A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (104 page)

By special arrangement with de Gaulle and travelling in utmost secrecy, Krim, accompanied by Ben Tobbal, was enabled expeditiously to visit Ben Bella and his colleagues. They were now interned in luxurious new quarters at the Château d’Aulnoy, close to Melun where the first abortive peace talks had been held eighteen months previously. It was a dramatic meeting: the first time that the former members of the “exterior” had had physical contact with any F.L.N. leader in the more than five years since their sequestration.[
1
] It was also the first time Krim had seen them since the beginning of the war, and — moved to find on the wall of Bitat’s room a copy of the historic photograph of the six founding fathers of the revolt, taken a week before it began — he insisted in posing all those present for a similar photograph in the snowy grounds of the château. Krim was impressed by the high standard of life of the five, though only a few weeks previously they had emerged from a prolonged hunger strike aimed at improving the conditions of their fellow F.L.N. prisoners. Ben Bella seemed particularly bitter at his long imprisonment; he wanted to see de Gaulle personally humiliated, and be made to
bouffer son képi
. Among them there existed parallel rifts to those within the G.P.R.A., with Ben Bella and Khider tending to support Boumedienne and the hard-liners. Analysing the latest exchanges between Paris and the G.P.R.A., Ben Bella insisted on the stiffening of certain terms and the exaction of more concessions from the French. He was particularly outraged by the proposal that the naval base of Mers-el-Kébir should remain in French hands for another fifty years. But all agreed unanimously that negotiations should now proceed; for them, at least, the successful conclusion of a peace settlement would mean liberation. After offering a toast (in orangeade) to “negotiation, victory and your liberty”, Krim returned to Tunis. The G.P.R.A. now had the green light to go ahead.

The “Yéti” preliminaries

The lengthy, wearisome, uphill climb to the final settlement now began. It would last two and a half months. Already in November the Quai d’Orsay had begun reconnoitring for a suitable site in which to hold the preliminary negotiations, which could be protracted. The choice was not an easy one; it had to be somewhere within easy reach of the Swiss frontier, so that the Algerians could sleep and lodge on neutral territory and yet attend the talks each day on French soil — as at Evian the previous year. But, unlike Evian, it also had to be somewhere well-removed from the sight of inquisitive journalists. Above all, it had to be safely beyond the reach of the O.A.S. Finally, three thousand feet up in the bleak Jura, a hideout was found which fitted remarkably all the requirements: the “Chalet du Yéti” at the hamlet of Les Rousses, half a mile from the Swiss border and connected to Geneva (twenty-two miles away) by the winding Col de la Faucille pass. To call it a “chalet” was sheer euphemism; in fact it was a bunker-like building of singularly unappealing appearance that housed the heavy snow-clearing equipment of the Ponts-et-Chaussées. Above the garages was some rather spartan accommodation used by the snow-plough teams, or by workers in the department desirous of a cheap ski holiday. Sited in a cul-de-sac well away from the public road, there could hardly have been a less likely place for high-ranking ministers to meet.

During December three pre-preliminary meetings took place at the “Yéti” between Louis Joxe and Bruno de Leusse (from the Quai d’Orsay) on one side, Saad Dahlab and Ben Yahia on the other. Progress was slow and painful (though Joxe declared stoically that it was less fatiguing than the Chamber of Deputies!). After the G.P.R.A. had given its green light, there was a further exchange at the end of January at which Joxe revealed himself unusually irritable and impatient; at one time it seemed, apparently, as if this dapper and sophisticated French intellectual might hurl himself across the table at the Algerian delegates. He requested de Gaulle to send him reinforcements. The next session in early February looked more promising, with Joxe admitting that “a hundred times as much had been achieved at a few meetings in the Jura than during weeks at Evian”. More remarkable, however, was the fact that the French Press — though giving play to rumours that high-level talks were going on somewhere — were still in the dark as to their whereabouts. By Sunday, 11 February, both sides were ready to launch into full-scale preliminaries.

Leading the French team Joxe returned, a pair of skis on his car and disguised as a winter sports amateur, and now reinforced by Robert Buron, de Gaulle’s fifty-two-year-old Minister of Works, and Jean de Broglie, Secretary of State for Saharan Affairs. In 1954 Buron had defied his party, the M.R.P., to join the Mendès-France government in order to end the war in Indo-China, and he had subsequently thrown in his lot with de Gaulle because of his belief that he alone could resolve the “Algerian dilemma”. Buron had made several visits to Algeria, his assassination had been ordered by the F.L.N., and he had been incarcerated by the rebel generals in April 1961; with his whimsical expression and jokey sense of humour, he was to help lighten the tenseness of the “Yéti” talks and later publish an outspoken diary on the proceedings. Like Joxe, Buron took elaborate precautions to fool the Press on leaving Paris for Les Rousses. Hiding his unmistakable carpet-fringe beard under a scarf, he was driven by his wife towards Orly, then was picked up on the roadside by a black Peugeot. Before leaving, a “sombre and physically exhausted” Debré had instructed Buron to be

particularly firm on the military clauses … watch out for Mers-el-Kébir and the Sahara. The Armed Forces would not understand why we were abandoning our finest and most modern naval base in the Mediterranean. And also don’t agree to our troops being pulled out too fast. Their presence is the only guarantee on which our compatriots can rely.

Throughout the coming negotiations it would seem that de Gaulle was at least as much concerned about what the military might think of real estate dispositions affecting it as about the fate of the
pieds noirs
.

The F.L.N. obdurate, once again

Led once more by Krim, the Algerian delegation consisted of Ben Tobbal, Saad Dahlab, Yazid, Ben Yahia, Reda Malek and Dr Mostefai. In giving his first impressions of the opposing team, Buron was rather surprised by the “Kalmuck” appearance of the silent Ben Tobbal, noting immediately that he was a hard-liner; Krim also tended to be silent, playing “with his chubby hands which were astonishingly young”, and resembling “a Corsican dignitary from the interior”; Yazid, the F.L.N.’s propaganda ace in New York, irritated Buron by his first interventions, reminding him of a “phoney Harpo Marx”. But the one who aroused the most universal respect was Saad Dahlab, Ben Khedda’s new Minister for Foreign Affairs, who, “of medium height, black hair and dark skin, is the most temperate of them all”, says Buron. To Joxe, who came greatly to admire Dahlab’s skill as a negotiator and statesmanlike qualities, he was “very direct, very sincere. A man of the south, with links to Black Africa. Completely in Krim’s confidence.”

The first day looked as unpromising as the previous summer’s talks at Evian had been. After the first quarter of an hour of discussions, on the Sahara, Buron realised it was going to be “long and painful”, and by the end of the first day he was noting: “Our interlocutors appear to be determined to discuss indefinitely the smallest details. We must absolutely oblige them to show their cards. Up till now they haven’t made one single practical proposition, and satisfy themselves by discussing rigorously our own projects word by word. This can only lead nowhere.” Yet de Gaulle’s final instructions on the eve of the conference had been, “Succeed or fail, but above all don’t allow the negotiations to prolong themselves indefinitely … moreover, don’t get stuck on detail….” For a whole week, in a stiflingly smoke-ridden room, the delegates marched back and forth over the whole well-trampled ground: the Sahara and French petroleum rights there; the problems of co-operation — financial, economic, administrative and cultural; the question of French military bases and the duration of a military presence; the length of the transitional period, and the shape of the “caretaker government”; and guarantees for the Europeans wishing to remain in Algeria.

Working conditions could hardly have been more uncomfortable; certainly the circumstances of Ben Bella and the “prisoners” of Aulnoy were considerably more sumptuous than those of the French dignitaries confined at the “Yéti”. Joxe was the only one to have a room to himself, or even a telephone; Buron slept in quarters used by day as a “withdrawing room” by the Algerians; while the unfortunate de Broglie slept in the conference room itself, in a hideous atmosphere of stale tobacco smoke, fearful of opening a window because of the arctic cold outside. To add to the overcrowding, both the French and Algerian bodyguards were positioned inside the “Yéti”, peering out through steamed-up windows for a possible O.A.S. attack, rather than around the exterior where their presence might have betrayed the location of the talks. Conditions were not much pleasanter for the Algerians, forced each day to make the round trip over the Col de Faucille in one of the most wintry Februarys of recent years. One evening their return to Switzerland was blocked by a snowdrift and they had to be dug out by a snow-plough from the “Yéti” garages. On another occasion the Algerian delegation was tracked by zealous journalists, but the driver of a following escort car, using the icy road as a pretext, resourcefully threw himself into a skid, blocking off the newsmen while the delegates escaped. But the inauspicious environment had one unintended bonus in that the informality of life in the “Yéti”, compared with the spacious atmosphere at Evian’s Hôtel du Parc, helped break the ice and create a human contact between those who had been fighting each other so viciously over the past seven years.

Algiers: the killing escalates

Nevertheless, by Saturday, 17 February it looked as if the negotiations were drifting on to the rocks. The French delegates were under daily pressure from de Gaulle to speed things up, not to get bogged down; “
Démerdez-vous!
” was his repeated injunction. At the same time, each day brought fresh news from Algiers tending to push things in the opposite direction, to harden the attitude of the Algerian delegates. January and February produced a new escalation of O.A.S. outrages.

The crimes are multiplying [wrote Mouloud Feraoun in his journal for 19 January]; every day one learns of the death of a friend, of an acquaintance, of a brave man, of an innocent….

A strike of public transport for the past few days. Naively people wait for a trolley-bus to arrive which never comes; instead, a car arrives, slows down, from it some fanatic gets out, aims, fires, fells a man, gets back behind the wheel, and drives off courageously at full speed….

Often it was boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty who were the gunmen. To step up the offensive, Salan had ordered the “general mobilisation” of the whole French population of Algeria. Special “courts” were set up to “sanction” those refusing to co-operate; a “sanction” generally meant being turned over to Degueldre’s Deltas. By the end of February the death toll had risen to 553 for the one month. A grim pall of fear had settled over all Algiers, European and Muslim alike.

But as the O.A.S. bombed Communists and hostile editors in France, fought the
barbouzes
and liquidated dissidents within its own ranks, and slaughtered innocent and insignificant Muslims in Algiers, so it seemed increasingly to lose sight of its primary objectives (impossible though they might be) while all the time setting the world against it and those objectives. The provocation against the F.L.N. in their endeavours to reach a peace settlement were indeed great. After the O.A.S. killings of December, the General Staff’s
Bulletin d’Information
repeated earlier threats by declaring even more pointedly: “We solemnly warn those Algerian Europeans who blindly follow the Fascists of the O.A.S. against the incalculable consequences which this unleashing of racist fury could have, which risks compromising forever the future of the Algerian Europeans.”

Then, on the very last day of the “Yéti” talks, two French T.6 planes made a rocket and machine-gun attack on the F.L.N. “Ben M’hidi” base at Oujda, just inside Moroccan territory. The O.A.S. immediately claimed responsibility for the raid, though it appears that it was in fact a “free enterprise” affair by two aero-club flyers, one of whom was avenging a brother killed by the F.L.N. In itself it was indicative of the growing anarchy in Algeria. The “Ben M’hidi” base contained some ten thousand people, including refugees and a hospital centre equipped by Yugoslavia and East Germany and well marked by a red cross. With unfortunately directed aim, bullets from the T.6s killed a wounded man actually on the operating table and a nurse tending him. Three others in the base were slain and several wounded. The raid bore a close resemblance to the Sakiet raid of 1958, which had had so profound an influence on the course of the war. This time, however, the F.L.N. gritted its teeth and with remarkable restraint said nothing — at least for the time being. But the net effect of the Oujda incident, and all the other O.A.S. outrages compounded, was to play into the hands of Boumedienne and the hard-liners and make it progressively more difficult for the negotiators of both sides to arrive at satisfactory guarantees for the
pieds noirs
. Cooped up in the “Yéti” Robert Buron wondered gloomily to himself who would win: “De Gaulle or Salan? … De Gaulle no doubt, but the loser will not be his adversary…. The poor
pieds noirs
for whom, with all our hearts, we are building a possible future, possible on paper, but which the multiplying violations are striving to make unrealisable, risk paying the bill….”