‘They Have Rights over Us’

This chapter turns away from partisan politics to analyse the development of the Algerian veterans’ movement over the course of the interwar period. It considers organizations that drew members not only from different ethnic and social backgrounds but also from a pool of men with an unparalleled claim to legitimacy born of participation in the war. The chapter focuses on the attempts of one such veterans’ association, the Amicale des Mutilés du Département d’Alger, to reconcile its supposedly non-racial notion of veteran primacy with the real primacy of the European community in the colonial state. Furthermore, it illustrates how the tensions at the heart of the Amicale’s discourse empowered indigenous veterans to assert their demands within the movement and eventually to set up their own organizations that were fully committed to achieving real change on behalf of indigenous ex-servicemen.