A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (110 page)

To meet this shortage of industrial manpower, which way did France turn? She increased the intake of Algerian immigrant workers so that their numbers actually rose by over thirty per cent in the course of the war, bringing a curious paradox in its wake. By 1960 the Algerian workers in France were sending home wages equivalent to about one-third of the earnings of the whole agricultural labour force in Algeria, which thus helped France by helping the Algerian economy. But at the same time those higher earnings also enabled the F.L.N. fund-raisers in France to purchase more weapons with which to shoot at the French conscripts whose places they were filling at home. Both before and during the war (and a similar picture prevails today), for all their benefit to the French economy, the Algerian migrant workers’ franc earnings almost certainly contributed more to the stability of the Algerian economy. With regard to the overall colonial profit-and-loss account, Algerian wine exports to the mother country constituted a perpetual embarrassment, while her raw materials (in which she was the least rich country of all the Maghreb) contributed relatively little. When the war began in 1954 French commerce with Algeria was comparable in value to that with the tiny Saar territory; in 1958–9, it accounted for only seventeen per cent of France’s export trade, while eighty per cent of Algeria’s exportable products were bought by France, and her trade deficit (which then ran at 3.8 milliard (new) francs) was largely financed by France. If one excludes the imponderable factor of the loss of the oil resources developed by French knowhow and capital, the ending of the war and the severance of Algeria must be reckoned a net gain to France’s economy. Certainly it was from the date of Algerian independence in 1962 that France’s own economic “miracle” stems — even though after that moment she continued still to bolster Algeria to the extent of approximately £700,000 a day.

From Ben Bella to Boumedienne

By the end of that first turbulent summer of 1962 Ben Bella had established his ascendancy, and in late September he pushed out Ben Khedda to become independent Algeria’s first president. The problems — economic, cultural, administrative and political — that he inherited seemed never-ending. The economy was still totally tied to that of France, and — with 4½ million Algerians deemed to be in a state of total poverty — it was only American surplus wheat that kept the population alive over the first months of independence. Almost immediately, Ben Bella demanded a revision of the Evian Agreements (with which, of course, de Gaulle had never permitted him to be formally associated), declaring his government not bound by them, and holding them to be incompatible with the Tripoli Programme of June in its far-reaching schemes of socialisation. Laws were passed to nationalise all “vacant properties” and take over
pied noir
farms, turning them into collectives run by self-appointed
comités de gestion
. Though these actions were strictly in breach of the Evian Agreements, in 1963 France — under her part of the articles of “co-operation” — nevertheless handed Algeria generous sums of financial aid to cover her mountainous deficits.[
1
] But despite foreign aid and the respite granted by living off the “fat” of the
pied noir
holdings, Ben Bella’s grandiose schemes of socialisation caused the infant state to totter from crisis to economic crisis.

Out of touch with external reality after his long incarceration, Ben Bella veered more and more towards measures of abstract socialism, more and more towards left-wing orientations; in his personal rule, more and more towards authoritarianism and the “cult of the personality” so primordially repugnant to the F.L.N. Observing his triumphal entry into Tunis, the Braces remarked: “In a crowd Ben Bella moves as though he were alone. He is intent on his own vision and seems scarcely aware of what people about him are doing.” Speaking to William Quandt, an old schoolmate of Ben Bella’s recalled how he had been “a good soccer player, but he never forgot the galleries. He wanted to be number one. Ben Bella always wanted his team-mates to pass him the ball so that he could score. He was the same way in politics.”

One by one his former colleagues fell away, or were purged. Ferhat Abbas, the old-school liberal who had helped him to power, was soon at odds with his anti-Western policies and was expelled from the F.L.N. in 1963. In April 1963 the influential Khider resigned once again — this time from the post of Secretary-General of the F.L.N. At almost the same time Ben Bella’s Foreign Secretary, Mohamed Khemisti, was mysteriously assassinated outside the National Assembly. In June Boudiaf, one of the
neuf historiques
of 1954, was arrested on Ben Bella’s orders, and the following month the third of Ben Bella’s prison stablemates, Ait Ahmed, announced that he was going into opposition to “fight” Ben Bella. (“Are we in the country of Duvalier,” he asked, “or are we in Algeria?”) He then took to the maquis, together with another war veteran, the Kabyle leader Colonel Mohand Ou el Hadj. By the end of the year Ben Bella was at war with the King of Morocco (whom he described as a
roi fantoche, un criminel
) over territorial rights. Scandals and corruption became rife, and two million Algerians were unemployed. In 1964 Ben Bella’s residence came under fire, and armed revolt broke out round Biskra led by Colonel Chaabani. Ait Ahmed and Khider supported the revolt, with the latter declaring that the regime was “slipping dangerously towards fascism and totalitarianism”. With the aid of Boumedienne’s troops, Chaabani was rounded up and executed and Ait Ahmed imprisoned. Khider fled to Switzerland, together with the F.L.N. “treasury” so painstakingly collected from Algerians in France and at home during the war. He was followed into exile by Abbas and Bitat, among many others of the old guard.

In all this period Ben Bella had come to depend increasingly on the support of Boumedienne and the army. With most of his rivals dead, in prison or in exile, by the eve of the Afro-Asian Conference of June 1965 Ben Bella looked at last secure. Then Boumedienne moved with the army which, ironically, had put Ben Bella in power and kept him there, and the tanks supplied by Ben Bella’s Soviet allies (who had but recently awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize). Though himself under sentence of death from Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed warned him “There’s going to be a coup against you.” Ben Bella was arrested, and Boumedienne took over the Government. The reasons given for Ben Bella’s removal were his excessive addiction to the “cult of the personality”, his “liquidation of revolutionary cadres”, his ideological confusion, his proneness to foreign (i.e. Eastern bloc) influences, and his improvidence with Algeria’s vital resources. Boumedienne had at last arrived, and the arrival of this taciturn and unknown colonel took the world as much by surprise as it did Ben Bella, who was returned to prison or house-arrest for another fourteen years.

France — the settling of accounts

Though her predicament was in no way so grim as Algeria’s in 1962, after the long war France too had her house to put in order, accounts to settle. The first was the bringing to justice of the captured O.A.S. leaders. On 11 April 1962 General Edmond Jouhaud faced his judges. Now cleanshaven, the
pied noir
air force general declared that he had but one regret: “not to be able to die on Algerian soil”. Among the defence witnesses was the widow of Albert Camus, who made a plea for clemency tragically eloquent of the
pied noir
dilemma. “I feel divided,” she told the court, “half-French and half-Algerian, and, in truth, dispossessed in both countries which I no longer recognise, since I never imagined them separated.” Jouhaud was also helped by a letter from Salan, still at large, in which he assumed full responsibility for all Jouhaud’s acts in the O.A.S. Nevertheless, after three days, the death sentence was read out. Women fainted in court but Jouhaud accepted the verdict impassively. For six weeks execution hovered over him. His coffin had, allegedly, already been measured, and de Gaulle in his memoirs admits that “my first reaction was to allow Jouhaud’s case to take its course”. In
L’Express
Servan-Schreiber clamoured for immediate execution as a “signal of hope” for France, but a flood of appeals for mercy poured in to the Élysée, supported strongly by Premier Pompidou. Although it was not until November that Jouhaud heard that his sentence had been finally commuted to life imprisonment, what really saved him was the fate of his leader, now also captured and in the dock.

Amid powerful emotions, Salan’s trial opened on 15 May in the same court where once Marshal Pétain had been sentenced to death. To Janet Flanner’s unsympathetic eyes, the defendant resembled “an elderly, pessimistic silver fox”, looking as if the anticipated death sentence had already been carried out; his recently dyed hair, growing out white over his ears but still a mawkish henna colour on top, imparted a “clownlike” appearance. In fact, Salan was the one person at his trial never to lose his dignity, always the imperturbable “Mandarin”. In a calm voice he read out his particulars: “ex-general of the Colonial Army, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, Military Medal, Cross of the Liberation, wounded in action …” etc., etc., then, announcing that he would answer no questions, Salan read out a long statement. “When one has known the France of courage,” he declared, “one can never accept the France of capitulation.” Recalling May 1958, he claimed he had been “duped” by “the one I gave power to”. He insisted that his responsibility for the O.A.S. had been total, and that henceforth he would remain silent. Over a hundred witnesses, among them the highest personages in the republic, filed in and out of the stand. For Salan there appeared ex-President Coty, the Maréchale de Lattre de Tassigny (who — still in her widow’s weeds — made a powerful impression), and General Valluy, who questioned sorrowfully, “I wonder how we ever reached this point?” François Mitterrand rekindled the bizarre episode of the “bazooka” attempt on Salan in 1957, pointing an accusatory finger at Michel Debré. The ex-premier rose to refute the accusations. Salan was brilliantly defended by Tixier-Vignancour, and on the eighth day of the trial a verdict of guilty, but “with extenuating circumstances”, was read out to a packed court; the sentence was life imprisonment, but Salan’s life was saved. His supporters broke into an ecstatic
Marseillaise
in the courtroom; at the Élysée de Gaulle erupted in rage at the judges’ leniency, and four days later had the tribunal suppressed.

With Salan’s life spared, it would hardly have been consistent to execute his deputy; thus Jouhaud too escaped the firing-squad. But, as a junior officer unsupported by the galaxy that had come forth to testify for Salan, Lieutenant Roger Degueldre was to bear the full brunt of the law. On 28 June, at the sinister Château de Vincennes, where Napoleon had the Duc d’Enghien executed, the leader of the Delta killer commandos was sentenced to death. His mistress (who bore him a son shortly before the trial) and a team of O.A.S. faithfuls attempted to “spring” Degueldre from the Santé; when this failed they examined no less than fifteen alternative schemes for assassinating de Gaulle in vengeance. Nevertheless, little more than a week after his sentencing, Degueldre was marched before a firing-squad inside the Fort d’Ivry. Wearing his para’s uniform, he sang the
Marseillaise
and declared himself proud to have kept his oath not to abandon Algeria to the F.L.N. It appears that the execution was appallingly botched, lasting an interminable quarter of an hour, with the squad firing wide and no less than five
coups de grâce
having to be administered before the agonised victim was finally despatched.

France “free to look at France”

With Algeria lost and its leaders removed, the O.A.S. and its affiliates still writhed on in France like a headless snake under the nominal leadership of Georges Bidault, Colonel Argoud and Captain Sergent. The
plastiques
continued to explode aimlessly in France, and over a dozen further attempts were made to assassinate de Gaulle. The most spectacular, and failing by a mere hair’s-breadth, took place at Petit-Clamart in August 1962, the month after the lowering of the flag in Algiers, when the car carrying the President and Madame de Gaulle was shot up by a band led by Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry. Outraged by the threat to his wife, de Gaulle saw to it that Bastien-Thiry followed the fate of Degueldre, the first senior French officer to pass before the firing squad in many years. An all-out, ruthless campaign followed to smash the O.A.S.[
2
] once and for all. From Bavaria, where he and Bidault were in refuge, Colonel Argoud had entered into correspondence with the distinguished British military historian, Captain Liddell-Hart, desiring to explain to him why, “for the past three years, I have led the fight of my life against the imposture of a man, supported, alas, by the cowardice of a whole people”. Liddell-Hart had replied that he found it “difficult to understand the course pursued and methods practised by such sincere and thoughtful people as yourself”, but that he was interested to learn more. At the beginning of February 1963 a final letter arrived from Argoud, announcing his intention to visit Liddell-Hart in London in a few weeks’ time. Argoud never arrived; instead he was found, trussed like a turkey, in a van outside the Paris Prefecture of Police, where the staff had been tipped off to come and collect him. It appears that a new outfit of
barbouzes
had been despatched from France to “snatch” Bidault, but had got hold of Argoud instead in the centre of Munich during the
Rosenmontag
festivities. The kidnapping, not unlike Napoleon’s spiriting away from Baden of the Due d’Enghien, provoked the worst breach in Franco-German relations of the post-war era. Nevertheless, it fulfilled de Gaulle’s aim; in April Bidault fled to Brazil, via Lisbon; the O.A.S./C.N.R. broke up; the last
plastique
exploded in Paris in July 1963.