f o r e i g n p a r t s

London and Washington as a distant and rather irrelevant conflict, was anything but. Butcher describes how the war in Bosnia helped radicalise a generation of Muslims and became a training ground for several leading figures in al-Qaeda. Two of the hijackers responsible for 9/11 and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the attack and deputy to Osama bin Laden, spent time there.

Aside from interviews with Princip’s surviving relatives, Butcher’s biggest coup is tracking down a former mujahid, called Shahid Butt – not in Bosnia, but in Birmingham. Now in his forties, Butt recounts a fascinating story of how he wanted to join the Royal Marines but was rejected for being, as he puts it, a ‘fat Paki’. Signing up with the mujahideen was much easier. Butt joined an aid convoy from Britain and stayed behind, waiting on the roadside in Travnik. Soon afterwards a foreign fighter appeared and greeted him in Arabic. Butt was recruited.

From Travnik Butcher heads further east to Srebrenica, the site of the worst massacre in Europe since 1945. Srebrenica was controlled by Bosnian government forces but was surrounded by Bosnian Serbs. The United Nations declared the town to be a ‘safe area’, under the supposed protection of Dutch peacekeepers. But the Dutch surrendered to the Bosnian Serbs and in July 1995 left 8,000 Muslim men and boys to be slaughtered. This is the most powerful section of the book. Butcher joins the Marš Mira, an annual peace march that retraces the route taken by more than 10,000 Bosnian Muslim men who fled Srebrenica, trying to reach safety in Tuzla through the woods and the fields. Perhaps half of them made it out alive.

The world stood by while the men and boys of Srebrenica were slaughtered. I often wonder what would have happened if the mujahideen, who were known for their ferocity, had been dispatched from the front lines to Srebrenica to fight the Bosnian Serbs. As for Shahid Butt, he survived, renounced war and guns, and lives peacefully in the Midlands. Gavrilo Princip was less fortunate. He died in an Austro-Hungarian prison in 1918, but his shots still echo around the world, perhaps nowhere more than in Bosnia. To order this book for £15.19, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 15

s u dh i r h a z a r e e s i n g h

Liberty, Equality, Enmity The French Intifada: The Long War between France and Its Arabs

By Andrew Hussey (Granta Books 441pp £25)

The relationship between France and her former colonies in North Africa is complex and multilayered. Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia all came under French control in the 19th century, but were treated and viewed differently by the metropolitan authorities: there was an exceptional force and emotional resonance to the myth of l ’Algérie c’est la France, which was not matched in the other territories. France was profoundly changed, both intellectually and culturally, by her colonial experience; likewise, any visitor to cities in the Maghreb can still observe the physical traces of the French presence, notably in the architecture and the urban layout. Colonies provided vital support for the French: thousands of troops from North Africa fought for France during the two world wars (it is a little-known and littlecommemorated fact that Algerian and Moroccan fighters played the decisive role in Marseille’s liberation in August 1944). But the empire could also be a potentially destructive force, as with the emancipation of Algeria from French rule, which brought down the Fourth Republic. The French claimed to be on a civilising mission in these territories, but their record on questions such as health and education was patchy at best, and their governance was marked by acts of barbaric violence against local populations, from Marshal Bugeaud’s murderous ‘pacification’ campaign in mid-19thcentury Algeria through to the Sétif massacre in 1945; French troops committed mass atrocities during the Algerian War, and their widespread use of torture was brought to the world’s attention by the publication of Henri Alleg’s La Question.

In contemporary France, the presence of several million North African immigrants, themselves divided along national, religious and political lines, continues to have significant ramifications: it has enriched French culture, notably through the emergence of a vibrant literary tradition embodied by such writers as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Yasmina Khadra and Assia Djebar (who was elected to the Académie Française in 2005). But the issue of the ‘integration’ of these immigrants has also been testing for the French, in multiple ways, in terms of justice and social equality, in particular in the suburbs of French cities, and over the controversial bans of the headscarf and burqa. These were underpinned by wider ideological questions relating to republican citizenship and the preservation of laïcité, not to forget more recent concerns with the threat of a ‘homegrown’ radical Islamism. And, of course, there is the rise of the Front National, which has both promoted and effectively capitalised on wide-ranging anti-Arab sentiment in France over the past three decades. This demonisation continues under Marine Le Pen, who recently compared street prayers by Islamic communities in French towns to the German occupation.

Andrew Hussey promises a ‘radical and urgent new take’ on France’s colonial past and ‘an accessible analysis of current tensions on both sides of the Mediterranean, informed by an account of the historical circumstances which have brought us to where we are’. The French Intifada provides a good illustration of how far removed the reality of French rule was from the lofty ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. There is also a sensitive exploration of the distinct colonial selfconception of the French settlers, to be found, among other places, in Louis Bertrand’s ideal of a ‘Latin Africa’. Hussey’s main argument is that the colonial experience continues to cast a long shadow on both French and North African societies, and that the fates of these two communities remain closely intertwined. The book also brings home the post-independence collusion between the French ruling class and authoritarian North African elites, operating at the expense of both the wider

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