Abdelhamid Benzine

Photo of Abdelhamid Benzine taken at Lambèse in 1960

Abdelhamid Benzine was born in 1926 in Béni Ourtilane. His grandfather had been a cadi, a Muslim judge employed by the colonial administration, and his father was a khodja, a secretary to the cadi. As a result, his family had accumulated enough wealth to purchase a farm in Petite Kabylia. On his mother’s side, his family was made up of Muslim scholars and religious leaders. As a child, Benzine attended a French primary school for indigenous Algerians, where his education was limited to a formation in agriculture, as well as the madrasa, where he received a religious education. In 1938, he won a scholarship competition to continue his studies, enabling him to attend secondary school in Sétif from 1939 to 1945 at the Albertini colonial college (Benamrouche and Gallissot).

In 1940, at the age of fourteen, he began participating in the clandestine Parti du peuple algérien (PPA), creating cells within his school and distributing the PPA newspaper L’Action algérienne along with leaflets. He continued this activity throughout the war, under the Vichy regime and after the allied landings in 1942 (Benzine, De notre histoire 81). Like many members of the PPA, he was convinced that France’s fight against fascism, in which indigenous Algerians had participated, should logically culminate in an end to colonial oppression—that it was ethically incoherent to oppose one tyranny and not the other. Because of this conviction, he participated in the nationalist demonstrations organized in Sétif on May 8, 1945[1]. He was arrested later in the month by two agents of the French intelligence police, interrogated, and imprisoned until 1946, when the charges against him were dismissed. This event put an end to his secondary education (Benamrouche and Gallissot).

Following his release, Benzine dedicated himself to militant activities for the PPA, which had been reconstituted as the Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (MTLD, sometimes referred to as the PPA-MTLD). He compiled lists of victims from the May 1945 massacres, distributed relief money from the organization, and evaded police pursuit by going into hiding. Seeking refuge at the Muslim University of Zitouna in Tunis from 1947 to 1948, he pursued theological studies. In 1948, Benzine was part of a group aspiring to join the Arab front in Palestine, but their plans were thwarted at the Libyan border, and they were sent back to Tunisia. From 1948 to 1950, he was charged with setting up the Organisation spéciale (OS) within the MTLD, which would eventually evolve into the armed wing of the nationalist movement, contributing to the formation of the FLN (Benamrouche and Gallissot). When the party was taken over from Dr. Mohamed Lamine Debaghine by Abdelhmaid Mehri in 1950, Benzine requested leave, citing family reasons, although his true motivation was the party’s exclusion of Debaghine, whose argument for Algeria’s right to self-determination was deemed too radical.

Benzine immigrated to France in 1950 with false identity papers and stayed there until 1952. While there, he briefly rejoined the MTLD, whose leaders in France had ties to the Parti communiste internationaliste (PCI), a Trotskyist political party. As a delegate of the MTLD to the Commission des travailleurs nord-africains in the Parisian CGT region, he interacted with diverse groups within the French CGT, including North African nationalists, communist union leaders, and trade unionists. His responsibilities involved following union issues and activities in the Paris region, leading him to become a political figure within the French labor movement, a role to which he was promoted due to his background in Algeria as a propagandist and organizer of the nationalist party. In 1951, Benzine represented North African workers at the 28th congress of the CGT, an event that would prove politically transformative. Sent as a delegate to union meetings of the communist World Trade Union Federation, he returned “ébloui” by the socialism of the East, which won him over to the Stalinist model of building socialism in the name of the proletariat (Alleg 9).

Between 1952 and 1953, the MTLD faced internal conflicts over its leadership and the conception of the Algerian nation, leading Benzine to shift his alliances permanently to the Communist Party while maintaining ties to the CGT. In 1952, he joined the Parti communiste algérien (PCA). When he was wounded during the Communist protests in Paris that same year, he struggled with immigration due to his past involvement with the MTLD. André Ruiz, the head of the CGT Federation of dockers in Algiers and one of the most influential communist leaders in Algeria, recommended him to Alger républicain, enabling him to return to Algeria. He worked there until the paper’s prohibition in 1955, at which point he went underground. He collaborated with other Algiers communists to insert the PCA into the armed struggle, contributing to the establishment of the Ouarsenis Maquis. He later joined the ALN in the summer of 1956. Taken prisoner during a skirmish in November of that same year, he endured torture and captivity in a succession of prisons before eventually arriving at the special military camp of Boghari.

[1] Algerian nationalists organized these protests against colonial oppression, which extended to the nearby towns of Guelma and Kherrata, to coincide with a parade celebrating the allied victory, seeking to take advantage of the special attention given to this day to broadcast their demands. They intended the protests to be peaceful. However, when a French police officer shot and killed a young demonstrator holding an Algerian flag, some of the protestors became violent, resulting in the deaths of around 100 Europeans. The French military retaliated with a massive show of force, massacring thousands of Algerians.

References

Alleg, Henri. "Preface." Le camp. Éditions sociales, 1962.

Benamrouche, Amar, and René Gallissot. “BENZINE Abdelhamid.” Le Maitron, Maitron/Editions de l’Atelier, 20 Oct. 2008. Le Maitron, https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article16290.

Benzine, Abdelhamid. “Algérie, un livre oublié: Le Camp.” Chimères. Revues des schizoanalyses, no. 42, Spring 2001, pp. 161-168. DOI https://doi.org/10.3406/chime.2001.2361.

Benzine, Abdelhamid, et al. “Islam and the Dangers Facing Journalists.” Nieman Reports, vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 1995, p. 49.

Benzine, Abdelhamid. Lambèse. Dar El Idjtihad, 1989.

Benzine, Abdelhamid. Le camp. Éditions Sociales, 1962.

Benzine, Abdelhamid, and Henri Alleg. De notre histoire au quotidien: Alger républicain 1989-1994. Chihab éditions, 2006.

Khalfa, Boualem, et al. La grande aventure d’Alger républicain. Éditions Delga, 2012.