Long-serving President who eased many of Algeria’s repressive policies but still eventually succumbed to popular resentment
Chadli Benjedid was the third president of post-independence Algeria. His decade in power in the 1980s was at a time of momentous changes in what had been, for its admirers, a model socialist revolutionary state.
Benjedid had emerged as the surprise, compromise candidate put forward by the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) on the death of the charismatic President Houari Boumedienne in 1979. At the time Algeria was still a tightly controlled society with the alliance between the FLN and the army ensuring almost complete central authority. But by the time of Benjedid’s removal by the army 13 years later, Algeria was in ferment: chronic economic problems and the collapse of communism worldwide had paved the way for a popular Islamist movement poised to be voted into power.
Benjedid’s hesitation, and indications that he was willing to consider sharing power with the Islamists, prompted the military to act against him. A savage conflict between the security forces and extremist Islamists tarnished the remainder of the 1990s, leaving no room for Chadli Benjedid’s qualities of pragmatism and flexibility.
Chadli Benjedid was born in 1929, the son of a small landowner, at Sebaa near Annaba on the northern coast of French Algeria. He joined the occupying forces and rose to the rank of NCO before deserting in 1955 to join the Armée de Libération Nationale (the armed wing of the FLN), an indigenous guerrilla movement aimed at securing the expulsion of the French and achieving Algeria’s independence.
He was arrested but escaped to join his comrades in exile in Tunisia. In 1960 he became commander of the rebel army’s 13th battalion on the Tunisian frontier. The following year he joined the insurgents’ general staff, where he liaised closely with Colonel Houari Boumedienne, the future head of state.
On independence in 1962 Benjedid was promoted to major and given command of the Constantine military region in eastern Algeria. An indication of his status was that he was chosen to head Algeria’s first mission to communist China in 1963. Two years later he helped Boumedienne overthrow Algeria’s first President, Ahmed Ben Bella. Benjedid’s reward was to be given a place, as a regional commander, on the influential Council of the Revolution. He remained a mainstay of the army and the regime supporting Boumedienne’s policies over the next 14 years and was promoted to colonel in 1969.
By the time Boumedienne was dying from a rare blood disorder, Benjedid was acting Defence Minister and Chief of Staff. Boumedienne’s death in December, 1978, was followed by an extraordinary session of the FLN which, against most predictions, chose Benjedid as its candidate for the presidential election.
He was seen as a compromise figure with the advantage that he was not linked to any particular faction in the party. He was inaugurated as president on February 9, 1979, after his sole candidature had been approved by 94 per cent of the electorate.
Benjedid inherited a nation which was highly respected in the developing world, with a potentially strong economy based on its oil and gas resources and with a history of political stability. But Algeria was also characterised by a climate of oppression which had worsened in Boumedienne’s last years.
Benjedid moved cautiously to try to change this. The activities of the secret police were curtailed, many of Boumedienne’s opponents were released from prison and exit visas, compulsory for Algerians since 1967, abolished. But formal dissent remained harshly treated, the monopoly of the ruling party was protected and human rights activists were regularly imprisoned. Benjedid was also uncompromising when faced with social disorder which seemed to threaten the national fabric. Outbreaks of Berber nationalism in the Kabyle region were suppressed with only token concessions.
In his economic policy Benjedid was bolder. The emphasis shifted from labour-intensive, centralised heavy industry towards more market-orientated policies. The revised National Charter of 1985 broke with doctrinaire socialist economics and sought to encourage foreign capital as well as local and individual initiative in Algeria. But, again, the unwieldy bureaucracy and entrenched ideas inherited from the Boumedienne era frustrated Benjedid’s ambitions.
Abroad Benjedid was more successful in laying the ghost of his predecessor. He managed to rebuild relations with the West, especially the US and France, without sacrificing Algeria’s radical Third World credentials.
Algerian mediation helped secure the release of the US hostages in Tehran in 1981, and in 1985 Benjedid became the first Algerian head of state to visit the US.
He was also largely successful in defusing the emotions which had troubled relations with France. Despite periodic rows over French support for Morocco in its war against the Algerian-backed Polisario Front in the western Sahara and the treatment of the Algerian community in France. Paris remained Algeria’s main trading partner. Benjedid was also the first Algerian head of state to visit France, in 1982.
This opening-out to the West was skilfully balanced by steadfast support for Arab radicals. Algeria was unique in maintaining good relations with almost all the factions within the PLO. The organisation’s reconciliation conference in Algiers in February, 1987 was largely a result of Benjedid’s industry.
At the same time, the Algerian leader succeeded, at least partially, in curbing Colonel Gaddafi’s destabilising activities in Chad and Tunisia in exchange for diplomatic backing and economic cooperation. Relations with Moscow, Algeria’s main arms supplier, also remained close.
Benjedid, as the candidate of the ruling FLN, was re-elected unopposed to the presidency in 1984. But already hopes that his liberal and reformist tendencies would be able to move Algeria in a new direction were fading. The manifest failure of world socialism and the government’s inability to solve the country’s economic and social problems — not helped by the fall in world oil prices — had begun to undermine the government’s credibility.
The first sign of the impending conflict was widespread and serious rioting in 1985, stoked by increasingly outspoken Islamist leaders who branded the government atheists and called for a government based on Islam.
Benjedid responded by initiating a programme of reform, removing many old-guard Boumedienne allies from the government and trying to push through privatisation more quickly. But the changes were too little, too late, and towards the end of 1988 the country exploded in rioting again.
It was clear that only radical political reform could save the regime. Consequently, Benjedid — who had been re-elected unopposed again in 1988 — pushed through a new constitution reducing the role of the FLN and, for the first time since independence, allowing other political parties to operate. Public sector workers were also given the right to strike. In the course of 1989 alone 21 new parties were founded, among them the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS).
However, the FLN still controlled most of the levers of powers, including the judiciary and the media. Despite this, a rising tide of Islamist activism saw the moderate FIS score an overwhelming victory at municipal and provincial elections in 1990. This was followed by a stunning FIS success in the first round of the general election of December, 1991. The FIS took a 188 seats against 15 for the FLN. With the Islamists certain to come to power after the second round of voting, the military-political regime struck back. The electoral process was halted, parliament suspended and the FIS banned.
Benjedid — whose willingness to reform was blamed by hardliners within the FLN for allowing the situation to develop in the first place — was another casualty. On January 11, 1992, under extreme pressure from the army, he resigned. A five-member Higher State Council, under Mohammed Boudiaf — who was assassinated five months later — took power in Benjedid’s place. The new military rulers calculated, probably rightly, that repression of the FIS would ignite a wave of extremist fundamentalist violence that would divide the Islamist movement and alienate many Algerians. But the ensuing savagery was to be a heavy price to pay for abandoning the political process which Chadli Benjedid had, albeit tentatively, begun.
For the remaining years of his life, Chadli Benjedid lived quietly in the western city of Oran, and avoided making political statements.
Chadli Benjedid, President of Algeria 1979-1992, was born on April 14, 1929. He died on October 6, 2012, aged 83
Author whose controversial bestseller based on the love lives of fellow Free French servicewomen became a classic of lesbian fiction
One of the early recruits to the all-women’s corps, the Volontaires Françaises, in the Free French Forces, Tereska Torrès spent most of her war service working as a secretary at General de Gaulle’s headquarters in London. she had also begun to write a novel at 17, and this was published as Le Sable et l’écume (Sand and spume) in Paris in 1946 to modest critical, but no commercial success. A compulsive diarist, she had throughout the war been recording her impressions of service life in London at war, and this diary was to be published decades later, only in French, as Une Française Libre.
It was her canny second husband, Meyer Levin, who suggested that a fictionalised account of wartime doings among members of the Volontaires Françaises ought to be published in English, in America. This account of the love lives of French women soldiers, both lesbian and heterosexual, appeared in 1950 from a US paperback publisher, Gold Medal Books, under the title Women’s Barracks, with a (for the time) suitably salacious cover, and swiftly made its author notorious.
However Torrès might protest that “only one-and-a-half” of her five main protagonists could be considered lesbian, and that the work was a serious survey of the effects of war on the emotional lives of serving personnel in a city like London, she found herself hailed as the queen of lesbian pulp fiction, and the novel sold two million copies in its first five years, en route to total sales of perhaps twice that number, in 13 languages.
The censorious Fifties were descending on America, and to the menace of communism was added the fear of a nationally enfeebling sexual degeneracy. This fear was particularly marked among the members of the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, who selected Women’s Barracks as an example of the morally subversive nature of paperback publishing. In Canada the book was banned after a trial in Ottawa in 1952 during which the Crown prosecutor described its contents as “nothing but lewdness from beginning to end”.
Her enthronement as a pioneering lesbian author was to continue to dismay Torrès for the rest of her life. Yet, when the Feminist Press republished her novel in 2005, it used the same cover under which it had originally appeared, with its somewhat endearingly dated portrayal of a group of really rather jolly women sitting about in brightly coloured underwear. Although she wrote 14 other books, Torrès was never able to escape from the reputation Women’s Barracks gave her.
Tereska Torrès was born Tereska Swarc in 1920, the daughter of an émigré Polish Jewish sculptor, Marek Swarc, and his wife Guina. When France fell in June 1940 her father was serving with the Polish units in the French Army, and was later to be evacuated by warship to England via La Rochelle. Deeply ashamed of the French capitulation and the Pétain collaborationist administration, she fled to London via Bordeaux, having heard that de Gaulle had raised the Free French standard in Britain. Determined to do her bit, she joined up.
In 1944 she married a young soldier, Georges Torrès, who was the stepson of the prewar French premier Léon Blum. But her husband was killed while fighting for the French forces in Alsace in October that year, leaving her five months pregnant. She became friendly with the American novelist Meyer Levin, whom she accompanied while he made a documentary film about Polish Jewish refugees who had attempted to flee the Holocaust for the safety of Palestine. During this time she kept a diary about the experiences of the refugees fleeing Polish cities and displaced persons camps in Western Europe to Palestine, where she was to find herself incarcerated for a time by the British mandated authorities. The resulting book appeared only in German as Unershrocken (Unafraid).
Torrès married Levin in Paris in 1948 and thereafter they lived in Paris, New York and Israel. He was not an easy companion, and her book Les Maisons Hantées de Meyer Levin (1974) described the bouts of paranoia that often put their marriage under strain and his 30-year obsession with writing a play about Anne Frank. Levin died in 1981.
Torrès refused to allow a French version of Women’s Barracks to appear in French, regarding it as giving too unfavourable an impression of the conduct of the Free French Forces in London. But in 2000 she published her wartime diary Une Française Libre — which appeared only in French. This, she felt, gave a more accurate description of the febrile nature of life in London, both civilian and military, as men and women tried to extract the most they could from what might remain of existence, as the German bombs fell.
Nevertheless in 2010 she changed her mind, and rewrote Women’s Barracks in French, incorporating material from her wartime diaries to give what she felt was a more authentic account of how things had been. Latterly she had settled in Paris where she died.
Torrès is survived by the two sons of her marriage to Meyer Levin, and by the daughter of her marriage to Georges Torrès.
Tereska Torrès, author and wartime member of the Free French Forces, was born on September 3, 1920. She died on September 20, 2012, aged 92
