nesvrstani modernizmi non-aligned modernisms —
sveska #5 / volume #5
Olivje Aduši
SLIKE BORBE NESVRSTANIH I TRIKONTINENTALA
—
Olivier Hadouchi
IMAGES OF NON- -ALIGNED AND TRICONTINENTAL STRUGGLES
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Olivier Hadouchi was born in Paris in 1972 where he lives and works. He received his Ph.D. degree in cinema studies. Hadouchi is a film curator, teacher and critic. His texts were published in Third Text,
CinémAction, La Furia Umana, Mondes du cinéma
and in the collective works (both in French): Benjamin Stora and Linda Amiri (Eds.), Algerians in
France, 1954-1962, War, exile, the life (Autrement,
2012) and Bertrand Bacqué, Cyril Neyrat, Clara Schulmann and Véronique Terrier Hermann (Eds.),
Serious Games. Cinema and Contemporary Art transforming Essay MAMCO-HEAD, 2015. He has
held numerous lectures or film’s presentations in Berlin, Algiers, Belgrade, Paris, Béjaïa, Beirut, Prague, Lyon, etc.
Olivier Hadouchi IMAGES OF NON-ALIGNED AND TRICONTINENTAL STRUGGLES
The first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement was held in Belgrade from 1st to 6th September 1961 and one of its goals was to circumvent the clutches of the world order which emerged aſter the end of the Second World War in 1945. The Non-Aligned Movement gathered together nations who longed for an alternative to the bipolar cold war order, above all to create a third way which would not result in two superpowers nor would rest on the logic that every country is forced to decide between and subjugate itself either to a capitalist block (under the United States) or a socialist block (at the head of which was the Soviet Union whose dominant position was challenged by another socialist country, China). The Non-Aligned Movement was made up of nations of the Third World which had recently been liberated by decolonisation or were in the process of being decolonialised or nations subjugated to a special form of neo-colonialism (remember Latin America), and the goal was the promotion and defence of the sovereignty of each country, striving above all for the right to peace and the independence of every nation. The movement supported the struggle and even the war of independence for the nations of the Third World (in the period from 1945 to 1975 Asia and Africa underwent
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decolonisation), because they presented a way which later would lead to true peace between the independent nations liberated from colonial subjugation, based on just and enduring foundations.
Meeting at the Conference of 1961 in Belgrade were globally prominent statesmen such as Tito (Yugoslavia), Nkrumah (Ghana), Nehru (India), Nasser (Egypt), Sukarno (Indonesia) as well as Benyoucef Benkhedda, the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic. In this way, Yugoslavia as well as the statesmen from the African and Asian countries tacitly recognised the most important Algerian freedom movement—the National Liberation Front. Cuba, a small Latin American country, which at that time was in the centre of world atention, was invited as a fully fledged member of the movement.1 Already in April 1961, the Cuban regime (arising from the revolution of 1959) openly declared itself socialist. For this reason, its opponents supported by the United States of America, atempted to overthrow this regime (the famous Bay of Pigs invasion) which was very quickly thwarted by the broad people’s front. Internationally, the year of the first Conference was filled with unrest and tension: the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) had built the Berlin wall during the summer; aſter the successful destabilisation of the Democratic Republic of Congo by the CIA and the then colonial force of Belgium, the opposition arrested and executed the president, Patrice Lumumba, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The humiliating recordings of Lumumba’s arrest (before he was executed far out of public view) provoked waves of protest, great biterness and mass demonstrations in several cities across the world, amongst which was Belgrade on whose streets
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about 100,000 people demonstrated on the 16th February, 1961.2
The first steps to holding of the inaugural
Conference of Non-alignment were taken in July 1956 at Brioni Island,3 at the meeting of the three statesmen (Nasser, Nehru and Tito) whose discussion was crowned by the joint declaration of the principles of political non-alignment. The Non-Aligned Movement which began in 1961 came about as a result of the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung of April 19554 and is frequently characterised as the first official appearance on the national and international stages5 of countries from the Third World, which strove to take destiny into their own hands and to do everything to make their voices heard. As a reminder, the term “The Third World” was coined by the demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952.6 He was actually inspired by the class concept “the Third Estate”7 which prior to the the French bourgeois revolution, in contrast to the nobility and clergy, counted for nothing on the political stage. There is the famous statement by Emmanuel Sieyès that the Third Estate hitherto in the political order was nothing but that “it desires to be something”,8 and Sauvy carries his formulation into the new reality: “… because at the end this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too.”9
For all those who fought (peacefully or with arms) against colonialism, neo-colonialism or imperialism, and for the artists who in their own way using their work joined in the struggle, it is of utmost importance to affirm the existence of the Third World, that it is apparent to everyone and becomes visible, that the legitimacy of its struggle for liberation is proven, its desire for
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freedom. Under the principles of internationalism and anti-colonial and anti-imperial solidarity, reporters, photographers, film directors and makers contributed to spreading the true picture of the struggle for freedom of the Third World.
The presence of Yugoslavia in the group of nations of the Third World can on first appearances be surprising. But “the Third World does not represent a place. It represents a project”10 as Vijay Prashad says. Yugoslavia had suffered the yoke of slavery for several centuries (under the Otoman occupation) and in contrast to other European nations, did not have a colonial tradition: nor had it ever atempted to create a colonial empire in Africa or Asia.11 Apart from this, there was the image of the Yugoslavian partisans which during the Second World War made a striking contribution to the armed resistance to Nazism and which could be revived and serve as an example for and mirror to others who in wars of national independence resort to so-called “guerrilla” tactics.
In the article published several months before the Conference in Belgrade, the great Algerian writer Kateb Yacine said of Yugoslavia that it was an “example for Africa”12 also adding: “They are very close to us, objectively and subjectively”.13 Zdravko Pečar hailed the Algerian revolution “the crowning of the five people’s revolutions of the world, the French Revolution, the October Revolution in Russia, the People’s Liberation Revolution in Yugoslavia and the Chinese Revolution” then adding: “as the door to Africa, Algeria was and still is the greatest hope for the whole continent because of its long and bloody people’s liberation war which, in its essence and actions, has acquired a place among the great people’s revolutions of the world.”14 Tito and Castro, for
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different reasons, knew they had to stand up to a hostile environment and to find a way out of international isolation.
They played on the card of an ambitious and dynamic foreign politics and in doing so would create numerous connections with the leaders of the African, Asian and Latin American States. A country’s foreign politics be effective on both the external and internal stages: certain regimes can become popular at the local and the national levels owing to the international standing of the leader of that country (who is regarded as the president of the people) and this standing passes down to the citizens of that country. Continuing the policies implemented during the war for independence under the wings of the National Liberation Front, the Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella (from 1962 to 1965) and Houari Boumediene (from 1965 to 1978), who would host in September 1973 a very important Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, developed an ambitious and very successful international politics for their country.15
From Non-Aligned to Tricontinental?
The Tricontinental movement appeared on the margins of the Non-Aligned Movement, several years aſter the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the Belgrade Summit in 1961, one more international movement striving to promote the unity and sovereignty of the Third World. Where and how does one situate the Tricontinental Conference in relation to the Non-Aligned Movement; that is the first Tricontinental Conference of the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America which was held in Havana in January 1966? Does it really concern a stream which joined up with the Non-Aligned Movement or an even
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more radical movement, with respect to the fact that it did not hesitate calling the United States of America the arch enemy nor at stopping at defending itself with arms in the cause of political change? For both movements the common desire was to give the Third World representation and to create ties between their countries, but the Tricontinental was conceived and channelled as a broad organisation which gathered together nations (Africa, Asia and Latin America) and the revolutionary movements of the Latin American sub-continent (not forgeting that they called Cuba “the first free territory of Latin America”), whilst the NonAligned Movement principally gathered together the heads of independent states, (apart from several exceptions such as the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Belgrade in 1961 and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in Cairo in 1964) and aimed to defend the process of decolonialisation as well as the adoption of the doctrine of peaceful coexistence inside the United Nations (UN). The movement used this international organisation as a forum “for the treatment of instances of barbaric colonialism, and the General Assembly as a means of communication and presenting to the world earlier crimes over they had been silent“.16 On the other hand, in the case of the Tricontinental movement, “it wasn’t about the Non-Aligned Movement but about the revolutionary movements which challenge the established order and for which, as the only way to gain freedom from imperialist domination (Western imperialism and not the Soviet type), armed struggle is suitable.”17
According to Mehdi Ben Barka, a champion of the Third World movement and the main opponent of the Moroccan king, who judging by all of this
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was abducted and killed in Paris in October 1965, the Tricontinental movement should unite two streams: first “that which began with the socialist October revolution and secondly that which appeared with the national liberation revolution”.18 As stated by Ben Barka, as well as Ernesto Che Guevara and the Cubans, imperialism is effective at the international level, not respecting borders, and therefore Tricontinentalism ought to offer an alternative and organise a counter-offensive on the same level, in order to effectively oppose it.
The Cubans, in addition, were the hosts of the conference of the Latin American Solidarity Organization in August 1967 in Havana, which was followed quickly by the incarceration and death of Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia in October (which marked the failure of his plans that the revolution should continue into South America), whilst in April 1967 “Che’s Message to the Tricontinental” was published, in which he proposed the need to “create two, three… numerous Vietnams in the world”. Aſter 1968, and in the following decade, the Cuban regime aligned with the soviet “model”, but meanwhile continued with a dynamic foreign politics on the international stage, especially in countries of the Third World and inside the NonAligned Movement (despite the very close ties to the USSR, Cuba hosted in September 1979 a Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement), and intervened in Angola to support the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in its fight against enemy movements, so that it would present an antithesis to the North American and South African influence on the region.
The Tricontinental, founded at the Conference of the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America in 1966,
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was presented therefore as the revolutionary wing of the Third World. The movement was short-lived (from 1966 to 1968 but its spirit and ideology lived on for several more years) but it didn’t succeed in developing an independent and, in the true sense of the word, non-aligned organisation.
In the visual material of the Tricontinental magazines19 prime place was given to the heads of the Third World, presidents of the liberation and/or revolutionary movements like Ernesto Che Guevara (who fought in Cuba), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Amílcar Cabral (Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde), Agostinho Neto (Angola) as well as the opponents of the regimes in their own countries like to Mehdi Ben Barka (Morocco), Camilo Torres Restrepo (Columbia), Carlos Marighella (Brazil), who were later killed and also unknown fighters, men and women, from Asia, Africa and Latin American, who with their rifles embodied “the people who rose up in arms”, i.e. all the iconic figures who inspired political posters. Every edition of the Cuban magazine The Tricontinental (published in several languages) had one of these posters20 as a supplement which were made by formally very talented and brave Cuban graphic artists of the 1960s and 1970s and provoked a lot of atention even beyond their own countries’ borders.
Images of guerrillas (guerilleros) and partisans
Documentary films about the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America (Tricontinental)21 and the posters made to go with them were used as a means of counter-information which helped reinstate the use of agitprop in the domain of cinematography. Of
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these films we can cite for example two films of the Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez Hanoi Martes 13 (1968) and 79 Primaveras (1969, filmed as a homage to Ho Chi Minh who died at 79 years of age),22 in which the author criticises the intervention of American soldiers in Vietnam and shows their atrocities, whilst extolling the national resistance of the Vietnamese liberation movement. The documentary production Madina Boe (José Massip, Cuba, 1968, aſter the place of the same name in Guinea Bissau) talks about the military and political activities of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) which then fought against Portuguese colonialists, life in the free zone and allows Amílcar Cabral, one of the leaders of the movement, to speak freely. This type of film and photographic reportage, in which fighters of a liberation movement from the Third World are given a face and voice, is of great utility and exceptional signifi- cance because in such conflicts public opinion, both national and international, can be the most powerful weapon. Because of this it is necessary to get through to and win over public opinion so that one can then successfully negotiate for independence.
Do films on the Non-Aligned Movement exist which are similar to the productions on the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America which on the whole were realised by Cuban cinematographers? The NonAligned Movement didn’t, however, define particular policies on cinematography, although cultural ties between the member states were certainly strengthened and crowned by various exchanges and meetings. Yugoslavia, the host country of the conference of 1961, had laboratories, cinema halls,
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educated film workers, production houses and institutions which regularly filmed and screened current events – Filmske novosti, Belgrade. At the end of the 1950s, an agreement was signed between the Filmske novosti (which was represented by Sima Karaoglanović) and Mohamed Sadek Moussaoui, beter known as “Si Mahieddine” and who was head of the “Picture and Sound” service of the Provincial Government of the Algerian Republic,23 to maintain a film archive of the Algerian struggle and to develop film stock in Belgrade. The second part of the agreement envisaged the filmmaker Stevan Labudović and Yugoslavian technicians joining the National Liberation Army on the AlgerianTunisian border and helping to educate future Algerian filmmakers and technicians. Moussaoui and several collaborators (amongst them was Pierre and Claudine Chaulet) visited Belgrade in 1960 in order to edit and complete post-production of the film Djazaïrouna (Our Algeria) which should later be screened at the United Nations.
It was a collaboration directed by Djamel
Chanderli and Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina using various sources: films of various points in the war which had been produced by different directors and filmmakers as Pierre and Claudine Chaulet recall
in the documentary film Les cinéastes de la liberté
(Cinematographers of Freedom), Said Mehdaouiz, Algeria (2009), which looks at the part and the roles of cinematographers (Algerian and foreign)24 in the liberation of the country. More than anything, the production Djazaïrouna succeeds in pulling together several aspects of the war for independence, combining war sequences with scenes which show the wartime laying waste of land (especially through the use of Napalm) as well as the resistance and determinedness of the native population.
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“The war in Algeria in no way represented a typical episode of international history, but rather was a symbol of the new transnational system which was emerging”25 quoting Mathew Connelly. It was a war of images and films,26 which Algeria turned to its own use, in spite of lacking the logistics, the industry and the cinematographic infrastructure and even a fire power comparable with the French.27 In order to refute French propaganda which spoke of disorder and interventions by the police, but never about the war of independence, the National Liberation Front accepted into its ranks foreign journalists (alongside several Algerian journalists like Djamel Chanderli who knew how to handle cameras and photo-equipment, which was a rarity in colonial times) and sometimes allowed them to film and photograph28 groups of soldiers, keeping above everything else in mind: that these pictures will contribute to promoting their struggle on the local (in their people) and on the international stage (in the West and the East).
Zdravko Pečar and Stevan Labudović: a portrait of partisan reporters and the solidarity of Yugoslavian reporters with the Algerian rebellion
Among the war reporters and correspondents who managed to show a different picture of the war for independence, there are two Yugoslavians, Zdravko Pečar and Stevan Labudović. They have played a significant role in winning over public opinion to the Algerian liberation struggle. The first reporter acted and testified through pictures and leters whilst the second documented the conflict and the lives of fighters on the Algerian-Tunisian border (through still and moving images, that is
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photography and film) and greatly contributed to the education of Algerian cameramen, as part of an agreement between Tito’s regime and leaders of General Staff of the National Liberation Front.
During 1957 and the summer of 1958,29
Zdravko Pečar resided in Tunisia (independent since 1956) as a war reporter for the newspaper Borba. During this stay, as a Yugoslavian war correspondent, who had himself been a partisan during the Second World War, he met members and political leaders of the National Liberation Front, the most important liberation movement in Algeria, and fighters of the National Liberation Army, the military branch of this movement. Along with Morocco, Tunisia had then represented a particular logistical base for the Algerian movement and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic was located in its capital. Furthermore, the reporter had witnessed the presence of Algerian refugees in Bourguiba’s country, especially following the construction of the Morice line.30 This line was made from an electric fence and minefields and was named aſter the then French Minister of Defence, André Morice. The construction of this line began in 1957 but did not fully follow the line of the Algerian-Tunisian border and encroached deeply into Algerian territory. It was supposed to prevent the free movement of the fighters of the National Liberation Army between the two countries so that they would no longer be able to carry out atacks in Algeria and then to flee into Tunisia where the French army no longer had the right to intervene. The French bombing of the Tunisian town Sakiet Sidi Youssef (on the pretext of atacking the National Liberation front) on 8th February 1958 provoked great biterness throughout the world because a large number of civilians
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were killed in this atack, amongst whom were refugees and children. In the beginning, certain groups of Algerian partisans would continue to cross over the border and the Morice line. In one of his articles, Zdravko Pečar compares the Morice line with the “Maginot line”31 in France, built to prevent a German invasion which quickly yielded under the Nazi army atack of 1940 even though it was considered to be impenetrable. The reporter writes about the different ways in which the fighters of the National Liberation Army cross the Morice line (deliberately not revealing all of them) and adds that “for the crossing of the Morice line, special individual units were trained who carried out this task like true experts. One sergeant, for example, crossed this line forty times.”32 However, such crossings of the Morice line would over time increasingly meet with failure and death. Furthermore, in 1959 the existing line was reinforced with the Challe Line (named aſter General Maurice Challe) and this led to the decision by the National Liberation Army units stationed in Tunisia and Morocco (outside Algeria) to change their tactics and cease atempting to cross the strictly controlled electric fence and minefields. Crossings of this line were still very common at the time when Pečar was present on this terrain and when he was writing his reports, so he had learned about the cruel and very fierce batles which took place around Souk Ahras in 1958, probably from the people who participated in them.
During his stay in 1957 and the summer of
1958, Pečar shared the everyday life of the National Liberation Army batalion led by Major Abderrahmane Bensalem33 which regularly crossed over into Algeria to atack and ambush French forces. The so-called “guerrilla” war represented