A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (101 page)

The previous day Jim Alcheik’s printing press had arrived in a heavy crate; instead of a press, however, it contained a devastating booby-trap which Degueldre had devised himself, consisting of ninety kilos of assorted explosive, with detonators secured to the planks of the packing case by parachute silk thread. Alcheik hastened to prise open the crate; there was an earth-shaking explosion, and the three-storey building disintegrated in dust. Alcheik, the karate champion, was blown to pieces and another eighteen
barbouzes
died in the blast; two survived by a miracle. Hanging in tatters from one of the few standing walls was one of Alcheik’s M.P.C. posters, proclaiming: “Neither suitcase, nor coffin, but co-operation!”

Hacq now decided that the remaining
barbouzes
had to be got out of the country, but once again Degueldre struck first. The last
barbouze
detachment of twenty-five men was trapped in a seedy hotel and submitted to a siege continuing forty-eight hours without the Algiers police making any effort to intervene. Four survivors tried to break out by car to get a wounded comrade to hospital, but were shot up on the way. Out of control, their car ran into a wall, and a terrible scene now took place.
Pied noir
occupants of the neighbouring apartment blocks rushed up, prevented the injured men from getting out of the car, then set fire to it and danced jubilant round the flaming pyre.

Thus died the last of Bitterlin’s
barbouzes
. The operation had been a disastrous failure; on the other hand, information provided by it had enabled Hacq’s professionals to arrest some 600 members of the O.A.S., including sixty-nine killers. Later, Pérez himself admitted that attacking the
barbouzes
had been a big tactical error: “They were too easy. They were sent to Algiers specifically to be killed — to distract the O.A.S. from getting on with its main job…. We fell into the trap … Godard in fact warned us against it. He was right.”

Algiers: the Muslims riposte

It was a “distraction” that did but little, however, to impede O.A.S. outrages against the civil population at large from escalating. The sheer savagery with which the last of the
barbouzes
had been wiped out exemplified the degradation of the atmosphere in Algiers and Oran by the new year of 1962. Uncannily, the two cities had acquired many of the siege aspects so brilliantly described by Camus in his grim novel,
La Peste
(first published in 1947), based upon a plague-ridden Oran. The fictitious plague, writes Camus, “had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.” As in Camus’ Oran, in Algiers alone more than 200 check-points were set up to examine papers and control movements within the city. Trolley-bus windows bore heavy metal grilles to protect against the random grenade; a curfew emptied the streets of vehicles from 9 p.m. onwards, and at 1 a.m. the public lighting was extinguished, plunging the city into darkness. Then, in this twilight world, the O.A.S. graffiti squads took over, and as fast as they worked so officially-backed volunteers (euphemistically dubbed “Rembrandts”) busied themselves scrubbing out their handiwork or amending the “
A bas de Gaulle!
” slogans into “
Vive de Gaulle!
” Trapped by Degueldre’s prowling Deltas, the “Rembrandts” often paid with their lives for this infantile role in the propaganda war. But even without the curfew, Algiers had become a dead city at night. There were no longer any public distractions, and little social life. Cinemas were empty or closed down; cafés had become dispirited and iron-shuttered bunkers. Instead of lingering in them, or promenading in the leafy, cool boulevards, people were driven by fear to hurry home and stay indoors, for death seemed to lurk at every street corner. At home, families were gripped by anxiety wondering whether the menfolk would return safely from work, while bitter mistrust grew between neighbour and neighbour. Cities that had once enjoyed the flashy late-night existence of an Alicante now became East Berlins — but East Berlins ruled by the mores of Chicago of the “Roaring Twenties”. (Indeed, the parallel of Chicago fixed itself on the minds of the French security forces so that an
alerte Chicago
become the standard code-name flashed between patrol cars to designate a
strounga
or a killing. But, as C. L. Sulzberger pointed out at the time, “more people in Algiers die violently each day than in the Midwestern city’s gaudiest era”.)

The killings continued to mount; from six killed and 430
stroungas
in August, the O.A.S. score rose to nine and 763 in October. In December the number of deaths attributed to the O.A.S. was 98, but by February of 1962 they had risen to 553 in one month. Partly to revenge the O.A.S. outrages against their fellow countrymen on an eye for an eye basis, partly to prove their growing ascendancy over the Muslim population, the F.L.N. now staged a recrudescence of terrorism. Already in September President Ben Khedda, speaking over Radio Tunis, had issued a warning for the future to

those European fanatics who, with the toleration of the colonialists’ army and police force, indulge in lynchings, massacres and pillage.… All they do is to compromise their future in the independent Algeria … these acts cannot but create obstacles to their coexistence with the Algerian people.

This had been followed up, even more specifically, by Yazid declaring: “If the French authorities do not take the necessary measures to put an end to murders and lynchings, the anger of our people will swoop down implacably.”

In November the F.L.N. began its counter-offensive, with acts made explicit in a new
Bulletin d’Information
, published for the first time by Colonel Boumedienne’s General Staff. Written in its own peculiar style that referred contemptuously to
la soldatesque française
, “traitors” and “colonialists”, as opposed to “glorious
moudjahiddine
fallen on the field of honour”, its first issue announced that “sixty traitors to the country or colonialists, including one major (in Kilea), one doctor (Barika) and one peace officer (Birmandreis), have been executed after being condemned for their crimes by revolutionary tribunals. Ninety-eight others have been wounded.” On the one day of 1 November, it claimed that two hundred Algerians had been killed. Reporting a further “intensification” of activities in its December issue, the
Bulletin
listed:

thirty-five colonialists, of whom nine were military, have been shot down; thirty-eight were wounded. Forty-four traitors who had been condemned to capital punishment by our revolutionary tribunals, were executed by bullets … parallel to these executions by shootings, our
fidayine
have thrown into brasseries belonging to the colonialists more than twenty grenades which resulted in, as well as serious material damages, the death of eight soldiers of the army of occupation and twelve civil colonialists … eighteen farms belonging to the colonialists were burnt.

Spurred on by the atrocities of the O.A.S., individual F.L.N. killings reached a new level of horror; a Jewish Algerian, sympathising with the F.L.N., told the author how “they killed a shop inspector in his car, a man who had never done anything to anyone. They sliced open his skull, took out his brains and carefully placed them on the ground — like a milestone on the roadside.” The twenty-year-old son of her friend was kidnapped and found the next day in their rubbish bin: “bled white, because the F.L.N. needed the blood for their own wounded”. Gruesomely improbable as this story sounded, it received some supporting evidence in the last month of the war when forty-one European bodies were discovered in an Oran abattoir, drained of blood. Meanwhile the grim year of 1961 ended with Boumedienne’s
Bulletin
reporting the execution of another 101 “traitors”, some of them
harkis
; at the same time claiming that in Oran terrible
ratonnades
by the O.A.S. on the one day of 3 January had left 127 Muslim dead and many hundreds wounded.

As the new year began, the O.A.S. were well on the way to succeeding in both its self-immolatory aims of bringing about a state of ungovern-ability in Algiers and Oran, and of creating a gulf of hatred between Muslim and European. After his trip to Algeria the previous autumn, Bernard Tricot had already observed how the O.A.S. violence and the F.L.N. riposte had resulted in “an alienation between the two communities which I had never previously detected”; and it existed “precisely where the European population was strongest, and where a possible partition could have created a French enclave”. Meanwhile, the poisons of fratricidal hatred had seeped across the Mediterranean to metropolitan France itself.

The O.A.S. and the C.I.A.?

Outside Algeria the O.A.S. had various networks of its own, allies and affiliated bodies, as well as terrorist splinter-groups that seemed more often competing than co-operating. First of all, there was the much-bruited connection between the O.A.S. and the C.I.A., which remains only partially explained to this day. According to the story which seems to have originated with Susini, though he does not mention it in his memoirs, Salan in November 1961 had a personal approach from a senior C.I.A. official based in France, offering arms and material to equip a force of 50,000 men. In exchange, Salan was to cede military bases and preferential economic treatment (i.e. access to Saharan oil) in the event of his success in creating an independent,
pied noir
-dominated state along the lines of Rhodesia. Today such a notion may seem fanciful beyond the realms of credibility; but it is worth remembering that in November 1961 the O.A.S. looked very much as if they were winning the battle, while a peace agreement between de Gaulle and the F.L.N. seemed further away than ever, and his own life a poor insurance risk. Unlike Challe previously, Salan certainly showed no inhibitions about courting “external” assistance. The story continues that Salan, accepting the C.I.A. offer, followed this up with a long letter (dated 12 December) addressed personally to President Kennedy, appealing for his support, which was then flown to Washington by special U.S.A.F. plane. Salan strongly denies that he ever wrote such a letter, while those of the Kennedy entourage at the time who should have been in a position to know equally deny its receipt. At the same time, the intensive Senate hearings of 1975 investigated C.I.A. involvement with the O.A.S. and were satisfied that there had been none.

But Salan himself insisted, to the author, on the following account:

During the anniversary celebrations of North African landings at the Arc de Triomphe on 8 November 1961, two men purporting to be agents of the C.I.A. made contact with our people who were present, saying that they wanted to come to Algiers to see me. They turned up in Algiers the following week — one of them under the conventional cover of ‘Vice-Consul’. I saw them, then passed the whole affair over to Degueldre. I was sure they were serious, because they knew all the right people, and their credentials were perfect. No, they were not
agents provocateurs
. Why? Because they actually began delivering the goods; a shipment of some fifty machine-guns arrived from Spain, via a small port near Cherchell.… I know nothing more.…

In view of the incompetence being shown by the
barbouzes
during this same period, and the fact that nothing relevant has ever been revealed by any French source, it seems highly improbable that the “C.I.A. agents” were part of a cunningly laid Gaullist “double” operation to penetrate the O.A.S. The mystery remains.

Friends and rivals

Among its active allies in France the O.A.S. would have liked to number the Vincennes Committee. Formed in 1960 by de Gaulle’s disenchanted one-time aide, Jacques Soustelle, the Committee embraced such disparate figures as Georges Bidault; Bachaga Boualem; Bourgés-Maunoury; André Morice; Cornut-Gentille (Gaullist ex-minister); Léon Delbecque (Gaullist “antenna” in Algiers, pre-1958); and Robert Lacoste. All were bound by a common dedication to
Algérie française
. Soustelle, who had been under constant threat of arrest ever since the April putsch, had gone into self-imposed exile in August, declaring that it was the second time since 1940 that a “dictatorship” had forced him to leave his country; then he had returned in November, briefly, to give comfort to the O.A.S. at two Press conferences. Though he condemned the “barbarous methods” it employed, the O.A.S. was, he declared, now “the real ‘third force’ in Algeria” with whom the French government would have to negotiate. (Why, he asked provocatively and with some exaggeration, had not the F.L.N. been opposed with one-tenth the energy currently being deployed against the O.A.S.?) Four hours after his last Press conference an arrest order went out, and Soustelle — one jump ahead as usual — fled to Belgium. But, though he was to be accused of it by de Gaulle, Soustelle still insists he never had any direct relations with the O.A.S.

At the height of the O.A.S. offensive in Algiers in mid-November, the Vincennes Committee met in Paris and there were some provocative anti-Gaullist and pro-O.A.S. remarks from the floor. “The only effective power in Algeria is the O.A.S.,” declared Léon Delbecque. “A
coup d’état
cannot be excluded,” warned Bidault; while a deputy of the extreme Right, Jean Dides, exclaimed: “Glory to General Salan, who will restore France’s grandeur!” On 22 November de Gaulle ordered the dissolution of the Vincennes Committee. As far as the O.A.S. was concerned, however, none of the Committee ever actively worked for it, any more than Soustelle — even Bidault, though designated Salan’s heir, denies he ever gave any orders in the name of the O.A.S.