February 22, 2003
An Arab Gadfly With a Memorable Bite
By ADAM SHATZ
PARIS If you can judge a man by the company he keeps, you can also judge
him by the enemies he makes. And Mohammed Harbi, Algeria's most renowned
intellectual, has certainly made some formidable enemies. Over the last
decade, his writings on Algerian history and politics have landed him death
threats from the Algerian secret police, radical Islamists and right-wing
French settlers still angry over their loss of Algeria to the National
Liberation Front or F.L.N., of which he was a high-ranking member as a young
man. The members of this improbable alliance of government spies, religious
fanatics and unrepentant colonialists have little in common besides their
hostility to Mr. Harbi, who embodies an Algeria still struggling to be born:
democratic and secular, rooted in North Africa yet open to the West,
embracing the Berber as well as Arab aspects of its identity. It may be
surprising that someone so powerless is considered to be so threatening.
After all, Mr. Harbi represents no party, faction or interest group. Yet a
man of principle is always a thorn in the side of authoritarian forces. "In addition to being an important historical figure and the most
respected historian of the Algerian national movement, Harbi is the
preeminent engagι Algerian intellectual of the past four decades," says
Arun Kapil, an American expert on Algeria who teaches in Paris. Like many secular Arab intellectuals caught between repressive military
regimes and fundamentalist oppositions, Mr. Harbi has found sanctuary in
Paris. Algerians here and at home speak of him with an admiration bordering
on reverence. In Menilmontant a neighborhood lined with halal butchers,
pastry shops and hip little bars young men greet him as "Si
Mohammed," in Arabic Sir Mohammed. "I've lived here for 25 years, and I feel very much at home,"
said Mr. Harbi, a slender, refined man of 69 with close-cropped white hair
offset by striking black eyebrows. Sitting at a bistro around the corner from
his apartment, he wore a black cashmere turtleneck, corduroys and wire-rimmed
glasses, and spoke in lightly accented French. He dispatches quickly with
personal questions, as if he'd rather talk about anything other than himself.
Writing his memoirs the first volume was recently published here to
considerable acclaim was, he says, "a strange undertaking, since I
don't have a taste for intimate confessions." It helps to have a good story, and Mr. Harbi undoubtedly has one. He
helped lead his country to independence from France in one of the bloodiest
colonial wars of the 20th century, only to become a prisoner of the newly
independent state. Since fleeing to France in 1973, Mr. Harbi has gone from
making history to writing it, establishing himself as an insightful student
of Algerian politics and as an unbending champion of secular democracy and
human rights. "The Algerian government," Mr. Harbi says, "is
not a state with an army, but an army with a state." In books like
"The F.L.N.: Mirage and Reality," he has traced the rise of a
military-bureaucratic elite that, in his view, has led the country to economic
ruin and civil war, displaying flagrant contempt for the people whose praises
it ritually sings. "To understand Algeria today," he says,
"you have to begin with the massive exclusion of people from power and
the rejection of pluralism." In 1992, a ghastly war broke out between government security forces and
Islamist rebels after the army canceled the country's first democratic
legislative elections, which the radical Islamic Salvation Front won. Tens of
thousands of Algerians have died, and over 7,000 "disappeared." Since
the early 90's, the Algerian government has projected itself as the country's
only defense against theocratic despotism. In Mr. Harbi's view, this is a
false choice, since, he said, most Algerians reject both the state and its
radical Islamist opponents. The army and the rebels, he argues, are objective
allies: both sides refuse to allow Algerians to govern themselves, both
reject political pluralism and both are willing to use extreme violence and
even, some reports suggest, to cooperate behind the scenes to further their
aims. Wishing a plague on both houses is, of course, the most dangerous position
of all in a civil war, and Mr. Harbi has kept a low profile for much of the
last decade, evading various assassination plots. "He seemed less
nervous about his safety than I was," Stuart Schaar, a historian of
North Africa at Brooklyn College, remembers. "I was afraid when he'd
take subways. I begged him to take taxis, but he wouldn't." If Mr. Harbi seems oddly serene in the face of these threats, it's because
he is used to the clandestine life. Born in 1933 into an affluent and highly
distinguished Muslim family in El-Arrouch, a town in eastern Algeria, he
joined the nationalist underground at 15. From 1954 to 1962, the years of the
independence war, he held various influential positions within the F.L.N.
After the war, he served as an adviser to Algeria's first president, Ahmed
Ben Bella. Yet even at the peak of his influence, Mr. Harbi was always an outsider in
the F.L.N. The seeds of rebellion were planted in him by his iconoclastic
father, Brahimi Harbi, and by his French high school teacher, an
anti-Stalinist Marxist named Pierre Souyri who had fought in the resistance.
Under Mr. Souyri's tutelage, Mr. Harbi rejected the Islam-inflected populism
common to most Algerian nationalists in favor of libertarian socialism. Mr. Harbi's secular ideals placed him at odds with most of his colleagues
in the F.L.N., who espoused the creation of an "Arabo-Muslim"
state. A staunch defender of the few Algerian Jews and French settlers who
supported the F.L.N, he says that these men and women "were arguably the
most genuine nationalists, because their understanding of Algeria wasn't
colored by religion." As a member of Mr. Ben Bella's cabinet, Mr. Harbi tried in vain to combat the
increasingly authoritarian direction of the revolution. He publicly condemned
the torture of dissidents and urged Mr. Ben Bella to arm the people to avert
a military coup. It was already too late: in June 1965, Col. Houari
Boumedienne seized power. Mr. Ben Bella was jailed, followed, two months
later, by Mr. Harbi. Never formally charged, he spent the next six years being transferred from
one prison to the next, until he was placed under house arrest in 1971. Two years later Mr. Harbi escaped across the Tunisian border, with a fake
Turkish passport. He ended up in Paris, where he'd studied two decades
earlier at the Sorbonne, and where his children from an earlier marriage to a
Frenchwoman lived. His first life, as a politician, was over. But while under house arrest, the revolutionary was reborn as a historian.
In the depths of confinement, Mr. Harbi had begun to write a chronicle of the
independence movement. In 1975, he published "The Origins of the F.L.N." It was the
first in a series of sober, unsentimental studies that demolished the
founding myths of the Algerian revolution, starting with the notion that
Algerians had been unified under the F.L.N. and that anyone who opposed it
was a traitor. Using a trove of documents that he had collected during the war, Mr. Harbi
revealed the internal life of the Algerian national movement, marked by
ideological splits, purges and brutal score-settling. As a witness to the
party's power struggles, and as an Algerian patriot of unimpeachable
nationalist credentials, he was able to expose the grim underside of the
F.L.N. as no scholar could. Without minimizing the wounds of colonialism, he
insisted on the indigenous roots of Algeria's troubles, stressing the almost
hysterical fear of political and cultural pluralism and the penchant for
suppressing it by violence, as well as the weight of conservative, rural
traditions. As the French critic Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a close friend, puts it,
"Harbi is that rare example of a political activist who has been able to
achieve the historian's detachment from his subject." By breaking the taboos surrounding the Algerian revolution, Mr. Harbi was
placing himself in the line of fire. Algeria's secret police had assassinated
a number of exiled dissidents. No sooner had Mr. Harbi arrived than Algerian
agents began to stop by his apartment, offering a monthly salary in return
for cooperation. French leftists with connections to the Algerian state
promised to get him a French passport if he would keep quiet. "I felt
extremely lonely in those years," he said. Today, Mr. Harbi is a celebrated figure in French intellectual life, but
his living conditions haven't much improved. He lives in a small apartment on
a tiny pension from the University of Paris, where he taught political science
for 20 years. "Mohammed refuses to be helped because he doesn't want to
depend on anyone," Mr. Vidal-Naquet said, half in admiration, half in
exasperation. The first volume of Mr. Harbi's memoirs (the second is to be published
this fall) is in large measure the story of a ferociously self-reliant man.
Spanning the period 1945 to 1962, the book provides an absorbing account of
Mr. Harbi's life in the underground in France, when he was raising support
for the revolution and running from one safe house to the next. And it
beautifully conveys the passage from lyrical illusions to lost illusions
the experience of an entire generation of Algerians who experienced the great
hopes, and the equally great disappointments, of the independence era. The most revelatory section may be Mr. Harbi's chapter on his adolescence
in the city of Skikda, since it offers a view of the colonial experience that
has seldom appeared in print, registering the volatile intimacy that both
joined and divided Algerians and the settlers. As the historian Benjamin
Stora notes, "Harbi was one of the first writers to show the colonial
world as it really was, a world of segregation and inequality but also of
contact between communities." Mr. Harbi's memoir is now prominently displayed in bookstores throughout
Algeria, where his work was banned until a decade ago. One Algerian reviewer,
the sociologist Lahouari Addi, likened the book to "collective
therapy," urging that it be "translated into Arabic and read by as
many Algerians as possible." He added, "All is not yet lost in a
society that can give birth to activists like Mohammed Harbi." Mr. Harbi, for his part, doesn't see his life in heroic terms. "My
story," he said, chuckling softly, "is the classic story of the
radical son of bourgeois parents," a tale of rebellion, disillusionment
and downward mobility worthy of Herzen. Does the retired academic ever feel a
tinge of nostalgia for his days as a nationalist revolutionary? "I have to be honest with you," he said, blushing. "For all
its miseries, being a political militant is much more exciting than life in
academia." A wry little smile flashed across Mr. Harbi's face, and he
returned the conversation, once again, to the country on the other side of
the Mediterranean. |
