(no subject)
Marie Burrell
History 1031 12:30
In the film “The Battle of Algiers” the Colonial government violently fights back against the FLN and Algerians. As the Algerians begin to retaliate against the French, they government steps in with even harsher punishment methods. When the Algerians went on strike, the government came in and corralled everyone out of their homes, took the men away, arrested some, and destroyed many of the shops in the Casbah quarter to find any link to FLN members.
In the beginning, when policemen begin to die at the hands of rouge Algerians, before they become members of the FLN, a cop and his friends go into the Muslim quarters and plant a bomb at an innocent, yet suspected murders home and this begins the true hostilities between the two factions. As soon as the Algerians fight back by planting bombs in the European quarter, the French decide to use force rather than reason to deal with the problem. The government used torture as a method to get information even though Colonel Mathieu in the film said that they only used “coercion.”
The use of coercion causes the Algerians to become more and more against the French government because even innocent men were being taken away. Those who were FLN members were coerced into giving out information, but only after twenty four hours so as to let the free FLN members change any of the information given to keep their plans hidden. The government’s use of interrogation methods does fail in the end when the Algerians perform mass demonstrations and the government cannot single out a single group from the collective voice.
A similarity today would be the Iraq war. The Army is protecting its members form the Iraqis like the French policemen against the Algerians. Also, the government is stepping in to try and influence how things are done in the country.