On 13 September 2015, the man widely believed to be the real centre of power in Algeria left office. General Mohamed ‘Tewfik’ Mediène, sometimes nicknamed rabb dzair, ‘the Lord of Algeria’, the 76-year-old head of the DRS, had retired, ‘relieved of his functions’ in the terse formulation of a presidential communiqué. Never seen in public, rarely glimpsed in unverified photographs, the face of the faceless pouvoir was suddenly all over newspaper front pages. Whether he left the office he had occupied unchallenged for twenty-five years of his own choosing or under pressure from the coterie around Bouteflika was unclear – and relatively unimportant.

The move could have been significant. ‘Tewfik’, the architect of the DRS, the iron core of the ‘deep’ state that had waged its merciless war on and of terror through the 1990s, had become indispensable, untouchable, all but un-nameable, known to every Algerian and answerable to no one. Observers of Algeria and human rights activists both in the country and abroad had long recognised that any meaningful move towards more democratic, accountable and law-bound government must necessarily pass through the removal of the DRS from the centre of the state and its subordination to legal oversight. Doubtless for their own, factional, reasons as well as or rather than on principle, Algerian political party leaders too regularly demanded the dismantling, or at least the thorough ‘restructuring’, of the political police.¹ In 2015, and for several years before, the rumour mill of the Algerian media was regularly fed with accounts of the ongoing tussle between the Presidency and the DRS, and in the course of the summer the agency did indeed see its prerogatives reduced, transferred to elements of the army, in what some saw as a significant clipping of the secret services’ sharp-clawed wings. In the context of a long-deferred ‘transition’ away from Algeria’s authoritarianism, the retirement of Tewfik might indeed have signalled a real departure, ‘the end of an epoch’, ‘an earthquake in the nation’s political life’.²

But there was no such transition. The appointment of Tewfik’s successor was a strong signal of continuity. Major General (retd.) Athmane ‘Bachir’ Tartag, a career soldier who had been recruited into the Boumediene-era sécurité militaire and trained by the Russians in the 1970s, had been ‘number two’ in the DRS and most recently, since his earlier retirement from the military, in a holding position as a counsellor to the Presidency. During the 1990s, he commanded the notorious Principal Military Investigation Centre (CPMI) at Ben Aknoun in the south-western suburbs of Algiers. A detention centre nominally charged with combating Islamist influence in the army, by most accounts this was one of the DRS’s main centres of torture and extrajudicial killing, where civilian suspects as well as soldiers were held, interrogated and murdered.³ What distinguished Tartag from Tewfik was simply the fact that he was a decade or so younger, a child during the struggle for independence and a student in the early 1970s when he responded to Boumediene’s appeal for graduates to enlist in the army. Like Tewfik, Tartag rose through the ranks in the mid-1980s and found himself in a critical position of power in 1990.⁴ Like Tewfik, he would be a relentless ‘eradicator’ and a leading practitioner of the policy of ‘the management of society by violence’. Hardly signalling a generational transition, even less did this suggest an institutional change or even a modification of policy. But the change from Tewfik to Tartag was another small instance of the slow, inexorable passing away of the generation born in the late 1930s, the generation of the revolution, of the youthful, forward-looking men of fifty years ago, of whom Bouteflika himself now remained the last, visibly fading, representative, clinging to power as to life, by his fingertips.

The disarmingly insignificant removal of Tewfik, and his replacement by a man whom Bouteflika, on first assuming the Presidency in 1999, had himself pushed into retirement as having played an especially brutal role in the ‘dirty war’, who had more recently shown himself less than adroit in handling the hostage crisis at the In Amenas gas facility in the Sahara in January 2013, and who had been returned to office by the factional manoeuvres of the president’s brother, was also, however, a sign of other changes.⁵ It illustrated the continuity of the ‘fierce’ dimension of the state, the degree to which Boumediene’s desire in 1965 to create ‘institutions capable of outliving personalities’ had been realised, at least in respect of the secret services and the informal powers around the Presidency that since Boumediene’s time had been at the core of the state. But it also illustrated their state of disintegration, their ageing, along with the men who ran them, and their reduction, at the very centre of power, from instruments intended to serve the construction of a strong state that would make its people strong to bickering fiefdoms, instruments of cliques and coteries serving to divide the spoils of the state among themselves.⁶ Le pouvoir had collapsed into a black hole, sucking resources, opportunities and the very future of the country into itself. American diplomats in 2007 characterised the regime as ‘fragile in ways it has not been before, plagued by a lack of vision, unprecedented levels of corruption and rumblings of division in the military … a government drifting and groping for a way forward’. In 2009 they wrote of the system as ‘a series of largely incompetent institutions … spinning their wheels independently, with nothing to connect the dots’.⁷ By 2015, even the terrible, omnipotent DRS had seemingly become a frayed, thinning institution.⁸

At the centre of le pouvoir as throughout the political system, with its ramifying party-clientelism, its proliferation of independent local candidates and their local means of patronage, and throughout the day-to-day economy by which many, perhaps most, Algerians earned their livelihood, it was the ‘informal sector’ rather than ostensible institutions that now held sway. And while, again ever since the wartime FLN, the ‘informal’, personal and factional, interior realities of the state had always had primacy over its formal, impersonal and constitutional external appearance, that informality now worked less through the institutionalised forms of the ‘shadow cabinet’, the departments of the Presidency and the DRS than in personal cliques divorced from any real arm of the state, no more law-bound than the old primacy of informal politics had been, but without their stability and capacity for self-perpetuation. And this, at a time of regional turmoil, with civil war on the country’s borders, an ailing president, an interminable, insoluble succession crisis and suddenly falling oil and gas prices.

On 23 December, slightly more than three months after the official departure of ‘Tewfik’, Hocine Aït Ahmed, since Ben Bella’s death in 2012 the last survivor of the FLN’s nine historic leaders, passed away, still in exile in Lausanne. He was buried on 1 January 2016, not alongside his former comrades, grouped around the austere tomb of the amir Abd al-Qadir in the martyrs’ square at al-Alia cemetery east of Algiers, but high in the Djurdjura, in the village of Aït Ahmed where he was born, near the mausoleum of the Kabyle sage and poet Si Mohand Ou Lhocine. A vast crowd, tens of thousands strong, chanted the shahada (la ilaha illa’llah, Muhammad rasul allah, the Muslim profession of faith) alongside Assa, azzeka, Dda Lhocine yella! (‘Today, tomorrow, Father Hocine still lives’), Corrigez l’histoire, l’Algérie n’est pas arabe! (‘Get your history straight, Algeria is not Arab’) and, most insistently, Pouvoir assassin!⁹ Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal’s car was spat at, rocks were thrown and the official delegation was obliged to make an undignified withdrawal. The war that tore Algeria apart in the last ten years of the twentieth century had been over for more than a decade. Algeria was as far from the resolution of its conflicts as it had ever been.

Figure A.1 Mohamed Issiakhem’s ‘sarcophagus’ over the 1928 war memorial in central Algiers (the former Government General building in the background).

(Author’s photograph)

For some time, the concrete shell covering the colonial-era war memorial outside the old Government General building in Algiers had been falling apart. Artist Amina Menia captured the fissures through which the art déco spahis and their medievalised horses had begun to peek in a series of photographs, Enclosed #0, made in 2013. The 1928 monument aux morts, before which Algiers’ Europeans had humiliated Guy Mollet in 1956, had been encased after independence by the painter and sculptor Mohamed Issiakhem in a ‘sarcophagus’, which was now opening up, revealing, as Menia wrote, ‘another relation to time and history’.¹⁰ The monument, and Issiakhem’s enclosure of it, could be taken to stand for something broader. As the spahis bearing aloft the unknown soldier sat still within the minimalist concrete case, out of which Issiakhem moulded two hands breaking their chains, so Algeria’s colonial past sat within the crumbling shell of the revolutionary nation-state. Concealed and disavowed, it could not be simply swept away, removed and dispensed with, because it was itself constitutive of the revolution, and of the society and the nation it had sought to liberate. Colonialism and its state were the substructure of independence and the nation-state, as surely as the qasr al-hukuma inhabits the former offices of the gouvernement général, on whose balcony de Gaulle appeared in 1958, to look down over the monument aux morts and the seething crowd in the ‘forum’ below.

Such evidence is still there, physically present everywhere in Algeria’s urban fabric. In the little coastal town of Cherchell, the memorial garden to the martyrs of independence occupies what was once the garden, in which stood a bust of de Gaulle’s predecessor General Cavaignac, of the adjoining porticoed church, whose stubby bell tower was built up after independence into an elegant, foursquare minaret. In the Place d’Armes outside the town hall in Oran, the amir Abd al-Qadir’s sculpted face, with the inscription wa ma al-nasru illa min ‘indi allahi inna ’llaha azizun hakimun (‘And there is no victory but from God, truly God is mighty, wise’¹¹), sits chiselled into each face of the obelisk that was erected in 1898 in memory of the ‘heroes of Sidi Brahim’, the celebrated stand of an outnumbered force of chasseurs against Abd al-Qadir’s forces in 1845, atop which the bronze winged victory still stands.¹² Like Issiakhem’s sarcophagus over the war memorial in Algiers, and like Menia’s later photographs, the victory column in Oran provides a striking instance of an Algerian artist engaging with the past, in recognition, in a kind of dialogue, knowingly, self-knowingly, less triumphant than discreetly, gently admonishing.

This does not mean that Algeria has never been decolonised, that it is somehow still inhabited by a secret trauma. It means, more simply, that Algeria’s relationship to its history is not as pathological as has often been supposed. Anyone believing that Algerians have long been animated by powerful ‘hatred’ of France and everything that France in Algeria entailed, a ‘hatred’ subsequently turned in on themselves and still today unexpiated, might wonder why, in Oran, where the summer of 1962 was especially bloody and murderous, pedestrians have walked every day for fifty years past a statue to the 1848 constitution that made Algeria part of France, without feeling the need to remove it, or even being concerned about what it is; or why the women of Oran still climb up to the church the settlers built at the very end of the colonial period, in 1959, at Santa Cruz, to light candles to lalla Maryam, the Virgin whose statue still looks benignly over their city from the mountaintop.¹³ It is not because of a misplaced colonial nostalgia. It is because these things do not matter as signs of colonialism and conflict, the war and fury that outsiders so often see as solely constitutive of Algerian history. They are simply parts of the landscape that Algerians inhabit, have always inhabited, and have re-appropriated for themselves, less, in the end, through the sound and fury of war and revolution than through the quiet endurance of a resilient society, one whose ancestral inheritance ‘today, tomorrow, still lives’, and with which, above all, its people want to live at peace.

Figure A.2 Oran, 2007: The Place d’Armes and Sidi Brahim monument, with Abd al-Qadir’s portrait added to the base.

(Author’s photograph)