A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (4 page)

Starting with the killing of local policemen and regional administrators—just as in 1954, but displaying less coordination—an appalling civil war ensued, with the Algiers government proving as incapable of crushing the revolt as the French Army had been in 1954–62. The FIS was in turn thrust aside by a far more extreme band of revolutionaries, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), prepared to wage war with total ruthlessness. Its origins and leaders were surrounded in mystery—but its aims appeared to be projected towards a complete and anarchic destruction of the existing order. On a note that was to become pointedly ominous on September 11, 2001, some of its killers were known as the “Afghans,” highly trained volunteers who had served their apprenticeship in that country. The economy was targeted, and so at one point were foreigners, businessmen and journalists, promiscuously massacred with the clear intent of driving out foreign capital. Whole villages—including women and children—would be slaughtered by unknown guerrillas, for unknown motives.

The techniques of murder equally had echoes from the grisly
égorgements
, the throat-slittings, from days of the Savage War, the “Kablyie Smile” as French servicemen dubbed it with unpleasant humour, frequently accompanied by castration. Beheading victims became common, their heads stuck on road signs as a kind of gruesome sport. Algerians themselves spoke of the “blind war,” but in its prolonged, random senselessness it came almost more to resemble Europe’s Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. Power now came to reside essentially in the hands of the military, and its role in the coming civil war remains a murky if not repugnant one. There were even ugly rumours that somehow the Army itself was involved in some of the uglier massacres. Reports seeped out via eyewitnesses and defectors suggesting that the security services and the regime, or at least elements within them, had a hand in some of the extreme violence initially attributed to Islamists. The main motivation for this was never quite clear, but there appeared to be a desire to demonise the Islamists and win over the bulk of the population—which seemed to be bewildered as to exactly who was killing whom.

All the time the economy suffered, leading to ever worse unemployment—one-third of the labour force, in a population well over three times that of 1954, produced by one of the world’s highest birthrates, and concentrated (in Algiers) in some of the world’s worst slums. All more incentives for bringing recruits to the revolt. By the end of 2001 at a rough estimate 100,000 Algerians had died—and 120 foreigners—with a cost to the economy running into billions of dollars. With strong US support, the Bouteflika regime has to some extent been successful in suppressing the Islamicist revolt, winning over the pious middle classes, and providing the Pentagon with a staunch ally in the war on terror—but at a questionable price in human rights.

In 1962, a popular slogan heard among exhausted Algerians was “
Seba’a snin, barakat!
” (“Seven years, that’s enough!”) Yet, five decades after independence, a savage war still continued in Algeria. It was a country exhausted by seven years of senseless violence, of not knowing who were the “good guys” and who the “bad.” As much as any other factor, it was this exhaustion that helped bring the civil war to an end.

Though the parallels may be only partially exact, dark comparisons also offer themselves between the two former French colonies both “liberated” in the 1950s and 1960s: Vietnam, infinitely more devastated than Algeria over twenty years of war, and lacking its natural wealth of oil and gas, but now rapidly emerging as the new Taiwan of Southeast Asia; Algeria wracked by internecine fundamentalism, and economically impoverished. Students of contemporary Islam and its incompetence in the world of material progress might wish to draw their own conclusions.

Shadows in France, Too

As for France, if at every hand in Algeria one could detect the roots, and pattern, of the war of 1954–62, so too in a similar fashion did the civil war between Algerians of the 1990s soon overflow across the Mediterranean. In 1995 and 1996 feuding between rival clans of the GIA brought terrorism to the Paris Metro, killing and wounding over eighty persons. Supposedly aimed at dissuading the French from backing the repression of the Algiers government, in what could have been a hideous preview of 9/11, an Air France plane hijacked, pointedly, on Christmas Eve, 1994, was evidently programmed to be flown suicidally into the Eiffel Tower. The problem of immigration became an ever hotter issue for any French government to handle, as carnage in Algeria—on top of overpopulation—persuaded increasing numbers of Algerians to seek refuge, and employment, in France. In the winter of 2005–6, outbursts of rage in the overcrowded
banlieues
, with their substandard housing, gave the lie to the Gaullist notion that, with the end of the war in 1962, France could wash its hands of the “Algerian Problem.” Now there are over five million of Algerian extraction living in France. On top of this there is the residual bitterness and strife between the “new” immigrants and the
Harkis
, the Algerians loyal to the French Army who took root in France in 1962 and have assiduously resisted integration. The Algerian War has effectively crossed the Mediterranean to France, bringing with it raw sensitivities that almost rival the legacy of collaboration in World War II. France has still not come to terms with it. Just a tip of the iceberg of Algerian émigré sensitivities in France could be detected in the extraordinary head-butting episode (as of writing still cloaked in mystery) of the Algerian-French football champion Zinedine Zidane, which may have caused France to lose the 2006 World Cup. In lieu of the decisive post-colonial divorce that was envisaged in 1962, a messy relationship continues with each country deeply, and unpredictably, involved in each other’s histories. All of this is grist to the mill of Le Pen—and to al-Qaeda.

After 9/11 and Parallels with Iraq

Following September 2001, whether in Paris or London, intelligence evolving about the terror networks of al-Qaeda indicated numerous links with Algeria. In turn there were roots of jihad laid back in the Savage War —though it was not of itself a conflict rooted in Islam. It was, in effect, first and foremost, an anti-colonial war of national liberation. One cannot stress this fact too often. Nevertheless, in many ways the horrors suffered in Algeria’s own civil war do read like a paradigm, a microcosm of present-day Islam’s frustrated inadequacy to meet the challenges of the modern world, the anger generated thereby finding itself directed into lashing out against the rich, successful West.

Generally, the old saw about history never repeating itself holds true. Nevertheless, its bad elements may well do so if national leaders pay no attention to its lessons. A few years back the Israeli press reported that Ariel Sharon’s favourite bedside reading was the Hebrew translation of
A Savage War of Peace
. Writing in
The New York Review of Books
, Amos Elon commented that “[Sharon] must have tragically misunderstood it. That book could not tell him what to do, but it could have told him what
not
to do.” The lessons surely apply today. At the time of writing, one feels that Bush’s Washington (and Blair’s London) also went blindly into Iraq —and into collision with the Islamic world—without the kind of necessary preparation, where study of Algeria in 1954–62 might have helped. At the very least its lessons might have imposed caution before getting involved in Iraq in the first place. There are at least three areas where the echoes are particularly painful, if not deafening.

ONE: In the early days of the Algerian War, once the FLN realised it was not strong enough to take on the powerful French Army, it concentrated its attacks on the native police loyal to France. Result: a deadly loss of morale among the police, with defections to the FLN, and the French Army defensively reduced to protecting the police, instead of concentrating on active “search-and-destroy” missions. The “insurgents” in Iraq have learned from this strategy with deadly effect.

TWO: The benefit of porous frontiers. In 1954–62, the winning French Army was paralysed by its inability to pursue its FLN enemy across into its friendly bases in neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco. This is what, in effect, led to the collapse of the French government and the advent of de Gaulle in 1958. In their turn, the Iraq insurgents have been able to use Syria—and now, much more dangerously, Iran—to similar advantage.

THREE: The vile hand of torture; of abuse, and counter-abuse. In the Algerian War what led—probably more than any other single factor—to the ultimate defeat of France was the realisation, in France and the world at large, that methods of interrogation were being used that had been condemned under the Nazi Occupation. At the dawn of the new century, the ugly ghosts of torture returned to plague France. In 2001, an eighty-three-year-old former general, Paul Aussaresses, published a book in which he unashamedly, indeed proudly, admitted to having tortured—in a good cause, he claimed. After a trial which gripped France, the aging general got away with a fine of one hundred thousand francs, on a uniquely worded charge “in the name of respect for the victims.”

Because of the slowness of communications in the 1950s and 1960s, it took a year or more for the message of abuses perpetrated in Algeria to sink in. Now, with the Internet and al-Jazeera, one set of photos from Abu Ghraib is enough to inflame hatred across the Islamic world against the West, providing excuse for all the beheadings and atrocities carried out by al-Qaeda. From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the “Battle of Algiers,” history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, that torture should
never, never, never
be resorted to by any Western society, I draw readers once again to the testimony of Prefect Teitgen of Algiers (
see
) which —three decades on—I still find deeply moving. Teitgen had been informed by the Algiers police that they had intelligence of a bomb which could have caused appalling casualties. Could they put a suspect to “the question”? Himself a deportee in World War II, Teitgen told me he refused:

…I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because if you once get into the torture business, you’re lost…. All our so-called civilisation is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find
fear
…. When you see the throats of your
copains
slit, then the varnish disappears.

How applicable this still is to the dilemmas facing the West in the war on terror!

In passing, one should also note France’s painful discovery that, fifty years on, many former “torturers” in the armed services were having to resort to psychiatric “counselling.” The inflicters of torture as well as their victims remain grievously impaired.

In 2005, at the suggestion of his staff, I sent a copy of
A Savage War
to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, underscoring the evils of torture—and, not least, the propaganda value even the least substantiated rumours of it can arouse. I received a flea in the ear—courteous, but a flea nevertheless—for my trouble.

After all the hopes generated for a free, happy and prosperous Algeria at Evian in 1962, within years of the departure of the French Army she was tearing herself apart in the most senseless and bloody civil war (between fellow Muslims) of recent times.

Does much more need to be said about the relevance of Algeria’s Savage War to contemporary Iraq? History continues to take its toll.

We historians, perhaps fortunately, are not permitted to see the future. Certainly when I started writing
A Savage War
back in 1973, I had not the least thought that it might find a new relevance, or modernity, in the twenty-first century. At the time it seemed a very tragic story sufficient within its own bounds. Now, for all the lessons it may contain—not just for the conflict in Iraq, but for wider issues in the world at large, and those as yet unforeseen which may still lie ahead—it affords me great satisfaction humbly to offer this book up once again.

The preface to the first edition of
A Savage War of Peace
included an accounting of kind friends, associates and agencies to whom I expressed warm appreciation. As many have since passed on, as have twenty-nine years, I hope my grateful thanks of yesteryear may remain on the record and that I may gratefully add three new names to the list: those of Dr. Eugene Rogan and Michael Willis Ph.D., of the Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Edwin Frank, of New York Review Books, for their most helpful editorial inputs. One particular debt, I feel, needs to be reiterated, however. The very genesis of writing
A Savage War
was proposed to me by my then publisher, and former Prime Minister, the late Harold Macmillan. To him Algeria—with its lasting impact on de Gaulle—had held his imagination ever since World War II, and, though already in his eighties, he was to give me invaluable counsel and constant encouragement, actually reading the manuscript himself three times.

[
1
] There is a certain parallel with the French campaign of 1940. Lasting a matter of weeks instead of seven and a half years, it granted few war diarists (especially on the French side) any opportunity to keep up their diaries or even scribble a letter home; as I discovered when researching
To Lose a Battle
.