain young men to shoot him.
I say the 1389 Battle of Kosovo is a key date mainly because it has loomed so large in the memory. In fact, most historians question the idea that it marked a decisive turning point in the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, or slowed it down. It seems to have been one among many milestones, a major battle no doubt, but not the last stand it is sometimes presented. Ottoman control over the region was not in fact consolidated until after their epoch-making conquest of Constantinople in 1453, bringing to an end, in theory at least, an Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire which had survived for over a thousand years. In its wake, Bosnia was finally conquered in 1463 and the area to its southwest, Herzegovina, in 1483. Bosnia had long been a land on the border between empires. At one time a domain of the Byzantine Empire, it had been under the sway of Hungary for some time prior to Ottoman conquest. It was home to three competing forms of Christianity before the arrival of Islam: Roman Catholicism, Serb Orthodoxy, and a native form independent of both, the Bosnian church, often identified with the Bogomils, a neo-Gnostic sect, who were regarded as heretics by both the other sects.
It is this fragmentation that is often cited as the reason so many Bosnians converted so readily to Islam under Ottoman rule. Poorly organised and busy fighting each other, the Christian churches were ill prepared to meet the challenge of the Ottomans’ religion in an area where Christianity had never put down really deep roots. Another explanation is that members of the Bosnian church, long suffering under persecution from Rome, were happy to embrace Islam, although the importance of this has been disputed by some. (Pinson, 1996) Either way, it is worth repeating it: the presence of large numbers of Muslims in Bosnia was mainly the result of Slavic peoples native to the area converting to Islam, not colonists brought in by the Turks to replace the native population. This is not to say that mass conversions started immediately. There is little evidence these were forced on the population, and there was little overt suppression of Christianity by the Ottomans. The only church that is basically wiped out at this point is the Bosnian church, although that was as much a result of pressure from their fellow-Christians as it was from the Ottomans. Certainly, the new rulers created the conditions that made it advantageous to become a Muslim and this produced its results over time, but it did not happen overnight.
Indeed, the religious consequences for Bosnia of the Ottoman conquest were far more complicated than might first appear. While the Ottomans made it hard for Catholics to build churches, proselytise, etc. they were noticeably much more tolerant towards Orthodox members. While the Catholic church was a powerful and hostile entity with its centre in Rome (the Crusades weren’t ancient history at this time), the head of the Orthodox church lived under Ottoman control at their capital in Constantinople, and that community was seen as far less threatening. In this period, Orthodoxy in fact won converts from Catholics who feared oppression from their new rulers. Instead of a flood of Muslim migrants into Bosnia, if anything the striking migration is that of Orthodox Serbs, initially fleeing the Ottoman invasion of their own country into Bosnia, which partly explains the intermingling of Orthodox Serbs in the Bosnian population which will have important consequences down the line. Moreover, many of these Serbs settled on land bordering Croatia, from which Catholics had fled. A result of this was that some of the areas with the highest concentration of Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s were not necessarily along the border with Serbia but right next to Croatia. This should give us pause to think about the impossibility of redrawing borders along clean ethnic lines, simply rejigging things so that everyone gets to be part of the nation they feel they belong. In Bosnia this wasn’t possible. People were all mixed up. Hence the brutal logic of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
I have dwelt on these medieval origins of Islam in Bosnia, but we are never going to get to the 1990s if we don’t do a bit of serious fast-forwarding now. We are therefore going to gloss over the 15th to early 19th centuries, simply noting that these were far from uneventful, but that they were also a relatively stable period. Certainly Bosnia saw dramatic ethnic and economic changes, but the height of Ottoman power (its borders encompassed Hungary and reached the doorstep of Vienna in the late 17th century) saw a period of prosperity and development as the area became the core of Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe. Urban centres like Mostar and Sarajevo grew into major centers of trade, and Bosnian Muslims played a prominent role in Ottoman administration, the arts and sciences. Many have noted a correlation between urbanisation in Bosnia (a place that had hitherto had few towns, never mind cities) and Islamisation. The towns, especially Sarajevo, became Muslim in population, and there does seem some truth in the generalisation that the cities were Muslim and the countryside Christian, even down to the 1990s.
Over time, the nature of Bosnian society inevitably changed. At the height of Ottoman power, this had been a core imperial territory, far from the frontier, relatively secure, stable and confident. As its borders contracted and Bosnia once again became frontier territory, however, certain characteristics begin to emerge. The practice of Islam, for example, became noticeably more conservative in Bosnia than other parts of the Ottoman empire, often the case when a religious community finds itself situated in an outpost far from the centre, surrounded by other religions. This was partly a result of isolation, but also no doubt because the great wars of the 1680s-1690s, which saw the conquest by Christians of Ottoman possessions in Hungary, sent shitloads of Muslim refugees into Bosnia, bringing with them a lingering fear and hostility towards Christianity.
Being the closest part of the empire to the Austrian empire (the Ottomans’ greatest external enemy at the time) had its own effect. As frontier societies tend to, Bosnia became a more martial and militant place. The Janissaries, elite troops raised locally that the Ottomans would use to fight their wars in far-flung corners of their empire, became a hugely influential and powerful class in their own right. The Ottomans had a unique system of recruiting and utilising the talents of people from the countries it had conquered, and Bosnia was no exception. Those, like the Janissaries, prepared to convert in religion and conform to the new order were rewarded accordingly. Over time, a class of wealthy Muslim landowners emerged, would would resist attempts by the imperial government to encroach upon their privileges by, for example, raising taxes.
Bosnia was ruled with a light touch for a long time, but tensions became more and more apparent in the 19th century as the Ottoman state attempted to halt its decline, relative to the European powers, by reforming and modernising itself along more rational lines. The landowners and Jannissaries in Bosnia furiously resisted such reforms, and eventually rose up in arms in 1831. While they were defeated, this did not put an end to the deteriorating situation in Bosnia. Placed under greater and greater pressure from Constantinople, the local Muslim rulers took out their frustration on their Christian peasantry, increasing the tax burden to intolerable levels in an attempt to offset the financial impact on their resources. This precipitated an uprising in Herzegovina (map below) which then spread to other parts of Bosnia.
This uprising was taking place against the backdrop of what historians in English call the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–78), a major episode in the decline of Ottoman power in Europe, whereby Bulgaria attained independence and the already-independent principalities of Serbia and Montenegro sought to expand into lands inhabited by their compatriots. Bosnia meanwhile came under occupation by Austria-Hungary, who used the weakness of the Ottomans to exert control of the region, as much to prevent the Serbs from taking over as anything else. Bosnia was not formally annexed but simply occupied and administered by Austria-Hungary, but everyone knew the Ottomans (by now dubbed the ‘sick man of Europe’) were gone for good. The consent of Europe’s big powers was obtained for the occupation at the 1878 Congress of Berlin.
This does not mean the people who actually lived in Bosnia were content to see them walk in and take over without a fight. Their new rulers apparently thought this would be the case. Gyula Andrássy, the Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary, remarked that the occupation would be a ‘walk with a brass band’. (Cruikshanks, 2018) The Ottomans and their local allies put up an unexpectedly stiff resistance, however, inflicting thousands of casualties on the invader. Nevertheless, by October 1878 Sarajevo was occupied and over four centuries of Ottoman rule at an end. At least de facto, because on paper Bosnia would remain an Ottoman possession until 1908, when Austria-Hungary formally annexed it. In the intervening decades, Bosnia was run by the Austro-Hungarian finance ministry (who ran military and foreign affairs), a compromise between the Austrians and Hungarians who, with the Compromise of 1867, had established a dual monarchy in which both Austria and Hungary were (in theory at least) equal partners. Most ministries were separate except finance and military, so to avoid either partner getting Bosnia, it was given to this common body.
Formal annexation in 1908 would aggravate Austria-Hungary’s relations with Russia and, above all, Serbia (by then an independent kingdom) which is pretty much the state of affairs as they stood when a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip (below left), a member of a secret society pledged to end Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia, shot dead the heir to the throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie (below right), in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The First World War represented a profound reshuffle of the cards in the Balkans. By its end, both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were broken and dismantled, resulting in the creation of about a dozen new, more or less independent states. Among these was the clumsily-titled Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the culmination of the hopes and dreams of a movement which had emerged in the nineteenth century called Yugoslavism (from jugo ‘south’ and slavija ‘land of the Slavs’ i.e. land of the southern Slavs). This was an ideology that sought to unite the various ethnicities in the area in one strong unified state that could stand up for itself against its formidable external enemies. Some proponents saw their own nationality as natural leaders of the movement, others saw it as a means of uniting what they saw as their own people, be they Serbs, Croats or whoever, in one national territory, bypassing the awkward fact that these peoples did not always inhabit discrete geographically territories. It was an idealistic idea in many ways, more an aspiration towards a national Yugoslav identity than a manifestation of one that was already established.
At our vantage point in history, knowing what we know about Yugoslavia’s ultimate fate, it might seem hopelessly idealistic and doomed to fail from the start. We should remember, however, that many states we have come to regard today as natural expressions of a ‘nation’ or national identity, were really forged in the same way Yugoslavia attempted to create a Yugoslav people, a somewhat artificial moulding and melding of disparate regional identities, people speaking ‘dialects’ which bordered on being mutually-unintelligible languages, different values, religions, moulded by the power of the nineteenth-century state and rationalised education systems into more homogenous ‘nations’. Such was the case with a country like France, which we think of as a naturally-coherent entity but, as a writer like Eugene Weber has shown, was sewn together from a variety of regional identities and peoples who could hardly be described as French until they were taught to be French by a systematising, centralising modern state.
Even more similar to Yugoslavia are places like Germany and Italy, which didn’t achieve political unity until well into the nineteenth century and were constructed from a hodgepodge of disparate statelets. The idea of a South Slav nation was no more idealistic than these cases really. The fact that Yugoslavia was ultimately less successful makes it appear more untenable. Cruikshanks has also noted that, just as in the case of Germany and Italy, where the unification effort was led by Prussia and Piedmont respectively, some Serbs saw themselves as the South Slav equivalent, destined to lead ‘their’ peoples to freedom under their auspices. Indeed the magazine of the Serbian Black Hand group, which facilitated Princip’s assassination of the Archduke, was called ‘Piedmont’. This offers a hint that Yugoslavism was not always entirely altruistic, tolerant and all-embracing. Nationalism among the South Slav peoples, especially the Serbs and Croats, has never been a monolithic thing. There were shades of opinion, everything from enlightened cosmopolitans who wanted to create a political framework that might accommodate the shades of identity that characterise the region, to those (again, usually Serbs or Croats) who saw it as a means of creating a state which might facilitate their domination over their neighbours and enable them to rule areas in which ‘their’ people were in a statistical minority.
In 1918, the newly-founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes included Bosnia, but not its name, which tells you something about the position of Bosnia’s Muslims in the new country. While the peoples mentioned in the kingdom’s title were recognised, ‘Bosnians’ were not. In a very real sense, Bosnian Muslims were expected to choose being Serb or Croat by nationality, their religion being immaterial. There were certainly no shortage of Serb nationalists who regarded Bosnian Muslims as nothing more than ‘unredeemed’ ‘Serbs who had yet to be drawn into the national fold’. (Pinson, 1996) And this will often be the problem with centralising impulses in Yugoslavia, that they will often be seen (with some justification it must be said) as efforts to strengthen one group at the expense of the others. The reforms that accompanied the changing of the country’s name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, for example, included the re-division of the entire kingdom into nine banovinas or regions, which were named after the main rivers and, in theory, gave no cognisance to national and ethnic boundaries. Whether they really did, however, is debatable. Croats and Muslims, for example, could hardly fail to notice that the re-division split up their own territories, while leaving Serbs in a majority in six of the new units. A centralising drive, ostensibly to strengthen the federal authority but widely suspected as a means of exerting Serb authority, will once again play a role in the lead up to war in 1991.
Before we get there, I want to backtrack a bit and look at the development of a Bosnian identity, and what that consisted of. I mentioned that, fearing an end to the privileges they had enjoyed under Ottoman rule, Bosnia’s Muslims resisted Austrian occupation. In the decades that followed the occupation, however, their position did not deteriorate as dramatically as might be expected. There were several reasons for this. The Austrians, having encountered initial resistance, were solicitous not to provoke any more. They allowed Muslims a certain degree of freedom to assert their religious identity and attempted, with some success, to co-opt the wealthy elite and religious leadership of the community, creating their own institutions and appointing their own Habsburg-friendly clerics to prominent positions. These were not universally accepted by the faithful, but definitely succeeded in taking the edge of their animosity. There was also a fairly steady and significant stream of Muslim emigration to Turkey in these years, indicating that not all were happy to stay and accept rule by Christians.
Perhaps one of the most important developments was the attempt by the Habsburg authorities to promote a Bosniak national identity. They did this partly to wean the Muslims away from loyalty to the Ottomans, and to blunt the idea of a Yugoslav identity that might encourage the Serbs and Croats attachment to their neighbouring compatriots. The idea was that all Bosnians would be encouraged to feel Bosnian, not Serb, Croat or Muslim, but most people didn’t buy it, certainly not the first two. In fact, these efforts may ironically have sharpened feelings of identification with the Croat or Serb nation among Catholic and Orthodox Bosnians. After all, until well into the nineteenth century (and this is true across large swathes of Europe) the imperative to feel part of any nation was hardly very acute among people, especially in rural areas where many never traveled more than a few kilometres from home in their entire life. Most people were probably happy enough to identify with their local village or region and leave it at that. It was only when some civil servant came along and told you you had to feel Bosnian that you suddenly felt you might be a Serb.
The only group among whom the Austrians’ tactic had something of the desired effect was Bosnia’s Muslims. It is in these decades that the first stirrings of a separate ‘Bosnian Muslim’ nationality become detectable, of a people who are beginning to perceive themselves as separate from their Ottoman overlord. Perhaps there is some symbolism in the fact that when the Austrians marched in in 1878, the Ottoman vizier sent a message to the locals to remain calm, because the empire was in no position to assist them. The local committee in Sarajevo responded with a message to the Ottomans: don’t send any more advice. (Pinson, 1996)
If the Austrians failed to make everyone feel Bosnian, the division of Bosnia into three ethnic groups nevertheless served some of their purposes just as well, keeping the different communities divided and at each other’s throats so they couldn’t unite in opposition to their rule. During World War One, for example, when the Serbs were public enemy number one, the Austrians organised militia of Croats and Muslims, known as Schützkorps, to kill Serbs. When the war ended, as we have seen, Bosnia’s Muslims were compelled to live in a state that didn’t recognise their existence as a separate people. It was in this atmosphere that the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (JMO) was founded in 1919. This has been described by Leslie Benson describes as ‘the voice of a frightened people’, and that’s an apt description. The JMO’s main goal through most of its two-decade existence was to hold its own and see to it that Bosnia wasn’t simply swallowed up in a Serb and Croat-dominated Yugoslavia. A significant feature of their strategy was to move away from religion as a marker of Bosnian identity and to abandon much of the conservative, explicitly Islamic features that had characterised previous Muslim political organisations.
Sometimes allied with Serbs, sometimes against them, the JMO became the dominant political party within Bosnia in the inter-war period, its leaders drawn from the ranks of the professional middle classes of the cities, rather than the religious establishment. These laid the foundations for a Bosnian Muslim identity that would be ethnic rather than religious in nature. In a post-Ottoman context, this is not as strange as it may sound. The Ottoman ‘millet’ system had divided subject populations up according to religious denomination, granting substantial autonomy in limited judicial and religious areas to the various groups. As a result, religion became more of a marker of identity than language, race or occupation for example. (Lopasic, 1981) It was, the idea went, the Muslims’ shared historical experience and culture that defined them. While this may have been religious in origin, it had developed into something broader than that, and that something had become a nationality, as distinct as any other in the multi-ethnic kingdom. As we have already seen, not everyone in Yugoslavia accepted the logic of this, but the JMO was successful and influential enough to get themselves banned in the 1930s, and after the Second World War, when the kingdom became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Communist rule, the idea of Bosnian Muslims as one of the country’s nationalities will slowly gain traction.
Initially the Communists were ambiguous about recognising the Muslims in Bosnia as a constituent nationality, instead simply defining them as a community with equal rights to Serbs and Croats. Being communists, overt religious activity was discouraged in public life. Tito’s regime got into all sorts of conflicts with the Catholic church and as for Muslims, Sufi orders were banned and mosques closed. In the 1960s, however, strictures began to loosen. This may be partly due to Yugoslavia’s relatively liberal (by eastern bloc standards) regime, but it must also be seen in the context of federal politics. From around 1966, Tito was more dependant on Bosnian party members in his struggle with deviationist trends in the Serb and Croat branches. By now, the original idea of a secular, socialist Bosnian Muslim identity had put down roots, and had become the dominant community within the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seeking their support, Tito supported the establishment of an ethnic category of ‘Muslim’ first in the census of 1961 and later in the new constitution, promulgated in 1968. To stress once again, this identity had by now become something almost denuded of religion. This has been well illustrated by Ivo Banac, who notes that a Bosnian could be a Muslim by nationality and Jehovah’s Witness by religion, like many of the inhabitants of the town of Zavidovići.
It’s worth pausing here to consider the political context. While I don’t want to dwell in too much detail on the country’s deepening crisis, it’s impossible to consider what happened in Bosnia without understanding the various dynamics at play in the last decades of Yugoslavia’s existence. The simplest way of understanding the situation is to do a quick synopsis of Yugoslavia’s post-war history under Tito. Central to everything that followed is that Yugoslavia, while run by a Communist party, was not a satellite of the Soviet Union following its expulsion from the Cominform in 1948. The reasons for Tito’s falling out with Stalin are complex, but the short version is: Stalin didn’t like the Yugoslav leader’s independent foreign policy (provocative action towards the western powers, support for the Greek left in that country’s civil war) in a period when he was trying to keep the Cold War as cold as possible. Tito refused to toe the line and obey Moscow’s orders and so the rift opened. Seeking new allies, Yugoslavia took a leading role (along with Nehru’s India and Nasser’s Egypt) in the Non-Aligned Movement, and reached an amicable understanding with the United States and its western allies, by which trade, tourism and diplomatic relations were developed in return for which Yugoslavia would demonstrate to other countries the advantages of independence from Moscow. The tacit agreement was that, if the west agreed not to interfere in how Yugoslavia was run or expect military co-operation, Tito was happy to see his country integrated economically into the western bloc, in so far as that was possible for an ostensibly communist country to become integrated into a capitalist world economy.
I say ‘ostensibly’ because, as Yugoslavia slipped from the grasp of Soviet control it developed its own brand of communism, characterised by a greater degree of pluralism and decentralisation than was typical of the average Warsaw Pact country. This does not mean that Tito allowed multi-party elections or complete freedom of expression, but it does mean a certain amount of involvement for ordinary people in choosing representatives to communal government and workers’ councils. While relationships with the eastern bloc were subject to diplomatic instability (some improvement of relations followed the death of Stalin in 1953, but the USSR’s intervention in Hungary in 1956 once again soured things) by the early 1960s, Tito’s government was liberalising the economy by reducing state control over wages and giving individual enterprises greater control over the management of their own affairs. At the same time huge loans were taken from western governments, while the country signed the GATT (a precursor to the World Trade Organisation).
The ‘market socialism’ which developed in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s was a weird hybrid. While some aspects were liberalised, others were not; the government retained price controls for example. At the same time, reforms were hindered by the problems they exacerbated: growing inequality and the development of a managerial elite (resented by the communist old guard) who rewarded themselves lavishly while the workers, who in theory were supposed to be able to exert influence over decision making so that their wages would not fall behind, were not able to, instead being subject to pay cuts and more demanding targets. Unemployment doubled in the four years between 1966 and 1970 from 6% to 12% while more than a million Yugoslavs emigrated, the majority working in West Germany. At the same time, much of the extra capital that reforms was supposed to generate did not materialise or was used up in paying managers’ and bureaucrats’ inflated salaries.
Inequality was not only a problem among individuals but among different regions of the federation, something that will have long-term consequences. By 1967, for example, Kosovo’s per capita income was less than a quarter of Slovenia’s (Lampe, 2010), and unemployment far lower there and in neighbouring Croatia than in the other regions. While the intention of reforms had been to knit together the country more closely, using increased production to generate profits that might be invested in underdeveloped regions, if anything it had the opposite effect, increasing the economic isolation of the individual republics so that, by the end of the 1970s, two-thirds of all goods and services were being exchanged within republics, and only 4 per cent of investment resources were jointly owned by firms cooperating across republican boundaries. (Benson, 2014)
Yugoslavia’s market reforms were, of course, long portrayed in the western media as an untrammelled success, but the people actually living through them often begged to differ. The strikes and student protests of 1968 had their counterpart here, where left-wing students protested for increased democracy in workplaces and universities along traditional Marxist lines. Tito, opportunistic as ever, came out publicly in support of the protesters and used them to buttress his power against rivals in his own party. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which Yugoslavia vigorously criticised, was also used to rally the population around the leadership and win plaudits in the west. Tito’s actions in this period are a classic example of his cunning in manipulating the various players to consolidate his own power and keep the lid on Yugoslavia’s inherent tensions. He used the opportunity to open the party to a new generation of young enthusiasts, replacing many of his own rivals. He also introduced a series of amendments to the constitution in that year which strengthened the power of the individual republics at the expense of the federal organs.
Any attempt at decentralisation was viewed as a move against the Serbs of course, especially when the reforms included shaving off two parts of the Serbian SR which became ‘autonomous provinces’, but more of that later. Others, especially the Croats, were displeased that the reforms didn’t go far enough, and in 1971 the so-called ‘Croatian Spring’ saw a movement within the Communist party calling for initially fairly-modest measures towards decentralisation infiltrated by those (criticised as nationalists by the government) calling for greater recognition of Croatian language and culture as well as political autonomy. Realising the reforms had gone beyond his control, Tito clamped down with a good old-fashioned purge, imprisoning those he considered a threat and putting a lid on further liberalisation and decentralisation. Indeed, some reforms were now rolled back and control of certain functions by the federal government tightened, for example, control of foreign reserves and rights to trade with the outside world, not to mention the strengthening of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) which Croats and other nationalities saw as unduly dominated by Serbs.
Essentially this period witnessed a complex mishmash of reforms and counter-reforms that pleased no-one entirely and ended up alienating more or less everyone. It goes some of the way towards explaining why Tito leaned on the support of Bosnian Muslims, as he identified the sources of his trouble as being primarily in Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana. He promoted men like Džemal Bijedić (above), a Bosnian Muslim who was Prime Minister of Yugoslavia from 1971 until 1977, when he was killed in a plane crash which some have speculated was engineered by Serbian rivals. Bijedić was often touted as a possible successor in the event of Tito’s death, and was widely lauded for his successful development of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s economic, transport and educational infrastructure. He was also active in promoting the equality of a Muslim nationality with the countries’ other identities, and he oversaw a renaissance of Muslim culture in Bosnia: not necessarily religious in character, but a growing confidence and pride in Bosnian Muslim heritage and their history as a discrete experience, not just some awkward middle ground between Serbs and Croats. This of course, was to provoke unease and hostility among the latter peoples who also lived in Bosnia.
Just as Croatia had seen activists and writers become increasingly vociferous about wishing to preserve and assert their distinctive culture instead of having it assimilated into a generic Yugoslav culture, so too in Bosnia voices began to grow more confident in asserting the rights of Muslims, not only on a cultural and political, but even on a religious plane. One of the most prominent of these was a lawyer named Alija Izetbegović, who had been imprisoned by the authorities at the end of World War II for his membership of the ‘Young Muslims’, a sort of Bosnian equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. After his release, Izetbegović had kept his head down for most of the 1950s and 1960s, but at the end of the latter decade published a book entitled The Islamic Declaration, which at the time was a largely theoretical work on the place of Islam and its relationship to the modern state. It has since become the source of much controversy, none of which I feel qualified to resolve.
Some (his enemies) have read it as a call to establish an Islamic state, in disregard of Bosnia’s Orthodox or Catholic peoples. Certainly it contains material that seems to suggest a revival of Islam, the taking of power by Muslims under certain (on this there is ambiguity) circumstances, and the imposition of Islamic law on the state. Others have argued, however, that Izetbegović should be judged by his subsequent political writings and actions, which indicate he held no such ambitions. As we will see, when he became the first president of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, he seems to have been far more keen on creating a multi-ethnic nation state within secure borders than anything else, and religion appears to have receded from the public to a more private realm. To the Communist authorities in 1983, however, his work, and that of other Muslim intellectuals, was seen as deeply subversive and counter-revolutionary. They were put on trial and he was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment, a sentence that was considered excessive even at the time. This was later commuted, only two years being actually served
We should, however, not exaggerate the level of ‘ethnic’ tension between Bosnian Muslims and their Serb/Croat neighbours at this stage. In the 1980s, things must have appeared relatively harmonious in Bosnia compared to Kosovo, where ethnic conflict had already come out into the open at the beginning and the end of the decade. If anything, it was other forces that were driving the country off a cliff. While obvious in retrospect, at the time they were less so. Sarajevo, after all, hosted a Winter Olympics in 1984, hardly symptomatic of a country collapsing in on itself! Several factors worsened matters, however. Firstly, the old man died in May 1980. By the sheer force of his charisma and reputation, he had kept in check many of the disparate ambitions at work in Yugoslav politics. After he was gone, there was no-one with the stature to stop reform initiatives from running out of control, as they inevitably did.
Secondly, with all of these other tensions bubbling over, the economy took a further nose dive in the 1980s. My own impression is that it was the economy more than anything else that incubated unrest. If you can keep a people well fed and supplied with copious consumer goods, the majority tend to take less risks in pursuit of civil rights and other, less material political objectives. If you don’t, they tend to start gravitating towards causes that provide a focus for their disenchantment. The discontent that resulted took shape in ideological forms. In Yugoslavia, it was predominantly nationalism rather than religious fundamentalism, but how many times in this blog have we seen this pattern? Relative prosperity and optimism up to the 1970s, economic decline, social instability opening a door to the rise of extremism.
During the 1970s, reckless government borrowing and spending masked the underlying problems and promoted a veneer of prosperity, especially when (as was often the case) Yugoslavia was favourably compared to countries like Romania or Bulgaria. Some white-collar workers and bureaucrats enjoyed conspicuous ownership of cars and kitchen appliances, holidays abroad, all of which garnered the attention of those in the west who were eager to equate economic liberalism with success. The reality is that these lucky ones were a small minority and they were in any case living beyond their means. The country was in fact running a huge trade deficit, its weaknesses mitigated somewhat by income from tourism and remittances sent home by Yugoslavs abroad. This left the ‘socialist’ republic hopelessly in hock to, and dependent on, capitalism, and it was only a matter of time before these chickens came home to roost.
They began to as the surrounding geopolitical situation changed with the decline of the Soviet Union and collapse of its sphere of influence in eastern Europe. When the Cold War was at its height, Tito had always been able to take economic advantage of the Americans’ eagerness to keep Yugoslavia on their side. Under those circumstances, the west could be relied on to subsidise whatever economic difficulties the country happened to find itself in. As things began to thaw with the advent of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika, however, improving relations between east and west reduced Yugoslavia’s strategic importance. A sense of crisis slowly enveloped the ruling elite, but different factions interpreted this crisis differently, and the measures that needed to be taken to tackle it. Many among this elite came to the conclusion that these would necessitate a rolling back of much of the decentralisation which had taken place since the 1960s. If international financiers were to be reassured that Yugoslavia was capable of implementing the fiscal and monetary strictures needed to secure loans, it was argued, the federation once again needed to be brought under tighter control from Belgrade. As we have already seen, however, in Yugoslavia, one person’s idea of ‘centralisation’ was another’s ‘domination’, and as we will see once we have looked at Kosovo in the next post, these efforts at centralisation will themselves be seen as—and provoke—a recrudescence of nationalism among the South Slavs.
FURTHER READING/LISTENING/WATCHING
Leslie Benson, Yugoslavia : a concise history (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Alex Cruikshanks’ History of Yugoslavia podcast, especially episodes 22 and 26
John Lampe, Yugoslavia as history : twice there was a country (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Alexander Lopasic, ‘Bosnian Muslims: A Search for Identity’ in Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 8, No. 2 (1981), pp. 115-125.
Mark Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina : their historic development from the Middle Ages to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, (Harvard University Press, 1996)
The Death of Yugoslavia (BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995)
Featured image above: Detail from a cartoon from the Le Petit Journal showing the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, tearing Bosnia-Herzegovina away from the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid II.
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 18: Algeria #3
We ended the last post with the government’s cancellations of elections (which the Islamists were certain to win with an overwhelming majority) in January 1992. This put an end to the hopes of the FIS that they might attain power by peaceful means, and effectively turned a huge number of its supporters into armed insurgents against the state. Those shadowy elements in the military who had engineered these developments claimed that they were cancelling democracy temporarily in order to ‘protect’ it from those who would cancel it for good if they came to power. So who were these people, who I have been euphemistically referring to as ‘the state’ and le pouvoir up till now? The most important thing to note about this elite is they had no over-riding ideology besides keeping power, enriching themselves and clearing the path for their kids to do the same.
They were the kind of grafters who do well under any regime. When the rhetoric of socialism had suited their purposes, they had espoused socialism; now they espoused neoliberalism. I have always suspected that many of the people who thrived under ‘communism’ in places like the Soviet Union and East Germany were probably the same people who did alright when these countries adopted capitalism. Algeria was (and is) run by such people. Bendjedid had been useful as a figurehead because those shady generals didn’t enjoy being in the spotlight. Because of this, it’s fun to shine such a spotlight on them, so before we get into the descent into chaos, lets identify some of the key figures in the military establishment who are going to do whatever (and I mean whatever) it takes to cling on to power.
Space doesn’t permit a detailed biography of each of these characters. It should be noted, however, that these dudes who really ran the country, the overseers of the ‘deep state’ if you like, were mostly French-trained officers alluded to in the previous post, who had joined the Algerian independence struggle pretty late on when the war was already won. They had been around a long time and Mediène would be around a lot longer. Also known as ‘Toufik’, he was often regarded as the most powerful figure for his power to make or break political opponents at will, as head of the secret services, the DRS (Département du renseignement et de la sécurité), from 1990 to 2015, that is twenty-five years: a long time to wield such terrifying power. Mediène, Nezzar (the minister of defense) and Belkhier, the interior minister, were the leading hardliners, along with Lamari, and they suspected Bendjedid for allowing the Islamist threat to grow out of control on purpose, in order to increase his power at their expense.
If there was a less hardline member of this group it was Zéroual, who was rumoured to have favoured negotiations with the Islamists. Within the regime, the following years would see a factional struggle between these two camps. Although Zéroual would become president (1994-99) and seem to have the upper hand for some years, you could argue that in the end it was the hardliners who won out, as they kept their positions of power later on when Bouteflicka became president. Before all that, though, in the Spring of 1992, this military junta established a body called the High Council of State as a front for their rule. The chairman of this institution would be the new head of the state of the country. Of course, none of them wanted the job and they sought a useful figurehead to take the spotlight off them. Various names were bandied around, and of all the people to be chosen, it was Mohamed Boudiaf, one of the founders of the FLN who had been in Moroccan exile for almost three decades. Regarded as a neutral figure, untainted by the corruption staining all other major political figures in Algerian politics, and without a network of supporters in the country (he had not even been politically active in exile, running a brick-making business instead) the generals and securocrats believed Boudiaf would be a malleable pawn who might lend legitimacy to their coup d’état. He was welcomed back to Algeria as the returning saviour on 16 January and met at the airport by his new ‘friends’.
Within six months, he would be dead.
To everyone’s surprise, Boudiaf turned out to be way more energetic and proactive than they’d expected, and (from the point of view of those who appointed him) not in a good way. Although he was clearly against the establishment of a theocratic state (why would they have appointed him otherwise?) Boudiaf quickly went off-script on his return. Instead of painting the situation in the simplistic terms of fanatical Islamists vs civilised secularists that le pouvoir wished to portray it, the old man offered a much more nuanced and honest assessment of the country’s problems to the Algerian public, arguing that the Islamists had only been able to get this close to power because of widespread disaffection with the regime and its corruption. It was this root cause that he intended to tackle. Although largely forgotten by the public (having been airbrushed out of official histories of the war), he was widely commended for these sentiments, and energetically went about a campaign of confronting corruption at the highest level of society.
While this campaign won over the public and engendered a brief feeling that things might, after all, be alright, it also won him enemies in high places. The very elite that had placed Boudiaf in power realised that instead of a puppet with which to combat the Islamists, they had someone threatening to expose and punish their own venality. No-one, it appeared, was safe. There were rumours that he was preparing to remove Lamari and Mediène by presidential decree. What all of this context suggests is that there are real questions to be asked about the assassination of Boudiaf on 29 June 1992, at a cultural centre in the eastern city of Annaba. It has never been proved conclusively that the army was involved in the killing, but the official version—that it was carried out by a lone Islamist, Lambarek Boumaarafi, a lieutenant in the GIS (Algeria’s version of the SAS)—raises its own questions and sounds so implausible that one of the many conspiracy theories seem a more likely explanation. These problems with the official account are neatly summarised by Evans and Phillips:
Why, given the train of events in Algeria, was the protection afforded Boudiaf on that day so lax and uncoordinated? At least three security agents left their posts beside Boudiaf just before the attack happened, and differing branches of the security services were operating on the scene apparently oblivious of each other’s presence. Commander Hadjeres and Captain Sadek, charged with Boudiaf ’s close protection, subsequently claimed to be ignorant of the presence of a unit of the specialist Groupe d’Intervention Spéciale (GIS) standing just behind Boudiaf. But it was as a member of this GIS detachment, included at the very last minute, that Boumaarafi was given such close proximity to Boudiaf. Moreover, when the shooting began, Hadjeres and his two adjutants Captains Zaidi and Sadek were conveniently outside the hall, while none of the GIS agents reacted to the gunshots. In fact one of them, Driham Ali, went so far as to shoot and wound Hamadi Nacer, the only police officer who pursued Boumaarafi.
There was, furthermore, no autopsy on Boudiaf’s body and the weapon used to kill him was conveniently lost. Perhaps most damning, several years later a dissident group of high-ranking officers based in Madrid affirmed that he had been the victim of a plot by the army and security services and explaining the subsequent killings of several figures who had tried to expose the crime. As of yet (2018) conclusive evidence is lacking, but all that can be said is that almost no-one believes Boudiaf was killed by an Islamist acting on his own. Perhaps most importantly of all, no-one believed it at the time either.
So hope drained away, and the momentum towards civil war seemed unstoppable. Neither the army nor the Islamists seemed particularly keen on avoiding one, but of course a significant proportion of the Algerian population supported neither side. Even among the combined 70% who voted for the FIS or FLN, there were no doubt large numbers who didn’t support a war, certainly not the kind of war that it was destined to become. The way the situation was deteriorating, it is hard, even now, to see what could have been done to avoid it at this stage. Fatwas and hit lists were being circulated in the mosques; by the start of 1993, there were over 20,000 armed Islamists active, mostly, for the moment, in mountain hideouts. Belhadj smuggled a letter (he and Madani had been sentenced to twenty years’ in prison) lending his support to the armed groups, especially the Armed Islamic Movement (MIA) led by Abdelkader Chebouti, but in no sense were these groups under the control of the FIS. Many of the recruits for these armed groups came from disenchanted young men from the cities, and influential (although not hugely numerous) leadership was provided by veterans of the war in Afghanistan.
The killing started, on both sides, even before the cancellation of elections. The army and police were already killing unarmed protesters, and the MIS launched a major attack on a police station in November 1991 from which they obtained a large amount of weapons and ammunition. From the very beginning, however, the jihadists were weakened by internal divisions and rivalries, which sometimes descended into violent confrontation with one another. They were also infiltrated by the security services, which sowed further mistrust between the different groups and made co-operation all but impossible. The army had several successes throughout 1992, largely due to information obtained from spies within the Islamists movement. The government made no attempt at negotiations making clear they had committed themselves to all-out war. If this had merely involved seeking out and attacking the Islamists in their mountain strongholds, the consequences of the war might have been contained, but it didn’t. What was already a rather authoritarian state became even more repressive: suspected sympathisers with the Islamists were put under surveillance, phones were tapped, people disappeared and tortured. If all this seems reminiscent of the methods practices by the French in the final years of the war of independence thirty years earlier, the probably wasn’t lost on many older Algerians either.
As we have seen so many times before in this blog, however, the very effectiveness of the government’s repression, instead of cowing the Islamists into submission, alienated significant parts of the population into sympathising with the latter’s cause. As we saw in the efforts of the French to hold on to their Algerian colony, a tactical victory does not automatically translate into a strategic one. There was also a growing belief, which posterity has rendered more and more credible, that the state was allowing some of the more horrific acts of violence to occur, or even colluding in them, in order to terrify the population into supporting it and turning against the Islamists. A bomb at Algiers airport in August killed 10 people and wounded 128 others, which it subsequently emerged the security services had known about and made no attempt to evacuate the airport. Worse was to come in this respect, and it came most notoriously in the form of the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé, the armed Islamic group), which was hardly a group at all, but a collective term for number of different groups that emerged throughout 1993, acting more or less independently, who were under the leadership of figures who viewed the MIA as insufficiently Islamic and insufficiently militant.
The evolution of this group was accompanied by a clandestine return to the cities by many militants. The rural guerilla campaign wasn’t working and it was clear that the army believed it could maintain the violence at an acceptable level if they could restrict it to the mountains. The jihadists focused on creating insecurity and making the country ungovernable by striking in the cities and towns. Although it would not ultimately win them the war, they succeeded in this way in escalating it far beyond the capacity their numbers and resources would suggest they were capable of. They seemed capable of striking at will and carried out numerous attacks on the army and police, killing over forty people at an army barracks in March 1993 in one particularly successful attack. As terrifying as the randomness of such attacks was the methods of killing. Decapitation, throat-slitting, torture, leaving bodies out in the street to rot as a warning to others-such things became commonplace.
Suddenly on the back-foot, the authorities imposed draconian curfews and restrictions on the civil rights of everyone, guilty and innocent, and parts of the country (even parts of Algiers) slipped entirely out of their control, with militants roaming freely and enforcing their strict Islamic moral code on the inhabitants. Desperation on the government’s side manifested itself in a widespread belief within the corridors of power that only a terrorism of equal savagery could win back the momentum, and suspicion towards anyone who didn’t adopt this mindset. A special counter-insurgency force was created that sped around in Landrovers, acting outside the law, men who were accountable to no-one and for whom human rights abuses were a routine part of their work. To conceal their identity, they usually work masks and hoods, for which reason they became known as ‘ninjas’.
As often happens in these situations, it became increasingly impossible to stay neutral. Non-commitment to one side was regarded as active assistance to the other. A grim joke from 1994 says it all:
A man is stopped by a roadblock. The hooded men ask him if he supports the government or the GIA. He replies ‘the government’ so they cut his right ear off. Shortly after, he is stopped by another roadblock of hooded men. They ask him the same question. When he replies ‘the GIA’ they cut his left ear off. The following day he goes to the doctor, who asks him which part of his face he wants sewn up first. ‘My mouth, so I cannot speak,’ he replies.
Besides army and police personnel, the GIA began to target intellectuals and public figures they considered hostile to their cause. To give just two high-profile examples (there were many others), the internationally-acclaimed novelist Tahar Djaout was killed in May 1993 for his criticism of the Islamists and advocacy of secularism. In September 1994 of the following year, the raï singer Cheb Hasni was killed outside his home for singing about drinking alcohol and premarital sex.
It became clear as 1994 wore on that the populace as a whole was becoming alienated by the GIA’s excesses. After all, even if you are not keen on being ruled by a brutal police-state, you are still not going to turn to a bunch of people who slit people’s throats and cut their tongues out for political solutions. Seeing this, the more ‘moderate’ elements of the Islamist movement who still hoped for a place at the political table (the GIA had no interest in negotiations; their avowed aim was to eliminate all ‘enemies’ of Islam) formed the AIS (Islamic Salvation Army) in July 1994 in response to the perceived rabid-dog image of the GIA. This group would take up arms against both the government and the GIA and was under the control of (what remained of) the FIS to some extent. Although they provided a serious challenge to the GIA in the east and west, the latter held strong control over the region south of Algiers, an area that would become known as the ‘triangle of death’ for reasons that will become clear.
The violence of both sides became increasingly nihilistic and it is simply too depressing to recount every single horror story in detail. Assassinating pop stars was one thing. The GIA next expanded the list of targets to all foreigners and non-Muslims in the country, then to members of rival Islamist groups, then to anyone who refused to conform to strict Islamic practice. With each new leader of the GIA, the net of enemies of Islam widened until it encompassed almost everyone in Algerian society except the GIA. Abdelhak Layada, a car mechanic from Algiers, oversaw the escalation of violence and the complete separation of the GIA from other Islamist groups, declaring any participation in the political process to be treason and that only victory by force of arms was legitimate. He was captured in Morocco in July 1993 and imprisoned, which probably saved his life; unlike most of the GIA’s leaders he is still alive, having been released in 2006.
Layada’s successor, Mourad Si Ahmed (aka Djafar al-Afghani, because he had fought in Afghanistan) was killed the following year and replaced by Cherif Gousmi, who declared the GIA as ruling over a Caliphate with himself as ruler. He was killed in September 1994 and replaced by Djamel Zitouni, who escalated the conflict to targets outside the country (primarily France) which of course played into the government’s hands by re-enforcing a narrative of them fighting a barbaric enemy of ‘civilisation’ in general. Zitouni, a poultry farmer with little education, also stepped up the war against other Islamist groups such as the FIS and its armed affiliates. Indeed, it is around here that the actions of the GIA become truly strange and difficult to understand from a strategic or tactical point of view, nor are the official explanations satisfactory.
Much of what the GIA began to do now—its killing of Islamist rivals, its attacks abroad, the increasingly gruesome murders of innocent civilians—all of it seemed ideally designed to discredit the Islamist movement as a whole. It was common knowledge that the security services had been very successful in infiltrating the GIA, which was relatively easy as they recruited their soldiers from the disenfranchised, anonymous young men of the slums. It was this infiltration that made it easy for the authorities to kill a succession of its leaders. But rumours began to circulate that this involvement went further than mere intelligence gathering, that the security forces were actually directing the GIA’s activity in ever-more extreme directions in order to turn the people against them in revulsion and present the government (warts and all) as the only bastion against the unspeakable barbarity of the GIA and their fellow travelers. There were even suggestions that Zitouni and, when he was killed in July 1996, his successor Antar Zouabri, were somehow controlled by the ‘deep state’. Rarely has the fog of war been so impenetrable as in Algeria in the 1990s.
Before we go into this, a word must be said about ‘conspiracy theories’. Anyone who reads this blog will know that I try to avoid indulging in them. The term has invariably-negative connotations, implying the theory in question, by definition, lacks credibility. But sometimes, theories have to be formulated in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or another, which is often the case, and a distinction has to be made between good and bad conspiracy theories. In the case of Boudiaf’s assassination, for example, the ‘official’ version is sometimes simply so implausible that other explanations must be sought. This does not make them conspiracy theories in the inevitably-negative sense of the word, if a great deal of evidence points towards their veracity, even if it falls short of proving ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Just as we should be wary of indulging in exciting theories about the moon landing being filmed on earth, or holographic planes simulating an attack on the Twin Towers, we should equally be wary of dismissing out of hand evidence-based explanations for events which are otherwise poorly explained. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ is–as often as it is rightly used–used to shut down legitimate discussion.
The activities of the GIA in Algeria in the 1990s are a case-study in this. There are less-conspiratorial explanations, that the GIA was simply a victim of its own twisted logic and came to define the enemies of Islam so broadly as to encompass practically everyone in Algerian society (even members of less-ardent Islamist groups) except themselves. There are also psychological explanations to the otherwise inexplicable brutality and sadism of the killing. Evans and Phillips argue convincingly that it had a cathartic element: the dispossessed and hitherto helpless showing the government that they would not be repressed any longer and that they could do what they liked now, exacting personal revenge on police officers and authority figures who for years had abused them. All of this may, at a stretch, be true. There are strong indications, however, and they become stronger as the years pass, that there was something more going on here.
In the killing of the author Djaout noted above, for example, those alleged to have killed the writer were conveniently killed by the police before a proper trial could be conducted. Then, when a truth commission was formed by concerned public figures, its two leading members, a journalist and a psychiatrist, both prominent campaigners for human rights and critics of the government, were both murdered with no apparent motive in broad daylight. This led some to suspect that, if not actively complicit in such killings, the security services were allowing them to happen in order to rid the regime of prominent critics. But it gets worse, far worse, under Zouabri’s leadership. An obscure figure, Zouabri rose up through the ranks under Zitouni, but few seem to remember him before his involvement with the GIA. He issued fatwas basically condemning to a gruesome death everyone who didn’t join the GIA and presided over the nadir of the conflict, a series of massacres in late 1997 and early 1998 in the ‘triangle of death’, the most notorious (although there were too many to list) of which were at Rais (200-800 casualties), Beni-Messous (87+) and Bentalha (200-400).
These massacres were committed, in most cases, against civilians who had been supportive of the Islamist cause. They were without the slightest shadow of tactical purpose and carried out with the most sadistic brutality, killing for its own sake. At Bentalha, several hundreds had their throats slit, at Rais, numerous babies were decapitated, pregnant women were sliced open.
The above picture, of Oum Saad whose eight children were all killed at Bentalha, is one of the most famous images of what really cannot be dignified by the name of war. But it says everything about the fog of uncertainty now enveloping events in Algeria that the picture and its context were almost-immediately contested. The government argued it was a distortion and that the woman was mourning her brother’s death, and Oum Saad apparently tried to sue the Agence France-Presse on the grounds that it misrepresented her story. It then emerged, however, that she had come under pressure to do so. What was true? Hard to say. What has become increasingly clear as the years have passed is that serious questions remain unanswered.
At Bentalha, for example, there were thousands of soldiers stationed in the area, some only hundreds of meters from the village. The GIA were able to attack with no interference from these, seal it off any carry out their murders for several hours uninterrupted. Witnesses recalled soldiers looking on and refusing to intervene. Some claim that the attackers themselves wore false beards and spoke of being in cahoots with the military. The most famous testimony was that of a survivor, Nesroullah Yous, who escaped to France and published a book Qui a tué à Bentalha? (Who Killed at Bentalha?) which provided a great deal of circumstantial evidence of government collusion with the killers. This theory was backed up by much of the foreign media present in the country, when it was allowed to operate (under close surveillance), and Amnesty International.
The journalist John Sweeney interviewed members of the security services who, on condition of anonymity, revealed the government’s role in the massacres. If all of this was a ploy to discredit the Islamists and win support from the international community, it has to be said that it worked. Horrified by the GIA’s actions, some Islamists split off and founded new groups, the most powerful of which was the ‘Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat’ (GSPC : Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) under the leadership of Hassan Hattab, which will later eclipse the GIA as the main insurgent faction and morph into al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But this is getting complicated enough as it is, so we won’t mention them again for now.
But there was more than one strategy on the government’s side. As noted above, a faction within the leadership led by Liamine Zéroual favoured some kind of dialogue with the more moderate Islamists. They vied with a group known as the Les éradicateurs, led by Lamari and Nezzar, who sought the complete defeat and eradication (hence the name) of the latter: no negotiations, no compromise, simply wipe them out. Zéroual, an army officer who had been in early retirement when the events of 1988 sullied the reputation of many army figures, was the closest le pouvoir had to a popular figure, and in 1994-5 he seemed to have the upper hand against his éradicateur rivals. He was therefore put forward as their candidate when they sought to have some kind of legitimacy bestowed on their regime by holding elections in November 1995.
Such legitimacy became more urgent because a series of negotiations to find a way out of the conflict were held in 1994-5 through the mediation of the Sant’Egidio community in Rome. These had drawn the participation of several significant factions in Algerian politics, including Ben Bella and Aït Ahmed and the FIS, but rejected by the government, who viewed it as outside interference, and of course by the GIA. The parties involved agreed on a common platform for progress, by which human rights would be respected and the FIS would accept political pluralism, but the Algerian regime’s hostility, as well as a lack of enthusiasm on the part of western government’s to support the initiative, meant that it was a dead letter, and the killing went on.
The elections of November 1995 were nevertheless seen as a step in the right direction, even if there was no serious opposition to Zéroual and little doubt about the result from the start. The GIA threatened to kill anyone who voted, promising ‘one vote, one bullet’. Under the circumstances, the official turnout of 74.9% (or more realistic unofficial estimates of around 50% for that matter) is quite impressive. Although there was a general feeling of goodwill and cautious optimism about the whole process, once again this proved to be something of a false dawn. The government’s attitude towards the Rome agreement said more about their capacity for compromise than all the fine rhetoric of a return to normality signaled by the election and, as we have already seen, the worst of the war was yet to come in 1997-8.
It was only after this horrific bloodletting that the war gradually began to wind down. Even if the government was ‘winning’ the war, such was the hardship it had involved for most ordinary people, this ‘victory’ was for many a profoundly pyrrhic one. Zéroual was visibly drained by his failures and the gradual clawing of his hardline rivals back into the ascendency and he announced his resignation in 1998, two years before his term was due to end.
A new president had to be found, and at this stage, pretty much everyone hated anyone who had been anywhere near power. This provided an opportunity for Abdelaziz Bouteflika to return centre stage. When we last saw him, he was failing to be appointed Boumédienne’s successor when the latter died in 1978. Under Bendjedid, he became a marginalised figure and fled the country to avoid corruption charges, only returning in 1989. As was so often the case in Algeria, absence was the best guarantee of popularity; he had also added his signature to a petition condemning the army’s violence in 1988, which didn’t hurt his image among the people. Gradually, as presidential elections approached in 1999, backdoor negotiations and machinations led to the once-sidelined Bouteflicka being adopted by the generals (despite some initial reservations) as their preferred candidate. Given that these were the same people that had started a civil war when the people didn’t vote the way they wanted, it was made abundantly clear to the Algerian electorate that this was more a matter of rubber stamping their appointment than a real election. Bouteflicka was given preferential treatment in the state-run media, and with early signs of fraud being organised, the other candidates withdrew in protest only 24 hours before the vote.
The coronation (sorry, election) went ahead with a turnout of around 20%, which is ironic when you think that this is lower than when people were threatened with death for voting a few years earlier. It was an inauspicious beginning for what was supposed to be a new era, but Bouteflicka was an experienced and canny operator. In the years ahead, he walked a tightrope between currying favour with the public by partly owning up for the state’s wrongdoings in the war, while never going far enough to really annoy his supporters in the military. The war did not end overnight of course. Just in case anyone was beginning to think Algeria’s troubles were behind them, the former FIS Leader Hachani was killed in broad daylight in 1999. Once again, claims that the GIA killed him were believed by some, and regarded with scepticism by others, who saw it as a convenient death for the security services, given Hachani’s status as a moderate Islamist with whom they might be forced to do business with.
This is a crucial feature to remember about the Algerian civil war: that the deep state was always far more comfortable fighting the most extreme fringes of radical Islam than sitting down and talking to its more moderate elements. By the time Zouabri was killed in 2002, the threat from the GIA had been suppressed to the extent that it could be described as a fringe group. As noted above, however, the GSPC grew in capabilities to the point that it would rebrand itself as part of the ‘al-Qaeda’ network after 9-11. Speaking of 9-11, the radicalisation of American foreign policy that took place after the attack on the Twin Towers was a key part of Algeria’s rehabilitation on the international stage. Once regarded as an embarrassing ally to be kept at arm’s length, in late 2001, the Algerian hardliners were suddenly able to portray themselves as having been right all along about militant Islam, and suddenly became a valued ally in the ‘war on terror’ and the simplified worldview it represented. After the mess of the last decade, it says everything that the US Deputy Secretary of State for North African Affairs, William Burns, saw Algeria as a success story, remarking in late 2002: ‘Washington has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism’. Rising oil prices between 2002 and 2015 no doubt also assisted the state’s efforts to return to normality.
But the war was never wrapped up neatly, and it might still be asked what ‘normality’ really means in Algeria.
I suggested above that that the éradicateurs won over their dialoguiste rivals in that more of them kept their jobs into the Bouteflika era, but another way of looking at it is that the latter faction got their way in that many of the Islamists were not eradicated, and were instead reintegrated back into Algerian society. The reason for this is that Bouteflicka’s strategy for ending the war, with the AIS at least, involved passing a ‘Civil Concord Law’ which granted amnesty for atrocities committed during the war to all Islamist fighters who signed up to it. Seeing no way out of the morass of war at the time, most people approved the law in a referendum, although it has been suggested that critics of the settlement were cowed into accepting it without debate because the public debate was framed in terms of being ‘for’ or ‘against peace’. Either way, in the years since, the Civil Concord law has been more and more criticised by those who feel the need for peace was used to excuse all sorts of barbarities for which no-one was held accountable. But an appetite for dissent has understandably been lacking in a country exhausted by years of brutal conflict, and protests are rare and generally low key. Even when the rest of the Arab world was asserting itself during its ‘spring’ of 2011-12, things never really kicked off in Algeria, the police and military containing what protests did take place. There are, in this picture, almost as many riot police as protesters:
Ultimately, the legacy of the war is ambiguous and deeply unsatisfying, especially for people who lost loved ones and have had to endure seeing those responsible walk away scot-free. It’s a complicated issue, and one which I feel completely inadequate to express an opinion on, so I won’t.
The long-term plan for this blog is that we will eventually reach the more-or-less present in all these individual national stories, and no doubt we will return to Algeria to look at the present situation then. Spoiler alert though: Bouteflicka is (as of 2018) still president after almost twenty years, despite the fact that a president is supposed to be limited to two terms. He had the constitution changed in 2008 to allow him to run for a third, and the limit was extended again in 2014 to hand him a fourth. There is talk of him running again next year. All of this is as dodgy as it sounds, with Bouteflicka routinely winning elections with around 80% of the vote, despite evident widespread unpopularity and the fact that he is, at this stage, clearly in failing health and scarcely able to speak on the rare occasions he is wheeled out for public appearances.
STOP PRESS: They got rid of him! In April 2019, after massive protests, he resigned after twenty years in office. Abdelkader Bensalah took over as acting president for 90 days, during which it was promised elections would be held. These have been cancelled and Bensalah is still running the country as I write this in July…
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charles Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present (London, 1991; first published in French 1964)
Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria : Anger of the Dispossessed (Yale University Press, 2007)
James McDougall, A history of Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Featured image above: eyes of Antar Zouabri, GIA leader from 1996 to 2002.
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 17: Algeria #2
Ultimately, the idea here is to set the stage for the civil war of the 1990s and explain the long-term conditions which led to its eruption. The period between Algeria’s attainment of independence and the growing crisis of the late 1980s must be examined in order to explain why Algeria became such a powderkeg. When Algeria won independence in 1962, the world stopped paying attention. That other dirty secret of French colonialism, Vietnam, had by now taken over the headlines in any case, as the Americans went from cautious advocates of Third World liberation, to energetic opponents of it. But the end of French rule was far from the end of Algeria’s woes, although it may have seemed so at the time. The 1960s and 1970s were in many ways an optimistic period, in which the country took the lead as a standard-bearer of the rights of Third World nations to assert themselves, and give substance to their newly-won independence in the face of attempts by the old colonial powers to extend a kind of neocolonial economic domination over them. Countries like Algeria, therefore, drifted towards socialism and the Soviet sphere of influence while also playing a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement of ‘Third World’ nations who sought to remain aloof from the Cold War rivalry of the two superpowers.
The socialist direction was evident from the first year of Algeria’s independence, as a struggle for leadership within the FLN resulted in the predominance of the more left-leaning revolutionary faction. This leftward direction emerged from meetings held in the Libyan capital, Tripoli in May, at which the FLN leadership criticised the Evian accords as making too many concessions to the colonial interest while not being sufficiently revolutionary in, for example, not securing the seizure of the settlers’ land, which the FLN regarded as stolen from the Algerian people. Agreement about these issues was far from uniform, however. While the movement for independence had maintained its unity while it had to concentrate on fighting the French, once this goal was achieved and the question of who would run the new state came up, cohesion quickly broke down and factions developed, vying for power and over competing visions of what kind of country Algeria would be. This was especially true after the release of the leaders arrested in 1956. This took place in July, at the same time independence became a reality, and everything was up for grabs in the turmoil of that summer.
In the previous post, we have already looked at the chaos surrounding the flight of the Pieds-Noirs and the massacre of some of them, and many Algerians who had collaborated with the French. Simultaneously with this was the struggle between Algerian factions in Algiers in July and August, to seize power. At Tripoli, while there was agreement on the broad strokes of a plan for Algeria’s future, the practicalities were another matter. One of the main points of contention was how and who the idealistic aspirations were to be put into execution by. The choice of the country’s first president was a particular bone of contention. The most popular figure among the people for this position was Ahmed Ben Bella (below), among those kidnapped in 1956 and just released by the French. Ben Bella was a bit like Algeria’s version of John F. Kennedy: charming, glamorous and popular, but less fabulous when you look beyond the surface gloss. Unlike many others in this story, he lived for ages, only dying in 2012 at the age of 95. He will reemerge in Algerian politics in the 1990s but he was not destined to remain around long after the winning of independence.
Perhaps even more important than charisma at this stage, Ben Bella had the support of the head of the ‘frontier army’, Houari Boumediène, who remained outside the country until September. These troops, organised more like a regular professional army than the forces that had been fighting a guerrilla war inside Algeria, were to become a vital factor in the showdown for power in 1962. Boumediène (below) was the king-maker, and had chosen to back Ben Bella, having sent his henchman, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (of whom we will hear more later), to sound out the jailed leaders earlier in the year. The choice of Ben Bella as leader was opposed, however, by the head of the Provisional Government, Benyoucef Benkhedda (who had replaced Ferhat Abbas), theoretically in charge of the country when the French left. He walked out of the Tripoli meetings, and returned to Algiers. I say he was theoretically in charge because really, it was unclear who actually wielded power in the new capital. Different armed groups affiliated with different commanders fought it out in the streets while the politicians bickered. Some of these armed factions supported the part of the army led by Boumediène, others were jealous and fearful of the power they would wield when they entered the country.
Ben Bella and his allies claimed legitimacy for their ‘political bureau’ in Tlemcen in late July. Benkhedda declared this illegitimate and his GPRA the legal authority. Two of the formerly-jailed leaders, Mohamed Boudiaf and Hocine Aït Ahmed (below left and right), were also opposed to Ben Bella’s installation as leader, but did not have sufficient muscle to stop him. As internecine fighting threatened to devour the country, most people simply wanted an end to war and for someone to come and impose order. Boumediène’s frontier army, along with its allies already inside the country, obliged, marching into Algiers and establishing order in September. Constituent elections were held for the first National Assembly that month, but all candidates came from a single list of FLN members, purged of many of Ben Bella and Boumediène’s enemies. Ben Bella was duly elected Prime Minister and, when the new constitution was adopted the following year, President. Opposition figures (to the extent that opposition was allowed) like Boudiaf and Aït Ahmed attempted to use the National Assembly as a forum for their opposition, but it quickly became clear it was just a toothless talking shop. Real decisions were made within the higher echelons of the FLN and even the constitution was not thrashed out in the assembly, but written elsewhere and presented to them for the rubber stamp.
Boudiaf formed an underground party to resist the regime but was arrested, and then escaped to Morocco after being released. He would spend the next twenty-nine years abroad, in obscure exile, taking no part in Algerian politics even from afar, but he will dramatically re-enter the story again in the early 1990s. The Berber Aït Ahmed likewise formed his own party, the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), and led a brief revolt in the Kabylie region in October. It was put down with brutal violence by the national army, and Ahmed would be arrested, receiving a commuted death sentence in 1965. He escaped the following year, however, and spent the next twenty-four years of his life in Switzerland. He too would return to Algeria during the crisis of the late 1980s, but ultimately thought better of it and returned to Switzerland, where he died in 2015, aged eighty-nine.
What these, and other figures (really the situation was more complex than I am presenting it here, and Boudiaf and Aït Ahmed are just representative examples) objected to was, among other things, the lack of pluralism in this new Algeria that Ben Bella and Boumediène were cooking up. Having said that, many of them would likely have done likewise, and it should not be imagined that the establishment of a one-party state was simply the result of a fiendish plot by the triumphant faction to keep its hands on power. There was a deep-rooted mistrust of multi-party politics within the FLN and the nationalist movement in general. Under the French system, when some limited participation had been allowed for a brief period in the 1940s and 1950s, separatists had found themselves frustrated and demoralised by their efforts to get anywhere within the rigged electoral system, which seemed to dissipate their energies and encourage factional infighting. The FLN had swept all this away when they emerged in 1956, demanding that all other separatist groups disband and join their struggle, or risk being branded traitors to the cause. While to us this seems extreme and intolerant, at the time it was widely viewed as providing a refreshing focus and single-mindedness to the campaign.
As James McDougall has written in his History of Algeria:
By 1956, many would see ‘politics’ itself in this vein — electoralist, legal, parliamentary, plural — as thoroughly discredited, ineffective at best, the deliberately time-wasting and obstructionist business of ‘traitors’ at worst. The FLN, in an important respect, would in this sense be an anti-political movement of militarised direct action. In the longer term, the consequences of this would be dramatic.
Indeed they would.
The habit of solving problems by direct action, often violent, would also leave a lasting legacy. As the post-independence summer was marred by the deaths of thousands in internecine fighting within the FLN itself, Ferhat Abbas wrote despairingly:
If armed militants today turn their guns on other militants, we may as well say that tomorrow they will turn them on the people and on their freedom. And in that case, what nation and what homeland shall we have, if those with arms can impose their will on the people?
Nor should we overestimate the yearning for democracy in the form of regular elections among the people as a whole. The FLN possessed huge popular legitimacy as a result of its leading role in winning the war, Ben Bella was himself tremendously popular, and most people were more concerned with putting bread on the table. If someone had to be made dictator for life to guarantee these basics, there doesn’t appear to have been a huge amount of opposition to it. This was particularly urgent because the country was in ruins at independence. While Ben Bella had great plans to emulate Tito’s Yugoslavia or Castro’s Cuba, there was a severe shortage of technical skills given that these had been heavily dominated by the French settlers, most of whom had now left. There were reportedly only two architects in the country and less than a hundred doctors. This state of ruin was the legacy of French rule, it should be noted, and those that blame the ruined state of the country on the war (and thus on the Algerians for rising up) miss the point spectacularly.
Ben Bella does appear to have sincerely tried to tackle these problems. Far from projecting a distant, authoritarian image, he was a hands-on leader, traveling the country and meeting the people to assess their needs and problems. Realising the scale of the effort facing him, he devised grand plans and brandished lofty rhetoric about Third World liberation and Algeria’s natural resources saving the country. A huge bureaucracy would be necessary to manage this project, and he intended to exert direct control over as many of its aspects as possible. Ben Bella began to concentrate more and more power in his own hands, and he made the mistake of getting cocky and forgetting who had put him in power in the first place. During 1963-65, he took over the ministries of information and finance, folding these departments into his own office, and even brought the important post of Secretary General of the FLN into his own hands. There was talk of him taking over foreign affairs, depriving Boumediène’s pal, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (below right, next to Boumediène at the United Nations), of the post to which he had been appointed in 1963. In the event, Bouteflika, would remain in the post until 1978. Why? Because they got rid of Ben Bella.
In centralising power around him, Ben Bella made little effort to conciliate or try to bring back on board those rivals in the FLN he had pushed aside in his ascent to power. His biggest mistake was that he failed to keep the army under Boumediène sweet, and even gave them cause to fear he was planning to challenge their power when he declared the army’s subordination to the FLN in the Algiers Charter of 1964, then spoke of creating popular militias as a counterweight to their power. His popularity among the people may, have conversely, told against him in the corridors of power, and there were mutterings of him cultivating a ‘cult of personality’. Acting before it was too late, Boumediène had his soldiers arrest Ben Bella on the 19 June 1965, and put the country under the control of a Revolutionary Council, of which he was chairman. Ben Bella was put in jail for several months, but later allowed to live under house arrest. He would eventually be released and flee, like Aït Ahmed before him, to Switzerland. The parliament and constitution (which had not enjoyed the substance of power in any case) were suspended and, once again, there appears to have been little appetite for resistance among the people as a whole, despite Ben Bella’s popularity. There was an attempt by left-wing factions within the FLN to organise political opposition against the coup in the hope that the people would rally to their cause, but this didn’t amount to very much.
Boumediène’s style was very different to Ben Bella’s. He kept a low profile in the early years of his rule (he wasn’t officially president until 1976) and you get the impression from reading his biography that he fell into the position almost by accident, that he didn’t really see himself as destined for political power, and was by nature reluctant to step into the spotlight. In many pictures of him meeting other world leaders, he has a bemused ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ look on his face.
At the end of the 1960s, his regime consolidated its power by either eliminating the opposition or placating and assimilating it. He also faced opposition from some within the army jealous of his and his cliques’ power, but easily crushed a coup-attempt. Relations with the Soviet Union grew stronger and the economic programme more explicitly socialist. There was an optimism which Boumediène managed to keep going from the Ben Bella era, of a brighter future for formerly-colonised nations who were now taking control over their own destiny (and natural resources). Algeria was seen as a leader of this movement and Boumediène explicitly reorientated his country away from Europe and the colonialism of the past and towards Africa and (what they hoped was) the potential of the future. This hope was never more clearly manifested than in Algiers’ hosting of the Pan African Cultural Festival of 1969, a huge event in which thousands of artists from all over Africa descended on the city and filled it with music, dancing and colour for a week. There is some cool footage here:
All of this was helped in the 1970s by a huge rise in oil prices (Algeria nationalised their oil in 1971), which gave the appearance of success to the Algerian economy. Boumediène’s regime must be given credit for not hoarding all this for themselves in Swiss bank accounts (unlike many other newly-independent countries rich in resources) but instead invested heavily in education, healthcare and social projects….as well as the army and secret police. Basic foodstuffs and goods were subsidised and available at affordable prices. In the modern west, where economic success tends to be measured in how often people can buy a new iphone or how many millionaires live in a country, there is a tendency to scoff at such achievements. This is deeply stupid. These were tremendous achievements in a country where people had been allowed to literally starve to death under French rule a generation earlier.
There is also often a tendency to play down the efficacy of such conditions in shoring up the legitimacy of even an authoritarian regime. Boumediène did not try and make the Algerian people like him. He sought their co-operation through actions and results, and if he couldn’t get it that way, he resorted to violence. Although many people would look back fondly on the Boumediène years as relatively prosperous and peaceful compared to what followed, there were warning signs even then for those who were prepared to look for them. The state violence and crushing of dissent was one, of course, but even economically, the flaws were in retrospect obvious; the economy suffered from the same shortage of consumer goods that would stymie most Eastern-Bloc countries in their final decade, not to mention the fact that much of its success was due to inflated oil prices, a phenomenon which wasn’t going to last forever. The ‘oil glut’ of the 1980s saw the price of a barrel of oil fall between 1980 and 1986 from $35 to under $10, over half of this decline occurring in 1986 alone.
By this stage, Algeria was deep in crisis and Boumediène was long gone, having died of a rare blood disease in 1978, after being in a coma for over a month. Algeria’s problems were much deeper than a crisis of leadership, but the unpreparedness and farcical way in which he was eventually replaced didn’t help. The main candidates to succeed as president were Bouteflicka (generally seen as favourite and a pro-western liberal) and the left-wing candidate, Mohammad Salah Yahiaoui, whose support came from the trade unions and youth movements. Decisions were made, largely by the army and security services, behind closed doors and from their point of view, both men represented a threat in that they had their respective power bases beyond the army. What they ideally wanted was a fairly weak character they could manipulate, a front to facilitate the exploitation of the fruits of power which already existed but would go into overdrive in the following decade. They decided to appoint the virtually-unknown Chadli Bendjedid (below), an army colonel and commander of the Oran region, who would become a figurehead for all the venality and negligence of Algeria in the 1980s.
Although certainly not an inspirational figure or very competent president, in some ways it is unfair to place too much emphasis on Bendjedid’s role in the mess that was unfolding. This is largely because it lets so many others off the hook: corrupt army officers and business associates, those paying bribes and those receiving them, denying the Algerian people the basic securities they had once been able to rely on, just as the price of oil was crashing and undermining the fragile foundations of the economy, just as the population-boom of twenty years earlier was throwing millions of young people onto a labour market that had no jobs for them, just as an impoverished rural population was flooding into the shantytowns surrounding the big cities that hadn’t the infrastructure to house them or even provide for their basic needs. Algeria was a society in freefall, and everyone knew it. A small elite attached to the army and the FLN were the only ones doing well and increasingly (it was the 1980s after all) flaunted their wealth and luxury, while growing more detached from the general population, living in gated communities and sending their kids to French-language schools and universities.
The cabal of army generals who were the real power behind the government were largely trained in the French army and in many cases had only joined the independence struggle in the final period, after it was already won. All of these facts confirmed a general impression held by the population that saw the the corrupt oligarchy that now ran Algeria, popularly known as le pouvoir (‘those in power’) as somehow affiliated with, or supporting the interests of, the old French colonial power. Another disparaging name for this elite has been the hizb fransa or ‘party of France’, and there was a growing feeling in the years before October 1988 that the FLN that now ran the country was not the same FLN that had won the war, but had been transformed into the very oppressive clique the Algerian people had sought to get rid of when they scared off the Pieds-Noirs. Bendjedid was a perfect figurehead for the pouvoir: widely perceived as a gangster who had used his position to enrich him and his family (his son was a particular object of scorn), an extra dimension was added to the public’s disdain by the widespread perception that he was also weak and somewhat unintelligent. Playing on a trope deep within Algerian society, of the weak henpecked husband who can’t even ‘rule’ his own house, never mind a country, he was portrayed as being the puppet of a domineering wife, Halima, who was believed to be the real brains behind the operation.
Whatever the truth of these allegations (Bendjedid does not appear to have been so hapless as often portrayed) the reality is that the country was really run by the army, and this would become more and more obvious in the years that lay ahead. Being army men, they knew no other response than force when faced with the eruption of street violence in October 1988, as thousands of rioters went on the rampage, protesting against the stagnancy and hopelessness of their plight. The sight of young men, idle and resentful, hanging around the streets with nothing to do was by this stage a fixture of Algerian society. Essentially, a generation (and a particularly large one demographically) was left to rot by the ruling class. Disenfranchised, unemployed, their reality was rarely articulated or acknowledged in the sterile, state-sponsored media. It found a manifestation in football and Raï music, a synthesis of Algerian folk music, influenced by western forms and instrumentation. Disapproved of by the establishment, Raï addressed taboo social issues like sex, alcohol and infidelity, giving a voice to an otherwise voiceless and disregarded youth culture. Oddly, just as Algeria was imploding in on itself in a maelstrom of senseless violence, Raï would explode onto the world stage in this period, producing international stars like Cheb Khaled (below). It would also find itself in conflict with religious conservatives, whose vision of Algeria was very different from the liberal, cosmopolitan and outward-looking ethos behind Raï.
The riots of October 1988 (often known as ‘Black October’) were a watershed in the history of modern Algeria. The authorities almost lost control of the situation, and it marked the beginning of the slide to civil war. Crowds of young men went on the rampage, attacking the affluent commercial district of central Algiers: the shops they could never afford to buy anything in, the nightclubs they could never afford to party in. Within days, the army under General Khaled Nezzar declared a state of martial law and the army killed around 500 protesters in the following days, showing little or no regard for civil rights. Political leadership was curiously lacking in the first days, as Bendjedid took a week to appear on television and appeal for calm, making vague promises of reform. Where leadership did come it was from the Islamists who, heavily influenced by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, had been organising among the poorest sections of Algerian society for years and, for many, were the only credible political force in the country that were untainted by the corruption of le pouvoir. Attempting to give the riots some kind of positive direction, a march of 20,000 was led on the 10 October by a young preacher named Ali Belhadj (below) and fired on indiscriminately by the army. It could be argued that, notwithstanding Bendjedid’s promises for reform, it was at this point that the battle lines began to be drawn between the Islamists and the army.
Among the reforms that followed the events of October 1988 were the holding of elections and the opening-up of the political system to parties other than the FLN. A new constitution was approved in February 1989. Opposition parties flourished, there was a liberalisation of the press. Political debate was suddenly permitted in the public sphere. The collapse of the ‘communist’ bloc in eastern Europe later that year should also be recalled, and there was a great deal of optimism that Algeria was following a liberalising trend at the time. Ben Bella and Aït Ahmed returned from exile, although it would become painfully clear they were no longer relevant to most young Algerians, many of whom hardly remembered them. Instead it was the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS: Front Islamique du Salut) who would emerge as the main opposition, so it is time to look at the forces of political Islam which, in the following years, looked poised to take power.
We have already noted one of the FIS leaders in Ali Belhadj, who was a talisman for the young and angry who formed a large part of their constituency. The appeal of the FIS was not limited to the dispossessed poor, however, and a part of their following also consisted of the pious middle-classes and small-time businessmen who sought social stability and moral certainty through religion. Their interests were represented in the co-leadership of Abbassi Madani (below), a university teacher and preacher who had fought for the FLN during the war of independence and been jailed by the French, who later turned to Islam, arguing that the Islamic content of the FLN’s original charter had been betrayed.
It’s worth looking briefly at the place of religion in Algeria since independence and the Islamists’ activities. Islam had been acknowledged by leaders such as Ben Bella as central to the identity of the country, and cultivated a kind of state-sponsored Islam which was sold to the people as going hand in glove with socialism. This can be compared with the efforts discussed in part ten, of the Karmal regime in Afghanistan to turn Islamic scholars into employees of the communist regime. Over time, and with the coming of Boumediène, however, the socialism tended to predominate and the government’s stance towards Islam came to be seen more and more by the clerics and fundamentalists as mere lip service. While some preachers and scholars continued to work within the confines dictated by the government’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, others argued that political independence from France represented a revolution only half finished. While French may have been expelled, their culture remained, and from the Islamists’ perspective, the task of cleansing Algeria of French and Christian influence had not been completed.
In this sense, the FLN, and their various charters since the winning of independence were seen as a betrayal of the principles inherent in the original declaration of November 1954 which began the war. The Islamists thus saw themselves as picking up the baton where the FLN had abandoned it. They represented the closest thing to an opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were financed by big landowners and wealthy people threatened by Boumediène’s reforms, especially the redistribution of land. The al-Qiyam (Islamic values) movement was, until its banning in 1970, the standard bearer of this dissenting Islamism, led by Abdelatif Soltani (below), an Imam who had supported the FLN and independence as a means of Islamicising Algerian society, but grown disillusioned when things didn’t pan out that way. He protested vigorously against socialism, and the continuation of practices deemed western after independence, such as the sale of cigarettes and alcohol and the participation of women in public life.
Indeed, the role of women would become a battleground between the Islamists and statists (for want of a better word) in Algerian society. While women played a central role in the fight for independence, some (and not only religious conservatices) then expected them to retreat to the private sphere and play no further part in politics. Some, such as Djamila Bouhired (below) did no such thing, and took the rhetoric of liberation and equality as effecting everybody, not just men. She continued to be active in several political organisations after independence, coming into conflict with both Ben Bella and conservatives for not wearing a hijab in public and campaigning for equal rights for women. This had to be done, because despite independence, the status of women turned out to be not a high priority for the government, and something of an obsession for the Islamists, who saw women wearing western clothes, working, going to school, etc. as all symptoms of an insidious neo-colonialism and moral corruption.
That it wasn’t massively important to the government can be seen in the fact that they were prepared to roll back whatever progress had been made in this respect in their efforts to appease the Islamists in the early 1980s. Having long been under pressure to legislate on these issues, Bendjedid’s government produced the family law in 1984, which basically threw out the idea of a socialist, progressive Islam that embraced equality for all, and sought to instate a code of laws in which women were treated as legal minors, dependents of their closest male relative, whether it be father, brother or husband. Under these laws, women would need the permission of their ‘guardian’ to travel, get married, work. It provoked a fierce reaction from women and progressive members of society, many of whom were FLN activists and many of whom were veterans of the war against the French. While initially backing down, the government implemented the laws and instead worked to undermine this opposition by undercover police operations and dirty tricks.
It might be asked why the Islamists were already so influential at this stage that the government felt the need to make concessions to them. The support they enjoyed among the population, even while operating largely underground, was evident. In the Friday moque, Islamists had a ready-made recruiting centre and platform for the propagation of their ideas. When Soltani died in April 1984 his funeral, despite going unannounced in state media, attracted 25,000 people. The government sought to mobilise this movement as a means of weakening its other opponents, primarily on the left. As we have seen with Sadat’s attempts to do this in Egypt in the 1970s, this would ultimately prove to be a huge mistake, and one that they would only realise was a mistake when it was too late and the Islamists had already been emboldened and established themselves as a potent force. A part of the reason the Bendjedid’s regime saw the Islamists as a useful cat’s paw was the economic crisis. With its debts out of control, the state had been forced to borrow from the IMF and was as a result was compelled to implement a raft of austerity measures, opening up the economy to foreign investment on more liberal terms, while cutting public spending and removing many of the safeguards that had hitherto made the peoples’ lives tolerable. Some of these measures were popular with the anti-communist Islamists,and in other ways they benefited because the resulting immiseration of the population drove many people into their arms.
The activities of the Islamist movement among the poor must be taken into account when explaining their growing popularity in the late 1980s. While the social conservatism should not be forgotten, it should also be remembered that for many poor Algerians, the Islamists were the only political grouping who seemed to be prepared to come into their neighbourhoods and share their poverty, who really seemed to care about them. The left was completely discredited by this stage, and seemed to offer no solutions. For one thing, the rhetoric of socialism and equality had been hijacked by the ruling FLN. Other left-wing groups were distant, academic theoreticians led by people who had been exiled for decades and displayed little understanding of their lives. The Islamists, on the other hand, spoke in an idiom they understood and seemed to promise a complete overthrow of the existing order and its replacement by the moral certainties of the Quran.
Another factor that increased the influence of Muslim Brotherhood ideas in the country was the fact that the government had been attempting since the 1960s to promote Standard Arabic (very different to the Maghrebi Arabic spoken colloquially in Algeria) as the language of administration and public life in place of the still-overwhelming French in these contexts. Finding few Algerian teachers able to teach it, they had brought in many teachers from other Arab countries, many of whom happened to be Muslim Brotherhood activists. Taking all these factors into account, it is not surprising that, when opposition politics became possible after 1988, the masses chose neither traditional left- or right-wing parties, turning instead to political Islam.
The FIS was created in March 1989 and made legal in September. This was not as straightforward as it might appear, because the new constitution forbade political parties which operated on a confessional, linguistic or regional basis, which frustrated the activities of Berbers campaigning for their rights. While in theory it also forbade religiously-based parties, the government either didn’t dare deny permission for the FIS to operate, or more likely Bendjedid was still trying to use the Islamists as a force in his own power struggles, not so much with left-wing opponents, but with other factions within the FLN and, perhaps even more so, with the army itself. He had been making attempts for some time both to tackle corruption and to rein in the power of the security services and the military. Feeling threatened, elements within these groups suspected that the president was using the FIS to strengthen his grip on power and might even make an electoral deal with them to do so. In the period immediately after October 1988, Bendjedid certainly displayed more political cunning than he is often credited with, and used the fear created by the events to shore up his own support within the political establishment, winning re-election as president by the end of the year and pushing through some modest reforms that weakened the hold of the military on the state.
This is important to remember: that this was not a simple struggle of government versus Islamists, there was far-from a united front on the government’s side, and this fact partly explains why the FIS were permitted to grow and develop as a force. The big mistake Bendjedid and others like him made was that they thought they could contain the Islamist challenge, and harness it to their own ends. Instead, it quickly grew beyond their control, and asserted its own ideology and objectives, that would clearly have little use for the machinations of le pouvoir once they had obtained power. The success of the FIS was spectacular. In local elections held in June 1990, scarcely a year after its foundation, the Islamists won 54.2% of the vote, almost double that of the FLN, their nearest rival. In the big cities: Algiers, Oran and Constantine, they won a 70% share. They took power in hundreds of local councils which an alarmed government moved to divest of many of their powers and starve of funding. Le pouvoir had no intention of handing over power without a fight, and this kind of underhand dealing did not go unnoticed by the Islamists, and was only the first of many measures, increasingly extreme, that the state would go to to prevent them from taking power.
It should be noted, however, that while the FIS would complain of election fraud and irregularities, its leaders openly admitted that once they took power there would be no more elections, and that there was only one form of just government, one based on Islam and the Quran, that needed no elections or mandate to legitimise itself. It might be asked why the FIS were prepared to use elections as a means to gain power in that case, and its enemies accused it of hypocrisy on that score. There were also those within the ranks of Islamism who likewise were impatient with this strategy, and they would come to the fore when the army closed off the avenue of electoral victory to them. But it had not come to that yet. 1991 saw a transformed Algeria. The rise of the Islamists had not just changed things on paper. The FIS were only the political manifestation of a social revolution, comparable in some ways with what occurred in Iran in 1979. Far more women were now veiled in the streets, some willingly, some unwillingly. Islamist youth, emboldened by their successes, were given license to harass those women that held out against these diktats, and pressurised shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol and cigarettes. Entertainments like concerts and cinemas were frequently canceled and those who had satellite dishes receiving French television signals intimidated into removing them.
The nationalist-religious fervour was only heightened by the start of the First Gulf War in early 1991 which, despite Saddam Hussein’s aggressive secularism and hostility towards political Islam, the Islamists took his side as an anti-imperialist cause, further boosting their popularity among the people, to whom the Iraqi leader (and indeed, pretty much anyone taking on the might of the United States) was a hero. The initial wave of optimism and enthusiasm for multi-party politics hardened into something else as the year progressed. A polarising took place into two camps: those who wanted an Islamic state and those who feared it, feared it so much they were prepared to abjure democratic principles to avoid it. Those who could afford it, the wealthy, Francophone middle classes, began to leave the country before the FIS took power. The army was already making contingency plans to prevent an Islamist takeover.
The FIS and its supporters understood this, and saw the desperate government’s changing of electoral boundaries and rules as a transparent attempt to thwart them of victory in National Assembly elections that were promised for July 1991. In protest against this, and also against continuing and painful economic reforms that were seen (rightly) as a neo-colonial foreign imposition, the FIS called a series of street protests and strikes in late May and early June. The rhetoric of its leaders became more strident and militant, talking of jihad and the establishment of an Islamic state by force if they could not obtain it by electoral means. Belhadj in particular was both an electrifying (to his fans) and terrifying (to his enemies) figure, whose charisma and skills as a impassioned speaker were legendary, capable as he was of whipping a crowd into a frenzy of anger or reducing them to laughter with his withering put-downs. He had a keen sense of the theater of politics and its symbolism (check out the clip below, where he produces an old photograph of his father holding a Kalashnikov, and vows to do the same if necessary), and seemed to have no fear of the consequences of his increasingly reckless statements. The prospect of him holding an office such as Prime Minister was deeply worrying to many, for whom he was almost the personification of unhinged fanatic:
But he was enormously popular and, compared to the career politicians and corrupt technocrats they were accustomed to, he came across as refreshingly blunt. A hundred thousand people came out onto the streets and once again the police could barely contain the violence. Given the pretext it needed to intervene, the army once again came onto the street and shot at protesters. All hope that the FLN might be able to mount a comeback in elections was more or less lost at this point and Bendjedid moved to distance himself from it, resigning as its president. In late June, Madani and Belhadj were arrested on charges of planning an armed uprising. Soon afterwards, the Salafist wing of the movement began gaining traction and younger, more militant members headed to the mountains to take up arms against the state. More moderate elements in the movement managed to retain control, for the moment at least, and a new leader from this wing of the party, Abdelkader Hachani (below), was chosen. This so-called Algerianist faction of the FIS was prepared to take part in elections and co-operate with other groups, and represented an alternative to the unbending ideological clarity of others such as Belhadj.
Hachani was well aware of the militants within his party and their preparations for a war, and indeed he made his own clandestine military arrangements so as not to be outflanked by them. But, when the government announced that the two rounds of national elections would take place after all, in December 1991 and January 1992, the FIS announced they would take part. The government had more or less given up on any hope of the FLN mounting a serious opposition at this stage, and throughout the campaign it was clear that the FIS was heading for a overwhelming victory, not merely because of their undoubted popularity, but also their aggressive taking-over of public space and physical intimidation of political rivals on the ground. A memorable campaign rally held in the Olympic Stadium, Algiers attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters. While Belhadj had invoked the memory of his own father in the earlier press conference, now that he was in jail, his young son was presented to the massive crowd:
The first round of elections were held a few days later, and even though a FIS victory had looked likely, the scale of it was still shocking to the establishment and foreign observers. Winning 188 of the 231 seats contested in that round, it now seemed inevitable the FIS would attain the two-thirds majority of parliamentary seats to be able to make fundamental changes to the constitution, paving the way for their Islamic state. The following fortnight was filled with trepidation and rallies, both by the triumphant FIS and by political groups (especially socialists and feminists) calling for steps to be taken to prevent an Islamist takeover. Much of what took place in the corridors of power during this time remains obscure, but the broad outlines are clear. While at first it seemed as if the regime was prepared to accommodate and work with the FIS, behind the scenes, the army decided they had sailed close enough to the democratic winds and determined to pull back.
Bendjedid was compelled to announce his resignation as president on television on the 11 January 1992, creating a constitutional crisis in which the continuation of the elections was declared to be impossible. Troops were put on the streets to impose ‘order’ on the situation and it was announced that, until a new president could be chosen (whenever that would be) the country would be run by a council composed of military figures and their allies within the regime. The second round was, therefore, canceled and the FIS were livid that they had been cheated of victory. Within weeks, the party’s leaders were rounded up and imprisoned and over eight thousand members put in camps out in the Sahara desert. With more moderate leaders like Hachani now in jail, the anger of the rank and file was channeled into more militant avenues, and those who could, took to the mountains or went underground, prepared to take up arms against the state.
This was the end of the road for the FIS as a viable political project. From now on it would be war: a war (spoiler alert) that they were destined to lose, but it is worth while dwelling for a moment on the reasons why the movement failed to establish an Islamic state. In retrospect, the FIS, buoyed by its early successes, probably overplayed its hand, and played it too early. They allowed themselves to believe that their victory was inevitable, and that they were in a more powerful position than they actually were. It’s leaders scared away powerful sectors of society (Belhadj making threats towards the army and Madani talking about not having any more elections after the FIS took power), alienating large groups like the middle classes and the military, who had the financial and military resources to thwart their project, notwithstanding its obvious popular appeal.
It’s an interesting conundrum: is it permissible to cancel democracy in order to prevent anti-democratic forces from gaining power? Do you become one of those anti-democratic forces when you do so? While people were justifiably worried about the kind of regime the FIS would establish, at the same time, its followers could not be blamed for thinking the commitment of the state to democracy (and the west’s espousal of it) was all a sham if they refused to recognise the results of any election that brought Islamists to power. In many respects, Algeria would be an early precursor to the double-standards witnessed in our own time, as the west has refused to recognise the democratic mandate obtained by Islamist parties (for example Hamas in Palestine or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) and instead gave their support to authoritarian forces seeking their overthrow. But those are stories for another post, as is the continuation of this story.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charles Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present (London, 1991; first published in French 1964)
Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria : Anger of the Dispossessed (Yale University Press, 2007)
James McDougall, A history of Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Featured image above: Police keep an eye on Friday prayers in the week after the second round of elections were canceled, January 1992.
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 16: Algeria #1
As I often seem to find myself doing, I will begin this post by justifying beginning so far back in the past, given that this is supposed to be a ‘contemporary’ history, and that what I am ultimately interested in exploring here is the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s and the growth and nature of the Islamist movement there. There is no way of understanding what went wrong in Algeria at this time, however, without understanding its bitter and traumatic struggle for independence from France, and there is no way of understanding that struggle without looking at what French rule actually meant in practice. It isn’t a huge leap from examining the conquest by France in 1830, to looking back at the period of Ottoman rule and the very beginnings of a concept of something called Algeria, as a distinct region in the central Maghreb. So, back to the sixteenth century it is, and the fallout of the Spanish conquest over the last Muslim stronghold in Iberia, Grenada, in 1492.
Emboldened by its expulsion of the Muslims from Iberia (at the same time their ships were landing in America for the first time) the Spanish invaded North Africa in the years that followed, and the fragmented dynasties that ruled small territories in the region appealed to the Ottomans (a major power at the time, having conquered Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453) for help. There followed a period in which the Spanish and Ottoman Turks vied for power in the region, some local dynasties siding with one of the other power, embroiled as they were in their own power struggles with each other. By 1529, a group of Ottoman adventurers had succeeded in establishing a unified state from these disparate territories with its capital at a small port town called Jaza’ir Bani Mazghana, or as it is today known, Algiers, which gave its name to this new state, the Eyalet or Regency of Algiers, a vassal state ruled immediately by figures (who held titles like Dey, Pasha, Agha) who were ultimately subordinate to the Sultan back in Turkey. The Ottomans survived a serious attempt to retake Algiers in 1541, led by the Habsburg emperor Charles V, and ruled the area for the following three centuries, during which the idea of a (sort of) cohesive territory known as ‘Algeria’ began to be distinguished from the surrounding area (modern-day Morocco to the west and Tunisia-Libya to the east).
As we want to get to the twentieth century as quickly as possible rather than get bogged down in the detail of Ottoman rule (although interesting in its own right) we are going to gloss over these centuries, noting a couple of points on the way: firstly, the regents who ruled Algeria on behalf of the Ottoman empire enjoyed a great deal of autonomy, especially after the advent of a class of rulers known as the dey in 1671, so much so that they often conducted their own foreign policy, having independent diplomatic relations with many European powers. In this sense, Algeria then might be considered what we now call an independent state, even while nominally a part of the Ottoman empire. This does not mean that it enjoyed self-determination, however. While they shared the same Islamic religion as their subjects, the Ottomans were foreign rulers, and they failed to cultivate an indigenous ruling class. The country was ruled by a Turkish military corps and privateering entrepreneurs, mostly outsiders, while the native population’s main contact with the administration was through judges and tax collectors whose role was to manipulate and control the local tribes and their leaders. A dichotomy in Algeria between the mountains and the plains (see map below) is important.
In the lowland areas, looking out over or at least in contact with the coast, lived a people who not only interacted with whatever foreign power happened to be running the country at the time, but interacted with the broader Mediterranean world as a whole. The mountains, on the other hand, were beyond the control of the state and inhabited by independent peoples who were never under anything more than a loose, distant rule. They maintained their tradition of resistance to central authority, whether it be that of the Ottomans, the French, or later on the Algerian government itself. This divide can also be loosely seen in terms of the Arab plains and the Berber mountains. Although its ruling elite have sometimes forgotten it, Algeria is not an exclusively-Arab country. The Berbers lived here before the Arabs settled the area in the centuries after its conquest by the Muslim Caliphate in the seventh century, and to this day they constitute somewhere between 25-30% of the population, speaking their own language, Tamazight, and concentrated in the Kabylie region east of Algiers.
The name Berber has the same origins as the term ‘barbarian’, from the Greek word barbaroi, which they used to describe anyone who didn’t speak Greek. For some reason, it stuck as the ethnic identifier of the Berber people of North Africa, and also gave the name ‘Barbary coast’ to the area, as well as ‘Barbary pirates’ which was what this area of North Africa was primarily known for in Europe in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when pirates known as corsairs operated with the blessing of the Ottoman regents, kidnapping people and selling them into slavery, or making money by ransoming them back to their European rulers (the ones who were prepared to pay for them anyway). The heyday of the Barbary corsairs had passed by 1830, when the country was conquered by France, although there was a recrudescence of activity in the period of European instability accompanying the Napoleonic wars. It was in this context that the French invaded Algeria in the last days of the restored Bourbon monarchy.
Very very briefly, the French Revolution developed into the military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, who founded the first French empire. On its defeat by the Seventh Coalition at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was finally deposed for good and the Bourbon monarchy, which had been abolished by the original Revolution in 1792, was restored. By 1830, the highly-conservative Charles X was deeply unpopular at home and (classic example of a troubled regime trying to bolster its popularity by launching an unnecessary foreign war) took advantage of a diplomatic incident in which the Algerian dey hit the French consul with a fly whisk while demanding the French pay a very large, and very late loan. In response, the French king blockaded Algiers for three years and, when a French ship was bombarded, decided to launch an invasion in June 1830. The Ottoman (not very robust) defenses were subdued and Algiers taken on 7 July, although the Bourbon dynasty that had launched the war lasted less than a month after this, as the July Revolution of 26–29 saw Charles X deposed and replaced by the Orléanist Louis Philippe, who would rule for eighteen years until France once again became a republic (the second) in 1848.
The Ottoman’s attempt to retain their hold over Algeria may have been swatted aside relatively quickly by the French (who quickly found a new commander prepared to swear allegiance to the new king), but the Algerian’s resistance to the French invasion took decades to quell. This was led in the eastern half of the country by a religious-military leader called Emir Abdelkader, who succeeded in holding the French at bay in the east for over a decade, until forced to surrender in 1847, whereupon the French (who had promised to let him leave the country and settle abroad) imprisoned him in France. Abdelkader is a fascinating figure to whom I can’t do justice in the limited space here. Renowned for his relatively-enlightened views on human rights and his honourable treatment of enemy prisoners, he later gained even more admiration, even in the west, for his protection of Christians in Damascus, having been released by the French and allowed to settle there. He underwent a transformation in the French imagination, from rebellious fanatic to honourable enemy. They even built statues of him in the 1940s.
Having consolidated their hold over the country, the French were in for the long haul. What Algeria endured under French rule was far more thoroughgoing and invasive a conquest than that experienced by most other French colonies. As a writer who is primarily concerned with Irish history of the seventeenth century, I cannot help being struck by the many parallels between Algeria’s ordeal under French rule and Ireland’s with English. For one thing, Algeria became a settler colony just over the water and not merely one in which a distant government exploited a subject population for material gain. French people (often poorer people squeezed out of the home economy or those seeking cheap or practically free land) emigrated across the Mediterranean in large numbers and, at their peak in 1926, came to comprise 15% of the population. The French even denied Algeria was a colony (just as some continue to deny Ireland was) by legally integrating the country (the northern part at least) into France as three départements (Alger, Oran, and Constantine) after the 1848 revolution. This was something which the French settlers liked to imagine made them as French as Paris or Nice. Indeed the latter was only a part of France since 1860.
The Pieds-Noirs (the name given to people of European descent who were born there and came to constitute the ruling class) actually ruled over the Arab-Berber Muslims as conquerors over a conquered people. The reality of life for this subject people belies the idea that it was ever ‘just another part of France’. Such a notion is patently nonsense, and again I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s equally-nonsensical statement that Northern Ireland (basically a war-zone at the time) was ‘as British as Finchley’. So let’s look at what made Algeria a colony in fact, if not on paper. It goes a lot of the way to explaining why most Algerians would come to emphatically reject French rule.
A caveat, and a revealing one at that, should be noted here: that not all Algerians explicitly rejected French rule from the word go, and for a long time some of them believed it might be turned to their favour. There are reasons for suspecting that many of these might have accepted it if they had actually been treated as equals and not subjected to the abuse and depredations of the Pieds-Noirs. Such an idea, that the modernisation and development of Algeria might take place under the aegis of French rule if only the natives were admitted to the same rights and privileges as the colonists, can be detected in the early thought of someone like Ferhat Abbas, who would later become a separatist but who in his earlier years had campaigned for equal rights for Muslims under French rule. It was only when the racist underpinnings of that rule became apparent did people like Abbas realise that this was never going to happen.
And this racism is crucial to recognise: the belief on the part of the Europeans that the native people were simply worth less and that the values that regulate human society in Europe did not operate there. This remained the case right up until the end of French rule and was in evidence from the very start, in the conduct of the war of conquest, where promises of respect for rights and the Algerians’ culture and religion were violated almost immediately, as people were summarily executed by an army completely without discipline and restraint, entire tribes were wiped out (the Ouffia, for example, who were all killed as punishment for the theft of some cattle) and one of Algiers’ main mosques confiscated and converted into a cathedral. As a commission of inquiry appointed by the French themselves put it:
We have sent to the gallows, on the merest suspicion and without trial, people whose guilt has remained more than doubtful, and whose heirs have since been despoiled of their goods; we have killed people carrying promises of safe-conduct, massacred on suspicion whole populations who were afterwards proven innocent [. . .] we have outdone in barbarism the barbarians whom we came to civilise and we complain of not having been able to succeed in civilising them.
Commission nominated by the king, 7 July 1833
Despite the enlightened sentiments here, note at the end the belief that the French had come to ‘civilise’ Algeria. Notwithstanding all the brutality and evidence to the contrary, those liberal Europeans (this is not a uniquely French thing) continued (and continue) to labour under the delusion that their colonial project was motivated by essentially noble intentions of spreading ‘liberty’ and ‘progress’ among ‘backward’ peoples, a cause betrayed by a few wayward generals and greedy landgrabbers. This idea would prove, in its way, more pernicious than the wayward generals and greedy landgrabbers, in that it has allowed France (and Britain) to tell itself a story of its empire completely at odds with the evidence: that the colonies were, in fact, an expression of the will of the aforementioned worst elements in their societies and were all about exploiting subject peoples overseas in the economic interest of the ‘mother country’. The liberal rhetoric was merely window-dressing, and not even window-dressing that was very prominent at the time. While toothless commissions may have condemned the conduct of the conquest and occupation, its commander spoke before the National Assembly in 1840 with refreshing candour:
Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate colonizers, without concerning oneself to whom these lands belong.
Thomas-Robert Bugeaud
And so it was. Algeria became known as a place where poor French people could come and get their hands on land for next to nothing. This land had to come from somewhere or, to be more specific, someone, and that someone was of course the native Algerians.
Some continue to claim that the transformation of the Algerian population to the point that they would become fully integrated into the French nation was a sincere (if long-term) goal of French rule. It bears taking a closer look, therefore, at some of the evidence that this was empty rhetoric, basing our assessment on the actual actions (as opposed to professed intentions) of those who ran Algeria: the settlers who, with the full backing of Paris, sought to keep the native population in subjugation. One hint that the integration of the Algerians into French society was not envisaged is that laws enacted in 1865 stipulated that Muslims were to be subject to Islamic law and Muslim judges (the cadis) as opposed to the French civil code, which sounds very tolerant and relativistic, but does give the lie to the idea that the French were interested in reforming the Muslims’ culture and legal system. Furthermore, it meant that, if a Muslim wanted to become a French citizen and enjoy all the attendant rights, they had to sign away their right to be governed by their own laws, essentially abandoning their religion. Given that religion is tied up with culture and values in such a complex way, it is not surprising that few Algerians made this choice. By 1936 only 2,500 had done this. (Evans and Phillips, 2007)
As an ‘integral part of France’, Algeria sent six deputies to the Assemblée nationale in Paris. But only French citizens could vote, so this effectively disenfranchised almost all natives. The government elected by the Pieds-Noirs served their interests exclusively, and because they perceived their interests to be threatened by any concessions towards the Arab and Berbers, Algeria’s ‘representatives’ worked hard to defeat any measures that might be cooked up in Paris to make life easier for the Algerians. Discrimination was hardwired into the system. Three departmental councils were established in 1875, on which colonists were guaranteed four-fifths of the seats, despite constituting little more than a tenth of the population. The fifth of seats allocated to Muslims were, in any case, handpicked by the French authorities. At a local government level, the percentage of Muslim representatives could not exceed one quarter. In communes mixtes, places where there were basically no Europeans yet, all representatives were appointed by the French administration. While Muslims were subject to Islamic law in some cases, there was also a special set of French laws enacted in 1881, the Code de l’Indigénat, which imposed harsh penalties for ‘crimes’ such as being rude to a colonial official or making disrespectful remarks about the Third Republic. On a day-to-day basis the supposed racial superiority of the Pieds-Noirs was reinforced. Settlers addressed all Muslims by the familiar tu rather than the more respectful vous, by which they insisted the natives address them. Algerians were regularly referred to by racial slurs such as melon, raton and bougnoule (the equivalent of terms like ‘raghead’ or ‘wog’ in English) or addressed by settlers as if they were children, which is reminiscent of the way blacks in Apartheid South Africa or the antebellum south were often addressed as ‘boy’, even by young people addressing elderly men.
Another idea that should be addressed is the claim (which continues to be bandied about by apologists) that French rule, even if harsh, raised the material living standards of the natives and, as such, was somehow a blessing for all its flaws. The facts simply do not bear this out. Economically, the communes arranged their finances for the exclusive benefit of the French settlers and taxed the natives as they saw fit. Even an imperial fan-boy like Jules Ferry described the system as ‘daylight robbery’. (Ageron, 1991) The Warnier law of 1873 was particularly destructive in that destroyed indigenous, communally-owned landowning practices, allowing smaller parcels to be bought up by settlers. And boy did they buy land, in the following three decades acquiring almost one million hectares. (Evans and Phillips, 2007) As more and more land was taken from them, the natives were crammed into the cities or emigrated to France, that is to say, the native population were impoverished by colonisation, with the exception of a small elite of collaborators.
Their growing immiseration was accompanied by a rapid population growth in the century that followed the French conquest, tripling to reach 6.5 million by 1940. This growth was largely a result of French medical science reducing child mortality, which might be placed in the ‘progress’ column, but for the fact that this growth came during a period when Algerians were less and less able to feed all these new mouths. The results were predictably catastrophic. A famine in 1867 cost untold thousands of lives (I have read conservative estimates of 800,000: McDougall, 2017) while as late as 1937, a terrible famine (for which I can find no solid casualty figures) saw corpses litter the roadsides while the colonists suffered few shortages. Again, this was because during times of economic contraction (like the 1930s Depression), the Algerian government was wholly focused on protecting the settlers’ economic interests above all else. Some cheerleaders for French rule have argued that the number of casualties in these famines was a result of the backwardness of native agriculture, and actually spoke for the imperative of French agricultural ‘modernisation’. In fact, Algerian society had, through centuries-long experience of surviving in an environment that permitted only a marginal existence, developed their own techniques, such as storing a certain amount of food for times of hardship, to handle such crises. Life in such harsh environments has to be rigorously disciplined and organised to make the best of scarce resources and the people actually living there knew best how to do so. When the French came in with their land confiscations, the impoverishment of the rural population messed up this system, pushing them to the point where food scarcity resulted in starvation and death. (Evans and Phillips, 2007)
So much for progress.
In 1930, the French establishment celebrated a century of this misery with much aplomb and rhetoric about the benefits of their ‘civilising mission’. The following magazine cover gives you some idea of the vibe. The subtitle beneath the headline reads: ‘Since the capture of Algiers, a century has sufficed to transform the barbarian coast into rich and prosperous departments’.
The Algerians, it would become increasingly apparent in the following decades, did not feel the same way.
The turn of the twentieth century might be mistaken for a period of ‘peace’ in French Algeria, as overt organised resistance from the population subsided. This has more to do with the utter subjection of the people than their contentment, however, as James McDougall has described this gap up until the beginnings of the independence struggle in the 1950s:
…the ‘law and order’ that followed, and with which Algerians thereafter had to contend, remained [. . .] a life lived under conditions of continuous, low-intensity warfare’.
McDougall, A history of Algeria
Even the beginnings of political activity in the Algerians’ interest cannot be rightly considered a nationalist or separatist movement from the start. As indicated above, people like Ferhat Abbas (below) initially saw the struggle of the Algerian people in terms of winning rights under French rule, not outside it. He even denied, as late as 1936, the existence of any notion of Algeria as a nation. Remember, this was the same dude who would become the nation’s first president thirty years later. Other groups, such as the jeunes Algériens or ‘Young Algerians’ of the 1910s likewise presented their demands in terms of increased civil rights and assimilation for Arabs and Berbers within French society, not separation. Things began to change, however, in the period around World War Two, as Algerians’ calls for their rights grew louder, and it became more and more clear the French would never grant them.
In 1936, a left-wing, anti-fascist government was elected in France, the Popular Front, which was relatively enlightened and progressive by the standards of its time and attempted to introduce some modest reforms which would have given citizenship to some Algerians. Seeing any conciliation towards the Muslims as the beginning of Armageddon, the Pieds-Noirs bitterly opposed these and they never got off the drawing board. Things might have been different if these reforms had succeeded, but after this failure, it became difficult to argue for anything other than complete independence on the Algerian side; indeed, the reforms were opposed by an emerging separatist movement led by Messali Hadj (below), often considered the grandfather of the independence movement.
Of humble origins and a self-taught intellectual and scholar, Hadj was an electrifying public speaker who had spent time in France, influenced both by the Communists and, increasingly, a sense of Islamic nationalism which placed religion at the heart of Algeria’s struggle for separation from France and a recovery of its honour. From the 1920s onwards he spent long bouts in prison, even being deported to the Congo by the Fascist Vichy government during World War Two. The Vichy regime was of course brutally repressive, although popular with the Pieds-Noirs, and besides a campaign of zero tolerance towards the separatist movement that was emerging, they also revoked the citizenship of the Jews in Algeria, who would henceforth be treated as second-class citizens, just like the Muslims.
The Second World War, and the ‘liberation’ of Algeria from Vichy (although the applicability of the term ‘liberation’ must be questioned, given that it simply returned to the colonial fold of ‘Free’ France), was nevertheless a watershed for the independence movement. Although leaders like Churchill and De Gaulle tried to argue that the principles of self-determination, enshrined in the Atlantic and later the United Nations charters, only applied to European countries, Arabs, Vietnamese and other peoples saw no reason why they should not apply to them as well. Agitation for independence or at least autonomy had been brewing for some time, but the impulse was quickened by several factors and events. Firstly, there was no doubt the huge participation of Muslim soldiers in the French war effort. Just like many other colonies in both world wars, many indigenous people fought for their colonial masters in expectation that their sacrifice would be rewarded by being treated as equals within the empire. Muslims made up 90% of the ‘French’ force defending Algeria. In a desperately poor country, the army was a steady job and many young men were attracted to what, under the circumstances, was a relatively secure income for themselves and, if they got killed, those family members they left behind. In this respect, Algeria was like Ireland during World War One, where many Irishmen volunteered for the British army and, despite attempts by some to claim that this suggests loyalty and affection for the ruling power, it is far more likely that there weren’t many other jobs available for men, who were left with little choice but to join the army.
The fact that such a large proportion of the army defending Algeria was Muslim begged the question: were they simply holding the fort until the colonial power was able to resume power? After the allies removed the Vichy regime from North Africa and returned the colony to De Gaulle’s government in 1942, there was hope among Algerian separatists that the defeat of German fascism might be linked with the fight against French fascism. An umbrella-organisation of most progressive Algerian parties, the Association des Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (AML) was founded and, at the end of the war, on VE Day itself (8 May 1945), demonstrations were organised throughout the country to remind the French that the end of the war did not mean a return to business as usual. Unfortunately, as far as the Pieds-Noirs were concerned, this was exactly what it meant. Most demos passed off peacefully, but at Sétif (see map for locations) in the east of the country, one group was attacked by the police, in retaliation for which the demonstrators began to indiscriminately attack the settler population, killing around 100 people. In counter-retaliation for this, the authorities launched brutal revenge attacks that left between 6,000 and 20,000 dead (yes, those figures are vague, because they are hotly debated, but in any case, it was a lot) and the violence spread to other areas, especially Guelma, where the army carried out mass executions and pretty much all Arab males were considered fair game.
This was a turning point. The AML and other organisations agitating for separatism were dissolved and banned. Even moderate leaders like Abbas were imprisoned and the army given a free hand to crush the movement by violence. Many of those responsible for this repression were the leaders of La Résistance, supposedly the more progressive elements of French political society such as the French Communist Party, who rather absurdly blamed Nazi Germany (who had just been defeated) for organising the protests. It was becoming clear to Algerians that even the left in France was indoctrinated to believe their rule was justified and would never take concrete action towards even modest reforms. This realisation created a new generation of separatists who would fight for nothing less than complete independence, and more radical parties and even armed cells began to form, especially in remote areas where they were harder to keep an eye on. Those reformists who sought to work within the parameters of French rule, meanwhile, became irrelevant, even as modest reforms were carried out, which to most Algerians were too little too late, and to most Pieds-Noir were a step too far.
The first manifestation of a new movement devoted to armed struggle was the Organisation Spéciale (OS), a secret guerilla group that was linked to Messali’s political movement. Several of the key figures in the Algerian War of Independence first made a name for themselves in the OS: Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohamed Boudiaf and Hocine Aït Ahmed, pictured here (left to right) under arrest together in 1956:
The military activities of the OS simply provoked the French authorities to redouble the repression, and the movement was decimated by arrests and confiscation of their weapons in the years that followed. Ben Bella was arrested but escaped to Egypt, while other leaders had to go into hiding. The momentum seemed lost at that point, and in October 1954, the minister of the interior (later president from 1981-95) François Mitterrand toured the country (pictured on the right, below), sending out a clear message that, although his government had already lost the northern part of its Indochina colony to Hồ Chí Minh’s Viet Minh, and was in the process of conceding independence to neighbouring Morocco and Tuniaia, Algeria would remain French and that the settlers had the government’s full support.
But unbeknownst to the French, a new body had been in existence for some months which would soon assume the name Front de libération nationale (FLN). This was another clandestine paramilitary organisation, to which most of the OS leaders became attached which, although ostensibly no better-prepared than the OS, launched a series of co-ordinated attacks against French targets only a fortnight after Mitterand’s visit. This date, 1 November, is generally regarded as the beginning of the FLN’s eight-year war against French rule which would win independence for their country. That this would be the eventual outcome was far from clear in the first years of the war, as the French turned the screw and the general uprising of the population against colonial rule which the FLN had hoped to spark off, failed to occur.
In fact, it is questionable whether some of the FLN’s more astute leaders even expected this to happen. Many of them were aware that their struggle, a few hundred poorly-armed men and women against the fourth-largest army in the world, had little prospect of military victory, but this was not the point. The strategy was instead to use armed struggle to achieve political ends by making Algeria ungovernable, by provoking the French into repressive measures that would fatally undermine the legitimacy of their rule both at home and abroad. In this, the FLN were extraordinarily successful, and the Algerian War of Independence is a classic example of an imperial power winning tactically, but failing strategically, winning the war but losing the peace. How exactly was this seemingly-impossible task achieved?
In its initial stages, FLN attacks were isolated and mainly concentrated in the countryside of central and eastern Algeria. Despite its aspirations, it did not enjoy the unequivocal support of the masses. While many no doubt shared the goal and broadly sympathised with its objectives, this does not mean they were willing to risk their lives or their families’ lives in order to help them or participate in the uprising. As ever, most people probably hedged their bets, reluctant to commit themselves to one or the other side until they saw who had the upper hand. This would be apparent in the closing months of the conflict, when it became clear the FLN had won and many so-called marsiens joined in order to gain some of the credit and show their loyalty to the new ruling party.
In the early days, however, when the French state still enjoyed overwhelming superiority, it might sound strange to say that some were obliged to hedge their bets, but this is because the FLN employed coercive methods of their own to drag an uncommitted population kicking and screaming (sometimes literally) into the revolution. As we will see in the civil war of the 1990s, neutrality or fence-sitting was simply not an option for most civilians. Non-committal to one side was considered siding with the enemy, and both the French and the FLN forced people to co-operate with them, often at gunpoint. Examples (often gruesome, such as throat-cutting) were made of those who betrayed the FLN to the authorities and refused to aid the insurgents.
A key dynamic here is that the French played their assigned role of dumb colonial oppressor to perfection. The summer of 1955 especially was a turning point, as the army enforced a policy of collective responsibility, punishing whole populations for the actions of the FLN. This backfired spectacularly, of course, and ensured the population identified with the FLN en masse in areas where they hadn’t before. In August, dozens of women and children were massacred alongside FLN fighters. As the bodies piled up, the situation became more polarised, and the idealistic rhetoric of those who sought to amend the status quo by reform became untenable. The FLN made sure this was made clear to rival political organisations by demanding their dissolution, and that they all come under their umbrella and fight together. One of the FLN’s most firmly-held tenets was the need for unity and an anxiety to avoid the factional infighting of the past. No more, they declared, would Algerian nationalists dissipate their energies by internecine quarreling. Somewhat ominously for the future of multi-party politics in Algeria, however, it is clear that they regarded multi-party politics itself as ‘internecine quarreling’ and a dissipation of vital revolutionary energy, but more of that in the next post.
Even longstanding campaigners for separatism such as Messali Hadj became branded traitors to the cause for refusing to toe the party line. The year the FLN launched their campaign, his followers formed a rival group, the Algerian National Movement (MNA: Mouvement national algérien) which became embroiled in a vicious civil war with the FLN in the following years, resulting in numerous atrocities. The MNA was particularly strong among emigré communities in France, and the two fought each other in what is often known as the ‘café wars’ in which as many as 5000 people lost their lives. While a hero to many with Alegrian nationalism, by September 1959 the FLN was attempting to assassinate Messali Hadj. Although he survived, many other prominent leaders did not, and by 1960, the MNA in Algeria was practically destroyed. While Ferhat Abbas attempted to maintain his stance as a ‘moderate’ conciliatory figure in the early stages of the war, its polarising logic led him to take a more pragmatic route, and he joined the FLN in 1956, being utilised as a diplomat and a representative on the world stage and, when the time came, a figure the French might see as someone they could negotiate with.
The growing prestige of the FLN as the sole torch-bearer of the independence struggle followed a series of diplomatic successes in 1955. They were invited to the historic Bandung Conference of newly-independent ‘Third World’ nations, and recognised as the representatives of Algeria. They also got their situation discussed at the United Nations, which provoked a walk-out by the French in protest against interference in their ‘internal affairs’. While things may have been going well on the political front, however, on the military, they were being squeezed. The actual military wing of the FLN was officially known as the ALN (Armée de libération nationale) and comprised elements within Algeria fighting both a rural and urban war, but also armed forces outside the country in Morocco and Tunisia, who allowed them to operate within their territory when they became independent in 1956. At the end of 1959, this ‘frontier army’ was formally organised under the command of a twenty-seven year-old colonel, Houari Boumediène. Both this frontier army outside the borders of Algeria (for the moment) and Boumediène himself will become crucial figures in the story of post-independence Algeria.
If there had been any inclination on the part of the French to compromise, this was now abandoned and they committed themselves to total victory over the FLN, although they refused to officially acknowledge it as a war (and, by extension, the FLN as a legitimate enemy) and maintained the legal fiction that the whole thing was merely a criminal problem. This renewed determination was perhaps not unrelated to the fact that they had recently discovered oil (they badly needed their own supply which they could pay for in Francs, so they were feverishly searching in the Sahara) at Hassi Messaoud in 1956. Later on, they would be so desperate to hang on to this that they offered the FLN an independent state that excluded the interior areas of desert where the oil was. For all the nationalistic bombast and talk of prestige and defending their colonists, this simple material exploitative relationship between the metropole and colony should always be remembered. Similarly, France used the Sahara to test its first nuclear devices in 1960, and continued to do so for several years after the country became independent.
Getting back to the war (oops, criminal problem), in early 1956, the French government voted ‘special powers’ to the Algerian settlers, and basically gave them a free hand to do whatever it took. Between March and July 1956 the number of French soldiers in the country doubled from around 200,000 to 400,000 (McDougall), and in October of that year Ben Bella, Boudiaf and Aït Ahmed were all abducted after they were kidnapped by the French authorities when en route between Morocco and Tunisia. In what must surely count as one of the world’s first acts of airline terrorism, the FLN leaders were scheduled to take a flight from meeting the sultan of Morocco to the Tunisian government. The airplane, which was Moroccan, was nevertheless registered in France and the pilot had a French license. While flying over Algeria, he was ordered by the military to land, whereupon Ben Bella and the others were arrested. It was a flagrantly illegal act which was initially celebrated by the French ruling elite, but only further undermined their legitimacy and made them look like a criminal gang.
The year that followed, up to around October 1957, is often described as the ‘Battle of Algiers’, as the army focused on crushing the FLN in the capital. They succeeded militarily, but the means they used to do so made a great contribution to the eventual strategic defeat of the French. By this stage, the army was more or less a law unto itself, acting outside all legal and moral norms. The paratroopers under the command of Jacques Massu (below) were particularly notorious, and a campaign of systematic torture and extra-judicial executions was carried out to break the urban guerrillas. Often this torture (which typically involved electrocution, simulated-drowning and rape) was not even to extract information, but merely to humiliate and demoralise the Algerians who, in many cases, were not even FLN activists, although you can imagine a lot of them ended up being after they were released. If they were released. Some prisoners were thrown to their death from the windows of prisons and police stations, others were brought into the forest, ostensibly to collect wood, where they were shot for ‘attempting to escape’. If the FLN member Louisette Ighilahriz is to be believed in an interview she gave in 2000 (and I don’t see why she would lie), General Massu was present at these tortures, and watched as she was raped and tortured repeatedly in 1957.
Massu, along with others like Marcel Bigeard, Raoul Salan and Maurice Challe (more of whom below) were the ones who presided over this carnage. Another well known name is that of Paul Aussaresses, who orchestrated much of the killing and torture under Massu. While others tried to play down or express mealy-mouthed regret for what happened, Aussaresses is one of those unrepentant imperialists that provide great material for a historian. Either too stupid or too racist to be ashamed of his and his colleagues’ actions, he wrote a bullish defense of French crimes, arguing that they were necessary, also revealing how these actions were not just those of a few ‘bad apples’, but sanctioned from the highest levels of government. Aussaresses could write with the assurance of knowing that De Gaulle passed an amnesty by presidential decree for all Algerian commanders in the 1960s, which meant they couldn’t be prosecuted for what they did. Even if it couldn’t form the basis for a trial, it is in any case a great source for the period. Another great source is The Battle of Algiers (1966), a fantastic film about the war, an absolute classic of the art form directed by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo based on the memoirs of FLN soldier Saadi Yacef.
It also contains one of my favourite bits of dialogue from a film ever, at 1:28:34, when the captured FLN leader, Ben M’Hidi, is attacked by a French journalist for using bombs in baskets to kill innocent civilians:
Isn’t it cowardly to use your women’s baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives?
To which Ben M’Hidi replies:
And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on unarmed villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.
Larbi Ben M’Hidi, incidentally, was one of the founders of the FLN who was captured in February 1957, tortured and hung by the army, who said he committed suicide. Aussaresses in 2000 finally admitted that his men murdered him in custody. Here is a picture of him with his captors. Everyone looks oddly cheerful:
It was in military defeat that the FLN and its cause found the path to victory. With the people now not merely alienated towards the French, but prepared to risk everything to end their rule, they declared a Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in September 1958, in exile, first in Cairo, then moved to Tunis. Abbas was its first president, although this should not mislead us into thinking he was really a leading figure in the struggle now. The post was largely an honorary one, and he was appointed mainly because of the esteem in which he was held abroad and in diplomatic circles. The new president was very much being led by events now, as opposed to leading them. Just who was leading events is hard to say. Within the FLN certainly, the military was always the prime mover, and the political elements affirmed this over and over again. Militarily, however, the FLN was almost defeated by 1958. At this point, however, French political turmoil breathed new life into the Algerian liberation struggle.
As this is a post about Algerian history, I do not want to dwell at length on French internal politics. Briefly, the Algerian situation was one of several causes of mounting discontent with the series of ineffective governments of the Fourth Republic, which suffered from, among other defects, a weak executive, and was perceived as being too indecisive to hold on to the colonies. The crisis came to a head in 1958, as rumours were rife that the government (there had been twenty-one of them since the republic’s founding just twelve years earlier) were about to enter into negotiations with the FLN. The Algerian settlers, led by General Massu, campaigned to have the retired Charles de Gaulle returned to a new, more powerful, presidency, and the army threatened a military coup if the government refused to make it happen. In May, the Fourth Republic acquiesced, voting itself out of existence and making De Gaulle ruler of what would soon be the Fifth Republic.
The Pieds-Noirs and the army generals were, of course, delighted. They had got ‘their man’ installed in power now, and surely he would soon put the boot in and finish off the independence struggle once and for all. This is what they were under the impression he had promised when he declared from the balcony of the governor-general’s residence ‘Je vous ai compris’ (I have understood you). They were, however, in for a rude awakening. Although De Gaulle had made macho statements about keeping Algeria French forever, when it came to the crunch, he showed the pragmatism and shrewdness that had made him such an astute political survivor. Maybe he had understood something else about the Pieds-Noirs.
He first attempted to quell the drive for independence by promising to modernise Algeria and work towards integrating it into France by bestowing on it the benefits of that status: modern technology, development, education, health-care etc. These were all nice ideas, but in practice they involved forced relocation of people from rural zones in which they were no longer allowed to live in for security reasons; they involved disrupting social patterns of life that had existed for centuries in a misguided zeal for ‘progress’; in short, it was ‘development’ on France’s terms, many aspects of which Algerians didn’t want. In any case, it was too little, too late. As McDougall has put it:
The metropole was thus at last imposing a solution, but as ever, it was a solution to the problems of twenty years earlier.
Even offers of a paix des braves, a sort of amnesty to those who had taken up arms against the state, were largely ineffective, and under pressure from outside (the Americans especially) and the growing prestige of the FLN on the international stage, De Gaulle began to give way. The problem was that, as he put out feelers towards offering some kind of limited recognition or autonomy, the settlers reacted with intense fury and accusations of betrayal towards the man they had thought would save them. Settler paramilitary organisations had been around for some years already, manned by ‘ultras’ who had been responsible for numerous atrocities towards Algerian civilians. Now, their violence intensified and involved elements within the army who felt they were being sold out, and several attempts were made to kill De Gaulle when he visited in 1960. Early 1961 saw the foundation of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), the ‘secret army organisation’, by right-wing former army officers exiled in fascist Spain, and began a campaign of violence in Algeria designed to keep Algeria French.
Thus, just as the army thought it had quelled the revolution, the country descended into a downward spiral of violence orchestrated by those who were determined to make sure that the French government offered no concessions that would alter their domination of the natives. This, of course, guaranteed that the crisis could not be defused and made independence inevitable. De Gaulle began to realise this and (probably even more importantly for him) that the Algerian problem threatened to stymie all his attempts to rectify the problems facing France itself in his new Fifth Republic. Another development also forced De Gaulle’s hand, which was in part a response to settler and OAS violence: namely, the mobilisation of the Algerian people. Whereas in the early days, the FLN had been a relatively small group of visionaries who often had to coerce the civilian population into co-operating with their strategy, by the end of 1960, tens of thousands of Algerians were demonstrating on the streets of Algiers, Oran and other towns, not just against the nature and abuses of French rule, but French rule in itself. French soldiers firing indiscriminately into the crowds and killing hundreds only hardened their hearts.
Nor was the violence confined to Algeria. In France itself, where the Algerian émigré community (by 1964, there were almost half a million Algerians in France) was an important source of funding and support for the FLN, protest marches took place, one of which was attacked by the police on 17 October 1961, enthusiastically joined by métro workers, firemen and passers-by. At least 120 (but possibly as many as 300) of these peaceful protesters were beaten to death or thrown in the Seine to drown.
Even after independence, a deeply-poisonous relationship between Algerians and the French occasionally erupted into violence. As late as 1973, the killing of a bus driver by a mentally-ill Algerian in Marseille sparked off a Summer of killing across the south in which thirty-two ‘Algerians’ (many of whom were French citizens of Algerian descent) were left dead, killed by French mobs, whipped up by a media which likened Algerians to a ‘vermin’ and ‘a plague’. Another aspect of this is the effect that large numbers of Pieds-Noir fleeing Algeria as independence became more likely had. There were about a million in 1960, of whom 800,000 more or less left immediately and another 150,000 in the years that followed, so that there were only about 50,000 of them by the end of the 1960s. These overwhelmingly settled in the south of France or Corsica, and many would go on to support the anti-establishment, far-right Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which was founded in 1972 and support for which was strongest in precisely the areas where the Pieds-Noirs settled, disgruntled and resentful towards a French political establishment which had betrayed them, and likewise resentful towards the Arab emigrants in France, with whom they lived side by side, and whom they felt it was their birthright to lord over, which was now taken from them.
This was just another sense in which the poison of the Algerian war was seeping into the body politic of the ‘mother country’, and De Gaulle began to talk of the inevitability of ‘self-determination’ and an Algerian republic. A referendum was held in early 1961 which gave him permission to negotiate with the Algerian provisional government, and negotiations began shortly after. One result of this was an attempt by some of the more right-wing generals in Algeria to launch a coup, designed to remove De Gaulle and prevent the loss of Algeria. It had the opposite effect. De Gaulle went on television to appeal to the nation to stand by him, and in the end most of the army backed him. Having faced down this threat, serious talks with the FLN got underway near the Swiss border at Évian-les-Bains in May, and continued until March the following year, during what the violence of the OAS intensified, against both the FLN and French government targets.
One of the main sticking points preventing an agreement was the French demand, alluded to above, that they retain large areas of the Saharan interior, where oil had been found and nuclear weapons could be tested. The increasing brutality of the OAS (they blinded a four year-old child in an assassination attempt on a French minister in February 1962) undermined the efforts of the French to hold out in their demands, however, and in March a ceasefire was declared, with referendum called for April (in France) and July (in Algeria) to ratify the so-called Evian accords, granting independence to Algeria. The French agreed to hand over most of the territory, excepting small areas they could temporarily use for military bases and testing sites; they also secured preferential treatment when it came to trading for Algeria’s oil, as well as guarantees regarding both the rights of Algerian immigrants in France and those of the settlers in Algeria.
Algeria became formally independent on the 5 July, 132 years to the day the French invaded the country. This did not mean an end to the tragedy, however, and in many ways the worst of the killing was still to come. It seems a theme of grudging imperial decline (cf: the Belgians sabotage of the Congo before they left, and the British hasty withdrawal from India that resulted in horrific communal riots and mass killings) that the departing ruler likes to leave as much of a mess as possible behind them, and Algeria was no exception. This could be seen in long term effects, such as the fact that the French took with them the blueprints for the drainage system and refused to share them, so that the Algerian authorities would have to dig up half the city every time they wanted to fix a burst pipe. The more dramatic short-term effect was the flight of the Pieds-Noirs, reprisals towards those who had collaborated with the French, and a campaign of senseless nihilistic violence by the OAS.
Many of the provisions of the Evian accords as they related to protecting the rights of those French left behind in an independent Algeria were rendered obsolete by the speed of events. As noted above, about a million Pieds-Noir fled to France, having no faith in the promises made regarding their lives and property. They can hardly be blamed for scepticism, since events like the Oran massacre, where hundreds of settlers were massacred by mobs after independence, and the FLN (or indeed the French police) didn’t lift a finger to help them, cannot have inspired confidence. Over the Spring and Summer, over 3000 settlers disappeared. You would think the OAS would have seen the writing on the wall in early 1962 and given up, but quite the opposite. They ratcheted up their campaign, exploding over a hundred bombs a day and launching attacks on French police and army. They also sought to prevent Pieds-Noirs from leaving, and had hoped to provoke the FLN into breaking their ceasefire and thus wrecking the prospects of peace, but the FLN kept their discipline and obeyed orders not to retaliate.
It was this discipline and organisation that probably sealed their victory, but as noted, this discipline did not extend to preventing vengeful mobs from massacring civilians, both Pieds-Noir and those who had sided with the French in the war, the so-called Harki (from the Arabic word for a ‘war party’). The fate of the Harki is, in many ways, saddest of all. While the Pieds-Noir were allowed to migrate to France for protection, the French authorities were far less generous towards those Algerians who had fought for them over the past decade, and De Gaulle issued orders that they be prevented from leaving along with the settlers. Although some escaped with the help of sympathetic police and army personnel, the Algerian population took a bitter revenge on the Harkis, killing perhaps 70,000 over the summer, often torturing them beforehand. Much of this was done by the above-mentioned marsiens, who joined the independence struggle late in the day and were now especially brutal in order to signal their loyalty and zeal to the new regime.
That the FLN condoned, even encouraged, this, did not bode well for the future of the independent state. In September, Boumediène’s ‘army of the frontier’ marched into Algiers, and a new round of blood-letting got underway, as the new state sought to consolidate its power and eliminate threats from within, both rival factions of the independence movement and the remnants of pro-colonialist sympathy. But nothing could be more misleading than to portray a united, harmonious FLN now taking the reins of power. As is often the case, when they had a single enemy and objective to rally around, factional struggles could be laid aside in order to focus on the task in hand. Now that was achieved, rivalries and conflicts-of-interest began to emerge as the victors squabbled over the spoils. I have not spent a great deal of time in this post looking closely at the personnel of the FLN and those who would become the leaders of an independent Algeria, because in the next post we will look at these power struggles, as the FLN established a one-party state and the heroic early years of Algeria as a torchbearer for Third World liberation gave way to the stagnation of the 1980s and devastating civil war in the 1990s.
FURTHER READING
Charles Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present (London, 1991; first published in French 1964)
Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria : Anger of the Dispossessed (Yale University Press, 2007)
James McDougall, A history of Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Featured image above: soldiers search women in Algiers during the war of independence.
A contemporary history of the Muslim world, part 15: The ‘Afghan Arabs’ : foreign fighters in Afghanistan
We have already looked in previous posts at the war in Afghanistan from its beginnings in 1979, beyond the Soviet pullout and into its civil war phase, up to the Taliban’s conquest over much of the country in 1996. This gives us, in a fair amount of detail, a good understanding of the heterogenous groups first fighting the Soviets in a loose coalition, and then each other, providing the background for the story we have to tell here, of another group which assisted in the jihad of the 1980s, those who volunteered from other countries throughout the Muslim world to help their Afghan brethren defeat the invaders. While these ‘Afghan Arabs’ (yes, the term belies the fact that these were not Afghans and sometimes not Arabs either, but it’s the term people use) were a small minority of those who fought the Soviet Union, and the importance of their contribution is debated (even bin Laden acknowledged that the war was won by ‘poor, barefoot Afghans’) their status and reputation was legendary among Muslims. There is another reason why they are a focus of interest, and that is in the widespread perception that Afghanistan provided the breeding/training ground for the internationalist strand of jihadism that would emerge in the 1990s, often (clumsily, I will argue) lumped together under the label of al-Qaeda.
This post will be an attempt to trace the participation of these non-Afghan fighters in the Afghan war, then look at their evolution as the war was winding down into something else, which will turn against the sole remaining superpower which had helped in the jihad against the Russians. Essentially, we will try and trace the roots of al-Qaeda, but it should be noted at the outset that looking into the genesis of al-Qaeda is a minefield. You quickly realise there are numerous different accounts of its early years, different opinions as to when it was ‘founded’ (if this word even has any real meaning here) and what we even mean when we use the term al-Qaeda (a word meaning, the ‘base’ or ‘foundation’ in Arabic). Rather than favour any single one of these accounts, I am going to try and synthesise what seem to me the more reputable of them, and by necessity keep things somewhat vague where there is absolutely no consensus on an issue.
So there is going to be a lot of ‘in the late 1980s’ and so forth in what follows, at least up until 1998, and the aftermath of the US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, when something called al-Qaeda begins to emerge from the mists of obscurity in contemporary documents. I think it’s interesting, for a multinational organisation that some claim had existed from the late 1980s onwards, that I can find not a single reference to the name al-Qaeda in any of the major western newspapers until 1998, and the American president Clinton continued to use the term ‘bin Laden network’ for the group even after 1998. This is worth bearing in mind. If anyone out there has fluent Arabic and can do a text search of some database with all the major Arabic-language newspapers and journals, I would be very interested in seeing what the earliest reference to the ‘organisation’ they can find.
Before we get to al-Qaeda, however, it is important to remember that such an organisation did not exist during the war against the Soviet Union. The main organisation for funneling Muslim recruits and money into the country from outside was the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), usually known in English as the Afghan Services Bureau. This was basically a guest house in Peshawar where Muslims from outside could stay on their way to the battlefield, receive training and indoctrination. It also acted as a publishing centre for theological works, primarily those written by the founder of the MAK, Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian-Palestinian scholar and jihadist who was the ideological driving force behind the development of an internationalist and militant Islamist movement towards the end of the war, anxious that the momentum should not be lost and the foreign fighters disbanded.
Although bin Laden is often represented as the mastermind behind these developments, in many ways this is anachronistic, a result of the prominent role bin Laden assumed in the 1990s. In fact, it was Azzam (below) who was bin-Laden’s elder mentor for much of the 1980s and some even credit him as coming up with the term al-qaeda al-sulbah (the solid base) in a magazine article he wrote, to refer to the revolutionary vanguard he argued was necessary to lead the Muslim world into rejuvenation and a resurrection of the Caliphate. While this might be an accurate explanation of the origin of the term al-Qaeda, this sounds a little bit too neat to me. Bin Laden himself is supposed to have said the name came about more or less by accident as a result of the term ‘base’ being used to refer to the Salafist training camps in Afghanistan, from which the name stuck. Either way, perhaps the best way to explain the evolution of this movement is to look a bit at the personal histories of the three figures so instrumental in its foundation and development: Azzam, bin-Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, whom we have already met in part two of this blog.
Abdullah Azzam was born in what is now the West Bank, Palestine, in 1941. The 1967 war forced him and his family to flee to Jordan when he was twenty-five years old. He secured a job as a teacher in Jordan (he had already begun his life-long study of Islamic jurisprudence) but abandoned what might have been a relatively-secure (given the circumstances) existence to join the Fedayeen fighters against Israel. While, as we have seen in previous posts, the Palestinian resistance to Israel, led by the PLO was overwhelmingly secular (Hamas would not be founded until 1987), Azzam was unusual in that he combined his attempts to liberate his homeland with membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, at the same time developing militant ideas about reviving Islam that were at odds with the Brotherhood and had more in common with Salafist ideologies. Indeed Azzam found himself at odds with the PLO and was reportedly once brought before a tribunal, accused of insulting Che Guevara, to which he replied that Islam was his religion, and Che Guevara under his foot.
At this stage in the early 1970s, the left-wing umbrella-organisation, the PLO, was the only show on the road as regards resistance to Israel and, feeling such groups dishonoured Islam and neglected the broader cause of Islam in pursuit of Palestinian goals (although these should be central to a wider struggle), Azzam abandoned the fight and returned to his academic work in Egypt and Jordan. Having been fired for his continuing political activism in Jordan, he moved to a university position in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 1981. It was not long before Azzam, who seems to have been a somewhat restless figure, began to feel disenchanted with those around him who, while they may have agreed on much ideologically, did little or nothing to put their ideas into action. The perfect opportunity was arising far to the east, however, where the war in Afghanistan was intensifying, and he perceived clearly that, while Palestine would always be the more important long-term goal for him, Afghanistan was the more immediate and pressing business at hand. He managed to get himself transferred to a university in Islamabad, Pakistan, from which he began to regularly visit Peshawar, the gateway for foreign jihadists into the Afghan war, a city he often referred to (here’s that term again) as al-qaeda al-sulbah.
He met Osama bin Laden (below) on one of his many return visits to Jeddah in 1984. Bin Laden’s family owned the guest house where Azzam would stay, preaching and raising money for the cause in Afghanistan and the younger bin Laden was profoundly influenced by Azzam. At this stage, the jihad had the full support of the Saudi state, and Azzam’s call for an influx of Muslim fighters into Afghanistan had been endorsed by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, effectively the seal of approval from the king himself.
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957, one of over fifty children of the Yemeni construction magnate Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden who died in 1967 in an airplane crash. His mother was a Syrian of Yemeni descent, Hamida al-Attas, who divorced Mohammed soon after Osama’s birth. It is sometimes claimed that she belonged to the Alawite sect, and even that she wasn’t really married to Mohammed bin Laden, being merely his concubine or ‘slave wife’, but this seems to be a fairly crude attempt to denigrate Osama bin Laden himself, and there is no evidence he was treated as a ‘lesser’ member of the extended family, which he surely would have been if this was the case.
Although there is no direct evidence for it, bin Laden’s first meeting with Azzam may have been in the late 1970s, as he attended the University of Jeddah to study business, and probably received religious instruction at the same time Azzam was working there. Most accounts of bin Laden in these years describe a hard-working, conscientious young man, modest almost to the point of shyness, and dedicated to his family, its construction business, and his religious faith. He worked for his father’s company, and not just in the token way the kids of rich people sometimes work, but actually worked on the sites, operating machinery, eating with the workers and earning a reputation for quiet generosity and for helping those less fortunate than himself while, although insanely wealthy, living a markedly austere lifestyle himself. There is no reason to doubt any of the many positive descriptions of bin Laden’s character that come down to us from those who knew him, especially those who have no ideological reason to eulogise him, and indeed have come under significant pressure to disparage and condemn him. There must, after all, be some reason for the tremendous personal loyalty he inspired in those around him, and we don’t need to buy into the simplistic image of an irredeemable monster that is peddled by the tabloid media. The overwhelming evidence is, unsurprisingly, that he had some admirable qualities, and this does not imply sympathy for his ideas or actions.
Another notable aspect of bin Laden’s character was the synthesis of word and deed. Like Azzam, bin Laden knew his theology and, like Azzam, knew that book learning alone was worthless unless acted upon. Conversely, he had tremendous respect for religious scholars, recognising that action without the wisdom to guide action alone was worthless too. If Azzam had been the kind of stay-at-home religious scholar that bin Laden would later criticise for not travelling to Afghanistan and joining the fight, their relationship would not have been as profound as it was, but his equal dedication to lecturing, writing and to fighting on the battlefield was one of the reasons the younger man admired him so much.
Although the precise date of his arrival in Afghanistan is debated, Osama bin Laden traveled to the war zone within months, perhaps weeks (some even say days but this is probably an exaggeration) of the war’s outbreak in December 1979. In these first few years. he acted mainly a conduit through which money passed from Saudi supporters to the Afghan Mujahideen. He recognised that his family’s financial resources, and those of other Saudis, were the greatest gift he could bestow on the cause at this juncture, and spent his time fundraising among his fellow Saudis and managing the disbursal of these resources back in Afghanistan-Pakistan. As time went on, however, he gradually assumed a more hands-on role as he developed a network of contacts, with the help of Azzam, and honed his military and organisational skills, taking a more and more prominent role in the operations of the MAK. For most of the 1980s, the Saudi government worked hand in glove with bin Laden and the Afghan fighters. Bin Laden’s main point of contact with the Saudi state was Turki al-Faisal, the son of King Faisal (see part 12), the head of its intelligence service, the Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah (General Intelligence Directorate) from 1979 to 2001. This is he in 2002 (for such an important dude, he seems to have been surprisingly camera-shy throughout the 1980s-1990s; I can find no images of him in that period whatsoever):
Bin Laden’s deteriorating relationship with the Saudi state in the early 1990s will be key to understanding his evolution from a jihadist against the communist enemy in Afghanistan, to declaring war on those governments in Muslim countries who he saw as inimical to Islam, and their chief enabler: the United States. Throughout the 1980s, however, he and the Saudi regime were rock solid in their support of the Afghans. You might want to return and look at part ten to refresh your memory as to the various factions fighting the war. Most of the resources from bin Laden and the Saudis were funneled into the factions of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, that is, those with the most fundamentalist and intolerant vision of Islam (and that is saying something, given the competition they were up against). Sayyaf, who had the closest links of all with Saudi Arabia, was the main facilitator in bin Laden building his ‘Afghan Arab’ unit, an objective which indicates something of a rift growing between bin Laden and Azzam from around 1987 onwards, as the two men began to grow apart on these subtle ideological differences.
Azzam had always a champion of promoting unity among the Ummah (the community of all Muslims) and wanted to disperse the non-Afghan volunteers out among the various Afghan groups as a way of fostering this. Bin Laden, however, was keen to found a separate unit of foreign fighters, believing this would better prepare them to return to their own countries after the war and wage war against the secular authorities there. There was also a perception that the ‘Afghan Arabs’ were being used by Afghan commanders as cannon fodder, although I have conversely read in places that there was an opposite concern, that the Afghans were treating the foreign volunteers as guests and refusing to put them in danger, depriving them of valuable combat experience. There was also a concern among Afghan commanders that the foreign volunteers were overzealous in seeking martyrdom, disrupting Afghan units with their recklessness. While prepared to die for the cause if necessary, Afghans were fighting a war to liberate their country and trying not to get themselves killed.
Another potentially-more troublesome rift was that Azzam championed Massoud (whom he described as the best Mujahideen commander) and this led to tensions with bin Laden and his allies. Perhaps the word ‘allies’ is putting it a bit too strongly. We should not exaggerate the differences he had with Azzam. Both men were concerned with preserving the unity of the Afghan forces and tried to avoid taking sides. Bin Laden would continue this attempt during the collapse into inter-factional fighting that followed the defeat of the communists. Azzam and bin Laden remained friends and comrades, and there is certainly no evidence to suggest that bin Laden was involved in the conspiracies that grew up among Azzam’s enemies and eventually led to his assassination in November 1989, only months after the Soviet withdrawal, but before the Afghan communist regime had been defeated.
But before we get to Azzam’s death, however, there is one more faction among the ‘Afghan Arabs’ that we should examine, that led by the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri.
We have already briefly examined the early career of al-Zawahiri way back in part two when he was among the hundreds of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) members rounded up and arrested in the aftermath of Sadat’s assassination in 1981. Following this, he was imprisoned and tortured in Mubarak’s prisons for three years, leaving Egypt upon his release in 1984, first for Saudi Arabia and then to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he had already worked as a relief worker prior to his arrest in Egypt. It was here that he met Azzam and bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri was one of many members of EIJ who left Egypt during the years after Mubarak’s crackdown, as hopes for a religiously-inspired uprising of the people in their country were disappointed.
A potted history of EIJ might be in order here, seeing as they are going to be folded into the broader story of Salafi jihadism as it evolves in the 1990s. For the background to the Egypt of the 1970s in which EIJ had it roots, see part two. As we have seen, al-Zawahiri had already been involved in underground Islamist activity since the death of Sayyd Qutb in 1966. The individual who provided the catalyst for the formation of a jihadist organisation, however, was Muhammad abd-al-Salam Faraj (below left), an engineer and university administrator who wrote a widely-read pamphlet entitled The Neglected Obligation (in English sometimes translated as the ‘The Neglected Duty’, the ‘Forgotten Duty’ or variations thereof), which argued that, not only did the defense of Islam justify the taking up of arms against unjust rulers who were hostile to it, but that this was in fact a duty of all true Muslims. It was a key text in the development of modern jihadism and Faraj further argued that the ‘near-enemy’ (that is, hostile secular regimes in their own countries) were the enemy to be prioritised. An engaging speaker, Faraj soon attracted a cadre of followers recruited from his sermons in mosques. They included al-Zawahiri and, as fate would have it, an army lieutenant named Khalid Islambouli (below right).
Islambouli told Faraj about a military parade planned for 6 October 1981 which President Anwar Sadat would be attending. Hated by the Islamists for the oppressive secular regime he ran, this hatred had intensified since the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Islambouli and other sympathetic army officers attacked Sadat on the appointed day, killing the president but failing to kill vice-president Mubarak, who would go on to rule the country for three decades. The ensuing trial gave Faraj and Islambouli an opportunity to promote their ideology from the dock, following which they were executed, no doubt satisfying a desire for martyrdom in the process.
As previously mentioned, many members of EIJ were imprisoned and rounded up in the period following the assassination, al-Zawahiri among them, but EIJ was not the only jihadist organisation active in Egypt at the time. Another branch (no doubt there was some overlap) developed in the 1970s called al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (‘the Islamic Group’) particularly among students. Such Islamic groups had initially been tolerated, even encouraged, by Sadat as a counterweight to his enemies on the left. When he perceived that he had let the religious genie out of the bottle and turned on them, they hated him all the more for it. Some (including al-Jama’a itself) have claimed that they were responsible for Sadat’s killing, and personally I cannot conclusively say who did it. Both EIJ and al-Jama’a were inspired by the teachings of a blind religious scholar, Omar Abdel-Rahman (below), who would become particularly associated with al-Jama’a, and was considered by many to be its leader, perhaps more of a spiritual leader after his arrest and imprisonment in the United States in 1993, implicated in a supporting role for the bombing of the World Trade Centre in February of that year, but that is a story for another post.
The 1980s were a decade of dispersal and defeat for the Egyptian jihadists. Bearing in mind this is something of a simplification, many in the EIJ went to Afghanistan while al-Jama’a, once it had regrouped, became more synonymous with the war at home against the Mubarak regime. Loosely organised in the towns and villages among the poorest sections of society, the al-Jama’a was extremely difficult for the Egyptian state to prosecute. Having spent some time in jail after Sadat’s killing, Omar Abdel-Rahman was released in the mid-1980s and provided a talisman for the movement, even after he left for the United States in 1990. They set in motion a cycle of violence in which they provoked the Egyptian state (always happy to oblige) into more and more repressive measures, thus acting (hopefully) as a recruiting tool for their movement. In the early 1990s, hundreds of those considered blasphemous or hostile to their project were assassinated, the most famous example being the writer and critic of armed jihad, Farag Foda in 1992.
The armed campaign within Egypt began to have counter-productive results, however. While repressive measures may have alienated some towards the government, on the whole al-Jama’a‘s actions merely alienated the population towards it. In 1993, a bomb attack blamed on them killed seven and wounded twenty in a poor suburb of Cairo, an area supposed to be their natural constituency. Attacks on tourists damaged the heavily tourist-dependent economy, the most notorious of which was the killing of sixty-two people (all but four of which were tourists) at Luxor, which may have been carried out by a faction within al-Jama’a who wished to scupper attempts by others within the movement to declare a renunciation of violence.
The reason some within al-Jama’a were prepared to do this was because the movement had already been battered hard by the state, thousands of its members having been thrown in jail and the public mood turning against them. The Luxor massacre only intensified this revulsion, which in turn allowed the government to enact much harsher measures against them, which really went into overdrive following a failed assassination attempt on Mubarak in Ethiopia in June 1995. Responsibility for this attempts was also claimed by EIJ, and even bin Laden may have been involved. By this time, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden were in Sudan, and known to be funding and assisting EIJ members who had been exiled. What had happened in the interim to al-Zawahiri and his fellow Egyptians? According to Faraj’s creed, having killed Sadat, the people were supposed to rise up spontaneously and topple the existing order, replacing it with an Islamic state and the imposition of shari’a. When things didn’t pan out this way, and after having spent a few years in prison, many Islamists went to Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri among them. Here, they linked up with the foreign fighters’ being organised by Azzam and bin Laden, al-Zawahiri becoming a sort of counter-influence with bin Laden and no doubt a factor in his shifting away from his mentor and taking his own initiatives.
The Egyptians, many of whom were well-educated (doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.) became known as the ‘brains’ of the operation and quickly rose to prominent positions in the non-Afghan units. As al-Zawahiri’s importance as an advisor to bin Laden grew, so the ideological fissures in the jihadist movement as a whole become more acute. Azzam had been a great proponent of Muslim unity, to the point that he disapproved of wars against other Muslims, even those regimes in Egypt and Algeria who had shown themselves hostile to Islamists. Azzam’s priority was the building of a new Islamic society based on Koranic models and the worldwide revival of Islam through defensive jihad. So, while in the long term they no doubt looked forward to a distant time when the whole world would convert to Islam, in practice they were not interested in aggressively spreading the religion, merely recovering to the fold of true Islam what they saw as areas that belonged rightly within it. It should be noted that although scholars call this ‘defensive’, it meant to people like Azzam and bin Laden, places like Andalucia in Spain and Mindanao in the Philippines.
In the question of who should constitute the enemy, the influence of Qutb was therefore far less marked in Azzam and, by extension, bin Laden, than in the case of al-Zawahiri and the other Egyptians, who vied for influence over bin Laden (who was, after all, the one holding the purse strings) as the Afghan war grew to a close. This contest culminated in a series of bitter disputes in 1989, as the al-Zawahiri faction accused Azzam of various misdemeanours, ranging from the specific (misappropriating funds) to the outlandish (that he was working for the CIA). Resentment at his support for Massoud and his closeness to bin Laden no doubt played a role too. Warned that his life was in danger in Peshawar and that he should leave town, Azzam ignored this advice and was killed (along with his two sons) by a roadside bomb on the 24 November 1989. Although the context in which I place this event here might suggest al-Zawahiri’s faction had him snuffed out, really pretty much anyone could have done it: al-Zawahiri, Mossad, the Iranians, the Pakistani ISI, the Afghan or Jordanian secret secrvices, you name it, they’re all suspects, and I’m not in a position to determine which of these claims is the more credible. I really do want to try and avoid flirting with conspiracy theories on this blog, so I will leave it at that. He was killed. We don’t really know who did it because the Pakistani authorities didn’t release any of the forensic evidence.
With Azzam gone, you might imagine that the way would now be clear for al-Zawahiri and the Egyptians to exert more complete control over bin Laden and his money, but by now, the Saudi had matured and was very much his own man. Although he would show influences of the Egyptian doctor in his thinking over the coming years, in many respects he would keep alive the ideological legacy of Azzam, especially in concentrating his mind, long-term, on the ‘far enemy’ and the transnational jihad which would be necessary to confront it. The Egyptians, on the other hand, may have fled abroad, but that does not mean they had given up the struggle against the ‘near enemy’ at home. This would be evinced by the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad by EIJ, of which bin Laden reportedly disapproved. As already noted, there was the attempt to assassinate Mubarak in this year too, and in the early 1990s, an observer might be forgiven for thinking that the future of jihad lay in these localised national struggles in Egypt, Algeria, Chechnya, Bosnia, etc. and the attempt to build an Islamic state piece by piece.
We will look at some of these struggles in subsequent posts, because they are absolutely vital (although few in the west appreciate how important they were) to shaping militant Islam in the last few decades. As a general observation, the psychological effect of victory against the Soviet Union should be grasped. Bin Laden’s generation of Muslims was one that had grown up in the shadow of multiple defeats to Israel, the gloss had gone off Nasser’s secular nationalism and the idea that the Muslim world might regenerate itself by adopting the technological innovations of the west and imitating its culture. The pessimism that replaced these hopes had been deep-seated, but the Mujahideen‘s victory in Afghanistan was transformational, seeming to affirm the belief of young men like bin Laden that, instead of trying to copy the west, the way to regenerate the Ummah was to return to the fundamentals of Islam and the example of the prophet Muhammad.
Fighters came home from the glory of victory with their defeatism dispelled and full of hope for the struggle back in their own countries, and the expectation that the oppressed masses (and make no mistake, they were oppressed) would rise up against their corrupt secular rulers. But, as we have seen, in Egypt and elsewhere, this didn’t happen, and disappointment led some to turn towards the ‘far enemy’ or turn towards the civilian population in their own countries in bitterness (we will see a textbook example of this with the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria). As popular Islamist uprisings failed to occur, and resurgent secular states turned the screw on the jihadists, it began to appear that Azzam and bin Laden had been right after all: transnational jihad against the ‘far enemy’, the sponsor of their repressive regimes, was the real solution, to confront the real threat to Islam at its source: the United States.
Whether al-Zawahiri and his allies were really thinking along these lines is debatable, however. It was likely pragmatic concerns as much as anything else that dictated they bend to bin Laden’s will as the 1990s went by. Desperately lacking funds, and in the aftermath of increasingly-successful repression by Mubarak’s regime, EIJ deemed it politic to hitch a ride on bin Laden’s project of building up a base for transnational jihad instead of everyone fighting their own individual battles against their respective secular enemies. In 1992, both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were in Sudan, where they had been given sanctuary by the regime of Omar al-Bashir and the influential Islamic leader Hassan al-Turabi, who was responsible for inviting bin Laden and many other jihadists into the country, both for ideological reasons, and in the hope that some of the wealthier Arabs, mostly Saudis, would invest in the country, which was relatively poor (this was before the discovery of significant qualtities of oil in the late 1990s). We will discuss Sudan in a separate post, but just to note here that many regard al-Turabi as having been not entirely honourable in his dealings with bin Laden (Michael Scheuer, for example, who is very knowledgeable about bin Laden, although I would not always concur with his interpretations), accusing him of draining the Saudi’s bank account and then allowing him to be expelled from the country under pressure from the Americans, having spent a great deal of money to little or no purpose in the country.
What al-Zawahiri was running away from in Sudan is obvious. Not only was Egypt no longer safe for EIJ members, but Mubarak’s security services had their tentacles in all sorts of other countries too, and were getting increasingly effective help from the CIA now that the Americans no longer needed the jihadists to fight the communists on their behalf. Al-Zawahiri’s movements in the early 1990s are a bit mysterious. He traveled around a lot on forged passports. At one point he was arrested in Russia in 1996 and held in prison for six months, but they didn’t know who he really was and released him. Bin Laden’s whereabouts between the end of the Afghan war and Sudan are less mysterious. He had returned to Saudi Arabia a hero, his legend only being burnished by an injury he received at the Battle of Jalalabad in March 1989. He still enjoyed the stamp of approval from the regime and, for his part, appears to have been still been a loyal Saudi subject at this stage.
Tensions soon emerged with the Saudi regime in several areas. First of all, there was their meddling among the Islamist factions in Afghanistan. While bin Laden had tried to use his prestigious position to bring the various groups together in order to prevent a civil war (which would happen anyway) between Rabbani-Massoud on the one hand and Hekmatyar-Sayyaf etc. on the other. Turki al-Faisal, however, strove on behalf of the latter alone, thus perpetuating divisions and hastening the slide to war. Then there was South Yemen where, as we saw in the last posts, the Islamists were emerging as a force to be reckoned with, fighting against the attempts of the southern Marxists to reassert their independence. Bin Laden and other jihadists in Saudi Arabia saw this as a more-or-less identical cause to the one they had fought in Afghanistan: atheistic communists, and camped in the Arabian peninsula of all places. They therefore threw themselves wholeheartedly into fighting them, participating in numerous attacks and assassinations of socialist leaders in the 1990-94 period. To the horror of bin Laden and his followers, however, their own government supported the Yemeni socialists, because they were seeking to undermine Yemeni unity and weaken the northern regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh. For the first time, bin Laden came up against the realpolitick of the Saudi regime when they asked him to stop fighting the socialists in South Yemen. Appalled by this failure to fulfill their religious duty to expel the infidel, he carried on regardless.
But worse was to come, far worse.
On 2 August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. There followed a six-month long standoff in which the United States and its allies (among them Saudi Arabia) demanded that Iraq withdraw or face an international coalition, which would indeed expel the Iraqis from Kuwait in January. The Iraqis let it be known that they would attack Saudi Arabia if they were attacked (which they eventually did) and the kingdom was on high alert, aware that its existing defense forces would be no match for Iraq’s. This was before Iraq was destroyed by two wars and a decade of sanctions; at this time, Saddam Hussein had built its army into a formidable military power, regionally at least. Bin Laden had been warning, both in letters and public talks, about the threat posed by Hussein (whom he regarded as a monstrous secularist) and these warnings had gone largely unheeded. His continuing loyalty to the House of Saud is evinced by his offers to use his family’s resources to construct defensive fortifications and raise a force of veteran jihadists from the Afghan war to man it.
The Saudi government rejected his proposal and, most shocking of all, requested the United States send a force to help defend the kingdom. This is an absolutely crucial moment in understanding the rest of Osama bin Laden’s life and career. Here was the Saudi rulers bringing infidels, armed ones at that, into the land of the holiest sites in Islam, which were supposed to be defended by faithful Muslims alone. Among the Saudi king’s titles is ‘Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’. This was an egregious violation of everything bin Laden and his fellow fundamentalists held dear, and a shocking betrayal by those whose duty he saw it to uphold the strict Wahhabist conception of Islam he believed in. On top of all this, King Fahd secured theological justification for his decision from the Grand Mufti (the same one who had blessed the foreign fighter’s intervention in Afghanistan), Abdul Aziz bin Baz (below) for the move.
Up to this point, bin Laden had always deferred to religious scholars, even when their dictates seemed to be guided by the interests of preserving the House of Saud rather than the sanctity of Islam. This critique was implicit in the Islamic Awakening (Sahwa) movement, which bin Laden supported when he returned to Saudi Arabia. This was a peaceful activist group which sought to bring the regime into full compliance with Islamic law and curb its more excessive material excesses. To even suggest that the monarchy isn’t already in complete compliance with Islamic law is, however, deeply subversive in Saudi Arabia, and the movement was met by a mobilisation of theologians and scholars by the state. The establishment of American troops in the kingdom was the straw that broke the donkey’s back as far as bin Laden and his companions were concerned, but it should be remembered that it was only with the utmost reluctance that he ‘went rogue’. Henceforth, he publicly denounced these state-sponsored scholars as corrupt propagandists and his farm was raided by the security services, who disarmed his followers.
Bin Laden became an increasingly dissident figure in Saudi society, dangerous from the point of view of the state because of the respect he enjoyed from his leadership in Afghanistan. It would certainly have been tremendously destabilising to have imprisoned or executed him. It is sometimes claimed that they banished bin Laden in 1991, or even that they let him go on condition that he not direct his activities against them. The most plausible story seems to me, however, is that he escaped. Having had his passport taken from him, he managed to get one of his brothers to acquire a ‘one-time’ passport for him to wrap up some business in Pakistan, after which he promised to return. He never did. In 1994, he would be stripped of his citizenship and disowned by his family. After a brief period in Pakistan, he moved to Sudan where, as noted above, by the time he was finished he had lost a fortune in unprofitable business ventures and payments to the regime in exchange for the sanctuary he gave them.
By 1996, the only country to which he could turn for refuge was Afghanistan, by now coming under the rule of the Taliban (see part eleven), who were soon busy forcing women to stay home, banning music, blowing up Buddhist statues and generally cutting the country off from the outside world. The idea that the Taliban and bin Laden and his movement shared the same goals and ideology, however, is very mistaken (although seems to be widespread). While they gave bin Laden and his followers refuge, for reasons which we will examine in a future post on Afghanistan after their takeover, the Taliban had little interest in transnational jihad and were in fact concerned about the kind of trouble bin Laden’s activities might bring upon them. Rightly so, as it would turn out.
In 1996, Afghanistan seemed the only country where the dream of an Islam, assertive in the face of what it saw as an expansionist and hostile west, could be kept alive, but it was only barely kept alive. This is important when we come to the late 1990s and the beginnings of al-Qaeda and its attacks on the United States: the jihadists were in crisis, weakened and harried, their project having run out of steam after the failure to overthrow regimes in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere. It is all-too-often forgotten in the wake of 9-11 and the blowing up of the al-Qaeda threat out of all proportion, that what was still being referred to as the ‘bin Laden’ network was in pretty desperate straits, hiding out in the wilds of Afghanistan in one of the few places were it might still have a chance of hiding from the U.S. war machine. Of course, this is not to say that they could not inflict damage on property and life. As the 1998 embassy bombings and 9-11 indicate, they certainly had the financial means, the manpower and the will to do this, but none of this mitigates the fact that militant political Islam, that sought to establish regimes based on shari’a, as a movement, was largely a spent force.
Knowing this, men like bin Laden and Zawahiri knew that only by somehow provoking the west into some serious atrocities against the Muslim civilian population could they breath some life back into their failed project. The only way to do this was to commit some atrocity of their own, big enough to get the American’s attention and ignite the kind of apocalyptic ‘Clash of Civilisations’ that they (in common with American neo-Conservatives) were hoping for. It is round about here that we have to start giving consideration to the ‘organisation’ we now call al-Qaeda which would attempt to ignite such a conflict. I place the word ‘organisation’ between inverted commas because some accounts give the impression that a group of that name, with an explicit and definable hierarchical structure, was founded around 1988 when Azzam was still alive, along with bin Laden and Zawahiri, and straightaway began to prepare the Afghan veterans for a coming battle with the United States. Things are far from being that straightforward.
Certainly, as we have already seen, Azzam was talking about something called al-Qaeda or ‘the base/foundation’ in the years prior to his death. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this was an organisation though, at least not from this early stage. You will sometimes see numbered amongst bin Laden’s early attacks on the United States, the bombing of two hotels in Aden, Yemen, where American soldiers were staying on their way to Somalia. There is, however, very little evidence for his involvement. It is likewise with the bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993, in which his role was at most limited to a distant and tangential financial support for some of those involved, possibly. In the early 1990s, there is nothing resembling a structured international network of jihadists directed from a centralised leadership. That does not mean that the idea of creating such an organisation did not exist. It seems overwhelmingly likely that it did, and that the term al-Qaeda was meant to suggest this aspiration, the base, foundation or basis on which a real movement which could realistically take on the west might one day emerge. The name can be seen as a recognition that this was more of an aspiration or long-term project.
Exactly how long term is difficult to say. Fawaz Gerges, for example, argues that al-Qaeda in the late 1980s and early 1990s meant only a series of maxims, not an actual organisation. This is perhaps an exaggeration, but there is very little evidence it amounted to much more than that. One of the best assessments is that of Jason Burke, who I think has done the most authoritative work (in English at least) on this. By the late 1990s, he argues that:
…bin Laden and his partners were able to create a structure in Afghanistan that attracted new recruits and forged links among preexisting Islamic militant groups…
but…
…they never created a coherent terrorist network in the way commonly conceived. Instead, al Qaeda functioned like a venture capital firm—providing funding, contacts, and expert advice to many different militant groups and individuals from all over the Islamic world.
Jason Burke, Foreign Policy, No. 142 (2004), p.18.
So, basically, rather than resembling a limited company with a board of directors and a CEO, by the late 1990s al-Qaeda was more like a franchise, McDonalds or KFC, with a certain amount of financial and logistic support given to those jihadists who wanted to perform a deed regarded as faithful to their cause. At times, indeed, it would seem as if certain groups and individuals were acting independently and simply using the name al-Qaeda (and the same is true more recently of ISIS) to lend gravity to what are basically lone-wolf actions. In this sense, al-Qaeda and ISIS have borne more similarity to the Animal Liberation Front than any conventional paramilitary group, in that anyone can carry out an action (there is no leadership) in the name of the ALF as long as they follow some basic guidelines, among which it must be mentioned to their credit is that no-one should be harmed, and indeed the ALF have never killed anyone.
As I suggested at the start of this post, I am sceptical of claims that al-Qaeda existed in any meaningful sense before, at very least, the late 1990s. The bombing of American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on 7 August 1998 is a crucial turning point in this respect. It is only after these that the security services and the media start talking about something called al-Qaeda. This doesn’t even mean that the people who carried out the bombings thought of themselves as members of an organisation of that name, even at this stage. One of the bombers, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, denied having even heard of anything called al-Qaeda. The most plausible explanation for al-Qaeda‘s sudden emergence (it seems pretty weird, after all, that you go from nobody talking about them to them being this international network of highly-competent militants, practically overnight) is given once again by Burke:
It was the FBI, during investigation of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in East Africa, which dubbed the loosely-linked group of activists that Osama bin Laden and his aides had formed as “al Qaeda.” This decision was partly due to institutional conservatism and partly because the FBI had to apply conventional antiterrorism laws to an adversary that was in no sense a traditional terrorist or criminal organization.
Jason Burke, Foreign Policy, No. 142 (2004), p.18.
That is, in order to have any realistic chance of indicting and convicting bin Laden and other instigators of these acts, the FBI needed to work within existing laws regarding criminal conspiracy. These necessitated the prosecutors providing evidence of the existence of an organization, in order to prosecute its leader, even if that person could not be linked directly to the ‘crime’. Of course, they needed witnesses for this, to testify that bin Laden was indeed the one pulling the strings from his hideout in Afghanistan. Enter an obscure figure called Jamal al-Fadl. He is so obscure that this is the best picture I could find of him:
This is a court picture from the trial which began in February 2001 of those who had carried out the embassy bombings, and (in absentia) bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and others who had financed them. Al-Fadl was a Sudanese jihadist who had joined bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. He was apparently a senior member of the ‘organisation’ in the following years but grew resentful of receiving a smaller salary than others and embezzled around $110,000 from them. Having been caught, he then went around to various security agencies hoping to be given refuge and a reward for offering them information. Finally the American embassy in Eritrea took him up on his offer and he went to the United States in 1996. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time for al-Fadl. When, two years later, the FBI badly needed someone who could join the dots for them and help construct a picture of al-Qaeda as a complex and tightly-structured organisation, al-Fadl was ready and waiting to do the job for them.
He gave them exactly what they wanted, because he had every reason to exaggerate the complexity and scope of al-Qaeda. The same was true of L’Houssaine Kherchtou, a Moroccan who was involved in the embassy bombings and gave detailed evidence of the ‘organisation’ in return for immunity from prosecution and witness protection. This is pretty much ‘the evidence’ for the existence of an international terrorist organisation called ‘al-Qaeda’ having existed since the late 1980s, and it is deeply flawed. In the aftermath of the 1998 bombings, and even more so after 9 September 2001, the exigency of building a prosecution against bin Laden and co. had become a more important priority than the actual truth of what al-Qaeda was and how long it had been around. The problem is that the flimsiness of the evidence it was based on was forgotten and subsequent accounts have reported the findings of the trial as if it was solid primary evidence.
Once again, none of this is to deny the fact that some kind of a network clearly existed prior to 1998 (and likely for some years) that had as its aim the extension of the war to the United States. Bin Laden made this clear in a public declaration of war on the United States in August 1996, published in the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, making clear that he had shifted his focus on corrupt regimes like Saudi Arabia, to their main sponsor. There was also the well-attested creation of the ‘World Islamic Front’ in February 1998, a union of al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian faction of EIJ and bin Laden’s network (whether we wish to refer to it as al-Qaeda at this stage or not) along with a few smaller jihadist groups. The fatwa in question contained sentences like: ‘The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it…’ You get the drift: the kind of thing you would imagine a formidable anti-American jihadist organisation to declare.
Six months before the embassy bombings, however, these grand declarations were greeted in the west with the semi-indifference they probably deserved at the time. Even afterwards, in 2000, Fawaz Gerges, an expert in this field was writing:
Despite Washington’s exaggerated rhetoric about the threat to Western interests still represented by Bin Ladin [. . .] his organization, Al-Qa‘ida, is by now a shadow of its former self. Shunned by the vast majority of Middle Eastern governments, with a $5 million US bounty on his head, Bin Ladin, has in practice been confined to Afghanistan, constantly on the run from US, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian intelligence services. Furthermore, consumed by internecine rivalry on the one hand, and hemmed in by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt on the other, Bin Ladin’s resources are depleting rapidly. Washington plays into his hands by inflating his importance. Bin Ladin is exceptionally isolated, and is preoccupied mainly with survival, not attacking American targets. Since the blasts in Africa, not a single American life has been lost to al-Qa’ida.
Fawaz Gerges, ‘The end of the Islamist insurgency in Egypt?: Costs and prospects’, in The Middle East Journal, 54:4 (2000) 597-8.
Writing a year before 9-11, Gerges would appear to have been spectacularly wrong. But if you think about it a little more, it seems to me that he was essentially correct in all but one (dramatically important) respect. He failed to note that even a relatively small and battered group like this could still carry out an attack like 9-11, and rely on the reaction of the United States to spark off a decades-long war. The terrifying fact of the matter is that any dedicated small group with a pile of cash could have carried out 9-11: the ALF, ETA, the IRA, any of these paramilitary groups could, if they put their minds to it and weren’t bothered by mass civilian casualties. This was certainly true at that time, before the stricter security protocols that 9-11 brought about were introduced.
Nothing about 9-11 changed the fundamental geopolitical situation, but so traumatic was the event to Americans that they felt the need to believe that it ‘changed everything’. This compounded the tragedy. The American government’s response made sure it ‘changed everything’, not the attack itself, and this is exactly what bin Laden and his allies had been hoping for. Ironically, by declaring a ‘War on Terror’ against an amorphous network of desperadoes as if it was a coherent ‘army’, sophisticated and hierarchical, there is a good argument to be made that the United States brought such an organisation closer to actually existing. After 9-11, many jihadist groups started calling themselves ‘al-Qaeda in the something or other’. A glance through some of the names of these groups claiming to be branches of al-Qaeda (below) suggests they are actually more-or-less independent organisations seeking to claim some of the street cred which bin-Laden’s group acquired among jihadists from the exaggerated threat they were presented as after 9-11. Again, bin Laden was only to happy to be blamed, and presented as some kind of omnipotent and mercurial Bond villain.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq (2004)
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (2007)
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (2009)
Al-Qaeda in Somalia (2010)
Al-Qaeda in the Levant (2012)
Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (2014)
If al-Qaeda was a franchise, the American state department drummed up some great business for them.
It might be asked why they did this? To analyse the American military-industrial complex is beyond the scope of this post, but it’s pretty obvious to any impartial observer that the military, security services and large swathes of the political classes have a vested interest in keeping the public in a heightened state of fear from an external threat. Adam Curtis’ fantastic series The Power of Nightmares suggests that, with the apparent failure of ideology and dreams of a better future to inspire people politically, politicians have found a useable replacement in fear of a vague, implacable and irrational enemy, who ‘hate us for our freedoms‘. It should also be noted that the threat from Islam and Muslims begins to come to the fore just as the communist bloc is collapsing and they could no longer use that particular bogeyman.
Besides, this there is the extremely lucrative arms industry, which would collapse without a good war to keep it going (even better, one with a vaguely-defined and shifting enemy and no obvious objectives, just like the ‘War on Terror’, which can be extended indefinitely). This is worth $1.69 trillion a year (2016), a quarter of which ends up in the Middle East or North Africa. The US, the UK and France are responsible for around 70% of all exports of major conventional weapons to the Middle East. You can read more fun facts here. There are literally armies of people whose very livelihoods depend on the existence of something like al-Qaeda or ISIS. This included not only actual military or law-enforcement personnel, but a legion of academics (whose numbers have swelled since 9-11) who follow the money when it comes to the many postgraduates programmes and postdoctural fellowships which abound in the subject of terrorism and security. These, the very people we look to for authoritative answers about this subject, are institutionally disinclined to offer an alternative narrative to the one we were stuck with, even though it is highly dubious. They are no more likely to question it than a member of the theology department is likely to question the value of studying the bible, or someone in a business school is likely to critique capitalism.
Given all this, if we ask ourselves whether the world’s most powerful intelligence-gathering agencies misunderstood the nature of al-Qaeda or whether they deliberately distorted the picture to create an organisation where one hardly existed, the ‘exaggeration’ thesis seems more plausible than the idea that they got it wrong. This is not to say that there was no threat (clearly there was) or that these intelligence agencies knew about 9-11 beforehand or anything. Simply that the nature of the threat was manipulated in order to justify attacks on entire countries that had little or nothing to do with the atrocities bin Laden sponsored. Where, you might ask, does exaggeration shade into outright lying? Round about here:
Rather than go into the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 1993 and 2001, or the embassy bombings of 1998, I will examine them in some detail in a future post. Before we do that, however, we have to look at some of the conflicts that have been alluded to in this post, where the fight was taken up by jihadists in the 1990s to the ‘near enemy’ in Algeria, Chechnya and Bosnia, discrete national stories that have been forgotten in the haste to paint a picture of all-encompassing global conflict between ‘the west’ and ‘the Muslims’, but which, if anything, are more significant.
Featured image above: Eyes of Osama Bin Laden.
Two legs bad 
