Word: messali
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
Parisian Shakedown. The contagion of violence reached to Paris itself. There the supporters of Messali Hadj's Algerian National Movement and those of the National Liberation Front formerly directed by Cairo-based leaders such as the captured Mohammed ben Bella, feuded like Chicago-style gangs over the privilege of shaking down the city's 80,000 Algerians for contributions. One Algerian objected that he did not want to take sides; his body was fished out of the Seine a few days later. Café owners who contributed to the National Liberation Front had their stocks smashed by Hadj...
...Algeria, where the new troops will bring France's total to over 330,000, the French found hopeful signs in the fact that the fellaghas were fighting among themselves. The Algerian National Movement, directed by bearded Messali Hadj from his enforced exile on an island off the Brittany coast, has been making a major effort to recapture the influence it lost to the more militant National Liberation Front, whose forces are commanded by Mohammed ben Bella and supported from Cairo by Egypt's ambitious Premier Nasser. Twice French troops have come across troops of Arabs with their throats...