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Individual land grants made Muslim recipients assassination targets and backfired

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tagsja-picks, seed, question, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@horne_savage_1977, loc. 476

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Individual land grants made Muslim recipients assassination targets and backfired

Evidence

Optimistically, it was hoped that 10,000 landless families might be settled on 150,000 hectares, but this first timid attempt at agrarian reform, well-intentioned as it was, played disastrously into the hands of the F.L.N. Jean Servier recalls how, after a parcel of land had been handed over to a fellah, he “immediately found himself condemned to death. A few days later a patrol found the body of the happy proprietor with his throat slit in his own field.” As a result few Muslim peasants henceforth had the courage to come forward to accept the French bounty. In Servier’s view it would have been more sensible to redistribute the land to communities instead of individuals — because then the F.L.N. would be forced to kill a whole village, and the villagers might have been encouraged to protect the land collectively. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 476

Categorization

  • SEED: A counterintuitive case study: well-intentioned agrarian reform that armed the insurgency against the colonizer’s own beneficiaries — usable for an essay on how top-down reform can feed insurgency.
  • QUESTION: Was individual-vs-communal land redistribution ever seriously tested as an alternative in French Algeria?
  • XREF: connects to: Provocation terrorism backfires by accelerating the settlement it aims to prevent — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1548; OAS targeted elite Muslims to force reliance on the Europeans — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1575

Broader Connections

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