A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (69 page)

There was also what Challe called the “positive” element of his campaign. Immediately a zone had been “pacified”, the army engineers hastened to build roads through to its most inhospitable areas; military posts and “self-defence” communities were established and new S.A.S. centres created. More schools and clinics were constructed than at any time since 1954—but still not enough. Deeply involved in all this, the army began to feel a renewed pride and saw itself “appointed by the nation and, almost alone, responsible for safeguarding a form of civilisation on this African soil and making possible advancement and progress there”. It also felt increasingly committed to those Muslims who had accepted its shield, above all to the
harkis
, to whom it constantly repeated pledges that France would
never
now abandon Algeria.

…and the “negative”

Of all the confidence and goodwill that may have been gained here, however, as much—or more—was lost through one essential concomitant of the “negative”, military element of the Challe Plan. This was the intensification of the old “regroupment” policy, aimed at draining away the “water” so that the “fish” would asphyxiate, when deprived of contact with the local population upon whom it depended for food and shelter. By July 1959 over one million Muslim villagers had been transferred to “re-groupment camps”, which varied from resembling the fortified villages of the Middle Ages to the concentration camps of a more recent past. In the latter conditions were nothing short of scandalous. Hunger first, and cold secondly, were the enemies. At one camp just outside Constantine, inmates were found eating grass in the field, and in the overcrowded, tented encampments for nomads of the south infants were often found dead of cold in the mornings. Tuberculosis and other ailments of malnutrition raged. Of one regrouped Kabyle village, designed for 3,000 but now holding 15,000, Jules Roy wrote: “As for leaving—at the gates of the village there is a garrison, barbed wire, an armed sentry, and trenches. And where is there to go? The land has been burned. A few onions are sprouting at the bottom of the wadis.” Elsewhere he describes the terrible plight of refugees, driven out of their homes in the “pacification zones”, not regrouped but living in squalid
bidonvilles
on the edge of already overcrowded towns: “without water, without sewage or sanitation of any kind, without land to cultivate and for the most part without work…what do they live on?… Returning to the city after a tour like this you feel you must wash your hands. You’re ashamed of yourself.” Even the hardened Massu was profoundly shocked to find at a regroupment camp less than twenty-five miles from Algiers that “the level of life, and in particular the situation of the children, was inferior to the most miserable I have known in Black Africa”.

All this, however, remained concealed from the gaze of the public in France until, in July 1959, the conservative
Figaro
launched a bombshell in the form of a searing report from a correspondent who had visited a camp near Philippeville. For two years the inhabitants had been living in tents, fifteen to each, where in summer the temperature reached 110ŶF. Many of the children were unable to attend school because of lack of clothes, and the hunger was acute: “I shall not easily forget those arms hardly thicker than a stick, those fearful expressions, those hollow faces.” The
Figaro
report provoked a major uproar, on Left and Right, and was followed by a spate of similar accounts in other newspapers. Challe was pressed to close down the regroupment camps but pleaded for their retention on grounds of military necessity; by the end of the year, however, a big effort had been made to improve living conditions within them.

At about the same time there were also murmurs that torture had raised its ugly head again, employed to extract intelligence vital for the Challe offensives. The de Gaulle government, however, had set its face resolutely against such malpractices. André Malraux, who in his own remarkable life had learned more about the full horror of torture than probably any other Western politician, had declared as Minister of Information that there would be no more of it; de Gaulle had openly criticised Delouvrier for permitting the army to resort to torture. So if it did continue it seems to have been on a basis of “private enterprise”, no longer the wholesale outrage that it had been during the Battle of Algiers.

The balance

In summing up on the Challe Plan, though one may respect Challe’s sincerity in claiming that “the military phase of the rebellion is terminated”, one may well question just how fundamental and lasting were the consequences of this military victory; would they be decisive on the political conduct of the war; was it, on the other hand, going to prove a case of the operation succeeding and the patient succumbing nevertheless? As so often happens with the soldiers on the spot, there was a certain amount of self-deception by the “centurions” of Algeria, a self-deception that would shortly lead to the gravest of misjudgements. Even if Challe had effectively broken up the
katibas
into penny-packets of shaken guerrillas, so long as they were not
all
annihilated or won over there always existed the danger that at some future date they might reform themselves and recruit new replacements to fill the gaps. As Lartéguy’s “Boisfeuras” remarks in
Les Prétoriens
, “In a few weeks, in a few months, the rebellion will break out again—you know, like the algae which always comes back in aquariums.” What was not visible to the French military at the time should also be recalled; namely, that it was already the deliberate strategy of the new A.L.N. chief-of-staff, Boumedienne, to build up a powerful new force outside under the safe umbrella of Tunisian neutrality, at the expense of those hard-pressed
katibas
of the interior, but waiting for the right opportunity that would present itself one day.

Then there was always the prospect of support from further afield. “In its hatred for the F.L.N.,” declared Jules Roy as the Challe offensives ended, “the army refused to realise that the F.L.N. might receive outside aid that will one day blow its barriers…. Instead of admitting that it is easier to make peace with the F.L.N. than with the Chinese, it cherishes the illusion that a decomposition of the rebel forces is imminent….” De Gaulle, however, was later to claim that he for one was not deceived by the scale of Challe’s successes. During his visit to “Binoculars”, after Kabyle village children had dutifully chanted the
Marseillaise
,

Just as I was leaving, the Muslim town clerk stopped me, bowing and trembling, and murmured: “
Mon général
, don’t be taken in! Everyone here wants independence.” At Saida, where the heroic Bigeard introduced me to a commando unit who had been won over, I caught sight of a young Arab doctor attached to their group. “Well, doctor, what do you think of it all?” “What we Arabs want, and what we need,” he replied, his eyes filled with tears, “is to be responsible for ourselves instead of others being responsible for us.”

Certainly de Gaulle had himself frequently stressed to the army that military success was not an end in itself. “A request for a cease-fire by those on the other side,” writes de Gaulle’s close collaborator, Bernard Tricot, “only seems to us foreseeable if, convinced that the armed struggle had become hopeless, they had good reasons for thinking that a return to peace would permit them to attain their objectives by political means.” All through the hard year of 1959 there were no effective offers of a cease-fire forthcoming from the F.L.N.—despite the relentless military pressure being applied by Challe—and meanwhile a political formula was still wanting.

Political and economic initiatives

On the political front, Delegate-General Paul Delouvrier was continuing to find de Gaulle’s instructions discouragingly vague. The only thing that was quite clear was the priority attached to getting the Constantine Plan under way, to give Algeria an economic solution to its troubles even if a political one was not immediately forthcoming. Here Delouvrier the technocrat, finding himself on his home ground, had moved energetically. During 1959 242 milliard francs had been invested, and a further 326 milliards earmarked for 1960; 132 new industrial enterprises had been projected, 400,000 acres of arable land (still not very much in relation to demand) handed over to Muslim farmers; the number of jobs for manual workers had been increased by eight per cent in only six months, while school attendance for Muslim children had risen from 510,000 in 1958 to 840,000 at the beginning of 1960. Under the “thousand villages programme”, designed to counter the miseries of regroupment, 38,000 housing units had been constructed. In November 1959 the oil pipeline from Hassi-Messaoud to Bougie entered into service; in March 1960 work was to begin on the Hassi-R’Mel—Arzew pipeline for natural gas, and plans were under way to build a major steel complex at Bône. All this represented a considerable advance over anything done, socially or economically, for Algeria in the past—as well as being a pledge and an assurance to the Muslims that France had no intention of pulling out. At the same time, de Gaulle had endeavoured to make various conciliatory gestures to the F.L.N. On the day of his inauguration as President, he had commuted all death sentences, transferred Ben Bella and his companions to more “honourable” quarters, released Messali Hadj unconditionally from his perennial house-arrest, and continued to set free Muslim internees in Algeria by the thousand.

At his first Press conference in the Elysée, on 25 March, he had told a questioner that France, “while endeavouring to achieve pacification, is working towards a transformation which will enable Algeria to find her new personality”. The following month, in an interview with the liberal editor of the
Echo d’Oran
, Pierre Laffont, he had made some hard-hitting remarks aimed at the diehard
pieds noirs
. When asked why he never mentioned the word “integration” in his speeches, he had replied haughtily, “First of all, because they wanted to impose it on me”; and then he added: “What they want, is to return to ‘Papa’s Algeria’. But Papa’s Algeria is dead, and if they don’t understand that they will die with it.” He had followed this up by emphasising (again chiefly for
pied noir
consumption) that it was in his name the Muslim “fraternisation” of May 1958 had taken place, and that only he and he alone could bring about a solution in Algeria.

Neither de Gaulle’s clemency measures nor his other olive sprigs of 1959 produced any more flicker of a
quid pro quo
from the hard core of the F.L.N. than British governments were to obtain from the I.R.A. The principal effect they had was to anger the army and arouse mistrust among the
pieds noirs
. The first anniversary of 13 May was a sombre affair in Algiers, Lagaillarde attempting (with only modest success) to transform it into a day of mourning, and there were heard the first shouts of “
De Gaulle au poteau!
” In France, Mollet continued to support de Gaulle on Algeria, while Soustelle was becoming increasingly alienated. There also seemed to be a divergence between de Gaulle and his Prime Minister, Debré; in August when the latter declared that “France would do anything—anything at all—to keep Algeria French,” de Gaulle was saying: “Peace is a necessity. This absurd war….”

Though as ever enigmatic when it came to revealing his precise intentions, de Gaulle had dropped one or two hints in the course of 1959 about the way in which his mind was working. At his inauguration on 8 January he had spoken of Algeria, “pacified and transformed, developing her own personality and closely associated with France”. And on 30 January: “destiny lies essentially within the Algerians themselves”. On 25 March: “a new Algeria, that is to say modern, educated and fraternal…will find her face and her soul”. To Bernard Tricot, his newly appointed councillor on Algerian affairs who was probably as close to the General’s thinking on this subject as anyone else, at that time “he gave the impression of a man who was still searching”. In August de Gaulle took a relatively long vacation of three weeks, his first while in office, accompanied by a note carefully drafted by Tricot and others on the prospects for an Algerian peace settlement. Among the points studied was the pursuit of a cease-fire that could be regarded by the F.L.N. not as an act of surrender, but as a transitional period leading to definitive negotiations; also it contained the proposition that the Algerians be consulted (presumably by referendum) on the future status of their country. It was during these weeks of withdrawal from the daily pressures of the office that, one can assume, de Gaulle thoughtfully deliberated his Algeria policy.

De Gaulle visits his army

Immediately afterwards he flew to Algeria on his
tournée des popotes
(round of officers’ messes), to put his intentions across to the army leaders who were fighting the war so wholeheartedly. He felt, not without reason, that communication between himself and the army in Algeria had become distinctly faulty. The military mind found the changeable nuances of de Gaulle’s statements not easy to decipher; on the other hand, Tricot claims that even his clearest instructions were often deliberately misapplied by the army when they conflicted with its own philosophy. Always pointedly in uniform, de Gaulle began (on 27 August) by visiting Bigeard in the Ouarsenis, half-amused, half-irritated by the flamboyant colonel’s “circus”; then on to Colonel Buis in the Hodna, followed by a lightning tour of the Morice Line in the east; ending in Kabylia (on 30 August) at Challe’s battle headquarters whence he was conducting “Binoculars”.