The Secret History behind the Algerian – German World Cup Duel
By Mathilde von
Bülow, Guest Author
An epic World
Cup encounter between Germany and Algeria in Brazil’s Porto Alegre traces its
roots to Algeria’s resistance to French colonialism and a secret history of Algerian-German
football relations that helped the North Africans achieve independence.
For Algerians,
the match in which they were knocked out of the 2014 World Cup also was an
opportunity to replay a World Cup game of 32 years ago that was widely seen to
have been fixed by Germany and Austria. Austria was accused of deliberately
playing a 1:0 score line against Germany in a successful bid to ensure that the
two teams progressed to the next round at Algeria’s expense.
It dashed
Algerian hopes and expectations at a time that the country celebrated the
twentieth anniversary of its hard-fought independence from France. The players
were filled with a sense of national duty, conscious that they were the heirs
of Algeria’s first national football team.
Founded in exile
in April 1958 by the National Liberation Front (FLN), the movement that
spearheaded the independence struggle, Algeria’s football squad had been a powerful
symbol of Algerian resistance to French colonialism. Capitalising on football’s mass appeal, the
squad served as an effective propaganda tool through which to rally Algerians
to the FLN’s cause, forge a distinct national identity, and impress upon world
opinion the patriotism, skill, discipline, and tenacity of the Algerian people
in their struggle for freedom. Several of the FLN’s original players went on to
form the new national team after freedom was won. Some continued to serve on
the 1982 squad’s coaching and managerial staff.[1]
The 1982 match
was not Algeria and Germany’s first footballing encounter. The two sides had met once before, on New Year’s Day 1964, after Germany’s
Mannschaft became the first Western
team to be invited to Algeria for a friendly that Algeria won 2-0.[2]
Considering
that the FLN’s original football team never actually played a match in, or
against, West Germany during the independence struggle, the fact that Algeria’s
Football Federation invited the Mannschaft
as one of the first teams to play its newly formed squad seemed rather odd, as
did the West German Football Federation’s decision to accept. After all, the
Algerian Federation had yet to join world soccer body FIFA, which, in response
to French pressure, had threatened harsh penalties against those who engaged
with the FLN’s team.
What’s more,
Federal Germany had been one of France’s staunchest allies all throughout the
Algerians’ independence struggle. The Bonn government had refused to have
anything to do with the FLN until after independence[3]
when Cold-War rivalries kicked in and Bonn feared that the government of Ahmed Ben
Bella government, with all the prestige it enjoyed in the Third World, might recognise
East instead of West Germany. It took the persuasive power of ‘chequebook
diplomacy’ for Bonn to stave off this nightmare scenario, which for a while at
least seemed like a real possibility considering East Germany’s generous aid to
the FLN throughout its fight for national liberation.[4]
The Secret History of Algerian-German
Relations
And yet, this
official narrative obscures a complex, often secret, history of connections
between the two countries that runs far deeper than is generally known. The
Bonn government might have shunned the FLN and all its representatives during Algeria’s
war of independence, but this didn’t stop the movement from setting up safe
houses, forgeries, bank accounts, training camps, and even a quasi-diplomatic
bureau in West Germany that helped sustain the fight against France.
In 1958, Germany
became a base from which the FLN launched and coordinated the second front of
its war in metropolitan France; it served as a hub for the clandestine transfer
of militants, army deserters, and funds from the metropole to North Africa; and
it became a preferred location where the FLN could secretly procure arms,
munitions, radio communications equipment and other vital supplies. These
activities created constant and severe tensions between the governments in Bonn
and Paris that accused the Germans of harbouring terrorists.
The FLN, meanwhile,
had become so effective at subversion that the German security services never
quite managed to catch up with them. On more than one occasion this prompted
the French secret services to intervene directly, sometimes with unintended and
deadly consequences.
Meanwhile, West
Germany also became a vital sanctuary for thousands of Algerian refugees
fleeing from police repression, political violence, and internecine warfare in metropolitan
France and North Africa. Largely young,
unskilled or semi-skilled, destitute male workers with no knowledge of German
who had left their families in Algeria to make a living in France’s industrial
centres, these refugees posed a social, political, and diplomatic problem for
Bonn.
The FLN’s
supporters pressured the government unrelentingly to extend political asylum to
the Algerians. French authorities, meanwhile, insisted on the refugees’
immediate transfer into their custody, arguing that they were likely to be rebels,
criminals and terrorists. Faced with these conflicting pressures and
constrained by legal restrictions, the Bonn government had no choice but to
tolerate the Algerians’ presence so long as they refrained from political or
subversive activities, though it denied them refugee status.
As such the
Algerians’ existence in West Germany remained precarious. If securing work,
shelter, and subsistence proved a daily challenge, it was rendered all the more
difficult by mutual incomprehension and colonial stereotypes that informed
German reactions to the new, darker-skinned arrivals in their midst.
Most refugees
depended on the charity and assistance of local aid organisations, trade union
branches, student associations and leftist political movements to secure their
basics. In many cities, local aid committees emerged to help the new arrivals. They
arranged shelter, mediated on the Algerians’ behalf with the authorities,
provided legal council, organised jobs and apprenticeships, and raised funds
for scholarships and language tuition. Even those who benefited from this help
found life in Germany tough as is evident from reports by the aid committees and
Algerian trade union representatives.
In one letter,
dated April 1961 that was written in broken German to Willi Richter, head of
the West German Federation of Trade Unions (DGB), 24 Algerians selected to
participate in an 18-month training programme, expressed their heartfelt thanks
for the DGB’s generosity in funding their education. They were particularly
grateful for the DGB’s additional donation of 24 football kits, including
cleats.
Faced with the
material and psychological pressures of exile from a brutal and dirty conflict
that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions others,
both internally and externally, the chance to play football represented a
welcome and needed release for the Algerians, a brief respite during which one
could forget the burdens or war and enjoy life. Football also provided them an
opportunity to communicate and bond with their German hosts in a shared
language and on an equal playing field. As the Algerians proudly informed
Richter, the kits and cleats “already helped us to one victory in a football
match when we played against a team composed of young German colleagues.”[5]
Just like the FLN’s national team, these young men used the sport to impress
upon their opponents that Algerians, too, were people of worth whose only
obstacle to realising their full potential was the colonial oppression they
were forced to endure.
Football Diplomacy
As a result, football
played an important role in facilitating and generating German-Algerian mutual
understanding and respect at a time when official relations between the two
countries did not exist. Racial stereotypes and daily hardships aside, the
interaction such matches fostered helped turn the tide of West German public
opinion against ‘French Algeria’ and for the FLN.
The German
national team may have never played a game against the FLN’s squad, but this
did not prevent Eintracht Frankfurt – the club that had won the 1959 West
German football championship – to invite several members of the Algerian squad,
who were passing through Frankfurt over Christmas that same year, as guests of
honour to one of its matches.[6]
Eintracht extended this gesture despite the fact that the Algerians were
returning from an extended visit to Communist China and in opposition to FIFA. Simple
as it was, the club’s gesture constituted a symbolic act of respect for, and
solidarity with, the Algerian team.
Ironically, an Algerian
win in this year’s match against Germany in Porto Alegre would have set the
Algerian squad up for an even more historic encounter: a quarterfinal against
their country’s former colonial hegemon in a year in which Algeria celebrates the
60s anniversary of the launch of the FLN insurgency against France.
One can only
imagine the pandemonium that would have ensued, not just in Algeria, but also
in France. After all, the country is home to millions of French citizens of
Algerian descent; 17 of the Algerian squad’s 23 players were born there; and
racial tensions remain a constant problem.[7]
Mathilde von Bülow is a lecturer in
international and imperial history at the University of Nottingham. She is
completing a monograph for Cambridge University Press that examines West
Germany’s role as a rebel sanctuary during the Algerian war of independence.
[1]
Michel Naït-Challal et Rachid Mekloufi, Dribbleurs
de l’indépendance: l’incroyable histoire de l’équipe de football du FLN
algérien (Paris: Editions Prolongations, 2008); Kader Abderrahim, L’indépendance comme seul but (Paris-Méditerranée,
2008).
[3] Jean-Paul Cahn and Klaus-Jürgen
Müller, La République federal d’Allemagne
et la guerre d’Algérie, 1954-1962 (Paris: Le Félin, 2003); Nassima
Bougherara, Les rapports franco-allemands
à l’épreuve de la question algérien (1955-1963) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006).
[4] On East German relations to the FLN,
see Fritz Taubert, La guerre d’Algérie et
la République Démocratique Allemande (Editions universitaires de Dijon,
2010).
[5] Archiv der sozialen Demokratie,
Bonn, Nachlass des DGB, Akte 5/DGAJ/000207, Brief von Saïd Rabah et al an Willi
Richter, 28 April 1961.
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