A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (108 page)

Fouchet’s pleas for sanity went unheeded by the O.A.S., which — like the headless monster it now was — threshed about in its protracted death throes, inflicting the most terrible and senseless wounds of its whole existence. In the madness of these last days, contemporary news films show disconnected shots of young O.A.S. thugs returning from the beach, then donning para tunics over bare shoulders and calmly getting into cars with their sub-machine-guns to set off on the evening’s killings;
pied noir
women repeating frenetically to the newsmen, “
Jusqu’à la mort, Monsieur, jusqu’à la mort!
”; an elderly lady tapping out “
Al-gé-rie fran-çaise
”; Muslim women riposting with their eerie, triumphal
you-you-you-you
ululations. April and May were, says ex-prefect Vitalis Cros, “horrible months, because terrorism had become completely blind”.

On 20 April, by way of revenge for the capture of Salan, the Deltas murdered twenty-four Muslims in Algiers alone. On 2 May there was an appalling massacre in the port of Algiers, when a powerfully booby-trapped car exploded amid a crowd of unemployed dockers looking for work. In this one incident alone sixty-two dockers were killed and 150 horribly injured. The following day what might have been the most infamous outrage of the whole war was only narrowly averted. To the heights above the Casbah the O.A.S. had driven a petrol tanker containing over 3,000 gallons of fuel and were planning to roll it down into the crowded Muslim quarter, where it would almost certainly have caused a satanic conflagration. Only the presence of mind of a local fire brigade (including
pieds noirs
) forestalled the disaster. A week which cost the lives of 230 Muslims ended with the calculated and separate killing of seven
fatmas
, elderly charwomen employed by Europeans, on their way to work. This cruel and pointless act particularly shocked French opinion; in the O.A.S. itself it was deplored by Gardes, and women operatives like Anne Loesch testified to a deep sense of shame.

Up to this point the F.L.N. in Algiers — secure in the knowledge that it was about to inherit the earth — had shown remarkable discipline and restraint. Now pressure from beneath forced the leaders to execute a reprisal. Seventeen bars known to be frequented by the O.A.S. in various parts of the city were hit by carefully co-ordinated grenade and machine-gun attacks; the result — seventeen European dead and thirty-five wounded. The next day, 15 May, came the inevitable O.A.S. reprisal: the result — fifty-six Muslim dead, thirty-five wounded. But, not for the first time, the O.A.S. was proved to be defeating its own ends; principally because of the atmosphere of terror created by the O.A.S., and despite its threats of “sanctions”, since the beginning of April no less than
one hundred thousand pieds noirs
had already left the country — or one in ten of the total European population. Now, in its despair at realising that all was lost, the O.A.S. adopted a “scorched earth policy”.[
5
] If the French cannot, or will not, remain, the O.A.S. argued, then we shall leave Algeria as it was when they arrived in 1830. After a brief respite, on 7 June the University of Algiers library was burned; then followed the destruction of schools, laboratories and hospital facilities — the finest benefits that French civilisation had bestowed on Algeria. In the biggest explosion to date, Algiers’s fine new Hôtel de Ville was blown up; finally, in June, Oran’s vast B.P. oil storage tanks went up in a great pillar of smoke.

Finally a truce — and exodus

From their prison cells both Salan and Jouhaud had interceded with the O.A.S., calling upon it to halt the fruitless carnage and destruction. Then, on 17 June, there was announced one of the more extraordinary events of this extraordinary war: the O.A.S. and F.L.N. had concluded a truce. Already, in April, Major Azedine, formerly the redoubtable and much-wounded veteran of Wilaya 4, had been sent by the G.P.R.A. to Algiers to reorganise the Z.A.A. structure and prepare the takeover of the city for the time of the French withdrawal. After a particularly nauseating outrage, when Deltas had destroyed a clinic they considered to be an F.L.N. “hospital”, gunning to death nine Muslim patients in their beds, Vitalis Cros had taken the unprecedented initiative of seeking out Azedine in a desperate attempt to collaborate in combating terrorism. Next, the shadowy political brain of the O.A.S. who had assumed leadership since the capture of Salan, Jean-Jacques Susini, the first to realise that the battle was lost, made contact in mid-May with Farès, the president of the Provisional Executive. Nothing came of these talks, but a bridge was created between Susini and the F.L.N. representatives. Under the mediation of Dr Mostefai of the Provisional Executive and Jacques Chevallier, the former liberal mayor of Algiers, a truce was finally concluded on Sunday, 17 June. In a piece of mad, irrelevant arrogance that typified the whole movement, Susini posed one final condition: the O.A.S. must be specifically mentioned in Dr Mostefai’s broadcast statement. Three days later the curfew that had cloaked Algiers for so long was finally lifted. Bar a few isolated, free-lance incidents, the Algerian war was at last over. In less than a year the O.A.S. had killed 2,360 people in Algeria, and wounded another 5,418; according to the calculations of Vitalis Cros, in the Algiers zone alone their activities over the last six months of the war had claimed
three times as many civilian victims
as had the F.L.N. from the beginning of 1956 onwards; i.e. including the Battle of Algiers. On 1 July Algeria held its own referendum on the Evian Agreements; 5,993,754 voted
oui
against 16,478
nons
; ten per cent, representing chiefly the
pieds noirs
, abstained. Two days later President de Gaulle recognised Algerian independence.

Following the conclusion of the O.A.S.—F.L.N. truce on 17 June, Bernard Tricot noted an immediate and almost miraculous détente in Algiers: “It was beautiful weather; one perceived that during this sad spring the flowers had burst into bloom in the gardens; under the sunshine the city was plunged into a Sunday silence not broken by the noise of any explosion, any shooting; never had the women seemed so charming.” But it was all very deceptive; masked by the summer sunshine the final act of the Algerian tragedy — and one of its saddest — was taking place. Only a few days later Tricot visited Bab-el-Oued and was shocked to find the quarter, once seething with colour and animation, all but deserted; its streets that still bore O.A.S. slogans on every corner, as well as signs of the recent siege, were now apparently tenanted only by a few old crones. One of the greatest mass-migrations of the twentieth century was under way. “The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it,” Camus had written in a strange prophecy in 1939. “Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together.” During that month of June alone, no less than 350,000 of the million
pieds noirs
left Algeria, compared to the 100,000 which the French government had calculated might depart over the first year of Algerian independence. No words of assurance by High Commissioner Fouchet or Farès could stem the panic-ridden exodus. Cars were put up for sale at £10 apiece, or simply abandoned in the street; parking lots looked like scenes from the British evacuation of Dunkirk. The smart shops in the Rue Michelet offered their entire stocks for sale at knock-down prices; bar-keepers simply closed the shutters and left. “Let’s face it,” a senior French official told British journalists, “the whole of Algeria’s up for sale.” Business came to a halt. In Bab-el-Oued great pyres were lit in the street as the
pieds noirs
burned sofas and chairs as well as the souvenirs from happier times — aquatints of the Conquest, framed photos of
grand’maman
, of family picnics to celebrate the “breaking of the
mouna
” — rather than let “them” take possession. From Oran, all the European doctors left; in the filthy streets, as yet another echo from
La Peste
, rats scurried about in open daylight.

At the airports and down at the harbours of Algiers and Oran there were the most heart-rending scenes. Permitted only two suitcases per person, the
pieds noirs
queued day and night for passages out of the country they had been born in: uncomprehending children clutching a precious doll; old people weeping silently in equal incomprehension. With their papier-mâché suitcases, Europeans as poor as many of the Muslims who were replacing them stretched awnings of bedspreads between crates on the quay to protect themselves against the midday sun during the long wait. Then the boats came. Like Boabdil, the last Moorish King of Andalusia, sighing for his lost paradise, but with the roles reversed, many a European wept inconsolably as the last sight of waves breaking on the Algerian coast slipped slowly out of view.

Among them the last of the O.A.S. leaders also made their exits. Pérez, hoping to the end — like Hitler in the Berlin bunker — for a lethal split to occur between his enemies, and for a possible “Palestinisation” of Algeria, sailed away to Alicante. Colonel Godard left for Greece, Dufour and Gardes for Spain. Only Susini lingered on, a haunted figure, possessed by some crazy curiosity to visit the Casbah, where — in all his life as a born
pied noir
— he had never once set foot. Then he too slipped away, landing in Italy on 30 July, his twenty-ninth birthday. As an additional instalment of the final tragedy, on the evacuation boats was also almost the whole of the Algerian Jewish community. To many who had sympathised, actively or passively, with the F.L.N. throughout the war, their expulsion at the hands of the Muslims came as a cruel shock. “Why are you making us leave, because after all we are your friends?” the Ankaoua family asked their Muslim neighbours. “Then we locked the door, taking the key with us. We thought we might be able to return. We still had hope … until we reached the airport at Maison-Blanche. Then we knew it was the end.” Over a hundred thousand Algerian Jews, many of them impoverished, backward and disease-ridden, poured into metropolitan France.

But they were more fortunate than the
harkis
and the other loyal Muslims who fought for France, and who were now abandoned to their fate to be massacred in their thousands by their vengeful brethren.

The last victory

By the beginning of August, of the 250,000 European inhabitants of Oran only 40,000 were left. When the exodus was all over it was estimated that 50,000
pieds noirs
had gone to Spain; 12,000 to Canada; 10,000 to Israel; and 1,550 to Argentina. But the huge mass, 1,380,000 strong (which included the luckier Muslim refugees) — equivalent then to the combined population of the two biggest French cities after Paris — had flooded into France. Only 30,000 stayed bravely, or hopelessly, behind. To fill the empty farms and tenements, Muslim strangers from the hills and the
bidonvilles
swiftly arrived, armed with F.L.N. orders to requisition and occupy. On the days succeeding Algeria’s formal acquisition of independence the streets of Oran and Algiers became a sea of white, green and red flags, filled with wildly cheering and chanting Muslims. Despite the total anarchy threatened by the sudden departure of the Europeans, the takeover was effected with almost miraculous smoothness. Disciplined troops arrived to assume point duty from French gendarmes; from somewhere technicians appeared who could maintain the essential services of gas, electricity, water and sewage that had been deserted by the Europeans; in the hospitals A.L.N. doctors and nurses from the field arrived to help the few Europeans who had remained. Tense as were the last days, they were marred by only one major incident against the
pieds noirs
in Oran, at the beginning of July. As seven
katibas
moved triumphantly into the city, some Europeans opened a suicidal fusillade. Out of all control, a wave of Muslims swept into the half-empty European quarters, indiscriminately cutting the throats of men, women and children; some of them within sight of French troops strictly obeying the edict of non-intervention now imposed on them by the Evian Agreements.

If the Oran massacre represented the final flickering out of any hope of reconciliation between the two races that still may have existed, it was also the final violence — at least between Algerians and Frenchmen. On 4 July the tricolour was lowered in Algiers for the first time in 132 years as High Commissioner Fouchet, the last of France’s all-powerful pro-consuls, left for home. Consulting de Gaulle whether he should be present at the flag-lowering ceremony or not, Fouchet after a pause of several seconds had been told simply: “
Je crois que ça serait inutile
….” But as he left the massed bands played
Le Marche Consulaire
composed for Napoleon after Marengo — something Fouchet would never forget. “It was a victory march,” he explains. “That may seem curious, but really it was symbolic because in these last days it represented a great victory over ourselves…. And, after all, wasn’t de Gaulle’s decision on Algeria in effect a great victory over himself?”

[
1
] They consisted of Ben Bella, Boudiaf, Khider and Ait Ahmed; joined by Rabah Bitat, who had been the first of the
neuf historiques
to be captured back in November 1954. Professor Lacheraf, the fifth member of the ill-fated group on the plane hijacked in October 1956, had at last been released by the French as being not politically involved.