A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (113 page)

Of the non-military contingent who put themselves on the wrong side of the law, Pierre Lagaillarde remained in Spain until the amnesty, and then returned to be a small-town lawyer in the French provinces, abandoning any grandiose political pretension. For a time Jo Ortiz ran a night-club in Majorca, but — finding the language of his forebears difficult to master — also returned to the south of France after 1968 to pursue his vocation. Dr Jean-Claude Pérez, the O.A.S. chief of operations and Degueldre’s superior, made his way from Spain to South America and then to Paris, where he created a thriving medical practice. He talked volubly and uninhibitedly about the O.A.S. and its
opérations ponctuelles
, stating that he would be prepared to “act” again if it were necessary. Georges Bidault, the former Resistance leader who was once de Gaulle’s Foreign Minister and who inherited Salan’s mantle, spent four and a half years in exile in Brazil after being refused entry to the United States, and then returned to retire in Paris, a sick, lonely, and embittered man. Some of the former O.A.S. leaders continued to remain at odds with the law, organising bank raids in France’s Mediterranean cities, to culminate with the famous “sewer coup” of 1976 in Nice. In 1977 the “Delta” squads raised their ugly heads again, claiming the random killing of an Algerian night-watchman in Paris. Other murders have been laid at the door of the O.A.S., such as that of Prince Jean de Broglie, one of de Gaulle’s negotiating team at Evian; and, in 1978, of Henri Curiel, a mysterious international agent of part Jewish and Egyptian blood, allegedly with K.G.B. connections, who aided F.L.N. networks abroad during the war. Both murders remain unsolved.

French leaders and “grands colons”

The only one among the “fallen angels” to be again prominently active in politics was Jacques Soustelle, de Gaulle’s wartime intelligence chief and the governor-general most beloved of the
pieds noirs
. In exile from 1962 onwards (when, he claims, at least two attempts — once in Brussels, once in Lisbon — were made to kidnap him
à la
Argoud), Soustelle characteristically refused to accept the amnesty of 1968 — on the grounds that he had committed no crime. Eventually he won his point and returned once more to being — briefly — Deputy for Lyon, still brimming over with ebullient passion, intellect and wit, whizzing back and forth from the Assembly, his bulky frame crammed into a Mini-Minor.

Soustelle’s successor in Algiers, Robert Lacoste, retired to tend his roses in the Dordogne, which he represented as Socialist Senator, discussed vigorously the Algerian War, but refused to write his memoirs. His successor, Paul Delouvrier, maintained a modest reticence about his time in Algiers, having returned to the world where he was happier — that of economics and high finance, appointed by de Gaulle to run France’s Electricity Board. Of the numerous French politicians to preside over the years of Algerian turmoil, Guy Mollet, the veteran Socialist, man of Suez and (next to de Gaulle) the longest to remain at the helm, was also one of the first to die, in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine. Among the
pied noir
leaders the all-powerful Senator Borgeaud withdrew much of his wealth from Algeria before the final crash, then died in France. His feudal domain at La Trappe was turned into a “Museum of Colonialism” in the first flush of Algerian independence; then, when the joke wore off, it became an agronomic institute. Schiaffino, the shipping magnate, somehow managed to maintain both the family fortunes and his shipping lines after independence. Comte Alain de Sérigny, banished from Algeria, his
Echo d’Alger
closed down in its fiftieth year after the 1961 putsch, ran a brewery from Paris. His office contained all the bound copies of the
Echo
and proudly displayed on a wall a family tree of his colonial ancestry. But, showing no signs of impoverishment, Sérigny claimed he had little time to keep up with his old
pied noir
friends and associates. Almost alone among the
grands
colons
to remain in Algeria after independence, Jacques Chevallier, the liberal ex-mayor of Algiers, became vice-president of the Algiers Chamber of Commerce from 1963 to 1966, greatly respected by the Algerians and a token that, had they been genuinely prepared to co-operate and share responsibility with the Muslims, some future for the Europeans could have existed. He died in 1971, aged only fifty-nine. Of the “loyal” Muslim notables, most of whom withdrew to France after 1962, perhaps the best-known was the
harki
leader, the Bachaga Boualem; once overlord of 33,000 hectares and twenty-four tribes, he escaped to own forty hectares of rice-fields in the Camargue tended by his family and the surviving
harkis
, observing that the
mistral
blows across his property “as furiously as the wind of history”.

The Algerians

For many of the numerous Algerian principal actors in the war, independence brought no happy ending. As of 1973, the sole member of the
neuf historiques
to hold senior government office was Rabah Bitat, Boumedienne’s Minister of Public Works. His story provides a romantic epitaph to the war: released with Ben Bella in 1962, he then married Zohra Drif, one of Yacef’s “heroines” from the Battle of Algiers. She herself had spent five years in French prisons, then returned to complete her law studies and become secretary-general of the Algerian École Nationale d’Administration. Zohra Drif’s fellow bomb-carrier from the Battle of Algiers, Djamila Bouhired, married her defending lawyer, then divorced him and returned to run the Algerian branch of Max Factor — with Zohra Drif, one of a small minority of today’s truly emancipated Algerian women. Another girl terrorist, Yasmina Belkacem, who lost both her legs at the age of 15 when her own bomb exploded, was to be seen at the thirtieth anniversary war celebrations, still an attractive, courageous and uncomplaining young woman, a living memorial to the horrors of urban terrorism. Their former boss, Yacef — having escaped the death sentence three times — took to making films after his release in 1962, co-producing one of the most remarkable of all time,
La Battaglia di Algeri
(1965), and acting his own part in it. Most of the revolutionary “old guard” withdrew — or were forcibly withdrawn — from politics. Of the veteran nationalists, the oftimprisoned M.N.A. leader Messali Hadj, lived in retirement (at last unrestricted) outside Paris; Ferhat Abbas in the suburbs of Algiers, on a pension from his pharmacy. Ben Khedda, Abbas’s successor as president of the G.P.R.A., still young but equally retired when I met him in 1973, then lived in a charming house in a garden suburb of Algiers, apparently subsidised by the state — in that it seems out of proportion to the modest pharmacy he still ran nearby.[
6
] Boussouf, Ben Tobbal, Major Azedine and Colonel Ouamrane devoted themselves to business, with Ouamrane granted the fiefdom of Algiers’s principal service station. Boudiaf, Ait Ahmed and Lebjaoui, already in exile under Ben Bella, remained abroad running various splinter groups in opposition to President Boumedienne.

Standing for a regime of social democracy combined with private enterprise, Lebjaoui lived in Geneva under protection of a powerful watch-dog — “just in case”. Certainly, in the past some of his fellow opponents of the regime have met with disquietingly violent ends. Mohamed Khider, one of the
neuf historiques
and Ben Bella’s fellow internee, had — as already noted — gone into exile during Ben Bella’s reign. He had taken with him the F.L.N.’s wartime “treasury”, totalling some £6 million, which he controlled in his capacity as secretary-general of the party, declaring that the funds would be banked to finance the opposition against Ben Bella. When Boumedienne ousted Ben Bella, Khider stayed abroad in opposition; and the money remained in a Swiss bank. Then, one day in January 1967, Khider was shot down by unknown assailants in a Madrid street. Something similar seems to have happened to Gorel, the O.A.S. “treasurer” who later disappeared in suspicious circumstances and has never been seen since.[
7
] The fate of Khider was also shared by the most senior maquisard of them all, Belkacem Krim, former Foreign Minister of the G.P.R.A. and the man who led the Evian negotiations for Algeria. Disillusioned by politics and the revolution, after 1962 Krim turned to making a livelihood from selling jewellery. When Boumedienne, Krim’s enemy from the earliest days, had come to power, Krim too went into exile and formed an opposition group. Declaring in 1969 that “seven years of independence were worse than seven years of war”, Krim was sentenced to death (
in absentia
) on charges of treason and conspiring with foreign powers. He took to travelling heavily armed, but his undoing was indirectly caused by the sudden coming to notoriety of Leila Khaled and the Palestinian hijackers in the autumn of 1970; in an airport check his automatic was found and removed from him. A few days later he was discovered weaponless and murdered in a Frankfurt hotel. The means of his death seems, ironically, to have been the same as that which he had tacitly approved for Ramdane Abane in 1957 — strangling.

With the death of Krim, only four of the
neuf historiques
of 1954 remained alive. Of these, Ben Bella continued to be held under close arrest in a house inside an Algerian army camp, vicinity unknown. From time to time there were grim rumours that this last of the old Algerian revolutionaries had been murdered, or his tongue cut out. In fact, though no other outsider had access to him, he was permitted to marry and raise a young family. With the coming of President Bendjedid, Ben Bella was then allowed to leave the country, to take up a voluntary exile in Switzerland. In 1985, he and his one-time fellow internee in France, Ait Ahmed, set up a “United Front” in opposition to Bendjedid’s government in Algiers. It was ironic that Ait Ahmed, brother-in-law to the murdered Khider, had also once been under sentence of death under Ben Bella’s own brief regime. Both claimed they still had to live in fear of assassination in Switzerland. Unable ever to see him previously, when the author was at last able to track Ben Bella down at his secret hideout in exile, though sixty-nine and despite having spent so much of his life in prisons, French and Algerian, Ben Bella still presented a vigorous-looking figure. Reputedly being financed by Ghadafi to destabilise Bendjedid, he insisted that his much more moderate regime was “just a continuation of Boumedienne”; but, with him and Ait Ahmed disagreeing on many fundamental issues, politically Ben Bella seemed a spent force. A sad man, he spoke of his nostalgic longing to be back at his home in Marnia; in Europe “one is cut off from everything that is dear — it is horrible!”

Following his takeover in 1965, Boumedienne remained firmly in power, challenged once only by an abortive uprising led by Colonel Zbiri in 1967. Then, on December 27th, 1978, he died prematurely of a rare disease, and was succeeded by Chadli Bendjedid. The coming of Bendjedid in itself marked a break with the past; instead of succeeding a forcibly deposed incumbent, this relatively unknown wartime colonel was elected peaceably by the Council of the F.L.N. The fourteen post-war years of Boumedienne, however, left a deep imprint which needs to be recorded in any study of the Algerian war; for modern Algeria is inseparably the child of wartime Algeria. The tone of Boumedienne’s Algeria was predominantly austere, and Islamic, and one of Cromwellian honesty. He ran it as a single-party military dictatorship, but restored nerves left ragged by the eight-year-long war, while laying the foundations both for the political stability and relatively high economic prosperity that endured into the 1980s. The adjectives that applied in 1954–62 continued to describe her under Boumedienne: tough and uncompromising, admirable and big-thinking, dour and undemonstrative, untrusting and secretive. The high walls that protect the villas of Algiers remained symbolic of the national passion for reticence. Boumedienne (and Bendjedid after him) was the very antonym of the “cult of the personality,” in sharp contrast to his neighbour Bourguiba. Seldom seen except when opening an industrial project or a housing estate, or addressing the Third World, when Boumedienne made his voice heard from behind those high walls, though often not helpful to the West, it was predictably consistent, never frivolous and seldom near-sighted. Western businessmen dealing with Algerian heads of industry discovered them to be just as indefatigably hard bargainers as did the French at Evian. Often a Western concern and one from the Communist world would find themselves coupled in the same project by the untrusting Algerians, the one checking and balancing out the other. But once a deal was made with the bright young men (many of them United States-trained) who run the Algerian economy, it generally stuck and was stuck to.

“In the space of only a few years, Algeria has transformed itself into a vast building site,” claimed Boumedienne on the tenth anniversary of independence, in 1972. The odds were almost as immense as those facing the F.L.N. in November 1954; a backward economy, an impoverished soil, high illiteracy, twenty-five per cent unemployment (in 1972) and heavy under-employment, and an exploding population of already fifteen to sixteen million with one of the highest growth rates (3.5 per cent per annum) in the world. Always in the background there were the nagging problems of Algeria’s excessive dependence economically on France — which the Algerians do not consider to have been balanced out by the vast sums of aid finance that they have received from across the Mediterranean. In solving this problem, and at the risk of further serious friction with France, Boumedienne pursued roughly the same tough policy as his predecessor. After expropriating French farm holdings, Ben Bella went on to make a first step (just before he was deposed in 1965) towards nationalising the oil and gas properties, by demanding that fifty per cent of their revenues be repatriated to Algeria. In 1971 Boumedienne completed the process by taking over a majority holding in all the companies. France retaliated by boycotting Algerian oil, ceasing imports of Algerian wine (long an apple of discord with French viticulturists), and withdrawing technicians. The dinar broke away from the franc, relations between the two countries tottered, and the Algerian economy looked stricken.