population towards Europe as had never before been seen.
French and Arab intellectuals had always pursued a policy of reconciliation, first with the FLN and then with its successors. It had been a useless exercise since the ruling elite refused concession, anchored in corruption, bound in its pseudo-socialist rhetoric. They preferred their version of a free market, without capital, without real markets, in reality giving priority to personal enrichment, which after all was what they really aspired to.
The majority of Maghribis had been rejected by their own governments; elitist, dirigiste and Francophone, frozen in a lay concept inherited from a colonial past.
To attack Islam was to attack everything that was sacred; it was an attack on the whole population and its identity. Islam was the refusal of westernisation or its concept of a liberal economy, and to the eyes of many an authoritarian modernity.
Once again, the transhumance from North Africa to the shores Europe commenced, adding to the ten million Muslims already present, enflaming the rightwing traditionalists and nationalists.
Between three and four million Algerians took refuge in France, Spain and Italy within the space of a few weeks. In France the reception centres established in the hangars of the ports of Marseille, Toulon and Sete were soon overflowing. The government created a committee to handle the crisis and to manage the exodus as in 1962, when in three months more than a million French fled Algeria, using the same procedures to provide assistance to the refugees on their arrival in Marseille and Toulon.
The France that greeted the new arrivals and refugees was a social paradise; five weeks annual vacation, a guaranteed minimum salary regularly readjusted to taken into account the cost of living, free education and health services guaranteed by law with generous retirement benefits provided by the state. A veritable paradise, where even the most underprivileged were provided with an allowance of five hundred Euros a month, accommodation assistance and universal health cover, a fabulous package to poor unemployed immigrants from the slums of Africa.
The wave unfurled, submerging Marseille and its region where the unemployment rate was already nearing twenty percent, provoking an explosion of protestation and demonstrations from the population.
“The deluge is threatening to drown us!” cried the Renaissance Party.
But the refugees were not only those with official visas. There were those who arrived by sea, as the boat peoples of Vietnam in the eighties, the infiltrators from China and Kurdistan, the Africans who arrived in the Canaries in the first decade of the century. They left in fishing boats, pleasure boats, old cargo ships and almost any kind of floating hulk that could take to the sea. There were also joined by Africans who took advantage of the chaos, crossing the Sahara in taxis, buses and trucks, on camels and even by foot. The door was closing and it was an occasion not to be missed.
From the Moroccan coast, they even tried to swim across the Straits of Gibraltar; their bodies covered the beaches of Algeciras and southern Spain by the hundreds and thousands. The Spanish coast guard was powerless before such a flood, refugees debarking day and night along its southern Mediterranean coastline.
They debarked in vast numbers, in chaotic disorder along the Mediterranean coasts of France, where government and humanitarian organisations struggled to handle the flood by setting up camps in the region between Marseille and Toulon.
The population of Marseille had already a high proportion of North Africans, transforming the traditional easy going cosmopolitan image of the city with certain quarters becoming severely run down like a struggling copy of Algiers. With the fall of the FLN and creation of the Caliphate the trickle of refugees became a flood. The French fled to the north as the number of Arabs reached fifty percent and continued to grow.
The creation of Algharb had been the consequence of pressure exerted on France by the Federation led by Germany. The reaction of the French government came too late and the country was confronted with the transformation of one of its most beautiful region, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, into a North African colony.
After World War II the governments of France, all political tendencies included, had encouraged the arrival of workers from its former North African colonies and protectorates. The objective had been to provide the labour necessary for the country’s reconstruction and industrialisation after the war to re-establish its position as a leader in Europe.
At the time of the first wave of migrant workers, Algeria had been part of France and the other North African countries were under French domination, the arrival of immigrant workers was almost without formality and restrictions.
The flow continued in all its forms after independence, without interruption for fifty years, either in the form of pure and simple settlement, or by the right of family unification, together with those qualified as political refugees. Whatever the motives the movement was accepted and encouraged by the left and right in spite of the cries of alarm by the vast majority of the French, who were ignored or accused of racism and belonging the extreme right. They were no more racist than the others, but were helpless witnesses to the changes that were taking place in the country. They simply refused to accept the transformation that was taking place and the rejection of their traditional values.
However, the changes of the traditional values of France continued over three generations, unquestioned or ignored. Islam became the third, then the second religion of France. Many French citizens in search of spiritual guidance were converted to the new religion, an Islam that as a religion was tolerant and discreet, but in the hands of politically motivated men it became an instrument of power.
The Frenchified bearded zealots took advantage of their numbers to demand rights and exceptions from the politicians who were afraid to be seen as racist. In the cities of France the Neos took the place of the French workers, who with better education had aspired to jobs with improved prospects and living standards, moving on to better residential neighbourhoods.
The result was that in the year 2000, certain neighbourhoods in large and medium sized cities were inhabited by populations that were one hundred percent new arrivals or established Neos, and for a large majority North African or sub-Sahara African. Integration was impossible as the ghettos became isolated, and given the tradition of large families, the Neo population grew and flowed over from their housing estates taking over entire neighbourhoods.
The French moved on, more concerned by their own economic well being, whilst the government refused to see the problem, treating it as a simple social question and not the installation of ethnic groups having different and conflicting priorities.
General educational standards amongst the Neo populations were often disastrous, which in turn favoured the introduction and success of Islamic schools, resulting in the establishment of Islamic values and the progressive use of spoken Arabic.
The independence of Algeria and its revolution resulted in the introduction into that country of an alien system - socialism - based on the soviet model. The failure of this system was the failure of an alien system, imported from Europe, and the Algerian people democratically chose Islam, but they were cheated of their victory by the Military government with the country continuing under the iron control of the corrupt generals and their apparatchiks, a completely obsolete system that had not changed in almost forty years.
The consequence was a long struggle by the Islamists who progressively won the support of the majority of the country’s citizens tired of state violence and the hopelessness of their situation. The FLN had thrown a whole generation into the arms of the Islamists before it was swept from power by a violent and bloody revolution, the cause of the first wave of refugees towards Europe and more especially France.
Algiers became even more sinister and oppressed than ever. Women disappeared from the cafés and restaurants, at public beaches their veiled or dressed in black from head to foot. Women were no longer equal to men under Koranic law, the veil had become obligatory, even for school girls,
and finally women were excluded from higher education.
When Israel finally settled their difference with the Palestinians with the creation of the Greater Turkish Levant, extremist Islamic movements slowly lost their influence; nevertheless Islam remained the only political and moral alternative to a discredited political system, incapable of replying to the aspirations of an impoverished population.
War and peace in the Middle East had had their effects on the world economy through the price of oil, which rose and fell dramatically with each successive crisis. In 1970 its price was three dollars a barrel, rising to thirty-two in 1980 creating a huge mass of capital in petrodollars, then falling back, momentarily, to twenty in 2000, before rising to one hundred dollars at the end of the decade.
After the boom in the early part of the century, the world economy entered a long deflationary period; the result was oil-producing countries saw their revenues fall steeply with barely enough capital to finance the most modest developments.
Those who had dreamed of another Singapore in Gaza after the Camp David agreement had not allowed for the tribalism of the Arab world or the profound factional disputes that tore the Palestinians apart. During three generations each