Word: messali
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Died. Ahmed Messali Hadj, 76, patriarch of the Algerian nationalist movement; in Paris. Tireless and magnetic, Messali began assailing French colonialism in the 1920s, spent years in jail and under house arrest, and saw himself as the Gandhi of North Africa. But when the struggle for Algerian independence intensified in the 1950s, he was regarded as an ineffectual anachronism by the militant F.L.N. (National Liberation Front). Ignored by the Algerian government after independence, Messali lived out his years an exile in France...
...M.N.A is headed by bearded Messali Hadj, 63, who was 'once as fanatic as the F.L.N. zealots. But after years of house arrest in France, he now espouses "association" with the French, has lost nearly all influence in Algeria itself; now his support comes chiefly from Algerian workers in France. Angrily, the F.L.N. dismissed the M.N.A. as "colonialist lackeys" and declared that the Evian talks were off unless France "makes an official statement clarifying the meaning of M. Joxe's declaration...
...morning of V-E day, 1945, ten thousand Moslems appeared in the streets of Abbas' own home town of Setif brandishing banners which read, DOWN WITH COLONIALISM, FREE MESSALI. There was a scuffle as gendarmes tried to wrest the banners away, and then, inevitably, a shot rang out. In sudden fury, bands of Moslems took off through Setif, savagely attacking every European they saw with clubs, knives and hatchets. And as word of the Setif "uprising" spread through the rugged mountains of Kabylia, bloodthirsty Berber bands, killing, pillaging and looting, set off on the warpath against the area...
...F.L.N., loud in its denunciation of such French "barbarities," was no less brutal to French soldiers, European settlers or their own reluctant Moslem countrymen. In May 1957, to discourage the villagers of Kabylia from rallying to the cause of Messali Hadj-who had long since become the F.L.N.'s bitter enemy-F.L.N. gunmen herded more than 300 peasants into the village of Kasba Mechta (TIME, June 10, 1957), and, when darkness fell, passed among them shooting and stabbing until all were dead. Moslems who persisted in active loyalty to France risked F.L.N. "Execution"-or being found alive...
...Murder. The murder was the most daring assassination yet achieved by the Algerians in their promised campaign to "carry the war to France itself." Most of the killings take place in the wretched Algerian quarters of French cities, where followers of the Cairo-backed National Liberation Front (FLN) fight Messali Hadj's older Algerian National Movement (MNA), and each terrorize fellow Algerians for contributing to the other. Chekkal's assassin, an unemployed plumber named Mohammed ben Sadok, admitted that he had been selected by the FLN for the honor of killing Chekkal...