Excellencies,
It is predictable that the Algerian government has accepted your arrival so that you may notice its success in managing the country’s business affairs. It has accepted you with the aim of hearing you, after your return, proclaim loud and strong its success and praise a country where ‘all is fine’, contrary to that which the ‘wicked’ NGO’s suggest, like Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch and Reporters sans Frontières who have been ‘infiltrated and manipulated by the GIA’ and who have sold their souls to work with ‘Western imperialism and neo-colonialism’.
It is predictable that they will wish to use your delegation as an alibi, as they did with Henry-Levy, Glucksmann, Pelletro, Bonnet and other Souliers. It is also predictable that with your fame and integrity they will not dare use with you the same methods they used with others, that is to say cases filled with bank notes or bloody shares in joint ventures (such shady affairs are just beginning to surface in the international press). But they will not hesitate to use your names and your experience in international forums to claim their innocence, to deny their crimes, to win sympathy. They will continue evoking your names, perhaps even quoting you, to show that there is no need for an independent enquiry commission.
It is predictable that they will use your conclusions, deforming them if necessary, to destroy the arguments of the General Secretary and the High Commissioner of Human Rights who for months have both been demanding such a commission of enquiry, and found themselves being called all sorts of names by the Algerian government and its relay stations in Algeria and elsewhere, and have even been disapproved of by close collaborators.
Excellencies,
Apart from inaccessible and unverifiable intentions, other things can be predicted about the Algerian military junta.
You are all in your own way, fervent opponents of colonialism and imperialism. Some of you, such as you Ambassador McHenry who are from the same political family as President John F. Kennedy, have even written on the subject of decolonization. There are amongst you old friends of the Algerian Revolution.
It is therefore predictable that you will meet those who play on this refrain, speaking about the ‘War of Liberation’, about the ‘attainments of the revolution’, about ‘national sovereignty’ and about the ‘principle of non-interference’. Those are only false arguments used by ‘impostors in spite of themselves’. Because fundamentally, these people have never really been independent and have never experienced real freedom. They remain colonialized in spirit, they retain the ideas, attitudes and reflexes of the colonialized accustomed to submission. That is why, potentially able to be re-colonized, they are not embarrassed, at the first opportunity, to compromise the political independence of their country, to sell off its economic resources and to mortgage its future.
The Algerian revolutionaries who you admire, the patriots who rose up against colonial oppression either sacrificed their lives during the War, as did Amirouche and Ben-M’hidi, or they have been put on one side, marginalized after independence by those who for decades have been reaping the advantages of the revolution. The rare symbols of the War of Liberation which had stayed intact in the eyes of the Algerian people, have unfortunately ended by tarnishing their past by joining, often zealously, the criminal enterprise of the putschists of the nineties. What a sad and pitiful end has been reserved for Mohamed Boudiaf, M’hammed Yazid, Ali Haroun, Rédha Malek and others, formerly famous for the fight they lead in the liberation of their people, today sadly shamed by this same people for the moral support they have given, and continue to give, to a military government lacking legitimacy.
It is therefore predictable that they will try to manage you by invoking common sentiments and struggles. Maître Jaques Vergès was not mistaken when he denounced torture in his ‘Open letter to my Algerian friends who have become torturers’. It should be said that Jaques Vergès feels bound by principles and to an ‘eternal Algeria’, that of ‘farmers and olive sellers’, not by a selfish nostalgia for the past and people. His strength has always been to predict the reflexes of the bureaucrats of injustice.
Excellencies,
It is predictable that during your stay in Algeria you will be warmly welcomed. You will be put up in wonderful Mediterranean villas and luxurious hotels. You will be treated to Algerian generosity and hospitality. You will be served fine couscous, with meat from lambs raised on the succulent grass of the Tel. You will taste the delicacies of a country with a culinary wealth drawn from the East and West. You will visit beautiful places, peaceful and prosperous. And when you have had enough and you ask to be taken to where you may, at last, begin your work, you will be taken to areas where everything is ready and waiting for you. When you begin to feel uncomfortable with the omnipresence of your hosts, you will be told that it is for your well-being, your security and comfort.
There, in the disaster areas, in the middle of ruins, it is a completely different Algeria that you will see. In ‘useless’ Algeria (as opposed to the ‘useful’ Algeria, which described during the colonial era the Algeria of the French, and which today describes where the interests of the reigning groups are concentrated) you will meet the misery and suffering written on human faces. You will be surprised to discover the sadness and grief of a people joyful by nature.
It is predictable that the people presented to you, to throw light on the situation, will have immediate replies ready for all of your questions. They will tell you, in nearly identical terms, their truth, that decreed by the services of Certainty. They will name all the ‘isms’ responsible for creating the unhappiness in Algeria : fanaticism, obscurantism, fundamentalism, fascism and, of course, terrorism, which as you will see all describe the ambient islamism. They will tell you about their struggle to save democracy, modernity, the Free World and even Human Civilization. They will also evoke, with pride, their feats against the savagery of medieval barbarism.
Excellencies,
It is predictable that after your official tour of the outside, you will be brought to meet influential personalities, opinion makers. Throughout the entire day you will be presented with battalions of men and women who will be introduced to you as the guardian angels of modern Algeria.
You will be received by the President of an ill republic, that of a government which has been searching for a helm for too long, that of a parliament whose only effective act since its ‘nomination’ has been to guarantee royal treatment for its members, and that of a senate, one epoch late, in a hurry to finish, whatever the cost, his ‘unfinished combat’.
It is predictable that you will not be received by those with real power, that is to say the generals of the clans entitled to sit at the military conclaves which decide everything in the country, from the election of a president to an import licence for camembert, with the percentages and results of local elections in passing. You will not be received by the officers of various army fractions who, in their battle to control the military institution and the looting of national resources, use the State, the government, the political and para-political parties which are merely executing agents, often disposable utensils looking after the interests of their superiors. You will not be received by the tightly closed circle of death strategists who control nearly four hundred thousand armed men, ranging from regular troops to self-defence militias, with the ‘islamist GIA’ and ‘Berber GIA’ in passing.
