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-minded nationalists in the neighbouring protectorates, so by 1937 Ben Badis was committed to establish an ulama association spanning the three French North African territories. 99 The Algerian Communist Party (Parti Communiste Algérien, PCA) suffered comparable state repression to the ENA/PPA after 1925, when PCA membership and the party newspaper
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
, Jacqueline Guerroudj says she saw the injustices of colonialism all around her, and, alongside a number of other communists, she joined the Algiers bomb network. Following her arrest and trial, Jacqueline Guerroudj was the only woman of European origin condemned to death. Jacqueline Guerroudj euphemistically states that communists did not join the FLN ‘like anyone else’ but that individuals within the FLN welcomed them with varying degrees of enthusiasm or hostility.53 The positions of the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, PCF) and Parti Communiste
appeared after 1943, far from being unified, was divided by deep and often bitter internal divisions that reflected the more global tensions between different political strands of the anti-colonial struggle. The three main umbrella parties under which the women’s organisations grouped were the Parti communiste algérien (PCA), the reformist Union démocratique du manifeste algérien M1822 - MACMASTER TEXT.indd 31 21/7/09 12:16:11 32 Burning the veil (UDMA) headed by Ferhat Abbas, and the nationalist, pro-independence Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratique