Drif-Bitat, Zohra

Zohra Drif-Bitat is a retired lawyer and long-time member of the Algerian senate, but she is best known for her participation in the armed wing of the Islamic Algerian nationalist movement of the 1950s. Although many, particularly the French far right, still view her as a terrorist, it is a label she rejects. She is unapologetic for the role she and her companions played in the so-called Café Wars, insisting that the National Liberation Front (FLN) was an organization of freedom fighters determined to deliver Algeria from French tyranny.

In the 1950s, young Zohra Drif, the daughter of a respected Islamic judge, was living with her family in Algiers, the capital city of what was then French-occupied Algeria. Nationalism had been on the increase in Algeria since the post-World War I era, and by 1954, the FLN had emerged as the strongest of the native Islamic Algerian nationalist parties. As a high school student, Drif had learned of the massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Sétif at the end of World War II, when an estimated 45,000 deaths/injuries occurred-an incident that many historians consider a main cause of the Algerian war of independence. By the time she was a first-year law student at Algiers University, the guillotining of Ahmed Zabane and Abelkader Ferradj, two FNL members, in Barberousse Prison had radicalized her. Drif joined the FLN's underground network in 1955. She says that she made a conscious choice of violence in 1956 because political response to French violence had proved ineffective.

The FLN, whose activities had been mostly guerrilla tactics in the countryside, decided in 1956 to extend the conflict to urban areas and to call a nationwide general strike timed to coincide with the United Nations’ consideration of the Algerian situation. The opening attack in the new campaign was to be the Battle of Algiers, which would begin with three women placing bombs at three carefully selected sites, including the downtown office of Air France. One of the three women was Zohra Drif.

The 20-year-old Drif was not only beautiful, but also possessed European features-a fact that meant she could blend undetected among the French residents of Algeria. On September 30, 1956, Drif and the other two women involved in the attack removed their veils, dyed and cut their hair, and disguised themselves in the summer dresses worn by European women. The disguises allowed them to pass through military checkpoints to complete their mission. Drif entered the Milk Bar, a popular gathering spot for Europeans returning from a day at the beach. On this Sunday, it was filled with mothers with their children. Drif pushed her bomb-laden beach bag under a chair, paid her check, and left. Within minutes, the scene literally shattered, with shards from the heavy glass walls proving lethal. Three people were dead and more than 50 were injured-a dozen of them with amputated limbs. The bombing captured international media attention and called the world's attention to the war in Algeria, fulfilling the FLN goal of internationalizing their struggle.

Over the next months, the FLN continued its campaign. Authorities were determined to crush those they deemed terrorists, and one act of terror was countered with another. The FLN proved they could strike targets even in the French stronghold of Algiers, Moreover, their appeal to urban Muslims was demonstrably strengthening, and the brutality and torture used by the army was creating doubts in France itself about the French role in Algiers.

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