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Hosni Kitouni, son of Abdelmalek Kitouni, an officer of the National Liberation Army (ALN) who fell on the field of honor, returns to this interview with the young independent on the significant events of the Algerian Revolution.
He also evokes the motivations that pushed the chiefs of North Constantine to launch, less than a year after the start of the Liberation War, the offensives of August 20, 1955. This act, according to him, represents a decisive turning point towards a more radical struggle, far from any “soft” approach.
The independent young: 70 years after the offensive of August 20, 1955, what analysis can we make events and what lessons to learn about it concerning the guerrilla strategy carried out against the colonizer?
Hosni Kitouni: Interference from different orders diverted us from November 1 and its symbolism. We even came to minimize its historical importance and to highlight secondary, sometimes futile aspects, thus directing our attention to internal struggles and conflicts instead of taking an interest in central dynamics, knowledge, knowledge and practices that have emerged with the national liberation struggle and which have marked its history.
The popular insurgency of August 20, 1955 is a founding act. It is essential to return, to analyze it, to understand it and to reveal its role in the global process of the national revolution. Without this insurrection, the national liberation struggle would undoubtedly be anchored in its natural environment, namely the peasant masses, without forgetting of course its international impact.
Can the offensive of August 20, 1955 be considered as a demonstration of force of the FLN in terms of the ability to conduct a guerrilla warfare?
It should be briefly recalling the situation of November insurgents in the summer of 1955. Barely nine months have passed since the insurrection, in politically unfavorable circumstances due to internal friction to the national movement. The bone (special organization), which was to prepare the insurrection by bringing together weapons and forming activists, was laminated by repression. The initiative of the 22 then appears as an extraordinary audacity. Nothing, absolutely nothing, suggested its success given the many unfavorable elements, both inside and outside the national movement. To these aspects, another element should be added: the insurrection has not experienced the same intensity everywhere. From the first attacks committed on November 1, the activists were isolated, both with each other and in the popular masses. The French concentrated their repression on the Aurès, and Bachir Chihani, temporary worker of Mustapha Ben Boulaid who had just been arrested, asked Zighoud to carry out actions to lighten the weight of the enemy. It was therefore all these reasons that motivated the strategy of the chiefs of North Constantine. It was not a demonstration of force, but a strategy of revolutionary rupture.
How did the offensive of August 20 marked a strategic turning point in the mobilization of the Algerian people and the isolation of supporters of a compromise with France?
In his Memoirs, Lakhdar Bentobbal recalls some elements having determined the offensive of August 20, both internationally and national. In the minds of its initiators, it was a question of moving from a guerrilla warfare to a real national insurrection capable of mobilizing the whole of the Algerian people and of isolate the hesitant as well as the enemies.
Regarding France, it was necessary to demonstrate that they were not skirmishes led by isolated elements, but a real national insurrection carried by the people. We often tend, speaking of the events of August 20, to ignore their strategic and political aspect, thus reducing them to a simple armed operation. Bentobbal clearly highlights it in his question, whatever the losses and the price to pay? It was necessary to achieve a radicalization of the war to cut short all those who wanted to get along with France. This strategic objective has indeed been achieved.
Zighoud Youcef, member of the group of 22 historic, led the offensive, but who were the real architects of this action?
I believe that history has not fully done justice to Zighoud Youcef. Admittedly, he was heroised and status, like so many other leaders of the Revolution, but the question is whether we have really measured his thought, his militant action and his role in the transformation of the Algerian revolutionary movement. I don’t think so; We continue to present it as a military leader devoid of any strategic vision. We came to minimize not only the importance of the insurrection of North Constantine, but also that of November 1, by moving the historic cursor to the Soumam Congress. It is an ideological reversal of history, not based on the facts and partial. One cannot save a historical movement at its convenience without risking false interpretations.
The Soummam Congress, without August 20, 1955, would have been impossible, or at least would never have had the same impact. Zighoud believed in the Revolution and in its inevitable independence. His obsession was to see the struggle of the people monopolized by people who have nothing in common with him. Unfortunately, this is what will happen a few years later.
When studying this period, it is essential to constantly return to the origin of the processes, rather than starting from their culmination. In this perspective, the action of August 20 has shown that the armed struggle was carried by the people, and by the people alone.
The disproportionate colonial repression after the events would have killed 10,000 and disappeared. Is this figure disproportionate?
We tend, in our approach to history, to focus the debate on the question of colonial violence, by retaining only the number of its victims, as if the ignominy of a repression was exclusively linked to the magnitude of its human destruction. This vision makes us forget the other aspects of colonial violence, which, although less visible or immediately perceptible, are just as destructive and vile. As soon as you give a figure, the enemy asks you to document it and opposes another figure, just as questionable.
It should be remembered that colonial repression, since 1830, has always practiced massacres en masse to destroy insurrectional movements and, above all, to terrorize populations and prevent other uprisings. To return to your figure, its symbolism undoubtedly imports much more than its statistical reality, because what the Algerians will retain from the repression of August 1955 is the vile determination of the colonial population to give in nothing of its privileges and its hegemony. A blood river was now going to divide both camps, and nothing will come to reconcile them.
Can we draw a parallel between the events of August 20, 1955 and the Palestinian Hamas offensive on October 7, 2023?
Many analysts have attempted this comparison. The price that the Palestinian people, the Gazaouis and, today, the Lebanese, have paid could alleviate our appreciation of the events of October 7. It is such a high price that it sometimes makes us doubt the opportunity of this date. We do not really know how events will evolve, but two things are safe: October 7 pushed the Zionist entity to get out of his martyrological speech, presenting Israel as a model of democracy in an ocean of authoritarian regimes.
This myth fell, and Israel proved to be under his true face: a bloodthirsty monster established in the heart of the East. Second, the Holocaust, as a symbol of the genocide of the Jewish people, is surpassed as horror by what the Zionist state subjected to the Palestinian people. Israel can no longer claim the exclusivity of human compassion, thanks to which it has a kind of ethical immunity.
Finally, the Palestinian question came out of the ghetto and the invisibility in which unipolar imperialism has locked it since the 1990s. More than ever, the right of the Palestinian people to their state has never been so topical. In addition, Israel can only survive as a racist and warrior state. Its population will not be able to bear this for a long time; The fruit will rot from the inside, as it has rotten from the outside.