Fighting on all Fronts (11 page)

The gains made in such a short time raised new challenges. The PPA attracted radicalised youth, who quickly came into conflict with the old cadres around Messali Hadj. Putschist tendencies arose with little regard for a sober analysis of the balance of forces in Algeria and beyond. One example is the Comité de Jeunesse, mentioned above, which managed to recruit 1,500 young members in the Belcourt borough of the capital city. “Having received their political formation in the syndicalist milieu of the tramway workers they are now seriously preparing a large-scale revolutionary offensive to be kicked off with propaganda, a few spectacular actions, the seizure of arms, writing slogans on walls”.
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Another example is the group around Mohamed Taleb, which started off amassing arms. On 30 September on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, the last day of Ramadan, the group led the masses that were leaving the mosques after prayers to Government Square, and there staged a huge rally demanding Messali’s, Abbas’s and Sayah’s release. The police intervened in force arresting scores of demonstrators.
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Similar scenes took place in almost every city, putting the colonial government on the defensive and creating mounting tension.

The PPA did not remain unaffected. The group around Lamine Debaghine had been leading the organisation since mid-1944. Under the influence of the new activists it now began to prepare for armed struggle. But many questions remained unanswered. What was the relationship between mass struggle and armed struggle? How should the organisation prepare itself against state repression? Can the army be won over? The PPA leaders gave the impression of stumbling from one step to the next. Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer commented:

The search for arms is on the agenda, in preparation for a revolutionary war which will at last give the people the means to express itself and take action… But in this struggle which promises to be merciless, they think it
is sufficient to simply launch the action for all obstacles to disappear. They mythologise political violence which gives them the opportunity to assert themselves, they give priority to tactics, because they can’t envisage a long term strategy.
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Within a year the PPA was dominating the AML. This was proven conclusively by Ferhat Abbas’s defeat at the AML congress held 2-4 March 1945 in Algiers. Thanks to rapid growth in membership the young radicals were able to outvote general secretary Abbas and the other moderate bourgeois intellectuals on all important motions. Boosted by this success, the PPA started putting its programme into practice. And the general mood was receptive. On 6 March there were hunger marches in Oran, and the next day in Tlemcen. On 12 March in Orléansville (now Chlef ) Qada were pelted with stones by a crowd of 200. The military secret service was alarmed. Ever since September 1944 it had been warning of the danger of an “insurrectionary movement”. The tragedy was that the general situation was indeed ripe for social revolution, but not the PPA. Its leadership failed to develop an adequate strategy. From its purely nationalist viewpoint the revolt could be nothing other than armed action taken by a minority acting on behalf of the masses. It had no class strategy and for them the masses had no independent role to play in the revolutionary situation. They were reduced to being bystanders looking on at the activities of the party leadership.

The voluntarist wing of the PPA around Lamine Debaghine and Hocine Asselah, who now dominated the party, reverted to spectacular actions at the end of the war in Europe in order to attract the attention of the Allied victors to the demands of the Algerians for independence. In April 1945 Debaghine and Asselah visited Messali, wanting to convince him of the necessity for armed insurrection.
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The latter surreptitiously embarked on an inspection tour on 16 April to see for himself what preparations were under way. He came back the next day completely shattered. He had discovered neither weapons nor trained partisans and nowhere anything resembling serious preparation, absolutely nothing to justify a venture which could easily annihilate all the political work the AML had invested. It was thanks to Messali’s opposition that the plans for insurgency were ditched.

While the great majority of party members and also of the population at large had no idea of these goings-on, the colonial army had started
military manoeuvres in preparation for the inevitable confrontation. The colonial government, however, still needed to find the right man to translate the discontent and impatience of the rightist forces into concrete action. The Socialist Yves Chataigneau, since September 1944 governor-general appointed by de Gaulle, seemed much too liberal in their eyes. Things changed when Pierre-René Gazagne was installed as General Secretary of the General Government. Gazagne originated from Algeria and had close connections with influential circles in French Algeria. On arrival he immediately took measures over Chataigneau’s head to hasten and heat up the conflict with the Algerian nationalists.

Informed by the secret services of the dissent within the PPA leadership, Gazagne and his retinue of colonial officers saw their time to liquidate the PPA together with all the other Algerian nationalist organisations had come. The General Secretary of Algiers Prefecture, Francis Rey, put it thus: “We have allowed the abscess to ripen so as to more easily puncture it”.
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At the beginning of April, Gazagne ordered the subprefectures across the country to stage provocations to be used as an excuse for arrests and so weaken the leading ranks of the PPA. Within a month around 50 cadres had been thus “neutralised”. Then Gazagne ordered Messali’s arrest, who on 21 April was carried off by the security forces to an unknown destination and subsequently deported to the Congo.
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The PPA, having dropped its plans for insurrection, was caught completely unawares by this turn of events. On the occasion of the traditional 1 May demonstrations it called for celebrating the approaching victory over Nazi Germany. It gave the order to chant slogans demanding Messali’s and others’ release as well as Algerian independence and to carry the Algerian flag. But the colonial administration would have nothing of that. In Oran and Algiers, the two largest Algerian cities, the demonstrators, pouring into the city centres from the outskirts, were stopped by police barriers. The police fired shots into the crowd and arrested some of the “ringleaders”.

The Communist Party, which had its own ministers in the French government, together with the leadership of the CGT trade union, sanctioned the repression, comparing the PPA with Nazis. A leaflet put out by the CGT on 3 May called for Algerian workers to foil the “manoeuvres” of the PPA, whose slogans were “the faithful expression of Radio Berlin”. In another leaflet the PCA maintained that the PPA “receives its orders from Berlin, directly from Hitler…the PPA demonstrations, an expression of Messali’s long tradition of divisive politics, are Hitlerian provocations”. The leaflet’s headline read: “Down with the provocateurs!”
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The French colonial machine set about implementing the PCA’s demand with the most vicious efficiency. On the day of the capitulation of the Wehrmacht, the AML was planning its own marches with distinct symbols: strictly non-violent and disciplined, the participants were to hold up flags of the victorious Allies, including France, interspersed with Algerian flags. Thus peaceful marches gathered together in eastern Algerian Sétif, as well as in many other Algerian towns and cities. As the Muslim crowd reached the town centre they were faced with a police cordon and the demand to hand over the Algerian flags, which they refused to do. There ensued a scuffle. To this day it remains unclear who fired the first shot. What is undisputed is that the police and the army then began shooting directly into the crowd. People panicked and sought refuge in the suburbs. Disorientated and full of hatred they attacked Algerian French on their way. The day’s record was 21 Europeans killed. How many Muslims were shot dead has never been investigated.

In the evening General Duval made an appearance in the Sétif area with the mandate to put down the “insurrection”. The job was to be executed not by the army alone. Weapons were distributed to the European settlers’ militia forces, who hunted down Muslims with complete impunity. The authorities distributed white armbands to Muslim civil servants. The rest were forbidden from walking the streets. An eyewitness report by a French officer explained that in the reaction to the European deaths, “we observe a large number of summary executions of dubious Muslims. Individual executions are tolerated. Right in the town centre a European comes upon an Arab without an armband, he kills him with one revolver shot. Nobody protests. In a garden a small boy is picking flowers, a sergeant passes by and kills him…”
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Whereas in Sétif the colonial administration in deploying the militia managed to get the situation under control, trouble spread to other parts of the countryside. Here the PPA and the AML had lost all authority over the various clans which now wrought vengeance on outposts of the colonial regime and isolated settlers and their families. As well as the militia now the French army was sent in. While the ground forces moved in, the air force bombed gatherings of people and even whole villages.

Colonial inequality applied even beyond death. Whereas the full names of all 102 Europeans killed during the events are known, no one knows the numbers of Muslims who met their death. The Algerian state today officially speaks of 45,000 deaths, an assertion which is not verifiable. What is certain is that the whole population of the Sétif region, measuring over 5,000 square kilometres, were subjected to a whole range of suppressive measures.

Then there was the town Guelma and its surroundings, the scene of similar violence on the evening of 8 May with one notable difference, namely that here a Gaullist subprefect André Achiary was directly responsible, the same individual who had played such a prominent role in the struggle for power in Algiers in 1943. He personally ordered the execution without trial and without verdict of nine AML members for “admitting to have initiated the movement on orders from Algiers”.
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Repression was so vicious and widespread that the AML was completely wiped out, while the PPA split and went underground, where it spent the next ten years primarily infighting. Eventually out of the various faction struggles a new group calling itself National Liberation Front (FLN, “Front de Libération Nationale”) emerged, which in 1954 engaged in a guerrilla war and eventually catalysed the complete demise of France’s colonial empire in Africa.

Under the coalition government constituted by de Gaulle after the liberation of France and which included Socialists and Communists, colonial domination remained intact and unchanged. What had changed were the Algerians. Large numbers of Muslim soldiers had fought and died alongside the Allied forces in the battle for Monte Cassino in Italy and during the reconquest of France. Those who survived and returned to Algeria after the war were expecting changes which did not materialise. Instead they were confronted with tales of the horrors committed by the French. Whereas in France and the other allied countries on 8 May people euphorically celebrated victory and the end of hostilities, in Algeria this day stood for the continuation of the brutal reality of colonial repression—only even more terrible than before.

Edward Behr describes the political consequences: “Every one of the ‘new wave’ of Algerian nationalists prominent in the National Liberation Front traces his revolutionary determination back to May 1945… Each of them felt after May 1945 that some sort of armed uprising would sooner or later become necessary”.
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Looking back, 8 May was for many the beginning of the coming war for national liberation. This was to last seven long years and claim hundreds of thousands of lives before Algeria finally became independent in 1962.

1
      
www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_16912.htm

2
      Labelling the various groups of the population in colonial Algeria is not easy. The Algerian French went alternately under the name “colonists”, “Europeans” or “pieds-noirs” (black-feet), the latter still a common term but of unknown origin. In modern texts the local population are, retrospectively, referred to as “Algerians”, though during the colonial period they were termed Arabs or “indigènes” (natives). All these various terms, however, only encompass a part of the historical reality. I have opted for the term Muslims to designate the nationally oppressed majority. This corresponds to their self-conception and self-denomination prevailing at the time. The French colonial administration used their religion to define the local population as “French subjects” (but not citizens)—a process which in turn bound them together.

3
      Robert O Paxton,
Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944
(London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972). As vice-président du Conseil, Laval was effectively the government’s strong man. He was prime minister from 1940 to 1944 with only a short break between December 1941 and April 1942, when Pierre-Étienne Flandin and Admiral François Darlan took over his functions. Field Marshal Pétain declared himself president as from July 1940, but did not intervene in the daily running of government affairs.

4
      Paxton, 1972, p80.

5
      Charles de Gaulle’s speech on the BBC on 18 June 1940:
www.charles-de-gaulle.org/pages/lhomme/dossiers-thematiques/1940-1944-la-seconde-guerre-mondiale/l-appel-du-18-juin/documents/l-appel-du-18-juin-1940.php

6
      Just how tiny this minority was is demonstrated by one number: out of the 18,000 French sailors residing in Britain in June 1940 only 200 followed de Gaulle’s appeal to remain in situ.

7
      Paxton, 1972, p114. This situation formed the background to the Hollywood classic
Casablanca
, which mistakenly showed the German Armistice inspectors in uniform.