Word: krim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Krim's first rebellion was against his father, a garde chamèptre (rural warden) in the mountainous, impoverished Kabylia region of eastern Algeria. His father, an old-fashioned Berber patriarch whose first loyalty was to his clan, wanted Krim to stay at home and follow the traditional Berber way of life. But Krim, determined to share in the new European existence introduced by the French, ran off to Algiers, where he lived with a cousin who was a minor civil servant, learned to read and speak French. Like the great majority of top rebel leaders, he is practically...
...still yearning for the kind of life he saw Europeans leading in Algeria, Krim joined the Chantiers de Jeunesse, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain's equivalent of the old U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps; from there he went into an infantry regiment, where he became a chairborne corporal. It was in the melting pot of the French army that he began to acquire a basic sense of frustration. "Wherever I turned," he recalls bitterly, "there was injustice. There were always differences between us, the Moslem inferiors, and the superior Europeans. I was a clerk and I had to fill...
...Nothing, Nothing. Discharged from the army late in 1945, Krim went home to the Kabylia and plunged into the nationalist movement. The French claim he became a bandit after killing a man who won the garde champètre job that he coveted. Krim denies the story, says he was wanted by the police for nationalist agitation, and fled to the hills to escape a two-year jail sentence for "an attack on French sovereignty." From then on Krim and his colleagues started preparing military rebellion...
...first they tried to organize a full-scale army, but the whole organization fell apart in 1949 when one naive conspirator was arrested carrying a full membership list. Thereafter, Krim & Co. restricted themselves to a small "secret organization," theorizing that the rebellion could rally mass support once it got started. It was on this risky theory that they launched their revolt in 1954. "The French could have stopped us easily in the beginning," says Krim. "Now we can go on fighting for a hundred years...
Assigned to command of Willaya (Zone) Three, his home region of Kabylia, Krim set about establishing politico-military structures in some 2,000 villages. Each village organization was based on a three-man cell-tax collector, recruiter and judge-and when terror proved necessary to rally the Moslems, the F.L.N. did not hesitate...