A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (25 page)

From the beginning the odds were heavily weighted against this idealistic sortie by Camus, perhaps a more effective writer than a politician. In France, led by his old friends Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the Left had dismissed him as a “bourgeois” renegade because of his criticism of repression in Stalinist Russia; acidly Simone de Beauvoir remarked that his language “had never sounded hollower than when he demanded pity for the civilians. The conflict was one between two civilian communities.” In Algeria the Muslims felt (not entirely without reason) that he understood their predicament less well than that of his own
petit blancs
; while to a large body of the more conservative
pieds noirs
he was totally suspect. Worst of all, the two men whom Camus selected as the Muslim lynch-pin of his campaign—Mohamed Lebjaoui, a prosperous middle-class merchant, and Amar Ouzegane, leader of the Algerian Communist Party and an old friend of Camus from his Communist days—had both become, secretly and unknown to Camus, members of the F.L.N. They decided to “penetrate” thoroughly the “civil truce” organisation and use it for their own purposes as an instrument of F.L.N. propaganda.

Arriving in Algiers, Camus was immediately shocked by the virulence of anti-liberal sentiments among the
pieds noirs
. At his first public meeting on 22 January 1956, a hostile mob congregated outside the hall and their shouts of “
Camus au poteaul!
” were clearly audible inside. On the dais with Camus was Ferhat Abbas, in one of his own last appearances as a moderate nationalist. Eloquently Camus urged: “We can at least exercise some influence on the most hateful aspect of the fight; we can propose, without making any change in the present situation, that we refrain from what makes it unforgivable—the murder of the innocent.” If this were to fail, the only prospect would be one of “definitive divorce, destruction of all hope, and a calamity of which we have so far only the feeblest idea”. Though an F.L.N. militant present accused Camus of having spoken like “a soft sister” (
bonne soeur
), for a time he held his mixed Muslim and European audience in a unique mood of fraternal fervour that was not to be witnessed again in Algiers until, briefly, the euphoric days of May 1958. Then the mounting hubbub outside forced Camus to cut short the meeting. The inspired but perhaps hopelessly over-idealistic notion of the “civil truce” collapsed from the stresses within and without; and with it there also died the last hope of a liberal compromise in the war. Camus, bitterly disillusioned on discovering how he and the “civil truce” movement had been traduced and “used” by the F.L.N., wrote to a close friend: “I thought myself able to speak in the name of reason, but all that is out of date, and passion carries everything before it. One has to come here to understand.” From now on he withdrew into his shell. Breaking with
L’Express, Combat
and
France-Observateur
, he was to re-emerge to write only once more about Algeria, at the beginning of 1958, before his tragic death in a car accident two years later.

The failure of the “civil truce” campaign also coincided with the end of the year of Soustelle. As Soustelle had warned Edgar Faure, the febrile uncertainty generated by the French election campaign (during which Mitterrand received a bloody nose from a well-aimed pear) had produced disastrous reactions among both Muslim and
pied noir
communities. The F.L.N. had seized its opportunities, and 1956 began on a thoroughly bad note for the security forces. On 2 January twenty-seven million French went to the polls and returned an astonishing and disquieting result; Faure’s governing coalition of moderates lost some hundred seats, while the Communists gained fifty-two to make them the dominant party. But the biggest shock was the phenomenon of the virtually unknown Pierre Poujade, whose faction of militant small shopkeepers collected no less than two and a half million votes and fifty-two seats, to hold a balance of power in the new Assembly. Proclaimed by his hysterical supporters as “Jeanne d’Arc and Henri IV rolled into one”, the stationer from the Auvergne was also described as being “anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-democratic, anti-parliamentary”; now he had hopped on the band-waggon of being pro-
pied noir
. The Bourse slumped fifteen per cent, the Eiffel Tower caught fire, Mistinguett died, and the Seine froze in the most bitterly cold winter since the war. For three weeks Faure struggled to form a new government, but on 24 January he resigned and two days later Guy Mollet, the secretary-general of the Socialist Party (S.F.I.O.) took office. One of his first moves was to announce Soustelle’s replacement by the seventy-nine-year-old General Catroux, the wartime High Commissioner in Algiers. Also in Mollet’s cabinet were Mendès-France and Mitterrand.

Like his patron, Mendès-France, Soustelle had been removed from office by the caprices of French politics before anything but a superficial portion of his reform programme could be enacted. In advance of his departure he addressed to the government an important and prophetic “testament”, warning it of three main dangers ahead. First, he feared lest the morale of the army might break: “disquiet, discouragement and disgust among the military is at its peak, especially in the lower echelons, that is to say those who get themselves killed feeling that France has no gratitude for them”. Secondly, there was the danger of announcing publicly an intention to negotiate with the rebels; this would “suffice to convince the population once and for all that the rebels are winning and to induce it, for fear of reprisals, to take refuge in the camp of the victors”. Thirdly, it would be disastrous to attempt to negotiate a settlement through an
ad hoc
Algerian Assembly acting as an
interlocuteur valable
because rebel terror would swiftly reduce such a body to subservience, and it would then inevitably opt for secession from France.

On 2 February, as Soustelle made his way to the port of Algiers to embark finally for France, there took place one of those extraordinary displays of volatile and passionate emotion of which the
méditerranéen-et-demi pieds noirs
were capable. Tens of thousands thronged the streets shouting, “
Ne partez pas!
” “
Revenez!
” and “
Soustelle, Soustelle, avec nous
!” At the harbour the police lines broke and Soustelle was engulfed in a raging human sea, in which here and there a general’s kepi or an admiral’s white cap could be seen bobbing on the surface. Soustelle had to be rescued and transported to the ship on the front of an armoured car: “It took us nearly an hour to cover the 200 metres which separated us from access to the quay.” Never before, or afterwards, had any French official had such a send-off as the despised “Ben-Soussan” whom, just a year ago, the
pieds noirs
had received in such icy silence as the figure appointed by Mendès-France to sell them down the river. With tears in his eyes, Soustelle watched “the bay and city of Algiers in its unforgettable majesty” as it receded into the wintry haze. “But it was man, that day, who held the foreground of the scene, the people of Algiers massed on the Corniche and on the quays, their voice dominating that of nature.
Ce n’est qu’un au revoir
, the crowd sang.” He was deeply, passionately stirred. Never in his life before had he tasted such popularity, such a warmth of human affection. For Soustelle at this moment—and henceforth: “
Algérie montait à la tête
.”

CHAPTER SIX
The F.L.N.: from Bandung to Soummam:
1955–1956

It is easier to fight one’s enemies than to get on with one’s friends.

Cardinal de Retz

The F.L.N. consolidates

From the point of view of the F.L.N. leadership, the period of 1954 to 1957 has aptly been called the “heroic years”. It falls roughly into three phases; first there is that of establishment and survival, over the cruel winter of 1954—the truly “heroic” days. Then comes the time of consolidation: new recruits, new leaders—and with them new policies and new discords—were now acquired. Falling into several distinct categories, the new recruits included a large body from previously uncommitted Muslims; the wholesale “conversion” of Messali’s rival M.N.A.,[
1
] and the absorption of members of the Algerian Communist Party (P.C.A.) and desertions from the Algerian units serving with the French army; and the support of pro-Muslim individuals among the European and Jewish communities.

This expansion of the F.L.N. was by no means uniform. There were times when the affairs of one Wilaya would prosper while another would falter and almost collapse. Sometimes such faltering came about as a direct consequence of French military pressure, but much more often it was related to internal dissension among the local F.L.N. leaders, or to a combination of both. Throughout the war internal dissent and personal animosities were the F.L.N.’s single greatest enemy; on the other hand, its greatest strength was the secrecy which (like the mutinies in the French army of 1917 that the Germans never learned about until too late) prevented the French from seizing an advantage.

Various reasons have already been suggested for the F.L.N.’s recruitment successes in 1955. There was, first of all, the anger provoked by the excessive zeal of French repressive measures, in disregard of Machiavelli’s axiom, “An enemy should be destroyed or bought—and never made a martyr.” Then, perhaps more important still, there was the success of success itself: the mere fact that the F.L.N. had survived through that first winter against all the might of France was in itself a most potent recruiting agent. In the eyes of a people regarding
baraka
as a heaven-sent attribute, this was also greatly increased by the sheer audacity with which the
moudjahiddine
carried out their forays, made their proclamations and struck down those earmarked for liquidation. And there was the weapon of terror, which, with the escalation of savagery, with new leaders and new policies, was to become accepted as a technique of proven efficacy.

Internationalising the struggle

It will be recalled that one of the declared top priority objectives of the C.R.U.A. in November 1954 had been the internationalisation of the conflict, and that Ben Bella and his team in Cairo had been charged with this. As far as material support was concerned, in terms of urgently required weapons and ammunition, Nasser, for all his grandiose exhortations, continued to prove a bitter disappointment to the Algerians. It was, says Abdelkader Chanderli who was in charge of arms procurement from Yugoslavia at the time, “negligible”. But “because of the need for solidarity, we could not say so”. Though its value as a factor of psychological warfare was undeniable, the bombast poured out from Cairo radio about Arab unity and the heroic Algerian
moudjahiddine
deceived the F.L.N. as much as it did the Mollet government whom, by the autumn of 1956, it was to lead into a misappreciation of historic dimensions. Through much of 1955 Ben Bella himself scurried from one capital to another, canvassing financial support and arms deals. The menace that he had already assumed in French eyes as Number One leader of the revolt is indicated by two mysterious assassination attempts against him behind which the long arm of French secret intelligence seemed unmistakable. The first was a bomb explosion outside Ben Bella’s Cairo office at the beginning of 1956; the second, later in the year, was an attempt from which he had the narrowest of escapes in Tripoli, mounted by a
pied noir
called Jean David who belonged to a shadowy organisation called the “Main Rouge” with its own subterranean links to French intelligence. Jean David was later shot while attempting to escape over the Libyan border. One of the first efforts at gun-running to the F.L.N. came in February 1955 with the “borrowing” of the Queen of Jordan’s private yacht, the
Dina
. Beached off the Spanish Moroccan coast, the
Dina
off-loaded a quantity of weapons; Rif peasants drove their sheep back and forth along the beach to cover up traces. More such operations followed—though most of them were to be apprehended by the French as interception techniques improved.

But the greatest bonus for the F.L.N. cause, both in terms immediately of arms supplies and later of troop movements, came with France’s granting of independence to Morocco and Tunisia in March 1956, the paths to which had been pioneered by Mendès-France. From then on the F.L.N. had friendly and open frontiers to east and west, of which the Tunisian in particular was to provide benefits of inestimable value. In the opinion of a
New York Times
correspondent, Michael K. Clark,

but for the aid and protection afforded it by Tunisia and Morocco, the rebellion would have been circumscribed and perhaps crushed before the end of 1957. But, as the United States learned in Korea,[
2
] it is singularly difficult to destroy an enemy enjoying the sanctuary of an inviolable frontier.

Although, in retrospect, any further delay in according independence to these two Maghreb territories seemed out of the question by 1956, to do so without also doing the same for Algeria looked like a major error, in purely strategic terms if no other. Initially, France retained certain reserve rights enabling her to keep military units on Tunisian soil, which in theory might have helped her to prevent the F.L.N. from using it as a sanctuary, but in practice it was to work out quite otherwise. President Bourguiba, always apprehensive that too overt a support for the F.L.N. could provoke a French reoccupation of his country, and in any case a dedicated exponent of maximum co-operation with France, provided Ben Bella with somewhat less than he wanted. His policy remained consistent throughout: Tunisia would grant the F.L.N. rights of sanctuary, but it would not openly join in the war, and its highest goal would be to persuade both parties that their only prospect lay in negotiation. These restraints imposed by Bourguiba would always cause a certain coolness between himself and the F.L.N. leadership; nevertheless, what he did afford it proved enough to assure its military survival.