A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (26 page)

On the diplomatic level the F.L.N.’s most outstanding feat of internationalisation began in April 1955. After some energetic lobbying by Ait Ahmed, his brother-in-law Khider and M’hamed Yazid (a former principal in Lahouel’s faction of the M.T.L.D.), the F.L.N. gained an invitation to attend the Bandung Conference, that landmark for the emerging Third World in which twenty-nine nations representing some 1,300 million people were to take part. Although the Algerians, with no recognised government behind them, could only attend as “unofficial” delegates, their presence at Bandung was sufficient to achieve a notable victory on the international scene. After condemnations of colonialism in all forms were pronounced by the conference, it adopted unanimously an Egyptian motion proclaiming Algeria’s right to independence, and called upon France to implement this forthwith. Behind the scenes, in private meetings with other Arab delegates, Yazid and Ait Ahmed gained pledges of vast sums of money to support the cause, and in a long conversation with the already legendary Ho Chi Minh they were told encouragingly: “
Les français
…that’s a problem we know well!” With Bandung a vital watershed had been reached for the F.L.N., and the road to the United Nations was open. Five months later the word Algeria was formally inscribed on the agenda of the General Assembly.

New leaders—new policies

Among the new faces coming to the fore with the expansion of the F.L.N. and the steady attrition of such old-guard leaders as Bitat, Ben Boulaid and Didouche, was Mohamedi Said, who was to become the effective leader of Wilaya 3 (Kabylia) upon the promotion of Krim and his lieutenant Ouamrane. A Kabyle born in 1912, and thus one of the oldest F.L.N. leaders, he had grown up with early memories of a French officer slapping his grandparents. Fanatically religious, he claimed to have worked during the Second World War with the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Husaini, joining the Muslim S.S. legion formed by the Mufti. In 1943 he was parachuted into Tunisia as an Abwehr agent, was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment, but was paroled in 1952. Later, when a colonel in the F.L.N., he explained to an American journalist: “I believed that Hitler would destroy French tyranny and free the world.” Whether out of nostalgia for the good old days or detestation for the French, in photos he almost invariably appeared in an incongruous Wehrmacht steel helmet. Under Mohamedi Said, and frequently at odds with him, arose another new figure who was renowned and dreaded for his remorseless cruelty, Ait Hamouda, alias Amirouche. A skeletally tall
montagnard
from the Djurdjura with wide-set eyes and a heavy moustache, Amirouche had been a member of both the religious Ulema and, in Paris, of Messali’s M.T.L.D. Of remarkably quick and decisive intelligence, Amirouche when still under thirty had assumed command of a group in Kabylia on his own initiative, following the death of its leader. He swiftly imposed an iron discipline and amazed a somewhat dubious Krim by his ability to exact from his men forced marches of seventy kilometres a day. Within six months he had under his command eight hundred well-trained and exceptionally mobile men, and had firmly established himself in the Soummam region of eastern Kabylia, which had not previously been pro-F.L.N., by a reign of sheer terror.

Ramdane Abane

A third new figure who shared the creed of Amirouche and Zighout that terror was the ultimate weapon, but of far greater weight than either of them, was another Kabyle called Ramdane Abane. Involved in the Sétif massacre of 1945 as an underground operator for Messali, he had been tracked down in 1950 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. During this time he had undertaken the longest hunger strike yet seen in a French gaol, giving himself acute stomach ulcers with a resultant short temper. Although he came of poor parentage, Abane had succeeded in educating himself to gain his
baccalauréat
and become municipal clerk to a
commune mixte
, while during the war he had served as secretary to the colonel of the same unit as Sergeant Ouamrane. But his real education had come in prison where he had applied himself to the voracious reading of revolutionary studies, Marx and Lenin—and even
Mein Kampf
—and to studying minutely the political aspects of the F.L.N. revolution. Recruited by his wartime acquaintance Ouamrane, on leaving prison in the spring of 1955 (by which time he was thirty-five) Abane was put in charge of re-organising the Algiers networks that had been so badly disrupted the previous winter. Immediately he made his mark as an outstanding political intellect, something which the F.L.N. had previously lacked.

Abane has been variously described as the Robespierre, the Jean Moulin or the Bourguiba of the F.L.N.; or, by Robert Lacoste, simply as its “best brain”. One revolutionary leader in exile went so far as to claim that, had Abane lived, “he would have become (although not a Marxist) the Mao of Africa; and he was the only member of the F.L.N. with the breadth to become a leader of the calibre of a Tito”. To Yves Courrière Ouamrane remarked of him:

I’ve known quite a few intellectuals, but Abane was remarkably intelligent. He was, moreover, a simple man of absolute sincerity. He was not interested in clothes, nor money. The only thing of importance to him was national unity, and he was determined to obtain it by any means. This is what shocked many militants. He was violent, brutal, radical and expeditious in his decisions. He knew nothing about the “velvet glove” (
mettre de gant
). Discussions with him were very violent…. He always used to say “
Messieurs
, look and judge,” but that didn’t deter him from then insulting anybody who opposed his ideas….

Short in stature, Abane had a smiling, chubby face with lively eyes. They belied a morose personality imbued with an unwavering belief that, just as France had conquered Algeria through violence, nothing but violence would ever shake loose her grip. The sinister dictum, “one corpse in a jacket is always worth more than twenty in uniform”, was a favourite of Abane’s, and representative of his basic thinking.

From the spring of 1955 Ramdane Abane’s philosophy was central to the F.L.N., both in its external operations and internal dissensions, leaving its physiognomy radically altered. His first notable achievement was to draft a new proclamation, dated 1 April 1955, by way of a riposte to France’s declaring a state of emergency in Algeria. Compared with the wordy initial statement of the previous November, it was a masterpiece of skilful propaganda, audacious optimism and conciseness. Beginning with an assurance to the Algerians that, over the first five months of activity, “in almost all encounters, our groups composed of ten to twenty men have defeated French army units and inflicted serious losses”, it went on to cite, with some exaggeration, various specific military “triumphs”. The proclamation ended with a clear menace to such “deviationist” bodies as the Algerian Communist Party and Messali’s M.N.A.: “The tribunal of the A.L.N. [Armée de Libération Nationale, as the military arm of the F.L.N. had now become known] will be pitiless towards traitors and enemies of the country….” On reading it for the first time, Soustelle’s chief political adviser, Colonel Eydoux, was heard to remark: “Something has changed in the management of the rebellion.”

In addition to his involvement on a regional level in resuscitating the Algiers network, Abane busied himself with restructuring the revolution in its every aspect. Being himself neither a Marxist–Leninist nor a devout Muslim theologian, he wanted the F.L.N. to fill a critical void by adapting its own ideology to embrace both creeds without becoming committed to either. Politically, he was the first F.L.N. leader to begin thinking ahead to requirements beyond merely the compass of the war. Deficiencies of discipline and internal security, of finances and propaganda, all came under fire from Abane—as well as such issues less immediately connected with the war as education and cultural affairs. Under particularly his and Krim’s impetus, politicisation of F.L.N. cadres moved into higher gear. In June 1956 the first copy of the F.L.N.’s own newspaper,
El Moudjahid
, appeared in a scruffily roneo’d format and was distributed secretly through the Casbah. By the end of the year, with the establishment of the clandestine Voix de l’Algérie, the transistor radio had become a major weapon of war, with the Algerians—not previously so addicted—buying up the country’s entire available stock. At first the French authorities tried to control sales, then jammed transmissions; both had but little success, and the Voix de l’Algérie established itself as a vital factor in maintaining morale and spreading the revolt still further. By this time it could genuinely be said that the F.L.N. had become a “mass movement”.

Abane: terror pays

Though Abane could hardly express satisfaction at the savage slaughter of innocents that accompanied it, his cold reasoning told him that the consequences of the Philippeville uprising would be a net gain for the F.L.N., and they were to encourage him in the initiation of a new offensive of urban terrorism—the Battle of Algiers. Like other revolutionaries both before and since, Abane concurred with his fellow F.L.N. leaders who had reached the conclusion that terror paid. As far as the uncommitted mass of rural Muslims was concerned, Soustelle notes the extreme susceptibility to pressure and blackmail of the average poverty-stricken
fellah
to an F.L.N. band, when, “with the knife literally under his throat they make him hand over 50,000 francs, they hurt him much more than the better off farmer who has had a tractor burnt worth two million francs”. It was remarkable, added Soustelle, that the F.L.N. “never sought to attach the rural populations to their cause by promising them a better life, a happier and freer future; no, it was through terror that they submitted them to their tyranny”. Visiting Kabylia in 1956, Jean Servier was shocked at the “terrible silence” he found in the villages, each one of which would be held in fee by a local F.L.N. representative responsible simply for collecting “taxes” and food supplies—a kind of “alternative government” to the French system of
caids
. One village headman to whom he tried to talk whispered, “Let another man come alongside me—so nobody will be able to say that I gave you any information. I shall have a witness….” At another village, west of Algiers, Servier attended a decoration parade for men who had killed two F.L.N. representatives “with an axe and sticks”, and when he asked them privately why they had done this he got the answer: “We killed them with blows of sticks and axe because the French took away our rifles.” Thus, in this context, the F.L.N. through its policy of terror could claim a double advantage in increasing the vulnerability of peasants in the remoter districts.

At an early stage in the revolution it became a customary initiation ritual for a new recruit to be made to kill a designated “traitor”,
mouchard
(police spy or informer), French gendarme officer or colonialist, in the company of a “shadow” who would dispatch the recruit himself should he show any sign of flinching. Admitting this policy in an interview in a Yugoslav journal, Krim stated: “An assassination marks the end of the apprenticeship of each candidate for the A.L.N.” Through this “passingout ceremony” the apprentice became both proven in reliability and bound, Faust-like, to the rebel cause by his act of outlawry. In their actual techniques of liquidation F.L.N. operatives consciously endeavoured to achieve the gruesome,
pour épater les bourgeois
, or an act of ridicule—to belittle the dead man. Mention has already been made of the Algerian predilection for throat-slitting,
le grand sourire
, and other even nastier mutilations; and a pro-F.L.N. American journalist, Herb Greer, records one deterrent execution of a renegade: “When we’ve shot him his head will be cut off and we’ll clip a tag on his ear to show he was a traitor. Then we’ll leave the head on the main road….” A loyal
garde-champêtre
would be found tied to a stake, his throat cut, and right arm fixed in mockery of a French army salute; a sergeant-major of the Goums dead with a warning label pinned contemptuously to his nose beneath a jauntily tilted European slouch hat.

“Kill the
caids
…” instructed orders seized from Chihani’s headquarters in the Nementchas in September 1955: “Take their children and kill them. Kill all those who pay taxes and those who collect them. Burn the houses of Muslim N.C.O.s away on active service….” From an early stage Muslim “moderates” (like Abbas’s nephew), or anyone who might play a mediatory or bridging role, were singled out. “Liquidate all personalities who want to play the role of
interlocuteur valable
”, read an order sent to Chihani from Ben Bella: “Kill any person attempting to deflect the militants and inculcate in them a
bourguibien
spirit,” read another. What this meant in practice, in terms of widening still further the yawning chasm between Europeans and Muslims, is revealed in some grim anecdotes about Algerian teenagers told by Frantz Fanon. In one, a thirteen- and a fourteen-year-old Muslim, who had murdered a thirteen-year-old European school friend, explained:

“We weren’t a bit cross with him. Every Thursday we used to go and play with catapults together, on the hill above the village. He was a good friend of ours….”

“But why did you pick on him?”

“Because he used to play with us. Another boy wouldn’t have gone up the hill with us.”