There’s a scene in Gilles Pontecorvo’s iconic The Battle of Algiers (1967) in which we see three young Algerian women – Zohra, Djamilla and Samia – shedding their long white veils to reveal elegant, summery outfits that wouldn’t be out of place on the French Riviera. They apply make-up and style their hair with meticulous precision. Samia tries to tie her hair back, but on second thought decides to cut off her long braids before beginning to bleach them. Once transformed, the women stand lined up in the corner of the room, silent and unblinking. A knock on the door follows and FLN leader Saâdi Yacef and his brother in arms Ali la Pointe enter the room. “Is this alright?” Zohra asks the leader. “Fine”, Saâdi responds approvingly. The women, now able to pass undetected in the European sector of Algiers, are then handed handbags with timed bombs inside. They must hurry; the bombs must go off in thirty minutes at three different locations in the French quarter of the city. Saâdi wishes them luck.
A key moment in the film is the explosion of one of the bombs in an ice-cream parlour, Le Milk Bar, on the elegant Rue d’Isly. It’s a faithful account of the terror attack set off by Zohra Drif on September 30, 1956, in the midst of Algeria’s war of independence. Zohra was only 21 years old at the time and apart from an excellent law student also a new member of the National Liberation Front (FLN). The North African region had been under control of France for more than a century and was subjugated to an unusual brutal form of settler colonialism. As the French colonizers (the pied-noirs) invaded and occupied territory to permanently erase existing societies, indigenous Berber and Arab populations were systematically disenfranchised through land appropriation, resource extraction and the Frenchification of social institutions. Zohra describes in her memoir Inside the Battle of Algiers that Algeria’s nineteenth century was “one of mass slaughter that made rivers of our ancestors’ blood flow, thousands of hectares of their land burned and seized, and countless cities, towns, and villages ransacked and set alight.” The settlers proliferated while the indigenous Algerians were being reduced to the status of subhuman foreigners in their own land.
Zohra also retraces her privileged upbringing in which education was valued (her forefathers had been distinguished jurists in the indigenous Islamic courts) and reveals her period of awakening. She describes how she transformed from an extremely shy, provincial woman into a committed nationalist and militant, willing to die for her noble goal. Reading the book helps one understand the mind, soul and motive of a young freedom fighter, and, frighteningly, why she set off the bomb on that fateful day in September 1956.
Zohra utters these words in an episode of the documentary series Terror (2019), her voice calm and confident, a degree of pride detectable. There are no regrets. “It was a war and we applied the rules of war,” she continues. “I used the resources, which unfortunately were very limited to achieve our political goal.”
How could she?
It’s easy and perhaps only natural to dismiss terrorist acts as evil. In their very essence they will always remain among the most heinous human acts. But reading Zohra’s memoir and getting a better understanding of the Algerian struggle does change one’s perspective on her actions. It fuels a sense of understanding.
The point is: morality doesn’t always preclude violence. Especially in the context of war, in which different moral codes apply, violence seems the only means available to avenge an invasion and ensure the future of a nation. This is a matter of self-defense, which in times of war cannot be achieved by non-violent means. As Zohra writes: “Even when our fighters killed European civilians, it was because they were involved in the cruel atrocities against our people or because they had murdered our own.” She then adds: “The only case where people have the right and duty to take up arms is when its country and territory are attacked by an external force. That was our case in November 1954 and throughout our struggle.”
Therein lies the fundamental difference between the actions the FLN took in the 1950s and early 1960s and the horrific violence used by radical jihadist groups like Daesh or Al-Qaeda today. The struggle of the FLN was aimed first at defeating French colonialism and second at alerting and mobilizing the international community and world public opinion to lend support to their effort, as the Algerians struggled to achieve the liberation from colonialism that the United Nations had promised them. The FLN insisted on bringing the rural war into urban cities, where the majority of residents were Europeans living under the protection of the French army, bathing in tranquility and displaying their lavish lifestyles.
Initially, Algeria’s nationalist leaders had confined themselves to strictly legalist and peaceful action. Zohra had walked the legal path as well. She attended law school in order to defend Algeria’s future fighters, never doubting that one day or another the explosion would take place. But she soon learnt that however noble the legal objectives might be, they remained astonishingly futile and completely out of proportion to the daily sacrifices of those who had taken up arms to free the country. In her youthful radicalism and irresistible desire to confront the colonizers, she felt obliged to join the armed struggle.
The morality of violence is the main theme of Virtuous Violence, a book by Alan Page Fiske (an anthropologist) and Tage Rai (a psychologist and post-doctoral scholar). The authors show that the most sustained and consequential forms of human violence, across history and cultures, result from beliefs that it is right and necessary to hurt and suffer harm to protect and save people, relationships, or entire nations. “People will do what is morally required if they feel their cause is righteous, whatever the consequences,” they write. “People often feel compelled to respond with violence when they feel that they have been violated.”
It’s interesting that Fiske and Rai speak in terms of feelings; whether or not the perpetrator feels that the cause is righteous. That the perpetrator feels righteous in his violent acts does not automatically imply that they are indeed acting out of morality rather than cruelty. Look at terrorist groups like ISIS. What feels righteous for them is not objectively righteous. They are steered by their own moral framework which may not be moral at all.
Algeria represents the most recent and bloodiest example of colonial history—an observable fact—and the scale of deaths and harm inflicted upon the Algerians seems to justify the motives of the FLN, however gruesome their methods were. When we apply the principle of proportionality, then what is the meaning of the three people who were gunned down during the milk bar bombing? How should we view those three deaths when we compare them to the millions of Algerians who were killed during more than a century of colonial oppression? How do we conceive of three deaths when we bear in mind that the bombing did pave the way for Algerian independence? These are nagging questions, a threat to our own values, but they do help us understand Zohra Drif and her act of killing.