Evian Accords: An Egyptian Perspective

In the 1950s, when I was in primary school in Bagour, Monofiya Governorate in Egypt, there were two issues that we especially cared about: the Palestinian cause and the Algerian resistance. Students had to demonstrate with slogans to denounce "Zionist" rape of Palestine and the French occupation of Algeria.   

The French military authorities arrested Ahmed Ben Bella, a prominent Algerian nationalist, in 1950 and imprisoned him for two years. In 1956, Ben Bella was again imprisoned after an air piracy operation carried out by French military aviation against the plane that was transporting him from Morocco to Tunisia, accompanied by other leaders of the "National Liberation Front", including Hussein Ait Ahmed, Mohamed Boudiaf and Mustafa Lacharef. During those events, we organized many demonstrations among our younger generation to demand the release of Ben Bella, as well as we raised the slogan of freedom and independence for Algeria. 

Egypt was in this period under the rule of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the main distinguishing feature of this period was resistance to colonialism and imperialism. When Ben Bella was imprisoned for the second time in 1956, it was the same year that Egypt was subjected to the Triple Aggression by Israel, France and Britain. This prompted us to go out and express our demands for independence for all the countries that were subjected to colonialism. Egyptian-Algerian relations witnessed a long history of joint Arab national solidarity. Egypt was supportive of Algeria, and so was Algeria of Egypt. This was clearly evident in every crisis that either of the two countries faced, beginning with Egypt’s support for the Algerian revolution, and even the Algerian position supporting Egypt during the October 1973 War.

Egypt played an important role in helping Algeria to achieve its independence from France by providing arms and the use of the media to tell the suffering of the Algerian people in international forums, as it supported the participation of the National Liberation Front delegation in the activities of the Bandung Conference in 1955. The role of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser was very important in deepening relations with Algeria through his support with weapons and equipment at the time of the revolution and hosting the Algerian fighters in Cairo.

When the defeat occurred in Egypt in 1967 and after the Egyptian airports were struck, the Algerian President Houari Boumediene told President Gamal Abdel Nasser that all the Algerian airports and planes were under the command and at the disposal of the Egyptian leadership, and it sent to the Egyptian front a tank corps, a mechanized infantry corps, a field artillery regiment and an anti-aircraft artillery regiment, seven support battalions, a MiG-21 squadron, MiG-17 squadron, and a Sukhoi aircraft squadron. When the 1973 war came Algeria was the first of the Arab countries that announced a ban on oil exports to countries that supported Israel.

The road to Algerian independence finally came to the stage of negotiations in 1960-61. The resulting Evian Accords were signed between the government of France and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, which was formed during the National Democratic Revolution in Algeria. Between the end of January and mid-February 1962, French and Algerian negotiators toiled cheek-by-jowl, spending long nights working through the issues of Algeria’s territorial sovereignty, the future of the European pieds-noirs, the presence of French military bases, and the main sticking point of the negotiations until that point, the status of the Sahara. Significant progress was made, including France’s willingness to forego claims to the Sahara in exchange for continued French access to petroleum rights.

On Sunday 8 April 1962, France voted in a referendum on the Evian Accords, agreed three weeks previously by representatives of Charles de Gaulle’s government and representatives of Algeria’s government in waiting. The referendum enthusiastically ratified the treaty, a foregone conclusion. Three months later Algeria would become independent. The gruesome war of liberation – fomented by the suppression of nationalist manifestations in May 1945 and unabated since 1954 -- was at last over.

The agreements provided for a cease-fire on the territory of Algeria, a referendum in Algeria on the question of self-determination, and, should independence be chosen, the full sovereignty of the future Algerian state in its domestic and foreign affairs. The accords also stipulated that the property of Frenchmen living in Algeria could not be confiscated without just compensation. In exchange, France undertook to provide economic, financial, technical, and cultural aid to Algeria on the basis of bilateral agreements, which were signed later as an extension of the Evian Accords. French companies retained the right to extract and export petroleum. A special declaration on military matters contained France’s pledge to complete the withdrawal of its troops from Algeria in three years. (They were in fact withdrawn by July 1964.) By July 1,1967, France had closed its military bases in Algeria, except for the base at Mers el-Kebir, which was closed in February 1968. In the latter half of the 1970’s France and Algeria recognized that the Evian Accords no longer reflected the actual state of their relations.

Meanwhile, the war took its toll on both sides: French counterinsurgency tactics including torture, large-scale internment, and deadly reprisals against civilians devastated Algeria’s Muslim population. The Algerian war of independence that has since become immortalized in popular imagination by such cinematic representations as Gillo Pontecorvo’s the Battle of Algiers (1966), and in the Arab world Youssef Chahine’s “Jamila” movie is an Egyptian historical film produced in 1958. It tells about one of the important women freedom fighters in the history of Algeria, Djamila Bouhired.

The Evian Accords are widely seen as a sincere, if flawed, attempt to bring peace to a conflict destined to end badly. But the Evian Accords did bring an end to a nearly eight-year war of attrition and allowed for cooperation to continue between the two nations. The history of the Evian Accords underscores the importance of compromise and pragmatism, even in the face of impossible odds and intractable interests. 

My generation was to follow the Algerian story with both pride and disappointment. The struggle was hard, but the end result was a country that was to go into “the black decade” of the 1990s, followed by a lack of orientation and direction. The 2019 Algerian “Arab spring” probably brought some hope for change and progress, even as Algeria is struggling with itself at this time.