Les camps de regroupement en Algérie: Une histoire des déplacements forcés (1954–1962)

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Notes

1 Citing Iain R. Smith and Andreas Stucki, “The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps (1868–1902),” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 3 (2011), 417–437. This reviewer could not find Sacriste’s reference to an American Reconcentration Act in the article, but its discussion of the Philippines is worth further quotations, especially for an American audience: ‘Anti-guerrilla strategies included not only the confiscation of property, summary executions, massacres, deportations and crop destruction but also civilian concentration in designated areas’, where they were called ‘concentration zones’, building on the ‘experience of establishing “reservations” for native Indians’. The authors also noted that ‘in the “pacified” towns and villages, American civil administrators tried to implement allegedly social ‘uplifting’ programmes and economic development: new roads, schools, medical infrastructure, sanitation, and ‘protection’ from the guerrilla forces’ – just like the French SAS in Algeria. There was another disturbing parallel: ‘In the “concentration zones” in the Philippines, tens of thousands of people died in the space of a few months from malnutrition and disease’ (424).

2 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Bases of Accommodation’, Foreign Affairs 46, no. 4 (July 1968), 642–656. The bottom of page 653 deserves a full quotation: ‘In an absent-minded way the United States in Viet Nam may well have stumbled upon the answer to ‘wars of national liberation’. The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines and gimmicks of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanisation and modernisation which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power’. On a personal note, I should add that, despite our political disagreements, Samuel Huntington was a pleasure to work with, as we organised a conference in 1968, later published as Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems, eds. Samuel P. Huntington & Clement Henry Moore (New York: Basic Books, 1970).

3 Djaffar Lesbet’s troisième cycle doctoral thesis, published as Les 1 000 villages socialistes en Algérie (Paris: Syros, 1983). See also Alberto Arecchi and Cyrile Megdiche, “Les villages socialistes en Algérie,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 19 (1979), 3–14, and François Burgat and Michel Nancy, Les Villages socialistes de la révolution agraire, 1972-1982 (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1984).