Word: krim
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...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...
...tried to avoid it at first because it isn't efficient," said Krim coldly. "You cannot hold a population by terror, and we need the population on our side. But we have traitors among us. And we had to answer French repression, too-massacres, tortures, bombardments. This is a hard war, but perhaps that is a good thing. We are building a nation, and we want no gifts. For nothing you get nothing...