نعى اليم ...... سودانيز اون لاين دوت كم تحتسب الزميل فتحي البحيري فى رحمه الله
وداعاً فتحي البحيري
|
|
 Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ (Re: سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد)
|
Henri Curiel, citizen of the third world, Le Monde diplomatique, April 1998 (English)/
(French)
The grave of Henri Curiel at Père Lachaise
WHEN INTERNATIONALISM MEANT SUPPORT FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLES
Henri Curiel, citizen of the third world
Twenty years ago Henri Curiel was gunned down at his Paris home. Born in Egypt, Curiel helped to found the Egyptian communist movement. Exiled by King Farouk in 1950, he came to France, where he devoted his life to helping third-world liberation movements and furthering the cause of peace between Israel, the Arab countries and the Palestinians. His lasting achievement was to have invented a new form of internationalism suited to the momentous anticolonial struggles that have marked the second half of the twentieth century.
By Gilles Perrault
He lived and died an Egyptian. It was a choice dictated by his deepest feelings. His birth in Egypt by no means made the choice inevitable. Henri Curiel first saw the light of day in Cairo on 13 September 1914, in what was still in effect the nineteenth century. His Jewish family had Italian nationality, although none of them spoke a word of Italian. He grew up in a country occupied by the British, and its inhabitants spoke a language he did not understand. He was educated at a French Jesuit college. His life was not destined to be simple.
The Curiels had been expelled from Spain by the Inquisition. They were said to have arrived in Egypt in the wake of Napoleon, probably via Portugal and Italy. Henri’s grandfather was a money-lender. His father broadened his activities rather than changing their nature, and achieved the dignified status of a banker. The family’s huge house on the fashionable island of Zamalek was furnished partly in the style of Louis XVI and partly in the modern fashion. While their life-style could not be described as austere, they sought to avoid ostentation, keeping only ten servants. The house was always full of guests, who came and went as they pleased and belonged, with very rare exceptions, to the Jewish community.
Their Italian (or Greek, French or British) passports were simply a matter of convenience, a means of benefiting from the Farouk monarchy and enjoying privilege of jurisdiction. They were "foreigners" whose ancestors had been laid to rest in Cairo cemeteries for generations. They had business interests in Egypt, but no interest in Egypt itself. Their spiritual homeland was France. Henri Curiel’s parents and their friends had a mystical attachment to France similar to that of their contemporary, the young Charles de Gaulle, who likened it to a princess in a fairy tale with a great and singular destiny. The banker Daniel Curiel, blind since the age of three, had his wife read him Le Temps every evening. At school, Henri and his brother Raoul recited "Our ancestors the Gauls". They learnt nothing of Egyptian history except for the pharaonic period, which figured in the curriculum for the first year of secondary school.
The family visited France every summer. It is hard for us now to grasp the depth of that attachment. In many cases, it led to voluntary enlistment and a harsher sojourn and final resting place in the blood-soaked trenches of Verdun. Recalling his youth a year before his assassination, Henri Curiel said: "The only country to which I felt I belonged was France."
Raoul was permitted to study in Paris and eventually became a distinguished archaeologist. Henri was bound to a desk at the bank, as his father’s chosen successor. One by one, he watched his friends and relatives leave for France, while he himself attended the daily round of wretched peasants who came to mortgage their next year’s harvest. Fate had dealt him a cruel blow, but how could he rebel against a blind father? Henri sought consolation in books and women, sharing his time equitably between the young ladies of his acquaintance and the Cairo whores. The former he gave Proust to read, and the latter Dostoyevsky.
His extreme sensitivity became a byword. Six feet tall and weighing barely eight stone, he looked like a scarecrow. It was not long before he developed pre-tubercular symptoms. A course of injections was administered by a young nurse from his own milieu with a social conscience. She persuaded him to help her treat the peasants who worked on the 250 acres of land which the Curiels owned in the Nile delta. Most peasant families eked out a living on one twentieth to one fifteenth of an acre. It was in the company of Rosette Aladjem, who was later to become his wife, that Henri Curiel discovered the boundless misery of the Egyptian people.
All those from Egypt who remained his companions in struggle until his death had experienced this overwhelming revelation of unbearable suffering. A donkey cost more to hire than a man. In the cotton mills, children aged seven to thirteen laboured under the blows of European taskmasters. Only the foremen had masks to protect them against the choking dust. Every year a third of the children died of consumption. Malaria carried off whole villages. Ninety five per cent of the peasants had bilharzia. Trachoma gave Egypt the world record for the numbers of blind. Average life-expectancy was twenty seven, excluding children who died within a year of birth.
Like young people in Europe, Henri Curiel and his friends read Malraux, Nizan and Gide, and hovered on the fringes of Marxism. But unlike their European contemporaries, they did not enter politics as the result of an intellectual quest. They were propelled into it by a profound, physical revulsion. What distinguished and will always distinguish their little body of activists from the hordes of European militants was the fact of being born in the third world (as it would come to be called), into a supremely cynical system of production that had achieved the ultimate in the exploitation of man by man. Theirs was no theoretical awareness based on some ideological opus or clever calculations of surplus value. It was a gut reaction that permeated their being and shaped their consciousness for ever.
Joseph Hazan said of his comrade Henri Curiel: "He never forgot that it was the misery of the Egyptian people which had led him to politics." How could they fail to become communists when Marxist doctrine so exactly fitted the situation they had discovered? But there was a problem. There was no Egyptian communist party.
Destined to devote his life to international solidarity, Henri Curiel first encountered its apparent opposite, the selfish force of nationalism.
Like all his circle, he was anti-fascist as a matter of course. In September 1939 he and his brother Raoul tried in vain to enlist in the French army. He was active in the Union Démocratique, which he set up with his friends to further the allied cause, and helped to found Amitiés Françaises in support of De Gaulle’s call for resistance.
In 1942, when Cairo seemed about to fall to Rommel’s Afrikakorps, the wealthy Jewish community crowded into trains heading for Jerusalem. Henri Curiel decided to remain, intending to organise resistance in the event of Nazi occupation. Without the knowledge of the British authorities, he was arrested by the Egyptian police, who were busy rounding up the remaining Jews as a welcoming present for the victorious German army. The prison was full of Egyptian agents working for the Nazis who had been arrested by British counter-intelligence. From his cell, Curiel heard thousands of demonstrators chant the name of Rommel. It was a shattering discovery. The mass of Egyptians were playing Hitler against Churchill. Those later known as the Free Officers, led by Anwar Al Sadat, were plotting with German intelligence and preparing to stab the British in the back. Was this connivance with Nazi ideology? Egyptian patriots were clearly prepared to form an alliance with the devil. Henri Curiel learnt the lesson: the aspiration of a people to independence cannot be suppressed.
In 1943 he founded the Egyptian National Liberation Movement (MELN), which was followed by the creation of the Sudanese Communist Party. "What does it mean to be communist in Egypt today. It means being anti-imperialist." Served by selfless activists with unbounded devotion, the organisation soon had considerable achievements to its credit: translation and dissemination of basic communist literature, establishment of a cadre-training school, active participation in the social conflicts that had broken out across the country and, of course, in the national liberation movement and the huge demonstrations in February 1946 that drove the British to pull their troops out of the cities.
But it also suffered from serious handicaps. Growth was hindered by the shortage of cadres. In 1945 the Egyptian workers, more amenable than the peasants to mass agitation, constituted no more than 3 % of the population. There was also tough competition among the plethora of organisations that aspired to become "the" Egyptian Communist Party. Three emerged from the pile: Henri Curiel’s MELN, Hillel Schwartz’s Iskra and Marcel Israel’s Libération du Peuple. All three leaders came from the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie. Their common origins only sharpened the quarrels inherent in political action. Nor did they facilitate contact with the broad masses, as the phrase went, despite the unanimous desire to "Egyptianise" the movement. Henri Curiel had taken Egyptian nationality when the monarchy was abolished. He had also begun to learn Arabic, although he never managed to master it. Can we imagine Lenin speaking pidgin Russian? Thirty years later an old militant, Said Soliman Rifai, commented sadly: "If Henri had been born Egyptian, the map of the Middle East would have been changed."
The main movements merged in May 1947. Had the merger lasted, it might have led to the creation of the communist party they were all dreaming of. But internal squabbles put paid to the short-lived unity. A year later, the different groups found themselves all together in an internment camp.
Henri Curiel and his friends had approved of the creation of the state of Israel. Apart from the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian people had not reacted strongly. But defeat in the first Arab-Israeli war was felt as an unbearable humiliation. Hundreds of communist militants had been arrested as soon as martial law was declared. For the Jews among them, their fate was sealed. In the words of Raymond Stambouli, a comrade of Curiel: "The war spelled the end of everything we had dreamed of and were beginning to achieve. We considered ourselves Egyptians, even if the Egyptians themselves considered us foreigners. Now it was over. We were no longer simply foreigners. We were Jews, i.e. enemies, a potential fifth column. Which of us could have foreseen that?"
Despite all the clumsiness and inadequacies for which they might be criticised, they had placed at the service of the Egyptian people an intense militant devotion that would have stupefied their European counterparts. They had not been spared by police repression. Many of them, Curiel first and foremost, had spent time in prison following strikes and demonstrations that had shaken the authorities. Now an unexpected war had ruined everything. They were imprisoned in their Jewishness.
Henri Curiel spent eighteen months in the detention camp of Huckstep. The authorities freed his friends in exchange for their agreement to leave Egypt for ever. Henri Curiel was determined to stay. In a travesty of justice, they deprived him of his Egyptian nationality, thus clearing the way for deportation. On 26 August 1950 he was forcibly put on a ship for Europe. He would never see Egypt again, nor ever forget it.
The man who arrived in Europe was certainly a communist, but a rather unusual one. Had he be born ten or fifteen years earlier, he would probably have joined the body of Comintern journeymen. But times had changed. Stalinism, followed by the cold war, had finally stemmed the tide of revolution. In Europe, East and West faced each other in trench warfare where no breakthrough was conceivable. What a contrast with Egypt, where everything was still possible! As for the Soviet Union, Curiel did not dispute its leading role or status as a model. But he did not see it as the socialist paradise on earth. More like a third-world nation that had made a promising start.
Curiel disembarked in Genoa and contacted the leaders of the Italian Communist Party. They gave him a very chilly welcome. He crossed the border illegally into France, where he was received more warmly by André Marty, whom he had known since 1943. Marty had spent four days in Cairo on his way from Moscow to Algiers. Obsessively wary of British intelligence, he had accepted with relief an offer to stay with Henri and Rosette Curiel. French prestige in Egypt was such that the responsibility for ideological and political struggle in Egypt had been assigned to the Colonial Bureau of the French Communist Party (PCF). But the Bureau’s permanent officials, all rock-solid Stalinists, had no confidence whatever in the young middle-class Jews who had undertaken to lead an Arab people on the road to socialism. Exasperated by the quarrels and splits that continued to plague the Egyptian communist movement, they had always refused to choose between the competing organisations.
Henri Curiel lost all chance of official recognition after the Free Officers’ putsch that deposed King Farouk on 23 July 1952. The whole communist world immediately condemned the "fascist military coup" by officers whom it was soon to glorify as impeccably progressive. In Egypt itself, the communist organisations vied with each other in their anathema for the Free Officers. Only the movement founded by Henri Curiel, which he continued to influence from Paris, welcomed the coup. Curiel had had contacts with progressive military circles for over ten years. Some of the most important Free Officers were members of his organisation. He was fully aware of the enthusiastic response throughout the country to the new authorities’ reform programme, which included land reform, a democratic education system and social justice. The reforms were scarcely typical of fascist dictatorships. But the communist oracles had spoken. The discussion was closed. Henri Curiel’s organisation was denounced as a "tool of fascism".
As for its exiled leader, the Marty affair soon put him beyond the pale of the communist movement. Any stick was good enough to beat Marty with: he was accused of having been put up in 1943 by a "dubious Egyptian couple". The French communist newspaper L’Humanité added that the couple had connections with "one of their relatives who was none other than a Trotskyist accused of being an informer during the German occupation."
Cowardice, error and libel had been distilled in a few lines. The cowardice consisted in not naming the Curiels while making them perfectly identifiable. Their cousin, André Weil-Curiel, had never been a Trotskyist, and had certainly never informed on anybody.
Henri Curiel had been turned into a political pariah.
His great insight was to have sensed the strength of the aspiration for national liberation as early as the 1940s. He anticipated the main political development of the second half of the twentieth century. Not many were so clearsighted. The PCF’s Colonial Bureau advised its colonised flock to be patient. Their emancipation, it constantly repeated, could come only from the victory of the European proletariat. Curiel had understood that the tidal wave of third-world nationalism, a mixture of pure and less pure aspirations, was gigantic and irresistible, and about to sweep all in its way. It was necessary to ride it or be left stranded. On the strength of this insight, Henri Curiel, a stateless Jew banned by the communist movement, became one of the great citizens of the third world.
In 1957 he met Robert Barrat, a journalist committed to the struggle against the three-year-old war in Algeria. At the time, Henri Curiel was still interested only in Egypt. But Egypt was slipping further and further away from him. His friends were worried by an uncharacteristic state of chronic depression. Robert Barrat gave him a new lease on life. In November 1957 he introduced him to Francis Jeanson, who was running a support network for the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front). The network had been in existence for a year but had set up a proper organisational structure only a month before. For three years Henri Curiel devoted his organisational abilities and exceptional militant energy to the FLN support network. His wife Rosette worked with him, as did Joyce Blau and Didar Fawzi Rossano, both of whom had come from Egypt. When several activists were rounded up by the French security services, and Francis Jeanson’s cover was blown, the Algerians asked Henri Curiel to take over.
After the Algerian war ended, Curiel sought to broaden the network and give it permanent form by setting up the French Anticolonial Movement (MAF). It was a serious setback. Curiel’s pragmatic approach clashed with the romantic illusions of activists who believed that, by a chain reaction, the "Algerian revolution", could set Europe alight. (Later the "detonators" were to be Cuba, China, Vietnam, and so on.) From his experience of Egypt, Henri Curiel saw that the FLN was simply a national liberation movement. Ahmed Ben Bella represented an inevitable stage in the emancipation of the Algerian nation, but he was no Lenin. And the idea of exporting the flame of revolution from Algeria to France was simply idiotic.
On 20 October 1960 Henri Curiel was arrested. He spent eighteen months in prison. Once the peace agreements had been signed, the deportation order issued at the time of his arrest ought normally to have been executed. He escaped deportation thanks to old and powerful connections. In Cairo, in 1943, his Amitiés Françaises organisation had rendered important services to Free French resistance workers, some of whom were now ministers in De Gaulle’s cabinet.
When he emerged from Fresnes prison at the age of forty eight, he knew he had been banished to the sidelines. But if he could not find a place in any organisation, he could act as a linchpin. His intellectual training and vast reading had made him a repository of European revolutionary experience. For years he had worked side by side with militants who had learnt the skills of underground activity under the Nazi occupation or in helping the FLN. He decided to make those skills available to third-world liberation movements whose organisational weaknesses he knew well since his time in Egypt
On this basis, Curiel set up an organisation that came to be known as Solidarité. It was a centre for the provision of services. A few dozen militants, most of them French, with widely varying backgrounds and affiliations (Protestant clergyman, trade unionists, Catholic priests, members of the Communist Party acting on an individual basis, etc.) placed themselves modestly at the service of other militants from all over the world. Their aim was not to act as political mentors, but simply to teach a number of crucial skills that could make all the difference. How to detect and shake off a shadow, print leaflets with a portable press, forge documents. How to use codes and invisible ink. Basic medical care and first aid. Possibly the use of arms and explosives. How to read maps, interpret terrain, and so on. Many of the instructors had doubts about the usefulness of such brief periods of training. But the trainees’ tragic lack of experience soon convinced them. Militants like those from the ANC, exposed to the cruellest and most sophisticated repression, turned out to know nothing of the elementary rules of underground activity.
Directed mainly towards the third world, this support was naturally extended to existing anti-fascist networks in Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar and Caetano, Greece under the colonels, and Pinochet’s Chile.
The militants came to France in small groups for training periods of varying lengths. They chose the topics most appropriate to the problems they encountered on the ground. The activities were funded at first by Algeria under Ben Bella, which was repaying a kind of debt. When Houari Boumedienne took power in 1965, the movements paid their own training costs, which were minimal in any case, as the trainers themselves worked for nothing.
Only Henri Curiel could have imagined this unique enterprise. It represented the sum total of his successes and failures. A difficult itinerary, punctuated by serious setbacks, had enabled him to invent the form of international solidarity best suited to the 1960s and 1970s, when so many third-world nations embarked on the road to independence.
Solidarité was an underground organisation, but it held annual congresses and elected a steering committee and secretariat. The variety of backgrounds and opinions were a constant source of tension. While the authority of the founding father irritated some, most of Solidarité’s members were deeply devoted to him. He never saw those who joined him solely in terms of their efficiency as militants. Their personal fulfilment mattered a great deal to him. Knowing Henri Curiel changed many lives for the better.
It lasted fifteen years. In the end, of course, even the most hardened activists were worn down by their efforts. The De Wangen brothers, who had been pillars of Solidarité, turned to other commitments. Henri Curiel himself eventually returned to a problem that had been haunting him since 1948, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Convinced that only dialogue would lead to a solution, he and other Egyptian exiles living in France had arranged secret meetings between Israeli and Palestinian doves. Time and again, the outbreak of war or a murderous terrorist attack had torn apart the patiently woven web of contacts. And time and again, Henri Curiel picked up the threads. He had just managed to arrange a meeting in Paris between Matti Peled, an Israeli reserve general, and Issam Sartawi, a former terrorist converted to the peace process and a close associate of Yasser Arafat, when the French weekly magazine Le Point published an article by Georges Suffert in its issue of 21 June 1976 accusing Curiel of being "the head of the terrorist support networks".
The accusation was frivolous but deadly. Henri Curiel hated terrorism. He considered it politically stupid and morally monstrous. But at a time when Europe was confronted with the violence of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades, which Henri Curiel utterly condemned, Suffert’s accusation was tantamount to a death sentence. The press campaign against him misfired, but it was followed by administrative measures, including house arrest in Digne. When the accusation proved baseless, the measures had to be lifted. Henri Curiel’s enemies were left with no other option but terrorism. Two assassins gunned him down in the lift of his apartment block on 4 May 1978.
His activity in favour of peace in the Middle East bothered the hawks on both sides, who were not averse to taking matters into their own hands. The South African authorities considered him one of their worst enemies, since Solidarité provided active support to ANC militants up to the very end. We now know that the South African secret services did not hesitate to send killers to Europe. The police investigation failed to identify the instigators and perpetrators of the crime. The Curiel case is now officially closed.
Henri Curiel was neither an ideologist nor a theoretician. He was a man with an exceptional gift for analysing situations. He was European by culture and a citizen of the third world by birth and experience. Of all those who claimed to be internationalists in the second half of the twentieth century, he was probably the one who invented, not the most spectacular forms of action, but those which were modest and intelligent enough to prove the most effective.
Times have changed. Globalisation proceeds apace, along with the waning of political solidarity among peoples. Henri Curiel will provide us with no prescriptions for the third millennium. But as a man who lived for his ideas, and died for them, he leaves as his legacy the burning need to invent a new internationalism.
* Writer. His works include Le Goût du Secret : Entretiens avec Jean-Maurice de Montrémy, Arléa, Paris, 1997, and Un Homme à Part, Barrault, Paris, 1984, translated into English as A Man Apart : the life of Henri Curiel, Zed Books, London, 1987.
|
|
 
|
|
|
|
|
| العنوان |
الكاتب |
Date |
| من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-24-07, 00:59 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سمندلاوى | 11-24-07, 01:12 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-24-07, 01:12 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-24-07, 01:18 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-24-07, 01:20 AM |
| Re | Waeil Elsayid Awad | 11-24-07, 01:58 AM |
| Re: Re | Mohamed Omer | 11-24-07, 05:21 AM |
| Re: Re | Abdel Aati | 12-05-07, 00:42 AM |
| re | Waeil Elsayid Awad | 11-24-07, 02:23 AM |
| Re: re | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-24-07, 02:40 AM |
| Re: re | Abdel Aati | 11-24-07, 02:52 AM |
| Re: re | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-24-07, 03:09 AM |
| Re: re | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-24-07, 03:11 AM |
| Re: re | Abdel Aati | 11-24-07, 04:07 PM |
| Re: re | Mohamed Omer | 11-24-07, 05:34 AM |
| Re: re | Mohamed Omer | 11-24-07, 04:13 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | Mohamed Omer | 11-24-07, 03:41 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | sari_alail | 11-24-07, 08:13 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | Mohamed Omer | 11-24-07, 03:52 PM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 11-29-07, 03:38 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 12-01-07, 11:31 AM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | سيف النصر محي الدين محمد أحمد | 12-04-07, 09:10 PM |
| Re: من هو هنري كورييل؟؟ | Abdel Aati | 12-05-07, 00:45 AM |
|
| |
Mohamed Omer
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست