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   Vol.65/No.42            November 5, 2001 
 
 
Algeria wins one in Paris match
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BY NAT LONDON  
PARIS--As shocked government ministers, politicians, and assorted personalities looked on, hundreds, then thousands, and finally many thousands of young people greeted the singing of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, with a growing crescendo of whistles, boos, and catcalls. According to participants, most of the 80,000 sports fans who filled the Stade de France soccer stadium to overflowing approved the action. "We booed La Marseillaise to give encouragement to our soccer team," one young sports fan from a working-class Paris suburb told a national television network. "We did it to support our country--Algeria."

The October 6 exhibition match between the national teams of France and Algeria--billed as an act of "reconciliation"--was the first such event since Algeria won its independence from France in 1962 following a bitter seven-year conflict.

The stadium was a sea of Algerian flags. With France leading 4-1, hundreds of supporters of the Algerian team, some of them shouting, "bin Laden, bin Laden," invaded the playing field, forcing the cancellation of the match. Two government officials, Labor Minister Elisabeth Guigou and Sports and Youth Minister Marie-George Buffet, a leader of the French Communist Party and principal organizer of the exhibition match, were slightly injured by flying projectiles, while Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was evacuated by his bodyguards. "I only wanted to bring about a Franco-Algerian rapprochement," said Buffet.

"Our working-class suburbs have become an Islamic fifth column," complained Philippe De Villiers, the president of the right-wing party, Mouvement pour la France. "Almost all the 70,000 'Algerian' supporters were French citizens.... There are 5 million Muslims in France, not all of whom are terrorists or even religious fanatics. But they are easy prey for recruitment to networks led from Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia."

The Algerian national soccer team was formed in clandestine conditions in 1958 when Mohamed Boumezrag, a leader of the section of the National Liberation Front of Algeria based in metropolitan France, returned from the 1957 International Youth Festival. Using the contacts he had made during the festival, Boumezrag recruited nine of the best known French national champion players to secretly leave the country and go to Tunisia where the Algerian national team was formally proclaimed on April 13. The World Football Federation announced that any team that played the Algerians would be expelled from the world championships, and the French government succeeded in arresting other players who tried to leave the country to join the team. Despite this harassment, the Algerian team played 91 matches over the next four years and helped win international recognition for the Algerian struggle for independence.  
 
 
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