A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (66 page)

Death of Amirouche the Terrible

Under mounting French military pressure, a fresh set of rifts had been provoked in the higher echelons of the F.L.N., both between the Wilayas and the “exterior” of the G.P.R.A., and within the various Wilayas themselves. The years of 1958 and 1959 were, above all, a time when the Wilaya leaders were scourged by terrible apprehensions of treachery, or purported treachery. Genuine acts of betrayal had existed, certainly, but they had been used with extreme cunning by French intelligence operatives to demoralise the maquis through playing upon the innate suspiciousness of the Algerian. It has already been noted how teams of
bleu
double-agents controlled by Captain Christian Léger during the Battle of Algiers had subsequently succeeded in penetrating the Western Zone headquarters of Wilaya 3 (Kabylia), rounding it up in its entirety. Colonel Godard, the expert on counter-revolutionary warfare, followed up the confusion and distrust generated in the wake of this coup by adroitly “dropping” incriminating correspondence with French intelligence among other immaculate leaders in the Wilayas. The bait was snapped up greedily by Amirouche, the jeweller from the Beni-Yenni and the most ruthless of any Wilaya commander, entering into the “game” with unparalleled zest and instituting massive purges like a latter-day Vyshinsky. Under appalling inquisitions supervised by an F.L.N. captain nicknamed “
La Torture
” who had worked with the S.S. during the Second World War, admissions of treachery were extorted which led to vast chain-reactions of suspicion. Orders were given to arrest all recent Muslim deserters from the French forces, and any recruits who had come from Algiers since the beginning of the battle. A kind of madness seized Amirouche, who is said to have caused the execution of possibly as many as 3,000, women as well as men, in the course of his reign of terror. Mouloud Feraoun wrote in his diary: “Sad epoch, sad Kabylia. Sad Kabylia because every day one discovers traitors, the traitors are killed, and those who killed them end by being killed in their turn.”

During this period activities against the French were all but paralysed, and, not satisfied with purging his own Wilaya, Amirouche urged similar measures upon the neighbouring Wilayas 2 (Constantine) and 4 (Algérois), Mistrust is contagious, and in rapid succession the leaders of both Wilayas followed suit. The havoc was particularly pronounced in Wilaya 4, which, with its “progressive” attitudes towards discipline and innovations of communal decision-taking, had for some time been a model sector. By the summer of 1959 all was havoc, its leader, Si M’hamed, having been encouraged—partly by the example of Amirouche, partly as a result of assiduous “moling” by Léger’s teams—to carry out a murderous purge of the numerous young students and intellectuals who had joined the Wilaya on fleeing from the Battle of Algiers. The “capital” crimes of which they were found guilty often amounted to little more than asking questions, or revealing an “incorrect revolutionary stance”.

By the end of 1958 Amirouche and his fellow commanders had their Wilayas in a grip of terror, while jointly the power they exerted in relation to the absentee G.P.R.A. was hardly less daunting. Hard on the heels of the purge in his own Wilaya, Amirouche was writing a fierce letter to the G.P.R.A. in Tunis, accusing it of bourgeois taints and of half-heartedness in its attempts to breach the Morice Line, and calling upon it to launch a “national purification” similar to his own. At the same time he endeavoured to canvass the support of his peers at an inter-Wilaya meeting held in December in the mountainous country round El-Milia, close to the boundary between Wilayas 2 and 3. Colonel Lotfi of Wilaya 5, who enjoyed close relations with his predecessor, Boussouf, now a powerful minister of the G.P.R.A., refused to take part, but Amirouche found degrees of support particularly from Si M’hamed (Wilaya 4) and Si Haouès (Wilaya 6). Having expressed fears (that were highly exaggerated) of the immense scale of French intelligence penetration of the entire F.L.N. movement, Amirouche persuaded the meeting to send a communiqué to the G.P.R.A. in which it was sternly criticised, summoned to “correct its errors”, and exhorted to devolve greater powers upon the Wilaya leaders. It was also agreed that one or more representatives at the meeting should go to Tunis to confront the G.P.R.A. the following April.

Evidently with this ultimate objective in mind, towards the end of March 1959 Amirouche was heading south-eastwards from his Kabyle fiefdom for a rendezvous with the czar of the Sahara, Si Haouès. In the barren wastes of the Hodna that lie between Kabylia and the true Sahara,
harki
scouts attached to Colonel Georges Buis came across a fresh latrine, with signs of it having been used by a large number of men. Swiftly flying in elements of three para regiments, Buis succeeded in trapping a whole A.L.N.
katiba
. Seventy-three were killed and eight captured alive, one of them being Amirouche’s private secretary on whom was found a number of helpful documents—including details of the inter-Wilaya meeting of December 1958. Amirouche himself had made his getaway only a few hours earlier. A week later, on 28 March, in a state of exhaustion he had reached Si Haouès in the desert south-east of Bou Saada. Almost immediately units under the command of Colonel Ducasse, Massu’s former chief-of-staff, who (like most of those present in May 1958) had been posted away from Algiers by de Gaulle, were attacking the rebel encampment. After a brief but fierce one-sided fight between 2,500 French troops and forty
moudjahiddine
, the bodies of the two Wilaya leaders were picked up. It was a notable success for the French, by whom Amirouche was regarded as one of the deadliest enemy commanders, and Ducasse was promptly made a Commander of the Legion of Honour. But the suspicion lingered long that possibly the tip-off on the leaders’ whereabouts might have been passed on by those of his colleagues to whom Amirouche, in particular, had become an embarrassment in his ruthless cruelty and lust for power. Certainly it seems a curious coincidence that, after so many years of frustration, the French should be able to lay their hands on two such important leaders of the A.L.N. at once.

The coincidence was, if anything, extenuated when, less than two months later, Amirouche’s other ally, Colonel Si M’hamed of Wilaya 4 disappeared mysteriously in the course of an operation. His body was never found, but it is generally believed that he was executed by his comrades, in all probability the victim of French Intelligence
bleuite
, like so many of the young Algiers students whose deaths he had himself ordered. With the disappearance of Si M’hamed, however, the purges in Wilaya 4 by no means ceased. Shortly after being appointed, his successor, Si Salah, reported to the G.P.R.A. that he personally had interrogated, judged and sentenced to execution 312
djounoud
, fifty-four non-commissioned officers and twenty officers.

In all this saga of upheaval in the echelons of Wilaya 4, French Intelligence suffered one notable reverse at the hands of Major Azedine, the former boiler-maker and deputy military commander to Si M’hamed. In November 1958 Massu had mounted a powerful sweep of the country round Palestro in the course of which Azedine had been captured, with a shattered forearm. Under interrogation Azedine declared convincingly that he was at odds with the conduct of the war by the G.P.R.A. He felt it should now make peace with de Gaulle, whose return to power had made the whole struggle “senseless”. Azedine offered to negotiate a surrender with the leaders of Wilaya 4, and actually made several trips into the maquis to this end, on “parole”. At the same time he fed his captors with quantities of false information, and exploited a local cease-fire to get a shipment of supplies through to his Wilaya. Then one day in December he vanished quietly into the mountains behind Blida and was never seen again—until he emerged as the F.L.N. commander negotiating the take-over of Algiers in the last days of the war.[
2
]

Revolt of the four colonels: enter Boumedienne

The commands of the Wilayas were in disarray; there was too much autonomous power on the part of their chiefs, verging on a “cult of the personality”. All this was abhorrent to the whole philosophy of the F.L.N., opening wounds which still festered since the liquidation of Abane, and revealed anew that the military authority of the “exterior” G.P.R.A. was as frail as that of its predecessor, the C.C.E. On top of this there were, as ever, the numerous papered-over conflicts that needed only an increase of stress for them to burst through to the surface: conflicts of ideology between the veteran F.L.N. members and the former supporters of Messali and Abbas, and between the conservatives and progressives; conflicts between city intellectuals and illiterate peasant maquisards; conflicts between the thousands of refugees living, like the Palestinians, miserable and hungry in wretched camps in Tunisia and Morocco, and the growing force of comfortable bureaucrats serving the G.P.R.A. in Tunisia; conflicts between the G.P.R.A. and Bourguiba; conflicts, as always, between the “interior” and “exterior”, and finally conflicts between the A.L.N. military command in Ghardimaou and the supreme leadership in Tunis. Seldom before had a strong hand seemed more necessary.

Then, in November 1958, what looked like the threat of a major revolt appeared on the Tunisian frontier. All through the year the command of that particularly hard-pressed, key front under the former S.S. legionnaire, Mohamedi Said, with his inseparable coal-scuttle helmet, had been in a far from happy state of discord and disorder. Selecting, symbolically, the All Saints anniversary of 1 November, a full-scale offensive had been mounted to breach the Morice Line and get supplies through to the suffering Wilayas 1 and 2. It was too obvious a date for the French army to be caught napping, and—like so many of those disastrous “big pushes” on the Western Front of 1914–18—it ended in a welter of blood and total failure in the barbed wire of the Morice Line. Morale among those involved hit rock bottom and four colonels, led by Colonel Lamouri, decided to act. With secret support, apparently, from Nasser (whose relations with the new G.P.R.A. were icy) they intended to march on Tunis, chuck out the G.P.R.A. and liquidate the “three Bs”, replacing it with a completely “military” regime. Lamouri tried unsuccessfully to make contact with the disenchanted Amirouche but, before he was able to, reports of his plans reached the ears of Boussouf’s intelligence network.

During the night of 16 November the four colonels were seized at a conspiratorial meeting near El-Kef, together with some twenty of their supporters. Altogether fifty-four suspects were rounded up on Krim’s orders, and in March the ringleaders appeared before a court-martial on Tunisian territory. The presiding judge was an austerely efficient but little-known young colonel who first appeared as Boussouf’s aide in Morocco. He had then taken over command of the Western Front where he had permitted none of the discords which had so riven its Tunisian counterpart. His name was Houari Boumedienne. The four colonels were condemned to death, and shot the following day; while the majors who had followed them, considered corrupted by their seniors, were given only two years’ imprisonment.[
3
] But the sentences passed by Boumedienne were unprecedentedly harsh by (official) F.L.N. standards, and exemplary. The A.L.N.’s strong man had arrived, and from this moment on its whole character began to show a steady change.

For all his eminence in the post-war decade, Boumedienne remains one of the least known of all the war leaders of either side, and in his secretiveness and retiring modesty he is most characteristically Algerian. In 1973 one leading Western ambassador was unable to tell the author where the then President of Algeria lived, or whether he was married or not;[
4
] in three years he had met him once. There exists no official—or even unofficial—biography of Boumedienne, only the scantiest of entries in
International
Who’s Who
, and pen-portraits differ widely as to the date he was born, and whether it was in Oranie or Constantinois, at opposite ends of the country. There are contradictions as to where and when he received his military training; some say at a guerrilla school in Egypt, one of his closer collaborators thought it was in General Kassem’s Iraq, while there were extravagant French rumours that Boumedienne had somehow found time for training in both Moscow and Peking. Yet there is, apparently, no truth in any of these speculations. Even after years of being not only President of Algeria but also one of the most influential leaders of the Third World, he has never shaken off his intense dislike of any form of publicity, and in his rare interviews with writers and journalists he steadfastly declines to discuss the war, or his role in it.

What is known with reasonable certainty of Boumedienne is that he was born in 1927 near Guelma with the name of Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharouba, and that his father was an impoverished small wheat-farmer with seven children, an Arab and a strict Muslim speaking no French. “Houari” and “Boumedienne” were both
noms-de-guerre
he assumed while serving his first apprenticeship with the A.L.N. in Oranie; the one from a mountain range, the other from a local Muslim patron saint. Using both, for a considerable time Boumedienne deceived French intelligence as to his true identity. It was evidently at Guelma, during the Sétif revolt of 1945, that Boumedienne as a youth gained his first experience of conflict with the French. He had been sent, aged fourteen, to school in Constantine, at one of the few centres dedicated to Arab-Islamic studies, where he stayed for six years. In about 1950 he went to Cairo to study in that great fount of Muslim learning, El Azhar University. His background was thus already totally different from that of the francophone nationalist leaders of the pre-war generation, like Ferhat Abbas, and his age when the revolution started places him among the rising leaders who belonged truly to the new generation created by the war itself. In the maquis he seems first to have emerged in 1955, carrying out a beach-landing of arms west of Oran from the “borrowed” yacht of the Queen of Jordan, and was then picked out for his silent efficiency by Boussouf, currently commander of Wilaya 5, to be his adjutant. On Boussouf’s promotion to the C.C.E. in July 1957, Boumedienne was himself appointed to command the Wilaya as the youngest colonel in the A.L.N. The following year he was given command of the whole Western Front, and subsequently transferred to the A.L.N. High Command at about the time of the plot of the four dissident colonels over whose judgement he was to preside.