Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Pacification of Algeria" in English language version.
In Algeria, colonization and genocidal massacres proceeded in tandem. From 1830 and 1847, its European settler population quadrupled to 104,000. Of the native Algerian population of approximately 3 million in 1830, about 500,000 to 1 million people perished in the first three decades of French conquest.
The French conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s reached genocidal dimensions when Arab tribes under Abd al-Qadir launched successful attacks against the invaders. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, who later became an ardent critic of French exterminationist policies in Algeria, had been in favour of radical means to defeat Abd al-Qadir
In the last years of his life, Lemkin developed these ideas most fully in his research on French genocides against Algerians and Muslim Arab culture. In 1956, he collaborated with the chief of the UN Arab States Delegation Office, Muhammed H. El-Farra, to produce an article calling for the UN to charge French officials with genocide. The text that survives in Lemkin's archives contains his annotations and comments. It is notable that El-Farra wrote in language that closely resembles Lemkin's-that France was following a "long-term policy of exploitation and spoliation" in its colonial territories, squeezing nearly one million Arab colonial subjects into poverty and starvation in "conditions of life [that] have been deliberately inflicted on the Arab populations to bring about their destruction." The French authorities, El-Farra continued, "are committing national genocide by persecuting, exiling, torturing, and imprisoning arbitrarily and in conditions pernicious to their health, the Algerian leaders" who are responsible for carrying and promoting Algerian national consciousness and culture, including teachers, writers, poets, journalists, artists, and spiritual leaders in addition to political leaders.
Taking, for instance, the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Algerian case would certainly seem to meet its bar in terms of the availability of evidence that the French committed acts 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'.
In the last years of his life, Lemkin developed these ideas most fully in his research on French genocides against Algerians and Muslim Arab culture. In 1956, he collaborated with the chief of the UN Arab States Delegation Office, Muhammed H. El-Farra, to produce an article calling for the UN to charge French officials with genocide. The text that survives in Lemkin's archives contains his annotations and comments. It is notable that El-Farra wrote in language that closely resembles Lemkin's-that France was following a "long-term policy of exploitation and spoliation" in its colonial territories, squeezing nearly one million Arab colonial subjects into poverty and starvation in "conditions of life [that] have been deliberately inflicted on the Arab populations to bring about their destruction." The French authorities, El-Farra continued, "are committing national genocide by persecuting, exiling, torturing, and imprisoning arbitrarily and in conditions pernicious to their health, the Algerian leaders" who are responsible for carrying and promoting Algerian national consciousness and culture, including teachers, writers, poets, journalists, artists, and spiritual leaders in addition to political leaders.
