What can feminists do?
Activists from the war of liberation organising in the months following independence in 1962 to oppose an
International Viewpoint #265 April 1995 and Adel, a member of the Socialist Workers' Party (PST) in Constantine, Algeria.
Fatiha: The problem for women did not start when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) began to be powerful. It wasn't the FIS that approved the Family Code of 1984, which makes all women into legal minors [subject to their husbands, fathers, or eldest brother]. The violent attacks might be new, but things have always been terrible for women.
Adel: But we ought to distinguish different moments of the last few years. We might be very critical of the Boumediene regime, but during that period there was a massive increase in scolarisation, which extended the mixing Financial contributions to the women's movement in Algeria can be sent to International
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France of boys and girls in society. This mixity in education was a mechanism which subverted society as we knew it on a daily basis. True, there was no philosophy, no theory of the role of co-education, nor indeed was the extension of co-education the result of a conscious struggle by women. It was above all the desire of the regime to industrialise the country which led them to modernise and extend the education system. But still, these developments enabled women to start saying "I have a qualification, I want to work now," or "I don't want to get married straight away."
We also began to see a daily mixing of men and women in the street. It didn't become the norm, but it was a real change. Unfortunately, this opening up of education and the world of work for women was not accompanied by a change in mentalities. And the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was able to develop its thesis that "this kind of modernisation is not for us. It is not based on Islamic values. Women should return to the domestic sphere."
Sanhaja: After independence, the Ben Bella government, and then the Boumedine governments, tried strenghen themselves on two fronts. On the one hand, they tried to link up with the "Communist" countries, which meant realising some reforms of the position of women (particularly given the important role of women in the war of liberation from France). But at the same time, the regime wanted to accomodate the Moslem currents, which had real support in society. During the colonial period, the struggle against the French Christian colonists and his value system was for many Algerians linked to certain other values, which we associated with Islam. You could see this for example in the activities of the General Union of Moslem Students.
This contradiction was reflected in the post-independence constitution. The first article proclaims Islam as the state religion, and a later article proclaims the equality of the sexes. And in the new, independent Algeria, women were still married by force, particularly in the villages. And many, many girls stopped their studies before the end.
At the same time, reality is more than the state of the legislation. The family code might make me a legal minor throughout my life, but it did not stop me from being an active trade unionist, a feminist, and a revolutionary communist. I suffered state harassment, I was interrogated, but I had the right to exist, and to exercise my identity as a citizen. I would stress the difference between this kind of situation, and life with the
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Algeria: The Algerian women's movement is as old as the country itself. against French imperialism began islamic-inspired Family Code that threatened to make adult women Algeria the legal charges of their fathers. In 1989-91, women's organisations were virtually alone in taking the fundamentalist threat seriously. Cahiers du feminisme recently published this round table with Fatiha, Sanhadja and Leila, three Algerian militants living in Paris,
International Viewpoint #265 April 1995
Algeria fundamentalists nowadays. Those men would be ready to burn me alive. They attack women whose only crime is to live alone, or to be teachers, or to have chosen not to wear the hijab (veil)...
We mustn't pretend that both regimes are just as bad. A fundamentalist regime under the FIS would be the worst thing immaginable for Algerian women.
Adel: The culture of the National Liberation Front (FLN) contained elements of Islamic political thought and of Marxism. And in a mass movement struggling against the monster of French imperialism, it was always the logic of national unity which dominated. The internal differences were not taken into account.