Elaine Mokhtefi

There were, however, ways around the problem. At UNESCO I was paid by the Tunisian delegation, at the FAO by the Italian government. The Paris office of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) refused to recognize the “clearance” during the years I worked there. Walter Binaghi of Argentina was the president of the organization and held firmly to a policy of independence with respect to the member countries, including the United States.
In Conakry, Guinea, at a meeting of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, I saw the petty machinations of Cold War politics at first hand. It was played out within the confines of a conference organized and financed by a pro-Communist international organization. The technicians, equipment, and interpreters had come from China, except for a Frenchwoman and me, who were hired by the Guinean government. On the eve of the conference, I was asked to interpret privately for the Guinean minister of justice, who was the French-speaking chairman of the conference, and the head of the Japanese delegation, who spoke fluent English. Their meeting was aimed at coordinating the positions of their delegations so as not to be outmaneuvered by the Communist delegations—and to avoid any condemnation of the United States in the final resolutions.
As the conference proceeded, a draft text on the Korean War that vilified the United States and called for Korean reunification was introduced in committee and passed. In the final hours of the conference, however, the Guinean chairman unabashedly refused to put that resolution to the vote of the plenary assembly. Delegates jumped from their seats in protest. The chairman called for order, to no avail. Losing all composure, waving his arms in an ugly gesture of rejection, he shouted, “Go back to Korea to settle the Korean question!” and stomped off the stage.
The Chinese technicians reacted in a flash, turning off the speakers’ and interpreters’ microphones, thereby shutting down not only the sound but the conference. As the delegates milled about in confusion and amazement, I watched from my post in the English-language booth as the two American observers in the visitors’ section left their seats and exited the hall.
Working from the WAY headquarters in Brussels, I organized the 1960 international congress in Accra, Ghana, Africa’s first independent postcolonial state. I also worked on tours for delegates to the newly sovereign countries of Togo, Dahomey (now Benin), Guinea, Senegal, and Mali. I plane-hopped to visit each country, passing through lean-to airdromes onto makeshift runways. Traveling in West Africa at the time was hazardous. Planes were few, while schedules were rarely respected, and reservations were subject to cancellation on a moment’s notice. Every trip was an adventure.

Algerians had been waging political battles against the colonizer since the 1920s, when Messali Hadj, the father of Algerian nationalism, founded the radical independence movement l’Étoile Nord-Africaine (the North African Star). Faced with bans, arrests, and death at the hands of France’s repressive forces, Algerians defended and reinvented themselves through the years. They raised new leaders and built new organizations: the Algerian People’s Party (PPA), the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD), the Special Organization (OS), the Movement for the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA), the Revolutionary Committee for Unity and Action (CRUA). When all else failed, they trained secretly and took up arms. With unsophisticated weapons—rusty, worn-down shotguns and rifles, bombs handmade from tin cans stuffed with powder—they struck.

On November 1, 1954, All Saints’ Day, twenty-two brave fighters launched a series of attacks against French colonial targets across Algeria. Under the name National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN), they called upon all Algerian nationalist organizations, all partisans of independence, to join them.

That small office was the official US headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, the FLN, the ALN (Armée de libération nationale), and all the other hands and feet of the revolution. The French complained often and bitterly to the State Department, even to the White House, about our office’s activities, against its very existence. They even objected to Algerians entering the United States on passports from friendly Arab countries. Washington replied that no US laws were being flouted.

Every Algerian home equipped with a radio was tuned to Radio Tunis or Radio Cairo nightly for news on the UN debate. Algerians who could get their hands on a foreign newspaper or the undercover edition of El Moudjahid, the revolution’s journal, followed the news out of New York. It was proof that the suffering and sacrifices they endured chimed with world opinion. That France was being accused, disparaged, and censured by dozens of delegates on the banks of the East River was cause for pride and reason to hope.

He once asked me what I wanted in a relationship. When I answered, “To put my head on someone’s shoulder,” he was adamant: “Non, non, non: stay upright on your own two feet and keep moving forward to goals of your own.” His words would come back to me often, and I have repeated them to others in need of that advice, as I was at the time

We couldn’t have been more different. Mohamed was sharp, quick to react; Frantz relentless and analytic. I was the willing, admiring apprentice of both. Along with Maurice Mpolo, the militant Congolese minister of youth, in uniform, who represented President Patrice Lumumba, they stood out among the delegates. They had put their lives on the line for freedom and justice. A few months later Mpolo would be executed alongside Lumumba

He and I spoke, making a connection immediately. He told me later that his first thought was that I was French. When he realized I was not, he was relieved: we could empathize.

Most came to attend the annual fall sessions of the United Nations: Minister of War Krim Belkacem;7 Benyoucef Benkhedda, future president of the provisional government; Minister of Information Mhamed Yazid; Mohamed Benyahia, future minister of information and later of foreign affairs; Lakhdar Brahimi, future minister of foreign affairs and UN special envoy to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; Ahmed Boumendjel,8 future minister of public works; Ahmed Taleb, future minister of information, of education, of foreign affairs; Ali Yahia Abdennour, minister and president of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights; and others.

When the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, the GPRA, was formed in September 1958 and sought recognition around the world, de Gaulle, obsessed with the war’s impact on France’s reputation, warned of dire consequences for countries recognizing the Algerian “state” in exile. He put pressure on those responding positively to the Algerian initiative, denigrating some, cajoling and attempting to buy off others. But the GPRA put an efficient set-up in place, with the attributes of a government that commanded respect, whereas French policy at the UN and with its allies was descending into mayhem. In that same month of October 1960, the USSR recognized the GPRA, de facto if not de jure. The Asian Communist countries—North Vietnam, North Korea and China, an early purveyor of arms—recognized the GPRA de jure in its first month of existence. The Soviet Union was, however, also an early supplier under cover of Syria and Egypt. Other Warsaw Pact nations had been providing not only scholarships and training, but arms and munitions for several years.

In Conakry in early 1960, as I made my rounds to organize West African tours for the WAY congress to be held that summer in Accra, I was contacted by a small group of Angolans who had formed an organization called MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), unknown at the time to the outside world. We met in a bare, thatched-roof hut on the outskirts of the Guinean capital, the group’s first foothold in Africa. Here I found a handful of silent men around their spokesman, who asked me to press their case abroad. Armed activity inside Angola had not yet begun, but the Portuguese dictator António Salazar had outlawed the new organization and arrested some of its leaders. The group provided me with documents in French and Portuguese that I translated and distributed to UN delegations.