'L'algerie en 1995 - La Guerre, l'histoire, la politique.'.

• Author: Zoubir, Yahia H.

Reviewed by Yahia H. Zoubir

The period 1994-1995 in Algeria was marked by an extraordinary level of violence that led to the deaths of thousands of Algerians, mostly civilians. Far from being a journalistic account of the events that occurred in that period, the Algerian-born French historian, Benjamin Stora, provides an analysis that seeks to explicate current developments from a historical perspective. From the onset, he rejects the commonly accepted view that Algeria's history begins with the FLN (p. 14), an interpretation which made the war of liberation the focal point of history. The result, he writes, is that both the opposition and the regime seek to legitimize their existence in relation to the wartime Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), 1954-62. In Stora's view, the fixation with this epoch has been such that all other major events that preceded 1954 have been deleted from Algerians' collective memory. He argues that all transmitted history was focused almost exclusively on nationalism, legitimized essentially by the war against France (p. 16).

In this study, Stora offers a thorough analytical survey of the situation that prevailed in Algeria until mid-1995. But although he might be faulted for having tried to cover too many aspects of this crisis, thus leaving many questions unanswered, Stora provides an interesting explanation for the violence which dominated the country.

Again, he sought the origin of the recent violence in the history of the nationalist movement. From his perspective, today's recourse to violence in Algeria finds its roots primarily in the regime's glorification of the war against France, for "the memory of the war of independence is transmitted in an exaggerated, legendary, heroic fashion, according to a central theme: France was defeated militarily, beaten with weapons" (p. 24), thus concealing the fact that other political means were at play. Stora concedes, however, that Algeria's history of violence began with the country's encounter with France in the 1830s (pp. 24-5). Algerian victims of France's violence turned this very same violence against the French to free the country. Unfortunately, the nationalist movement itself was characterized by violence which was used among "brothers" to eliminate ideological opponents and groups (p. 56). Stora argues that the recourse to such violence in this case was due to the "depersonalization" caused by the colonial system. The violence used by the colonial system...