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Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher, activist, and writer who focuses on climate justice, extractivism, and anti-colonial struggles in North Africa and the Arab world. He coordinates the North Africa programme at the Transnational Institute (TNI) and is a founding member of the Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC) and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA). 

He has authored several books, including Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region(2023), and his writing appears in outlets such as the Guardian, Middle East Eye, and openDemocracy. 

Issue #190 of The Internationalist features an excerpt from Hamouchene's Towards Palestinian Liberation. Here he traces how Vietnam's victory over French colonialism at Dien Bien Phu inspired anti-colonial solidarity across North Africa and draws parallels to today's resistance in Gaza.

It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because ‘quite simply’ it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe. – 

Frantz Fanon

It is hard, at a distance of 70 years, to imagine the impact the first Indochina war, and especially Dien Bien Phu, had on the colonial world, particularly France’s overseas colonies, from Algeria to Senegal and from Morocco to Madagascar. A colonial power had been defeated. A regular army had been beaten! 

In the 1940s, during the Second World War, when France was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany, tens of thousands of Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese, Vietnamese and others bravely joined the battle for its liberation, which they hoped would in turn lead to their own liberation. But when it finally rose from the ruins, France set about restoring its shattered empire in all its colonial pomp. Despite negotiations in Paris between Jean Sainteny and Ho Chi Minh to find a compromise on the question of post- war Vietnam, and despite the victory of the left, including the Communists, in the November 1946 French elections, the French government nevertheless decided to reconquer Vietnam. Whether it was led by the right, the centre, or the left, or by forces that were religious or secular, and from one republic to another, France continued to cling to its empire, from the Dien Bien Phu valley to the Casbah of Algiers.

Following the outbreak of the first Indochina war in December 1946, from 1947 to 1954, tens of thousands of North Africans were sent to !ght for France in Indochina (the figure ultimately reaching 123,000), at a time when their own countries were experiencing the first stirrings of the struggle for independence. Once in Vietnam, hundreds of them deserted and joined the Viet Minh. In doing so, they were responding to Vietnamese appeals for anti-colonial solidarity. One such appeal was made in a letter a minister in Ho Chi Minh’s government sent to the Moroccan independence leader Abd El-Krim, in exile in Cairo, in early 1949. He wrote:

"Our struggle is your struggle and your struggle is in no way different from ours. Also, the solidarity of the national liberation movements within the framework of the former French empire is capable of putting a final end to French imperialism. Your Excellency, the government of Ho Chi Minh asks you to use your great spiritual authority to ask the soldiers of North Africa to refuse to leave for Viet Nam, and also asks you to appeal to the dockers to boycott French ships."

Abd El-Krim was a revolutionary guerilla leader who had defeated the Spanish army in the epic battle of Annual in 1921 and who had set up the short-lived Republic of the Rif (1921–1926) before being ultimately defeated by the French and Spanish through air raids, gas and napalm bombing, self-propelled guns and tens of thousands of recruits from the empire. He replied to the minister: “The victory of colonialism, even at the other end of the world, is our defeat and the failure of our cause. The victory of freedom anywhere in the world is ... the signal of the approach of our independence.”

The succession of setbacks suffered by the French army in Indochina only heightened awareness of the need for solidarity among colonised people. Responding to this need, Algerian dockers working in the ports of Oran and Algiers refused to load war material bound for Indochina.

The Vietnamese also asked Abd El-Krim and the Moroccan Communist Party to send them a North African who could establish a psychological warfare network that would encourage North African troops within the French Expeditionary Corps in the Far East (CEFEO) to desert, join up with and !ght alongside the Vietnamese, and ultimately return to their home countries to fight the French colonisers. This role was taken on by M’hamed Ben Aomar Lahrach (alias Maarouf). A Moroccan, like Abd El-Krim, Maarouf was a trade unionist and a member of the Moroccan Communist Party.30 At the end of the 1940s, he travelled to Hanoi. He described his activities with North African soldiers in Vietnam, some of whom had indeed deserted the French side and were now fighting with the Vietnamese, and some of whom had been captured during the !ghting and were being held by the Viet Minh separately from White French prisoners of war:

"I try to create real villages for my Arab and Kabyle prisoners, I put them in self-contained huts, I manage to give them a life reminiscent of the country. We mustn’t make these guys Vietnamese; we must repatriate them as quickly as possible! They must remain themselves; they will form the cadres of our liberation armies ... I won’t let my Moroccan or Algerian deserters die."

In his appeals to North African soldiers fighting on the French side in Vietnam, and in his political education work with North African captives and those who were now fighting on the side of the Vietnamese, Maarouf’s message was “Go back home: these people, like you in Morocco, are fighting for their independence. … Return home and use your fighting spirit to liberate your country.” Above all, he sought to recuperate North Africans who were being used by the French as cannon fodder, and who found themselves lost in this distant Asian country, with the explicit aim of repatriating them as soon as possible to their own countries.

The effectiveness of Maarouf’s work is best demonstrated by the hun- dreds of Algerian repatriates who became effective military cadres for the FLN starting from 1954 / 1955. Maarouf’s activities in Vietnam were truly heroic: in addition to his activities with his fellow North Africans he participated in the arrest of French General De Castries in Dien Bien Phu. Testifying to the high esteem in which he was held, Ho Chi Minh gave him the name Anh Ma, which literally means ‘Brother Horse’, and the Vietnamese awarded him the rank of general, and decorated him with medals.

For France, Dien Bien Phu became a symbol of anachronistic obstinacy leading to catastrophe. For Vietnam, it was a symbol of the recovery of national independence. But Dien Bien Phu was also an historical event that reverberated outside these two countries: throughout the world, the battle was seen as a turning point that heralded the coming of other battles for liberation. The echoes of gunfire had barely subsided in the Tonkin valley when they were heard in the Aurès mountains in Algeria. And within less than a year, the ‘wretched of the earth’ gathered in Bandung. As for the colonialists, De Lattre, France’s commander-in-chief, confided to the officer he had put in charge of creating his Vietnamese army that they had to hold the imperial line: “it’s in Tonkin that we are defending our positions in Africa. Everything must be subordinated to this imperative”.

Today, it is in Gaza and the wider Middle East that US-led imperialism seeks to defend its global hegemony and to hold the imperial line. To do so, it has applied similarly brutal methods to those used by the French in Vietnam, including starvation of the civilian population. In the first Indochina war, the French focused on breaking the Vietnamese’s access to rice, as part of French General Raoul Salan’s order to ‘starve the adversary’ (Salan later founded the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a clandestine terrorist organisation that sought to prevent Algerian independence). The use of food as a weapon of war was by no means new, imperial armies have practised this form of warfare since antiquity, but the French were the first to apply this approach in a 20th-century war of decolonisation – with terrible consequences for the Vietnamese. In doing so, they collapsed the dividing line between combatants and civilians, and between the home front and the battle front. This was la guerre totale (total war), as advocated by General Lionel-Max Chassin, commander-in-chief of the French air force in Indochina during the early 1950s. Chassin insisted that such an approach was the only way to win a colonial war, arguing that “One must starve people to death”. In 1956, Chassin told his superior that he was “convinced that had we killed all of the water buffalos, destroyed all of the rice in Indochina, we would have had the Vietnamese at our mercy whenever we wanted”.

Similar logics prevailed in France’s attempt to ‘pacify’ Algeria between 1954 and 1962. They have again been at work in Israel’s total war on Gaza. What has taken place in Gaza over the last two years cannot only be described by the term genocide. Although it is almost impossible to find the right terminology to describe the level of destruction and death Israel has unleashed on Palestinians, a plethora of concepts are now being used to understand the enormity of what Israel has done: urbicide, scholasticide, domicide, ecocide, and holocide – the annihilation of an entire social and ecological fabric.

Excerpted with permission from Towards Palestinian Liberation: Global Perspectives on Anti-Colonial Resistance and Solidarity, published by Daraja Press.

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