A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (103 page)

[
1
] Lagaillarde continued to remain in Spain, but — according to Susini — declared his readiness to return to Algeria and join the O.A.S. provided its senior leaders would “write him personally an invitation in good and correct form”.

[
2
] After the collapse of the O.A.S. with Algerian independence in 1962, the “treasury” — then still totalling several hundred million (old) francs — “disappeared”. Though various allegations have been made since, the fate of it remains a mystery to this day, and (as will be seen) provides a curiously parallel story to the fate of the F.L.N. funds left over from the war — which have also never been recovered by the Algerian government.

[
3
] His son was murdered by the F.L.N.

[
4
] In fact, the Pont-sur-Seine attempt turned out to be the work of an autonomous group, affiliated to the O.A.S., and calling itself “The Old General Staff”, under the orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Bastien-Thiry — the only senior officer actually to be executed for his activities.

[
5
] Slang for “false beards”.

[
6
] In conversations with the author, Salan claimed that he had no control over O.A.S./Métropole; “There was no real chief in France, but I was prepared to accept all responsibility for what happened.”

[
7
] Salan in fact sent a letter to
Le Monde
, published on 15 September, in which he dissociated himself from the attempt, declaring melodramatically: “I would not besmirch my military past or my military honour by ordering an assassination attempt against a person whose past belongs to our nation’s history.” Quoted at his trial the following year, it may well have tipped the balance in saving him from execution.

[
8
] Sergent points out that the commando was not acting on his orders. Three months later André Canal, identified as the leader of “France III”, was arrested by the French police and charged with the Delphine Renard bombing. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at the same time as General Jouhaud’s, and he was later amnestied.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Exodus:
January–July 1962

The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together.

Albert Camus, 1939

De Gaulle’s “right-about turn”

“Il faut en finir!”
Already, well before the O.A.S. campaign and its ugly climax, the outlook towards Algeria of the French majority had passed through phases of disenchantment and cynicism to reach one of pure apathy. By the latter part of 1961 it was approaching that of the “don’t-want-to-know” British over Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s. Algeria had been in the headlines just too long; the country was fed up with rebellious generals, raucous
pieds noirs
, murderous
fellaghas
, anti-French diatribes at the United Nations and fruitless peace talks. Once again there were many more immediate problems at home demanding attention. There was more discontent on the social scene. Because of the rate of inflation, the
syndicats
were angered by a wage increase limited to only 2.25 per cent, and December saw a new spate of strikes in the public sector. Manifesting that political restlessness so characteristic of it, the nation was becoming bored with its government, bored with the pudgy, vehement features of Michel Debré. Though only sixteen out of twenty-seven of his original team of ministers still remained, he had survived more than a thousand days — out-distancing the previous record set up by Waldeck-Rousseau at the turn of the century. The nation was also becoming a little bored by de Gaulle; his new year address of 29 December (though, in fact, it contained some quite dramatic clues to the way ahead) was dismissed by the Partie Socialiste Unifié as his “hollowest speech” and — more cruelly — by
Le Monde
as “self-satisfaction”. The O.A.S. outrages now transformed indifference into an angry impatience.

De Gaulle was, as usual, well-attuned to the country’s mood. His own gloom following the collapse of the Evian-Lugrin peace talks had been reinforced by the Pont-sur-Seine attempt on his life — potentially the most lethal of a dozen previous endeavours to assassinate him. Though shaken by the fiery blast, de Gaulle showed his customary composure at the time, but the incident undoubtedly provided one more straw to his already intolerable burden.

“I have seen many brave men in the course of two wars,” wrote Harold Macmillan in retrospect, “but I have seen few who had such outstanding physical and moral courage as Charles de Gaulle”. Nevertheless, by the end of 1961, believes Macmillan, “it had begun to get him down”. More than by any sense of personal fear, de Gaulle was probably most affected by the conviction (and not without reason) that he was indispensable to France. As ever, only he could cut the Gordian knot of Algeria, and ahead there still lay the daunting programme he had set himself for the
renouvellement
of his beloved France. None of this could be got on with so long as her gaze was distracted and her resources drained by the presence of 600,000 troops on the wrong side of the Mediterranean. And he was now seventy-one.

In the autumn of 1961 de Gaulle performed what his fellow statesman and friend, Macmillan, described as a “right-about turn”. At the time of Evian he had still believed that the Sahara could be retained for France. Since then the Bizerta debacle had taken place; with it was forfeited Bourguiba’s goodwill and any support which de Gaulle hoped for among the “riparian” states for his notion to share out the Sahara on a “community” basis. All the neighbours had become apprehensive of falling out with an independent Algeria. Now, brusquely, de Gaulle wrote off the Sahara. During his Élysée Press conference of 5 September he declared that in Algeria “it was now a matter of disengagement”, going on to declare blandly that at Evian “the question of the sovereignty of the Sahara has not been considered, as indeed it must not be by France”. For Debré, committed publicly as well as privately to retention of the Sahara, the carpet had been given a brutal tug beneath his feet. To his distressed protests de Gaulle simply replied: “This separate Sahara was an artificial construction. One must give it up.” At about this same time de Gaulle received a memorandum from a counsellor whose advice he seldom disregarded, Bernard Tricot, recently returned from his latest visit to Algeria. Shocked by the animosities he had found, Tricot wrote:

The Europeans I met there are so hardened in opposition to everything that is being prepared, and their relations with the majority of the Muslims are so bad, that I do not imagine that they will desire, or be able, to remain quietly in an independent Algeria. The essential thing, now, is to organise their return.

This was a boldly prophetic opinion of quite outstanding significance; although Tricot admits that, when writing it, he had no conception “that the exodus would be so massive, and above all so rapid”.

De Gaulle was now determined to get rid of the “Algerian problem” at the earliest possible date. Like Henry Kissinger with Vietnam in 1973, he was a man in a hurry. Nothing else mattered. “Francisation”, “association”, all such idealistic formulae had long since been abandoned; now any claim to the Sahara must be sacrificed, and the best deal possible accepted for the
pieds noirs
. De Gaulle’s haste was manifest in his new year’s broadcast for 1962; in the briefest of references to Algeria he declared that France intended to terminate “one way or another” her involvement there. Then, “come what may, the year ahead will be one of regroupment in Europe and the modernisation of the major part of the French army”. In Algeria, a lifelong liberal and francophile like the writer Mouloud Feraoun felt that the Algerians were being dismissed, rather scornfully, to “manage as best they can”. At the same time, in Tunis the hard-eyed men of the G.P.R.A. could not escape noticing that de Gaulle, in his haste, was giving them a good look at his hand — or lack of one. When it came to the negotiating table again, de Gaulle’s revelation that he intended disengaging, “one way or another”, in the new year would mean placing them in a position of being able to exact the most advantageous terms.

The machinery was already in gear before de Gaulle’s new year address. In mid-December French and F.L.N. representatives had agreed on an exchange of documents, stating the positions delineated at Lugrin in the summer, and defining the areas of disagreement. Narrowing down these areas, the exchange continued over the next month. Meanwhile, for de Gaulle, the omens looked good. At its December session the United Nations, accepting that peace was in the air, had been unwontedly mild, merely inviting the interested parties to resume negotiations. After his inaugural tough-talking, Ben Khedda too had shown himself equally moderate in his public utterances.

Peace pressures on the G.P.R.A., too

In fact, the G.P.R.A. had good reasons of its own for accepting de Gaulle’s new offer to negotiate with an alacrity comparable to de Gaulle’s in issuing it. These were not, however, apparent to the impatient French at the time. To begin with, the O.A.S. was now considered by the G.P.R.A. to represent as great a potential threat to its aims as it was to those of France. “1962 was perhaps the most dangerous time of the whole war for us,” Ben Khedda told the author,

because the union between the O.A.S. and dissident French army units was creating so much provocation, in its murders and indiscriminate massacres of Muslims, and was attempting to get the Muslims to demonstrate, out of control, in Algiers. Had they succeeded there would have been an appalling massacre.

In the minds of the G.P.R.A. at that time there always existed the mistrustful fear that de Gaulle might use the excuse of such a state of anarchy to re-establish military dominion; or, alternatively, says Ben Khedda, “there was also the possibility of the French army intervening, once again, to try to impose its own solution on de Gaulle, by removing him”.

So it was imperative to reach a settlement before a complete breakdown of civil order occurred in Algeria. Just such an aim had indeed become a priority of the O.A.S.: to provoke a Muslim backlash by their ferocious outrages, which would in turn force French army riposte, thereby wrecking negotiations with the F.L.N. But it was a strategy that totally defeated its own ends; far from preventing negotiations, the O.A.S. terror was precipitating them and making both sides more disposed to concluding a final settlement.

As usual, the G.P.R.A. also had its own complex, internal motives for speeding negotiations. Though characteristically reticent on the subject of rifts within the Algerian camp — and, especially, the role played by Boumedienne — Ben Khedda himself admits the significance of the tensions existing at the time: “Our greatest danger was that, because of the O.A.S., anybody treating with the French might be regarded as a traitor by his own side.” As the final negotiations approached, the line-up seemed to be Boumedienne and the General Staff versus the “politicos”, as represented by Krim, with Ben Khedda generally siding with the latter. In his posture of dissent, Boumedienne and his supporters mirrored all the innate mistrustfulness of the Algerian character, exacerbated by the seven years of ferocious warfare to which his
moudjahiddine
had been subjected; mistrustful that somehow the hard fought for fruits of victory might be wrested from them by French guile. Beyond that, Boumedienne as always was resolutely determined that no concessions should be made that would permit any French influence in an independent Algeria. In opposition to Krim, Boumedienne was quite clear in his own mind that his Algeria held no future for a
pied noir
minority; therefore no guarantees should be offered them in the peace settlement. Meanwhile, as the O.A.S. killings of Muslims continued to mount remorselessly, so anger and impatience grew in the army — conscious of its new power with the influx of Soviet and Chinese arms reaching it — to the point where Boumedienne was constantly pressing the G.P.R.A. to toughen its line with the French negotiators. By the end of 1961 the General Staff was accusing the G.P.R.A. of “going too fast and too far” in its exchanges with the French. Rather than compromise, they left no doubts that the army would prefer to continue the war. Thus, to Krim and his camp, every day lost in bringing the French to the conference table presented an advantage to Boumedienne and the General Staff, and a weakening of the G.P.R.A.’s position.

On 4 January Ben Khedda, Krim and the other political heads of the G.P.R.A. conferred in Morocco, under the guise of a courtesy visit to King Hassan. Producing a dossier of specific charges against the General Staff, Krim proposed angrily that Boumedienne and his two lieutenants, Mendjli and Slimane, should be replaced. Boussouf, Boumedienne’s former patron, came to his rescue and a heated exchange ensued, lasting several days and ending with the break-up of the triumvirate of Krim, Boussouf and Ben Tobbal, which had wielded so great an influence over the F.L.N. leadership ever since the liquidation of Ramdane Abane four years previously. At the end of the session a vote was held on Krim’s motion, which was lost by Krim in a minority of two. On the other hand, it was agreed unanimously that negotiations with France should be resumed at the earliest. There was one proviso: full approval must be obtained from Ben Bella and his fellow detainees.