Impact of the Decolonization War

The image of the casbah changed fundamentally in 1954, when the region became the site of urban guerrilla warfare. For the Algerians, it became the locus of "the legend and the slum," that is, the legend of the Revolution and the slum of daily life. The National Liberation Front's Committee of Coordination and Execution had reorganized the administration of the casbah by dividing it into zones and establishing a system of planques (hideouts) and caches of resistance.^[88] The complex configuration of the casbah, with interlocking terraces and passageways and tortuous dead-end streets, made penetration by French authorities difficult and facilitated defense.

As the site of war, certain locations in the casbah became associated with unforgettable moments for Algerians. The houses where resistance fighters were caught, tortured, and sometimes murdered became engraved into public memory. For example, the Rue Sidi bin Ali was the hiding place and explosives laboratory of Yacef Sadi, who escaped miraculously during the invasion on 6 February 1956; the same night, on Rue de la Grenade, Djamila Bouhired's father and brother were tortured in her presence for hours; two months later, Djamila herself was shot and arrested in the same location. On Rue Caton, Yacef Sadi and Zohra Drif were caught on 24 September 1958; on 3 October 1958 a group of houses was blown up by parachutists, resulting in the death of Ali la Pointe and Hassiba ben Bouali, in addition to thirty others.^[89]

Figure 22.
Barricades in the casbah.

From 1956 on, it was common practice for the French security forces to invade the casbah and cut it off from communication with the rest of Algiers (Fig. 22). Even a random selection of news items conveys the change in the daily life of the casbah, now frequently interrupted by unexpected police raids. On 28 March 1956, in an attempt to "decontaminate" the casbah of troublemakers and "to protect the lives and properties of many families . . . whose only desire is to work and live in peace," the police forces blocked unexpectedly the Rue Marengo and Rue Randon, together with adjoining smaller streets, to question more than two thousand people; five hundred were taken to the police headquarters for identity checks. The same evening, a similar operation was carried out in the upper casbah, and still more people were put into custody. Another "giant control operation" imprisoned sixty-five hundred residents in the casbah on 26 May 1956 for twenty-four hours, during which more than four thousand people were interrogated and all contact with the exterior was halted. The casbah was surrounded at midnight, and machine guns and grenade launchers were placed at key locations, such as Boulevard de la Victoire and Rue de la Lyre. Colonial

newspaper accounts commented tongue in cheek on the lack of picturesqueness in the casbah during those twenty-four hours, when the residents were locked inside their houses and allowed to open their doors only to the police. On 8 January 1957, armed forces two thousand strong undertook a search operation in the upper casbah. A secondary objective of this massive action, which had started at 3:00 A.M., was to recruit unemployed people as construction workers. On 23 September 1956, twenty-four smaller streets around Rue Bab el-Oued, Rue Bab Azzoun, and Rue de la Lyre were barred from circulation "for an indeterminate amount of time."^[90]

The French considered the defeat of Ali la Pointe the end of the Battle of Algiers, with the paramilitary forces as the victors. From that point military order reigned in the casbah and marked the region with its own symbols of war and occupation. Military and police officers had increased in great numbers, all strategic crossroads were wired, entries and exits from the casbah were controlled, and public spaces were decorated with propaganda posters (which were in turn covered with graffiti expressing themes of resistance and independence).^[91] In December 1960, a tract signed by several resistance organizations and published in El Moudjahid , the official journal of the National Liberation Front (FLN), called the casbah the "new ghetto of Warsaw," in reference to the two hundred thousand people besieged here.^[92] Yet though the casbah was locked off from the rest of Algiers and under military occupation, it still functioned as a theater for resistance, with parades echoing others elsewhere in the city until the end of French rule.^[93]