A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (15 page)

“The rigging of the elections of the Second College has become a byword in Algeria,” deplored a correspondent of
Le Monde
normally sympathetic to the regime: “Today, even the most
évolué
of Algerian nationalists will say to you: ‘These elections are a farce. If you consider us incapable of voting, then why not admit it openly…?”’

Said Ahmed Boumendjel, the distinguished liberal leader from Constantine:

It is a question of contempt, and beyond this the oppression of the mass of our people; that is what is impossible for us to tolerate. Why should we feel ourselves bound by the principles of French moral values … when France herself refuses to be subject to them and to accept the essential rules?

“The French Republic has cheated,” he declared bitterly, “she has made fools of us.” For liberals like Boumendjel and Abbas these were bitterly frustrating experiences. Combined with the emasculation of the 1947 statute, the electoral frauds marked an important stage in the crystallising of Muslim rage; it also meant that, after 1954, when any French leader talked about offers of “free elections” no Muslim would believe him.

The attitude of the average
pied noir
was one of thankfulness that the feared and disliked statute had been nullified, and that the Muslims had accepted the electoral results with such apparent passivity. “Rid of their psychosis about civil war,” says Professor Charles-André Julien, they returned to their traditional concepts of colonial Algeria: “little by little the liberal achievements of Governor Chataigneau crumbled; the municipal centres stagnated; … projects in rural communes were abandoned; the rehousing of
fellahs
was considered to have been finished … even education … suffered from a dearth of credits.…” Not every
pied noir
leader, however, was quite so short-sighted at this time. Liberals like Jacques Chevallier foresaw a grave danger that French tactics would force the Muslims “to attempt to unite themselves in a kind of policy of the worst, and to push them into compromising themselves in a desperate gesture.” To do something about it, to attempt to see the 1947 statute loyally and properly enacted, Chevallier himself resigned his mandate in Paris to take a seat in the Algerian Assembly in 1951. From then on, until November 1954, this body under Chevallier’s influence began to assume a more hopefully liberal aspect; but it moved too slowly — and too late (though Germaine Tillion believes that even if, by 1 November 1954, genuine elections could have been held in Algeria, “they probably could have spared us a long and cruel war”). Writing in 1953, Professor Julien warned prophetically: “It is by closing the normal paths of legality to a mass of eight million people that one risks driving it back into the arms of the declared adversaries of
la présence française
, who aim to solve the Algerian problem by violence.”

Nationalism after Sétif

The reasons for the apparent political torpor of the Algerian Muslims, which gave the
pieds noirs
such a false sense of complacency over the long nine years of deceptive tranquillity, can be traced back to the aftermath of Sétif. The nationalist movements were virtually decapitated by the seizure of their leaders — Messali Hadj deported to the French Congo, Ferhat Abbas under house arrest. Messali’s M.T.L.D. in particular had been disrupted by French repression, and all groups were more disunited than ever before, with the liberals fiercely reproaching the M.T.L.D. for their role in the disastrous revolt of 1945. (To this day, Abbas believes that Messali, in collusion with the colonial police, instigated it with the aim of destroying the unity achieved by his Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté created the previous year.) Released in March 1946, Abbas had launched a new, more coherent party called the Union Démocratique pour le Manifeste Algérien (U.D.M.A.), but otherwise he resumed his moderate policies very much as before: “Neither force nor base submission”, he declared, addressing Muslim youth, “will bring a veritable solution.” Elected to the National Assembly, he was shocked by the lack of understanding, and often sheer racial arrogance, that he and his fellow Muslim deputies encountered there. During one particularly stormy, and deplorable, session in August 1946 Abbas rose with great dignity to state: “It is a hundred and sixteen years that we have been awaiting this moment, that is to say the opportunity of being here and making ourselves heard among you.… Therefore, have patience, I ask and beg of you.… We are but a very small minority. Be generous…!”[
4
] But, as the preceding pages have shown, France could not, the
pieds noirs
would not, be sufficiently generous. As rage succeeded frustration with the sabotaging of the 1947 statute, so the support for Abbas and his liberals began to slip away, and Abbas himself was forced to move steadily to a less moderate position. The returning war heroes who had fought so fiercely under Marshal Juin were particularly disillusioned to discover how little things had changed at home after all they had seen and learnt in the outside world. Many gravitated towards the more extreme doctrines of Messali, and began to clamour for yet more direct action than even the M.T.L.D. was proposing. A new post-war generation was emerging that had acquired some knowledge of Marxist revolutionary techniques; that was impatient with interminable political dialogues, meaningless manifestos and unfulfilled promises; that respected strength and force, and that, in short, would not flinch from violence.

Ben Bella and the O.S.

One of these new figures was a strongly-built young Arab called Ahmed Ben Bella. He was born at Marnia, west of Oran, in 1918 of a father engaged in petty commerce who also owned a small farm. His oldest brother died of wounds suffered in 1914–1918, and his two other brothers died at early ages. Although, as already noted, Ben Bella first became aware of racial discrimination at secondary school, this did not inhibit him from joining up — twice — with the French army. In the 1940 campaign he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Demobilised after the fall of France, he rejoined a Moroccan regiment to fight at Monte Cassino and all through the Italian campaign, where, rising to the rank of warrant officer, he had the Médaille Militaire pinned on his chest personally by de Gaulle, who little knew that he was decorating the man who would become one of the initiators of revolt against France and the first president of an independent Algeria. During this campaign Ben Bella had contact with the Italian resistance, for whom he formed lasting admiration. On returning to North Africa in 1945 news of Sétif so shocked him that he refused to accept a commission, and instead entered local politics, running successfully as a municipal councillor. There now follows a confused episode, related by Ben Bella himself, in which the administration attempted to neutralise him by means of a “plot” involving another Muslim set up to confiscate the farm Ben Bella’s father had left him. In protecting this property, Ben Bella got into a shooting match and wounded his adversary. This, he claims, forced him to abandon his office as municipal councillor, assume a false name and go underground with Messali’s M.T.L.D. as a “clandestine militant”. Disgusted with its unproductive dialectics and outraged by the administration’s electoral frauds, Ben Bella soon became one of the founder members of a new splinter group inside the M.T.L.D. called the Organisation Spéciale — or O.S. Pledged to fight colonialism “by all means”, legal or illegal, the O.S. was in effect the first nationalist body dedicated to preparing for an armed confrontation with France — now considered inevitable — and thereby it became the immediate predecessor of the F.L.N.

By 1949 Ben Bella had emerged as the most forceful leader of the O.S., and, together with a twenty-six-year-old Kabyle called Ait Ahmed, organised its first major coup: an armed raid on the central post office of Oran. Amateurishly mounted, the raid netted a sum of three million francs (little more than £3,000), while leaving ten times this amount scattered on the floor; nevertheless, this modest booty provided the future F.L.N. with its first operational funds. But although it was constructed on a system of watertight compartments that was to be successfully emulated later by the F.L.N., the security of the O.S. was poor and French intelligence efficient. The following year Ben Bella was arrested and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. By this time O.S. membership numbered some 4,500, and many of those who escaped imprisonment either fled abroad or formed the nucleus of a growing maquis in the more inaccessible parts of the country. Some of the names are worth mentioning, as all were to reappear later as founder leaders of the F.L.N.:

Ahmed Ben Bella:
imprisoned, subsequently escaped.

Ali Mahsas:
imprisoned, subsequently escaped.

Mostefa Ben Boulaid:
imprisoned subsequently escaped.

Belkacem Krim:
underground in Algeria.

Omar Ouamrane:
underground in Algeria.

Lakhdar Ben Tobbal:
underground in Algeria.

Mohamed Boudiaf:
underground in Algeria.

Mohamed Khider:
in refuge in Cairo.

Hocine Ait Ahmed:
in refuge in Cairo.

As an organisation, however, the O.S. was effectively broken up by the French police action. Ben Bella himself, together with another member of the O.S., Ali Mahsas, managed to escape from Blida prison after sawing through the bars of their cell with a blade hidden, romantically, in a loaf of bread. He made his way to Tunisia, France — and finally to Cairo. In Tunisia he confided to the then outlawed nationalist leader, Habib Bourguiba, that his Algerian counterparts had still not yet recovered from Sétif, and were in no position to embark on full-scale armed revolt.

Fresh splits among the nationalists

In reaction to the electoral frauds of 1951, all the nationalist parties — U.D.M.A., M.T.L.D., the Ulema — joined by the Algerian Communist Party, had come together to constitute a “Common Front for the Defence and Respect of Liberty”. It was promptly branded by the
pieds noirs
as a threat of “Communist totalitarian fanaticism”, but in fact it represented little more than yet another ephemeral papering-over of differences. For the liquidation of the O.S. was to cause the gravest split to date among the ranks of the Algerian nationalists: straight down the centre of the M.T.L.D. itself. A group of young intellectuals, headed by Hocine Lahouel and calling themselves “centralists”, decided to break away from the leadership of “El-Zaim”, the “unique”, as Messali was then venerated. Once again Messali himself was in exile, this time in France, as a consequence of the O.S. round-up; he was beginning to show his age and was able to do little effectively to prevent the split. In the summer of 1954 the “centralists” declared their intention of creating yet another new nationalist party, to be called the National Algerian Congress, from which El-Zaim would be expressly barred; all of which was accompanied by a spate of internecine killings between the two rival groups. Meanwhile, the
pied noir
leaders rejoiced to observe this further disarray among the Muslims, resuming their habitual complacency with little heed to the warnings of Chevallier and other prophets without honour. A point of no return, however, had now been reached by the Algerian revolutionaries.

The dispersed leaders of the O.S. soon appreciated angrily that this new schism within the M.T.L.D. could only postpone still further the day of armed revolt. In March 1954 Ben Bella’s fellow escapee, Ali Mahsas, met furtively at a café near the Odéon in Paris with Mohamed Boudiaf, then head of the M.T.L.D. in France, plus his deputy, a young Arab called Mourad Didouche. They agreed that it was essential to create, without delay, a new “third force” that would have armed revolt as its sole objective. That night Boudiaf and Didouche flew back to Algeria to get things under way there; Mahsas remained in France to organise the 60,000 M.T.L.D. supporters among the Algerian immigrants round Paris. Through the summer of 1954 and into the early autumn there now followed a series of frequent conspiratorial meetings, in France, Algeria and Berne. Because of its proximity to France, its removal from the vigilant eyes of the French security services (D.S.T.) and the ease with which Ben Bella and the outlaws from Cairo could fly there, Swiss territory was to play an important role in rebel preparations — as indeed it was to do in the final act of the war. One of the most historic meetings, in July 1954, was held in Berne under cover of the Germany—Hungary World Cup.

The “neuf historiques”

By the end of April the new body had given itself a name, a rather ponderous title of the Comité Révolutionnaire d’Unité et d’Action — C.R.U.A. It also appointed nine leaders — known henceforth as the
neuf historiques
— to head the C.R.U.A. They were:

Hocine Ait Ahmed

Ahmed Ben Bella

Mostefa Ben Boulaid

Larbi Ben M’hidi

Rabah Bitat