Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
The birth of a nation on the move.
Seventy-nine years later, the issue of the Soummam Congress remains whole. While the armed revolution, launched on November 1, 1954, painfully completed its second year, the leaders of the National Liberation Front knew that resistance to colonialism had to organize with rigor so that it could last over time. The strategic objective was to unify above all the ranks.
For the FLN strategists, the watchword was simple: a single revolution, one voice! For the Tandem Abane Ramdane-Larbi Ben M’hidi, it was first necessary to convince and rally all the national political forces around the idea of independence, then organize and structure the struggle on the military, political, logistical and diplomatic levels and finally impose a single interlocutor against the enemy.
It is undoubtedly this colossal program that allowed this congress to succeed and to become the cornerstone of this fighting Algeria. It is still this congress that married the path to the restoration of national sovereignty, to use the terms of the historian Mohamed El Korso.
The architects of the platform had analyzed the declaration of November 1, its scope and its limits. They took a critical and objective look at this emerging revolution, measured the means and potential of the struggle.
They especially highlighted their rejection against personal ambitions, individualisms, sectarian and clan minds and divisions, both outside and inside, which were formed around the triggers of the Revolution.
It is thanks to this congress that the other Algerian political forces have joined the revolution. UDMISTS, CENTRALISTS, Communists, Muslim reformists, autonomous intellectuals, and even Messalist executives and militants, all have found a patriotic rallying point and a unifying spirit in this platform.
For soummam delegates, there are two major points to build and defend: first, organize the revolution, structure the fighting base and give it the means of the struggle. It is here that the FLN created the six wilayas, plus the autonomous zone of Algiers, commandments and advice, appointed chiefs and commissioners, and launched new forms of organization of resistance in the countryside, but also in urban agglomerations.
Second, impose the famous primacy of politics on the military and that of the interior on the outside. This is a strategic postulate that Abane had thought, after having known and undergoing the throes of the division, the maneuvers of diversion and the attitudes of leaderships of certain officials.
And this is undoubtedly what later provoked his assassination with his own companions, panicked at the idea of losing privileges or powers.
For the historian Mohamed El Korso, the victory of the Congress was “de facto” that of Abane, whose “leitmotif was unity in the fight, which passed through the widening and opening of the militant and fighter base of the FLN to all the national anti -colonalist forces.
Even the Christian and Jewish communities were asked to help their liberating struggle. In this sense, we must remember the remarks made by Abane to Ferhat Abbas when he had said to him: “The FLN does not belong to anyone, but to the people who fight. The team that sparked the revolution has not acquired any property rights on it.
If the Revolution is not everyone’s work, it will inevitably abort ”. Today, it seems clear that these ideas of sovereignty and primacy again hover over national political life. They still resonate, as in the time of the Hirak, last year, as a perpetual discourse of popular and civic demand.