A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (115 page)

At Sidi-Bel-Abbès, a town plonked down in the middle of dusty nowhere that was once the home of the Foreign Legion, it is hard to find any trace of
Beau Geste
. In answer to discreet enquiries, while
Parlez-moi d’amour
oozes nostalgically from the radio, a local restaurateur affects never to have heard of
La Légion
: “Yes, there was a
campe de triage
[vetting centre] up here, and a torture camp (you know what torture is,
m’sieur
?) over there. There were foreigners there, of course, who did the torturing — lots of Germans. But, as for a Foreign Legion,
j’en sais rien
.” At Zéralda the barracks from which the 1st R.E.P. marched out forever in 1961, singing Piaf’s
Je ne regrette rien
, have been bulldozed to make way for a vast new tourist complex. At Sidi Ferruch, the beach where the French landed in 1830, an even more ambitious complex and marina have been built. “We thought this was the most appropriate kind of monument,” Algerian officials explain; “so the French can land here again — but this time with their travellers’ cheques!”

At Toudja in Kabylia, the wartime devastation of which so shocked Jules Roy, new fig trees have been planted and a new clinic built next to the former French barracks, part of which is now used as a school. A mountain stream rushes through the village; it is a green and peaceful demi-paradise. But the lack of men in their thirties and forties is conspicuous. A youth with a flute will proudly take you round the village, pointing out the lovely “
Arbres de France
” (acacias, “one of the good things left behind by France!”), but he cannot recall exactly where the fighting took place, or just what it was about. The Algerian attitude towards history seems, to Europeans, a curious one. “The page is turned,” they tell you. Even in the Algiers Casbah there is not a single plaque or inscription to remind one of the house where Ali la Pointe was blown up, where Yacef hid, or where some of the more legendary of the F.L.N. freedom-fighters fought so tenaciously against Massu’s paras.

In Algiers, too, most of the streets were renamed soon after independence. (It was said, apocryphally, that, in the early days of xenophobia, Constantine’s Boulevard Anatole France had been rechristened Anatole Algérie.) Rue des Colons, with some poetic justice, is now Rue des Libérés; Place du Gouvernement, Place des Martyrs. The Forum, scene of the wild moments of crowd hysteria when the para colonels tumbled the Fourth Republic, is now the Esplanade de l’Afrique. The elegant Rue d’Isly bears the name of Ben M’hidi, the F.L.N. leader who died mysteriously in French hands during the Battle of Algiers. The prancing equestrian statue to the rebel chief, Abd-el-Kader, has replaced that of his vanquisher, Marshal Bugeaud. In the same square the office of General Salan — once the target of the “ultra” bazooka — is now F.L.N. party headquarters. The “Otomatic”, haunt of the
pied noir
“ultras” which was bombed during the Battle of Algiers, has become the “Cercle des Étudiants”, now catering to an almost all-male Muslim clientèle. The “Casino” night-club, so brutally bombed during Yacef’s second offensive in the Battle of Algiers, has become a dour club for Algerian officers. With the going of the
méditerranéen-et-demi pieds noirs
, certainly Algiers has lost its erstwhile gaiety. The sun beams down on Algiers — but the inhabitants do not smile back. It is a surly city, harrowed by the stresses of over-population and under-employment; with the architecture of Cannes, but the atmosphere of Aberdeen. During the day the cafés are thronged with all-male, typically Arab society. At night the city, responsive to President Boumedienne’s own personal brand of puritanism, closes down like wartime Toronto on a Sunday. The once exclusively
pied noir
areas of Algeria have become so totally Arab in atmosphere that one wonders how the French dreams of “integration” or “association”, or the liberal hopes of a Camus for a multi-racial society of the 1950s, could ever have come true. Despite the Timgad-like bricks and stones left by the
pieds noirs
, were they ever really here at all?

“Everything fades,” says Camus, quoting a cemetery ex-volto, “save memory.” But the nostalgia can be overdone. Today’s Algerian is a thoroughly pragmatic individual. Near Skikda (ex-Philippeville) there is a paradigm of the Algeria of the present and future. The Plage Jeanne d’Arc once housed a rest and rehabilitation centre for Bigeard’s paras returning from operations in the
bled
. Now bulldozers constructing an immense new oil refinery have crunched through the road to the beach settlement, leaving it isolated from the outside world. Shutters hanging crazily askew, the bistros and “discos” and “dancings”, where once Massu’s centurions chatted up the local girls, are sliding aimlessly into the sea, leaving a spaghetti-like tangle of reinforcing rods protruding from the ephemeral prefabs. By some miracle, here and there geraniums still flower out of untended window-boxes. But perhaps even by now Plage Jeanne d’Arc has disappeared forever beneath the pounding surf — more immemorably than either Roman Timgad or Tipasa.

Certainly by the thirtieth anniversary of the war in 1984 the Plage Jeanne d’Arc had gone without a trace, and a few more relics of the
présence françcaise
had expired with it. On the way to Camus’s ravishing Tipasa then I noted how the typically France bandstands that once dominated the main square of small provincial towns were no longer there. In the heart of Algiers itself (a much less dour, perhaps more self-assured city, than I remembered it from 1973), on the Plateau des Glières which had provided the focus for the events of 1958, the hideous Monument aux Morts still stood. But — instead of removing it in its entirety — the Algerians had simply rendered over with cement its excessive bas-reliefs to colonial feats of arms. Meanwhile, superbly sited above the city and visible from every part of it, stands the vast new monument to Algieria’s war dead. Representing three vast palm fronds ingeniously cantilevered against each other and over three hundred feet high, designed by Polish architects and constructed with Canadian knowhow — it is in itself almost a symbol of post-1962 Algeria’s balancing act between East and West. Beneath, a museum contains a vivid record of suffering and resistance under the 130 years of French rule. At its heart one descends into a crypt in polished black granite; in the centre is a simple patch of desert sand embracing a rock from the Aurès mountains where that savage war began on November 1st, 1954. It is an imposing and solemn place — about a thousand light years removed from that memorial on its sea-girt promontory at Tipasa, where a carefree Albert Camus once rejoiced in that other Algeria.

Tragically, it was very soon evident that the bright hopes of 1984 were — once again — to be dashed. Under worsening economic conditions, Fundamentalism led by the F.I.S. [Islamic Salvation Front], came to acquire a growing ascendancy throughout the country. Alarmed at their power, the F.L.N.-based regime under Liamine Zeroual in 1992 cancelled the second round of the National Elections. From then on escalated a new civil war, which by the time of the next elections three years later, had killed perhaps as many as 50,000 people — over twice as many as all the French fatalities, civilian as well as military, during the eight years of the War of National Liberation. The targets of the slaughter, as well as the techniques, seemed rooted in those horrendous years of conflict. One of the first, eminent victims of terrorism that June was the President himself, Mohamed Boudiaf. Almost sole survivor of the greatly respected “
neuf historiques
”, he had been brought back at seventy-three to head a government of reconciliation. As an echo of the 1950s, two weeks alone of January 1994 saw 116 Algerian policemen assassinated, in a deliberate attempt to sow the kind of fear that had gripped the populace during the struggle against the French. Magistrates,
evoluées
women who refused to wear the veil (and to whom the Revolution had brought such high hopes of emancipation), novelists, journalists and intellectuals all appeared high on the Fundamentalist hit-list.

Also targeted, in a determined effort by the F.I.S. to ruin the country’s economy by scaring off badly needed external investment, were foreign journalists and technicians. Distinguished political leaders, like Ait Ahmed, were driven — once more — into exile, for fear of their lives. The Government met terror with counter-terror. There leaked out accounts of torture, executions without trial, and “disappearances” that recalled the worst moments of the French Occupation. As in the ’60s, during the reign of the O.A.S., terrorist bombings now struck at Metropolitan France again.

In 1995, two rays of hope appeared. Oil exploration in Algeria made the world’s biggest oil discoveries for the past year. But would these now be put to the salvation of the country’s desperate economic problems, and to countering the demands of overpopulation — that fertile field on which Fundamentalism breeds so readily — or would they be, once again, profligately wasted, as under Boumedienne?

Then, in November of 1995, Zeroual held the long-promised national elections. Closely watched by international observers, they seemed properly conducted and, despite threats of “days of blood”, resulted in a 61 per cent landslide vote for the Government. It was heralded as a triumph for moderation and hopes rose high for the beginning of a new era of reconciliation for the strife-weary Algerians.

Yet, within days — and only eight hours after Zeroual took the oath of office — the most senior Algerian general to be killed so far was felled by terrorists in a smart suburb of Algiers.

How much longer, Algerians ask themselves, is hope to go on being deferred, as the clock moves closer to the fiftieth anniversary since the War of Liberation began on that historic day of 1 November 1954?

[
1
] In 1963 Algeria received from France loans of 1,300,000,000 francs — compared with only 500,000,000 and 250,000,000 from the U.S.S.R. and China respectively.

[
2
] Renamed, under Bidault, the Conseil National de la Résistance (C.N.R.).

[
3
] To the author Christian Fouchet, de Gaulle’s last High Commissioner, admitted that even at the time of Evian he never foresaw that the
pieds noirs
would all be able to stay forever: “It would certainly have been impossible for them to have continued to hold land — there would, at best, have been a transitional period of, say, fifteen years — then they would have had to give up.”

[
4
] What would have happened had the exodus taken place during a time of economic recession, instead of boom, daunts the imagination.

[
5
] During his first weeks in prison he wrote his account of the 1961 putsch,
Notre Révolte
, at top speed on the assumption that de Gaulle was certain to have him shot.

[
6
] In March 1976 Ben Khedda and Abbas entered the political lists again, briefly, in signing a manifesto to President Boumedienne demanding democratic freedoms and an end to the conflict with Morocco over the Polisario. Both were placed under house arrest; Ben Khedda died a short time later.

[
7
] After six years of legal wrangling, the Swiss Supreme Court finally ruled against the Algerian government’s claim to the money, on the grounds that Khider had paid it into a personal account, and that he was the real owner — not the F.L.N. “which at the time had no legal existence”. Thus the money remains, apparently, still in limbo and presumably frozen indefinitely. Following Gorel’s presumed death, the identity of the ultimate beneficiaries of the missing O.A.S. funds remains a mystery.

Afterword

HE knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city.

Albert Camus,
La Peste, 1947