A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (84 page)

On certain projected and far-reaching social reforms the F.L.N. had remained steadfastly consistent from the Soummam Declaration onwards; one of these was agrarian reform and land redistribution, which — combined with the high promises and sadly inadequate achievements of successive French programmes — made a progressively powerful impact on rural Algeria. With the revolt beginning in the country rather than in the cities, with educated urban rebels flowing to the
bled
in refuge from Algiers, a profound revolution had taken place in the traditionally conservative consciousness of agrarian Algeria, lying deeper than the devoted French S.A.S. administrators could gauge, let alone reverse. After only two years of war, in 1957 Germaine Tillion had noted pessimistically how almost the whole of Muslim society in Algeria was “to be found solidly, and efficaciously enclosed within a clandestine framework”. Though this “framework” had only come into being with the insurrection, it almost gave the impression “that these invisible cadres, a powerful weapon of war, had been prepared for a long time”. She had criticised then the failure of French politicians “not to comprehend the irreversible character of the movement which was accomplishing itself in the silent depths of the people who had neither newspapers nor representatives”. On returning to her beloved Algeria some four years later, Germaine Tillion observed how, out of those “silent depths”, had arisen a “national unitary, Algerian consciousness” through six years of war, which reminded her of the German unity achieved as a result of the Napoleonic wars. It was, she reckoned, “a trump card for the Algeria of tomorrow”.

Proof that this kind of national consciousness existed, and of the control which the geographically absent G.P.R.A. exerted now over the Algerian people, was detectable in the local elections held in May 1960 where, though still mainly supporting de Gaulle, only fifty-six per cent of the electorate voted; while in the Casbah of Algiers the turn-out was down to thirty per cent, and in Sétif (the home town of Ferhat Abbas) to only fourteen per cent. Then, at the end of that year, further evidence was to be forthcoming in a manner even more dramatic — and discountenancing to de Gaulle.

Neutralising the “Bao-Dais”

The more one studies the Algerian revolution, the more one comes to realise how well the F.L.N. leadership succeeded in spinning an impenetrable cocoon of secrecy around the incessant rifts and dissents at the top (and it may well contain a lesson for the West in its present-day fits of political self-destruction). Much as the maquisards of the “interior” may have railed and raged at the “exterior” in its failure to furnish military replenishment, to the Muslim masses of Algeria the mere appearance of this seemingly unruffled, undivided and unrelenting façade was immeasurably heartening and encouraging, and probably did more to keep the flame of the revolution alight than a steady flow of dozens of fresh
katibas
across the Morice Line would have done. The moral effect of the Melun talks and their skilful exploitation by the G.P.R.A. has already been indicated, and this in turn was more grist to the mill of the hard-liners. Their line of argument was that “self-determination” had been wrested from de Gaulle simply by five years of remorseless violence initiated by the F.L.N. — not by the softer methods of Abbas or Messali. The direct consequence of “self-determination” had been the negotiating table at Melun. And who had sat at it with the representatives of the French government? Not the men of Messali or Abbas, but delegates selected by the F.L.N.

Early in November 1960 three leaders of French Black Africa had an interview with de Gaulle to discuss Algerian solutions. A few days later they were in Tunis, relaying to ministers of the G.P.R.A. de Gaulle’s current preoccupation with finding “acceptable” leaders that might head an “Algerian Algeria” of the future. This had at once thrown the Algerians into the normal state of agitation provoked whenever suspicions were aroused that de Gaulle was still looking around for that elusive “third force” to cut out the F.L.N. Ahmed Francis, the G.P.R.A. Minister of Finance and one of the older and more experienced members present, recalled how at the close of the Indo-China war the French had “produced out of a hat” the Annamite ex-Emperor Bao-Dai, whom they had then sought to impose as the “nationalist interlocutor” in preference to Ho Chi Minh. De Gaulle, warned Ahmed Francis, “would like to play the same trick on us again today…. And that’s why our task is clear. We must, above all, neutralise the little Algerian Bao-Dais.”

In fact, from the earliest days the F.L.N. had never let up on their ruthless campaign to “neutralise” the Bao-Dais that might have challenged their supremacy. There were the various Muslim “liberal” apostles of “association” returned in the elections since de Gaulle had come to power: courageous men whose heads, however, had been progressively kept down by selective outrages of terrorism. But still the principal foes, the modern counterparts of Tito’s Četniks, were the brother nationalists of the M.N.A. With the demise of the last private army under Bellounis, the M.N.A. had all but lost its last claim to bring revolution sprouting out of its gun muzzles, and inside Algeria it no longer carried much weight as a coherent political force. Yet always there existed the fear that de Gaulle would produce it “out of a hat”, like Bao-Dai.

It was inside France, though — and particularly in the Paris area, where Messali had exerted a traditionally potent influence from the days of the antediluvian Etoile — that the M.N.A. remained strongest. Starting in 1957, a savage internecine war had raged between the two factions, which by 1960 had already claimed hundreds of dead among the 250,000 Algerian workers in the Paris region alone. In 1960 the killings reached a crescendo as the F.L.N. stepped up its campaign to achieve total ascendancy. Barely a day went by without a corpse fished out of the Seine, or found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne. A favourite place of reckoning was the quiet Canal Saint-Martin, flowing towards the Bastille in the east of Paris, which with hideous regularity yielded up its crop of sacks containing the disfigured bodies of Algerians. As during the Battle of Algiers, women were often employed as executioners’ “liaisons”; they would take a pistol concealed in a handbag to the appointed place, slip it to the killer, then take it back immediately the deed was done, to disappear silently into the crowd. Under the blanket of terror successfully imposed by the F.L.N., the French police received a minimum of information — even from the relatives of victims — with which to track down the terrorists. Meanwhile, the perfected system of fund-raising was bringing in from the Paris region alone something like three hundred million francs a month.

As the F.L.N. campaign hit a peak in 1960, the Paris authorities launched a counter-offensive, adopting methods that had proved so successful in Algeria. A small group of “loyal”
harkis
was created in the capital who infiltrated among the Algerian
quartiers
to track down the F.L.N. operatives. Some spectacular shoot-ups ensued in the streets and alleys of Paris; on one occasion two terrorists who made their getaway in the
métro
were pursued from station to station by
harkis
commandeering the next train, and finally catching them. Within less than a year the
harkis
suffered twenty-four dead and sixty-seven wounded, but the results seemed to pay off. In the 13th Arrondissement alone fund collections dropped by a half after the first month, while from spring 1960 to the end of the war nearly 1,200 terrorists were rounded up, including four leaders of the F.L.N.’s metropolitan network.

Yet, even inside prison walls, these militants were far from being safely neutralised. Like the detention centres of Northern Ireland where I.R.A. members blatantly drilled and trained before the eyes of British troops, the French prisons were transformed into recruiting grounds and veritable staff-colleges for the F.L.N. At Fresnes prison, for example, holding 1,500 F.L.N. suspects, discipline was exerted not by the prison administration but by a committee under the direction of Bachir Boumaza, subsequently a minister in both the Ben Bella and Boumedienne governments. As F.L.N. spokesmen were fond of boasting to journalists at the time, “We have three O.P.A.s: one in action, a second in reserve and a third in prison”. Prison — so revolutionaries from the early Bolsheviks onwards have discovered — provides the best of schools.

Jewish dilemmas

Finally, as the F.L.N. raised the pressure against the “non-conformists” ever more relentlessly, there was one particular community in Algeria which found itself most cruelly caught between the fires: the Algerian Jews. Over the long years of the colonial era anti-semitism had seldom raised its head among the Muslim population, but soon after the revolt began the F.L.N. was applying the screw upon the Jewish community to force it to declare itself. As with the other uncommitted groupings, the Jews found themselves subjected to the persuasion of terrorism and economic sanctions. Typical was this threatening letter to a Jewish shopkeeper in Algiers:

Sir,

If on Wednesday you do not hand us a sum of two million francs, which must be deposited in the hall of the building situated at 1 Rue d’Isly, Wednesday 7th before 16.45 hours, near the staircase at the end near the cupboard, your daughter will be abducted and will serve as a mattress for the army of liberation. Useless to put her in safety, we have our eyes on her.

If you do not follow our instructions, your shop will be blown up and we shall have your skins, yours and your wife’s.

In the spring of 1956 a terrorist grenade attack in the Constantine ghetto had been followed by a nasty outbreak of inter-racial killings, which showed just how precarious the war had rendered coexistence between the two peoples. In March the following year Jacob Chekroun, the rabbi of Médéa, was assassinated on the steps of his synagogue, while the following month a boycott was imposed on the Jewish merchants of Tlemcen. And so the stick-and-carrot coercion had gone on, with the Jews being made to realise with brutal clarity as the prospects of an “Algerian Algeria” came ever closer that, if they were to have any future in it, they would have to throw in their lot decisively with the F.L.N. During the latter months of the war such proclamations as this were addressed to the “Israelites of Algeria”:

Your silence must cease and you must condemn such demonstrations organised in your quarters by the O.A.S.…many Israelites are militants in our ranks…the independence of Algeria is close, independent Algeria will have need of you, and tomorrow you will also have need of her as it is your country. Your Muslim brothers stretch out the hand frankly and loyally to you for solidarity coming from your side. IT IS YOUR DUTY TO REPLY TO THIS.

The menace was thinly veiled, with pressures leading to uncharacteristic divisions among the Jewish community. Members of the intelligentsia and of the left-wing parties joined forces with the F.L.N., while the commercial bourgeoisie either strove for neutrality or supported
Algérie française
. Even families were tragically riven; in the Lévy family of Algiers, the father would later be assassinated by the O.A.S. as a F.L.N. sympathiser, while his son was killed by the F.L.N. on suspicion of belonging to the O.A.S. Thus there was never any such thing as a united front, or collective policy, established by the Jews of Algeria; nevertheless, when the day of reckoning came, they were all to be lumped into the same boat — a boat that was never to return to Algeria.

Boumedienne consolidates

By the latter part of 1960 the F.L.N. looked supreme and politically unbeatable on the internal Algerian scene, and it could claim that uncompromising determination had made it so. With its two cardinal events of the
pied noir
revolt in “Barricades Week” and Melun (combined with the destruction of the dangerous separatist threat of Si Salah), 1960 was the year which saw the ascendance of the hard-liners within the F.L.N. It was also the year of Boumedienne’s decisive consolidation of power within, and around, the army. The Comité Interministereal de Guerre, created at the Third C.N.R.A. in January largely to placate Krim’s ruffled feelings, had remained a dead letter, with the newly-appointed army chief-of-staff swiftly taking over the reins. Although the C.N.R.A. had passed a solemn motion declaring that the war would be lost if no reinforcements could be got through to the “interior” in the course of the year, it was not Boumedienne’s intention to follow in the footsteps of those French generals of the First World War. He was not going to let his army of the “exterior” be “bled white” in repeated vain attacks against an almost impregnable Line, against this ideal of a Maginot system which French ingenuity had at last perfected. Boumedienne’s was a calculated risk which external political developments, notably de Gaulle’s peace initiatives, were to vindicate.

With the same kind of ruthless efficiency that had brought him to note in his lower echelons of command, Boumedienne devoted himself to a rapid reorganisation of the A.L.N. The 12,000 men in Tunisia under control of Mohamedi Said, the old Abwehr agent with his inseparable coal-scuttle helmet, had degenerated into a state bordering on anarchy. In the boredom of inactivity some elements had taken to “mugging” local Tunisians, and one of Boumedienne’s first acts was to have twenty of these, officers and men, shot in front of the troops. (According to Ben Bella after the war, blaming Boussouf, “thousands of men” had been killed in the course of these purges.) There was also trouble in the Moroccan-based A.L.N. where a Captain Zoubir had launched an insurrection a hundred strong; with the help of the Moroccan army it too had been crushed, but not before Boumedienne’s forces had been more or less neutralised there for the best part of three months. To eradicate permanently this kind of indiscipline, Boumedienne introduced his own tough deputies — Azedine (the same much-wounded hero who had deceived his French captors in Wilaya 4), Slimane (alias Kaïd Ahmed) and Ali Mendjli — to weld the whole army closely under his personal control. Mendjli was a thirty-eight-year-old former café-owner, who had enlisted on the first day of the war, served as an officer in Wilaya 2, then left for Tunisia in 1958. He was as taciturn as his chief, Boumedienne, in contrast to the volubility and noisy rages of Slimane — a farmer and local dignitary from Tiaret who had commanded one of the zones of Wilaya 5 on the Moroccan frontier.