| This Mere Men article has not been expanded past 1954 yet. |
| Algerian Republic للجمهورية الجزائرية (Arabic) Timeline: Mere Men
OTL equivalent: Algeria | ||||
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| Capital (and largest city) | Algiers | |||
| Official languages | Arabic | |||
| Religion | Islam | |||
| Demonym | Algerian | |||
| Government | Unitary semi-presidential republic | |||
| - | President | |||
| - | Prime Minister | |||
| Establishment | ||||
| - | French Algeria | 5 July 1830 | ||
| - | Independence | |||
| Time zone | CET | |||
Algeria, officially the Algerian Republic (Arabic: للجمهورية الجزائرية), is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. Although it is the largest country in Africa, most of the country is covered in the Sahara desert and most of its population lives on the Mediterrean coastline in the north. Algeria borders Mauritania, Mali and Niger to the south, being connected to the latter two by the Transsaharan railroad, Morocco to the west and Tunisia; it also additionally borders Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Chad through the disputed Fezzan region, which has been under Algerian control since the 1970s.
Algeria was populated by Arabs in the 7th century and experienced prosperity during the Regency of Algiers. During the 19th century, Algeria was conquered by France and became its integral part, which led to an influx of European settlers. An independence movement emerged in the 20th century, culminating in a guerilla war against the French, starting by the end of the Second World War and escalating in the 1950s. After achieving independence, Algeria was briefly a democratic republic before Abane Ramdane assumed control over the country as an authoritarian ruler.
History[]
French rule[]
Algeria had been an integral part of France by the start of the Second World War, but avoided most fighting of the Battle of France. The port at Mers El Kébir was a major base of the French Navy, but after the fall of France the navy was ordered to return to Toulon on the mainland. After Philippe Pétain proclaimed himself the Chief of State of France, the already harsh laws against native Arabs were tightened even further. Algeria served in part as a penal colony for the French government as many political and other prisoners, including a large amount of French Jews, were sent to forced labour on the Transsaharan railroad project, which would connect Oran in nothern Algeria with Dakar and other French possesions in West Africa. French control of Algeria was disrupted in 1943 after German forces occupied the mainland and Algeria was used by the Allies to commence an invasion of Italy. After the war, Algeria returned to France and the construction of the railroad was continued, largely financed from the American aid. France was also granted control of Fezzan to maintain order in the territory after formerly Italian Libya would be granted independence in 1958. While Ghat and surrounding area was attached directly to Algeria, the rest of Fezzan was nominally autonomous under hakim Ahmad Sayf an-Nasr, but since 1950 it too would start to be ruled remotely from Algiers.
In Algeria, nationalist movements were already present by the beginning of the Second World War, but as Messali Hadj and other leaders of the movement had been arrested in 1939, the movement was largely shattered. After the Allied troops entered the territory, hope emerged that Algeria would be granted independence after the war if it supported the Allied war effort and a manifesto calling for an independent and democratic Algeria was published by Ferhat Abbas. The return to French administration was met with disappointment among the Muslim Algerians and additionally Abbas and other newly emerging nationalist leaders were also arrested by the French authorities. New nationalist movements continued to form, however, and slowly turned toward guerilla warfare against the French as a means of achieving independence, seeing the successes of the Viet Cong in Vietnam, where many Algerian conscripts were sent. The most prominent separatist movement that formed was the Algerian Revolutionary Committee with Hocine Aït Ahmed as its leader and many later Algerian politicians such as Abane Ramdane, Benyoucef Benkhedda or Chadli Bendjedid as members. The group's popularity rose after Pétain's successor François Darlan recongised Vietnamese independence and withdrew from Indochina altogether.
With the formation of the French Fourth Republic in 1953, Algeria first gained political representation, when the government of France under François Darlan formalised Algerian status as French province in an attempt to discourage local separatism.