Key advocate of diplomacy ending Algerian war talks Gaza at documentary screening

Dec. 7 (UPI) -- An English translator and anticolonial activist who championed efforts that led to the United Nations resolution ending Algeria's war of independence from France blasted Israel's war in Gaza at a special screening of a documentary about the Algerian war in New York on Friday.

Elaine Mokhtefi had a significant but behind-the-scenes role in Algeria's fight for independence working as a translator and activist to help Algerian delegates craft their messaging for addressing the U.N. when much of the world was pressured by the colonial power France and its ally, the United States.

She attended the screening of Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels organized by art historian Maura McCreight at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan. Mila Turajlic, the director of the 2022 documentary, also attended with a lively crowd of viewers from North African countries like Tunisia.

"What struck me watching Mila's film was how stories of revolutionary struggle, transnational solidarity, and the power of visual media remained as urgent today as ever," McCreight said. "I am referring to the 76-year-long struggle of the Palestinians, human rights, and the innate right of all human beings on Palestinian soil to self-determination."

The film specifically follows the late Stevan Labudović, a Yugoslavian cameraman who was handpicked by President Josep Broz Tito in 1960 to document the Algerian war because he saw parallels between Algerian resistance and the resistance of Yugoslavians against Nazi occupation during World War II.

"It was a difficult period where no one in the United States was interested and people knew little about Algeria and less about the war and were very influenced by the French," Mokhtefi said.


The films Labudović made had an effect in chipping away at the tremendous influence of the French, Mokhtefi said. She noted that France released 20 colonies just to try to keep Algeria and it kept a heavy hand on those colonies when they became independent states.

Mokhtefi said, "The United States backed France all the way to such a point that there was an American armament, American planes being used by the French, the French were being financed by the United States," which provides military assistance and other funding to Israel.

To get his footage, Labudović embedded with Algerian militants-later described as terrorists by the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy, much like Israel and the United States and their allies today describe Palestinian groups like Hamas.

Mokhtefi noted before the film was screened that France had portrayed Algerian resistance fighters as anything but a real army, which it said doesn't exist. Israel likewise has denied Palestinians the right to a fighting force as it defines militias like Hamas as terrorists. "You'll see a real army," Mokhtefi said of how Labudović depicted the Algerians.

Scenes from the film are resonant to anyone who has followed the Gaza war since it began on October 7, 2023. For example, Labudović points to the location of a refugee camp along Algeria's border with Tunisia and discusses protests and demonstrations in the streets of Algiers.

The Yugoslavian cameraman was one of the few documenting the Algerian side of the conflict when French newsreels were showing pro-colonial propaganda. France engaged in efforts to remove him from the battlefield as his films were then shown within Algeria and to the United Nations to convince them to support Algerian independence.

Likewise, Israel has killed at least 135 journalists and media workers in Gaza and Lebanon since the war began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And earlier this year, the Israeli government raided and shuttered Al Jazeera, forcing the news broadcaster to report from outside of Israel.

After the war, Labudović films were locked away in a vault in what is now Serbia upon the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Viewing them requires special permission from the Algerian government, which granted Turajlic special access because her film focused on the life of Labudović-who is considered a national hero in Algeria.

The French newsreels often said the Algerian people supported French colonialism similarly to how Israel often argues that its Arab citizens have full rights and representation, though human rights groups have long contested that claim. And French newsreels, like Israel's where dialogues like "Free Palestine-From Hamas" abound, paint the Arab population as void of a future without their intervention.

"The French also made newsreels. What did their newsreels say," Turajlic asks Labudović at one point. He responded, "Their newsreels said the opposite of what I was making. They couldn't have told the truth, of how they tortured, so they told fairy tales." And while Palestinians allege facing rape and torture, Israel has defended its actions.

"Who would accept an occupier who tortures and maims," Labudović said in the film. Later in the film, Labudović's wife notes that France didn't consider Algeria to be a colony. It considered it a part of France. Now, Israel's far-right politicians have called for illegally annexing Palestinian land as the country continues to approve illegal settlements.

And while the United States continues to be the sole veto of any U.N. Security Council draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel itself has pushed back against every U.N. agency that challenges it from the UNRWA to UNIFIL.

"At the moment our reporter's camera filmed this event, the U.N. began a debate on 'the Algerian question.' The French government refused to participate claiming the situation was an internal problem of France," an announcer on one of Labudović's newsreel reads in the documentary like a past echo of what is happening today.

Mokhtefi told the crowd that, after the war, in 1968, she was walking in the streets of Algiers and people were crying from the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War as Israel clamped down on movement in occupied Palestinian territories and began the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.

"Friends of mine came to visit me and just sat on the couch and cried for Palestine and they had always had a strong feeling for them for their tragedy of the Palestinians, but they thought it was very close to their own struggle," Mokhtefi said. "I imagine that has continued today."

Mokhtefi continued to work as a translator after the war and married an Algerian man who had fought in the war for independence. She also continued to be involved in elements of anticolonial activism, threading together representatives from various anti-colonial factions globally that visited Algeria for diplomatic or training purposes.

Turajlic said she found correspondence between Mokhtefi and Kathleen Cleaver, a prominent leader of the Black Panther movement in the U.S. The translator helped the Black Panthers take a position on the decadeslong Palestinian conflict.

In the 1970s, Labudović himself was sent to Palestine to make a documentary about Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. "All of this footage is in Belgrade, none of it has been digitized and there is no project by the Serbian government to do so," Turajlic said of Labudović's Palestinian footage.

And while students in the United States have received criticism for engaging in campus protests against the war in Gaza, Mokhtefi said that she too became involved with politics shortly after leaving high school. She blasted schools like Columbia University, near where she lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for how they have handled the protests.

"There was a really concerted strategy behind the media efforts to internationalize the question and to create a situation where it was morally untenable for France to remain in Algeria," Turajlic said after the screening.

"I find it so striking that the same mechanism has been deployed today but the world isn't reacting in the way it reacted in the 1960s. Where is the world's moral outrage they managed to successfully harness in the 1960s that for some reason is missing today?"