Equality among the Refugees: A Rancièrean View of Montréal's Sans-Status Algerians

ABSTRACT The political status and movements of refugees and sans-papiers has become a focal point for French political thought, but also more universally in the wake of globalisation. We have witnessed the issue here in the US in the debate over immigration. In France, Alain Badiou's Organisation Politique, for instance, has coined the phrase, in regard to France's sanspapiers, 'all those who are here are from here.' However, if we follow closely the events of 2002 and after among the Algerian refugees of Montreal, what emerges is a case study in politics as conceived by Jacques Ranciere. This paper details both the movement and its implicitly Rancierean underpinnings. I will include an overview of Ranciere's political thought. What is attempted in this paper, as part of a larger project that will examine other contemporary political movements, is to show how a politics can look in our world, and thus to begin to efface the line that is often drawn between political theory and political activism. On May 12, 2002, three or four dozen people gathered in a small hall in Montreal. They heard several speakers discuss the recent years of their lives. One of those speakers was a young woman named Amel, who had three children. She had arrived in Montreal in 1999, during the height of the Algerian civil war. Like thousands of other Algerians, she had asked for refugee status. She explained to the gathering that, I had two addresses in Blida, two of my children were born in Algiers. I lived in Blida but my passport was issued in Algiers. This sufficed to convince them [the immigration commission] to refuse me refugee status.'1 Another refugee, Ryad had vowed never to leave Algeria, but finally did after he received five bullet wounds as he was leaving his house one day in Algeria. His crime was that of being the brother of someone who wrote pamphlets denouncing the Islamic fundamentalists. He had also been refused asylum, and therefore was among the thousand or so Algerians living in Montreal who had the status of sans-statut; that is, the status of no status. Why were these people gathered here on this particular evening? The May 12 meeting was called in response to an announcement that, except for what happened after May 12, would have gone largely unnoticed among the Canadian people. A month earlier, on April 5, the Canadian minister of immigration, Denis Coderre, had lifted a moratorium on deporting Algerians refused asylum or immigrant status that had been in place since 1997. The original moratorium had itself been enacted in response to the continuing violence of Algeria's civil war, a violence that had eventually claimed the lives of over 150,000 Algerians. The civil war, which is not entirely over yet, had begun in 1992, when the first round of national election results indicated that the likely winner was the Islamic Salvation Front, the FIS. The army, composed of members of the resistance movement against the French occupation that lasted until 1962, cancelled the election and proceeded to govern without an electoral mandate. At that point, the FIS took up arms and began killing government officials, and then civilians, and eventually massacring whole villages. The government's response, if not equally brutal, was certainly brutal enough.2 Caught in the middle of this civil war was the Berber population, descendents of the people who lived in Algeria before the arrival of Islam and the Arabic-speaking population. The Berbers, sometimes called Kabylians because of the region in Algeria where many of them are concentrated, were often targeted by both sides. Although they were not the subject of some of the most notorious massacres, they were often targeted because they were active in their own self-defense from early on in the civil war. They formed a large percentage of the refugees that came to Canada. But why Canada? In her 2003 thesis Julie Mareschal, who stuthed the Berber refugee movement, explained that there were three reasons. …

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