The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuściński Page A

for the first oil fields and for the stones of Tassilli where the oldest frescoes in the world have been preserved. At the town of Insalah in the Algerian Sahara the largest slave market in the world existed until recently: Ben Bella closed it, dividing the land and date palms of the slave traders among the slaves. Today Insalah is the only place in the world ruled by the slave class, known as the
haratin
(beasts of burden). Thus did Ben Bella make the dream of Spartacus come true.
    Colonialism fosters social chasms, and the fissures still run through Algerian society. Colonial policy elevates a class of ‘cultured’ and ‘reliable’ natives while pushing the rest of society down on a stratum of poverty and ignorance. The bureaucrats, the bourgeois and the intelligentsia are cut off, all clearly and undemocratically raised above the rest of society. They have modelled themselves on the French, have adopted their way of living and, to a large degree, of thinking. Their habitat is the city, the desk vacated by the Frenchman, the café. Every Algerian politician is here from reactionaries to communists, united by their lifestyle, not their politics. The people who run Algeria’s political and administrative machine have been recruited from these circles. A command of French is a condition for entry and these people are fluent in French. One more commoncharacteristic: their isolation from the country. One thing these people are certainly not doing: they are not filling in the chasm between Algiers and Algeria. That is not their job; they do not think about it, mainly because they do not know the country: they live in Algiers, but they do not live in Algeria. ‘It is striking,’ someone told me in conversation, ‘that these people are generally strangers to Algeria. Nobody here knows the countryside. Ben Bella took a slight interest in the villages, but nobody else.’ And the villages are eighty per cent of Algeria.
    The war in Algeria lasted seven and a half years and, with China’s and Vietnam’s, was one of the biggest wars of liberation of the last twenty years. The Algerian people showed the highest proof of their heroism, endurance and patriotism.
    The war ended in defeat for France.
    But Algeria paid a high price for their victory. It is still paying.
    One tenth of the Algerian population—more than a million people—died in the war. The killed, the murdered, and the napalmed go by the name of
chuhada
—the martyred.
    The French worked enormous destruction upon Algeria. Eight thousand villages were levelled, and millions were left without a roof over their head. Thousands of acres of forest, which shielded the soil from erosion, were burned. The cattle that provided half the peasantry with its livelihood were killed off (only three million head of cattle out of seven million survived). The
fellah
bore the brunt of the war.
    The war caused huge migrations. Three million Algerians were driven from their villages and confined to reservations or resettled in the isolated regions. Fourhundred thousand Algerians found themselves in prison or interned. Three hundred thousand fled to Tunisia and Morocco. At the same time, throughout the whole war, people from the villages—where repression hit hardest—fled to the cities, where, today, thirty per cent of the Algerian population now lives. Most of them have no jobs, but they do not want to go back to the villages, or they cannot return because the villages no longer exist.
    Beyond the human and material losses, however, the traces of the war persist in the social consciousness. These are
living
traces, both positive and negative. Positive: because Algeria emerged from the war as a country of independent social and political ambitions, as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial country. Negative: because divisions arose in Algerian society paralysing it.
    This had never been a homogeneous society. It consisted—and still consists—of a mix of ethnic groups, religious