A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (82 page)

[
4
] This was reinforced by Abdelkader Chanderli, who declared categorically to the author (in 1973) that the Si Salah episode was “just an aberration. De Gaulle had absolutely no intention of dealing with Si Salah; though Si Salah was an honest man and thought he was acting for the best.”

[
5
] It should be noted here, however, that the Wilaya 4 leaders in their remarks about ending “European domination” were clearly envisaging the attainment of majority rule, and not any return to the
status quo ante
of 1954.

[
6
] In November 1984, to mark the 30th anniversary of the opening of the “Algerian War of National Liberation”, President Chadli Bendjedid decreed an act of amnesty embracing posthumously some fifty F.L.N. leaders who had fallen prey to internal dispute, both during and after the war. Prominent among these was Si Salah. At the time of the 1984 amnesty, among Algerian veterans knowledgeable about the episode, the author was also able to meet the son of Si Salah (alias Zamoun) himself. He was eight at the time of his father’s death and anxious to ascertain the precise facts surrounding it. It is now accepted that, in the first place, the grievances of Si Salah and Wilaya 4 against Boumedienne’s “exterior” were real indeed. Secondly, Si Salah on his return from Paris was
not
(as surmised on p. 393) killed by a French patrol. Instead it appears that, after spending nearly a whole year in semi-captivity, Si Salah was executed on the orders of Boumedienne and the G.P.R.A. As of 1984, the official view of Si Salah seems to be an essentially tragic one; he had breached discipline in treating with the French, but was no traitor — simply a victim of the wiles of de Gaulle at his most Machiavellian. Such revelations about the inner workings of the F.L.N. could certainly not have been made in 1973, while Boumedienne was still alive.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
Revolution in the Revolution

There are only two powers in the world…the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword is always defeated by the spirit….

Napoleon Bonaparte

In the maquis: a grim struggle for survival

ALTHOUGH the two consecutive halves of the Vietnam war may have continued longer, in the post-1945 world no “war of liberation” has combined so long a duration with such a disproportion of logistics as the Algerian war. Because of the natural taciturnity and stoicism of the Algerian, all too little is known in the Western world of the suffering endured in the maquis by the forces of the interior. But it is reasonable to surmise that not many other peoples could have withstood better six such grim years of unrelenting hardship. It was also no accident that the end of the winter of 1960 had brought with it the Si Salah offer of a separate peace; for in more than one region of the interior the Challe offensive had reduced the maquisards to the limits of endurance. In the rugged Atlas highlands of Algeria winter can be as bitter as anywhere on earth; and it is made all the more penetrating by the extremes of heat that precede it and the lack of acclimatisation of those subjected to it. And the winter of 1960 was a particularly harsh one. Some of the rare films of the period show grim scenes reminiscent of the worst moments of the Yugoslav partisan war of 1941–5. Haggard remnants of broken
katibas
huddled over meagre fires in their mountain hideouts, while young children attempted to melt snow in steel helmets. Often the proximity of Challe’s Commandos de Chasse prowling only a few hundred yards distant made it impossible to light any fire at all for days on end. There was always a shortage of warm clothing and, worse still, of food. Cut off from contact with Muslim villagers, sometimes the maquisards would endeavour to track the trackers themselves in the desperate hope of gleaning a few crusts of bread or other rations abandoned by the French. Under these circumstances nourishment would consist of nothing more than a cold gruel of wheat kernels and grass. Under the strain of being constantly pursued, and of being forced to speak in whispers perhaps for weeks on end for fear of betraying themselves to the enemy, seasoned fighters not infrequently broke down and became demented.

Possibly even worse than the tribulations of cold and hunger was the appalling suffering of the F.L.N. wounded. Unlike their well-equipped adversary, the maquisards had no helicopters with which to whisk casualties from the battlefield to a modern operating theatre in a matter of minutes. There were times when the F.L.N. wounded had to wait ten days or more before their wounds, by then probably gangrenous, could be tended. On one occasion in 1960 a young lieutenant of Si Salah’s, Boualem Oussedik, despatched on an urgent liaison mission to Tunisia, was caught up in a
ratissage
on the way and had his knee shattered by a bullet. An F.L.N. doctor told him that, without proper surgery, he would lose the leg, but Boualem refused, taking with him a supply of antibiotics to tend his own wound. Bouncing about in agony astride a donkey and finally dragging his useless leg behind him under shellfire through the Morice Line, Boualem with extraordinary stoicism took six weeks to complete his journey. He survived, kept his leg, and together with another
grand mutilé
, Azedine, was to lead the last battles in Algiers. But many another wounded
moudjahid
succumbed to his wounds before he could receive treatment.

That any medical services could be organised at all under the conditions of the war was a miracle in itself. “Hospitals” would generally be sited deep in the interior of dense forests, well camouflaged from the air, near a clean stream. The wounded would be scattered about in rough shelters, lying on straw matting on the ground, with the rare mattresses reserved for only the most serious cases. Drugs and medicaments, more precious than gold, would be concealed in safe caches some distance from the “hospital”, so as not to fall into enemy hands in the event of the whole encampment being forced to strike camp and move, dragging the wounded with them. Well-organised networks throughout the Wilaya were responsible for the collection of drugs, smuggled out from F.L.N. pharmacists in the cities, run at great risk through the Morice Line, or stolen from French hospitals — despite elaborate controls to prevent their reaching the F.L.N. Even so there was always a tragic shortage, with amputations all too frequently performed, without anaesthetic, by an ordinary hack-saw sterilised in a flame. Qualified doctors and nurses were equally short. Sometimes the deficit was made up by
pied noir
sympathisers with the F.L.N. like Dr Pierre Chaulet who, on being forced to flee from Algeria, continued his practice in Tunisia, tending the F.L.N. sick and wounded at the frontier posts. A number of doctors were Muslim women — like Dr Nefissa Hamoud, a petite Algiers pediatrician in her early thirties. The first woman to join the F.L.N. medical service in the field early in the war, captured by the French and released again, apparently because of her influential connections, she immediately rejoined the A.L.N. With considerable ingenuity medical and nursing “schools” were established inside each Wilaya, and more and more young Algerian women began to appear in the khaki uniform of
sanitaires
— sometimes, initially, to the shocked disapproval of the more conservative Muslim
moudjahiddine
. Nevertheless, despite the F.L.N.’s efforts and enterprise, their rudimentary field hospitals of the interior could all too seldom cope with the terrible injuries inflicted by modern warfare, above all the massive burns caused by napalm. Thus the percentage of fatalities among the wounded remained depressingly high throughout the war.

…
but the political revolution thrives

As hardship and casualties compounded took an increasing toll of the battle-trained
moudjahiddine
, their replacements — often drafted direct from the
fidayine
, or village militia, because nothing but a trickle of reinforcements was getting through the Morice Line — showed a distinct drop in combat value. By the time of the Melun negotiations in the middle of 1960, war-weariness and a defensive mentality had made their greatest impact on the interior and, from the A.L.N.’s point of view, the war was definitely running down. Therefore, on this tangible and readily discernible evidence Challe could well claim to have been proved right in all his calculations. Yet, paradoxically, while the armed rebellion might be seen to be “withering away”, at the same time the political imprint of the revolution was imposing itself more and more indelibly on the population. As the
katibas
disintegrated under Challe’s pressure, their members would filter back to their own villages and often, far from abandoning the cause, they would there reinforce the political struggle by establishing new clandestine cells under the Organisation Politico-Administrative. There was, indeed, a growing resemblance to “that algae which always comes back in the acquariums”, as Lartéguy’s “Boisfeuras” had seen it. Gradually, also, in a number of ways the long years of war had fundamentally infected the lives of the vast majority of Algerian Muslims, despite all the earnest and real efforts of psychological and political warfare made by successive French administrations and their S.A.S. detachments. That simple, cheap and ubiquitous miracle of the modern age, the transistor radio, had brought the war into the most remote Algerian homestead. To possess a transistor, says Frantz Fanon, “was solemnly to enter into the war”. Already by 1959 more than five separate stations, located safely abroad, were beaming their transmissions to Algeria, so that millions of families could hardly avoid following the course of the revolution, discussing it and arguing over it among themselves.

The family and Muslim women at war

It was at that tight-bound, highly conservative and sacrosanct unit of Muslim life, the family, that the revolution had perhaps struck hardest. Obviously first-hand contact with the atrocities of war had the most direct effect. Fanon relates a case of a father beaten up in the street by troops in front of his children, then interned, his wife forced to take over and fend for the headless family; and of the young taxi driver who, after his wife had been raped, became impotent and suffered from repeated obsessive nightmares about his one-year-old baby transmuted into a dead and rotting cat. But the strictly hierarchical structure of the family was also affected in less dramatic ways. A father might, naturally, take the more traditionalist line that the French were stronger, and would always win, to dissuade a son from joining the F.L.N.; but when the son disobeyed nevertheless, the father eventually “discovered that the only way of remaining upright was to rejoin his son”; or, says Fanon, there were the grievous occasions, shattering to family unity, when a son might have to be present at the trial of a father guilty of renouncing, or “betraying”, the revolution. Then there were the cases of a militant wife castigating, or even breaking with, a husband condemned of cowardice in her eyes through not going off into the maquis.

“The Mediterranean woman”, says Germaine Tillion, “is one of the serfs of the contemporary world.” In the register of this serfdom the Algerian female stood very low down the scale, and it would be hard to find any other aspect of life more profoundly affected by the coming of the Algerian revolution. Because of her traditional seclusion inside her house and behind her
haik
, hitherto the Algerian woman had always remained more immune to French culture and social penetration than her menfolk; thus, when the revolt began, in many a household it was the woman who provided a hard nucleus of anti-colonial militancy. According to Fanon, she would use her
haik
as a weapon of war, wearing it as a symbol of resistance against the infidel “occupier”; then dropping it when called upon to mingle among
pied noir
crowds and carry bombs for Yacef and his terrorists; next resuming it when (following that brief day of fraternisation in May 1958) French psychological warfare experts had endeavoured to exploit unveiling and emancipation as a means of weaning the women away from the F.L.N. (or, says Fanon, of striking “at the culture of the male Algerian”). As far as emancipation was concerned, the Algerian woman had much to gain from the war — from both sides.

Even though, by the beginning of the war, polygamy was becoming rare in Algeria, in general women’s rights remained deplorably medieval. For the young Algerian girl life tended to hold but two stages; childhood — and puberty, which meant marriage (usually in her early teens). The espousal would be arranged by the families, and it was not unusual for the couple to meet each other only on the day of the wedding. It was hard for a young girl to find any employment outside marriage, so that the longer she remained unmarried the more of an economic embarrassment she was to her family. Divorce, or “repudiation”, was easy, brutal and total — for the male. Matters were worst in Kabylia, where conditions for women were the most inequitable in all the Maghreb. Although permitted the superficial privilege of freedom to walk about unveiled, with inheritance limited strictly to the male a repudiated Kabyle wife could be turned out of her husband’s house, deprived of her children and the dowry which her father had put up at the time of marriage, and forbidden by her divorcing husband to marry again — or allowed to do so only upon payment of a certain sum.