A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (27 page)

As far as the deliberately contrived, selective killing of European settlers went, the clear-cut aim was to drive them in from the
bled
, thus further reducing existing contacts between the two communities. The anonymity of their murderers—as with the Mau-Mau in Kenya—served the same purpose by making the whole of the local Muslim population suspect in the eyes of the fearful Europeans.

Mopping up the opposition

Even after Philippeville, however, it was still their fellow Muslims who bore the brunt of F.L.N. terror. Over the first two and a half years of the war 6,352 against 1,035 Europeans were estimated, as a minimum figure, to have been killed in F.L.N. attacks against civilians. During the Yugoslav partisan war of 1941 to 1945, much of Tito’s efforts was expended in combat against Mihailović’s Serb četniks, and such a simultaneous internal “civil war” is a not infrequent concomitant of revolutionary struggle against an external enemy. To the F.L.N. the Number One enemy at home was constituted by the “traitor” M.N.A. supporters of Lahouel, and the absent Messali—once again under house-arrest in France. As a result of the French over-zealous round-up of nationalist suspects in November 1954, many of the M.T.L.D.—M.N.A., like Ben Khedda, had already come over to the F.L.N. of their own volition. Those that remained became the object of ruthless attack. Warfare was particularly intense in Kabylia, which, up to 1954, had been regarded as a Messalist stronghold. The M.N.A. then tried to win it back by sending in packets of armed men to form their own maquis.

One such group five hundred strong was created, armed and uniformed in eastern Kabylia under a former M.T.L.D. municipal councillor called Bellounis. At first the F.L.N. reacted by slitting a few random throats. In Algiers, Soustelle’s psychological-warfare experts began to toy with the idea of using Bellounis’s dissident force as an “anti-guerrilla” along lines that had proved profitable in Indo-China. Then, with the summer of 1955, the ferocious Amirouche—in whose sector Bellounis had appeared—moved in, encircling Bellounis’s camp at Guenzet and attacking it by surprise. The internecine massacre lasted forty-eight hours, watched gleefully by neighbouring French troops without intervening. Only Bellounis and a handful of his five hundred men escaped alive. Bellounis now directed his footsteps towards the French. Amirouche’s operation did, however, signify the end of the M.N.A. challenge in Kabylia, and the beginning of its elimination as a serious rival to the F.L.N. throughout the country followed in the second half of 1956; an elimination that was to have meaningful echoes when, by the first Evian negotiations of 1961, Gaullist France toyed vainly with hopes of the all but extinct M.N.A. providing an
interlocuteur valable
alternative to the F.L.N.

After what the Parisian Press scathingly dismissed as this “settling of accounts between North Africans”, the F.L.N. concentrated its attentions on the Algerian Communist Party (P.C.A.). All Saints’ Day had placed the P.C.A. in an awkward predicament. Back in 1945 it had strongly condemned the Sétif uprising, and was actually reported to have taken part in the reprisals; in turn, it had been attacked by the rebels, who went so far as to seize the local party secretary and cut off his hands. The P.C.A. role at Sétif had never been forgotten. With Europeans comprising the large proportion of its membership (which was only 12,000), the P.C.A. tended to support the
petits blancs
rather than the Muslims, and, not without reason, Algerian nationalists had come to regard it as being tarred with the racist and anti-religious brush of Stalinism. It was closely associated with the French Communist Party and aligned to Moscow, where the acquisition of the soul of the French worker (who had only the most meagre natural sympathy for the Algerian, seen either as an immigrant worker threatening his own job, or as a rebel killing and mutilating working-class
pieds noirs
) clearly rated a higher priority than the national aspirations of a few million non-Communist Algerians. In November 1954 the P.C.F. had supported Mendès-France, offered lukewarm “solidarity” to the Algerian people, but condemned “individual acts” likely to play into the hands of the worst colonialists. When Mollet was to call for “special powers” to enable him to send conscripts to Algeria in 1956, the P.C.F. would again support the government, and as late as March 1956 it declared in words that could have come from almost any other French politician at the time: “We are for the existence and permanence of political, economic, and cultural bonds between France and Algeria…. Peace must be re-established in Algeria.…”

Meanwhile, however, in Algeria individual members of the P.C.A. had become restive at the party’s policy towards the rebellion. Feelers were put out to the F.L.N. about collaboration but were rebuffed on the grounds that the F.L.N. would accept members of the P.C.A. into its ranks, but only as individuals. In July 1955 the central committee of the P.C.A. decided to participate in the revolution, but under its own organisation. Stalemate. Then, in September, it found itself dissolved by the Gouvernement-Général. On 4 April 1956 a twenty-eight-year-old
pied noir
called Henri Maillot, who was a Communist and the son of a Communist, and who had been recalled to serve with the army as an officer cadet, left Miliana with a convoy of arms for Algiers, seventy-five miles to the north-east. Arriving in a wood just outside Algiers, Maillot dismissed the escort to get their breakfast, tied the driver of the arms truck to a tree, and drove off into the blue with a booty including over two hundred automatic weapons as well as a large quantity of grenades and ammunition. It was all too ridiculously easy. Two days later a body calling itself the Combattants de la Libération announced the setting up of a
maquis rouge
, which Maillot had now joined. On 5 June, in a previously unaffected region near Orléansville, militiamen under the command of a prominent “loyal” Muslim, the Bachaga Boualem, reported the presence of a new armed band. With surprising speed it was located, pinned down and wiped out. Among the dead picked up was Maillot, easily identified despite his hair and eyebrows having been bleached.

At about the same time, delicate negotiations were under way between the adroit Ben Khedda (for the F.L.N.) and P.C.A. representatives for a “takeover bid” of the party membership. In the course of them it was revealed that Maillot’s arsenal lay buried in a tomb at the Clos Salembier cemetery. Disinterred, the weapons were smuggled by truck to Palestro on the western fringes of Kabylia, where, a few weeks later, they were to help Ouamrane perpetrate the bloodiest reverse to date on the French army itself. By September 1956 the remaining survivors of the short-lived
maquis rouge
had been mopped up. Then, in November, the Algiers police, evidently acting on a tip-off, caught a militant European Communist called Fernand Yveton red-handed in the act of placing a bomb in a gasworks. Yveton was tried and, though adamantly denying that his bomb was intended to inflict human casualties, guillotined a few months later.

Both he and Maillot have since been enshrined as “Heroes of the Revolution” by the F.L.N., but at the time grave suspicions existed that the
maquis rouge
might have been betrayed to Boualem’s men by the F.L.N. itself. Such suspicions have never been either allayed or confirmed; while even the circumstances of Yveton’s arrest strike a curious note. Whatever the truth, the F.L.N. undoubtedly viewed the rival
maquis rouge
with ill-concealed hostility, and this liquidation marked in fact the end of the P.C.A. as a separate entity. On 1 July a communiqué attributed to the Combattants de la Libération announced their dissolution and integration within the F.L.N. At the same time the important trade union, the Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens (U.G.T.A.), now came completely under the control of the F.L.N. The Secretary-General of the P.C.A., Bachir Hadj Ali, withdrew in exile to Moscow where he spent the remainder of the war. P.C.A. members were, however, never fully trusted by the F.L.N., and were frequently detailed to undertake “suicide missions”. From this background — and the prolonged Soviet reluctance to send the F.L.N. effective arms support — stems the markedly cool relations between Algeria and the U.S.S.R. that were to continue beyond the end of the war itself.

Tirailleurs desert

The reduction of the M.N.A. and P.C.A. as political rivals and the swallowing of their members constituted major successes and milestones for the F.L.N. during this period of consolidation. With less coercion, other useful allies were also flowing in to join the rebellion of their own accord. Of growing concern to the French was the effect that the more sophisticated propaganda of the F.L.N. under Abane was having on the reliability of veteran Algerian units within the army. In his novel
The Centurions
Jean Lartéguy relates how, on killing a
fellagha
leader, Si Lahcen, French paras found in his pockets a
médaille militaire
and a mention in despatches from Indo-China. “There’s something wrong about this war,” one para officer remarks to another. There was indeed. At night on 9 February 1956 a platoon of the 46th Tirailleurs stationed near Tlemcen was called out on an alarm — to be mown down by one of their own number, a
caporal-chef
, who wounded six soldiers before running off with the attackers. Worse followed ten days later when fifty men of the 50th Tirailleurs defected under another
caporal-chef
, a returned veteran from Indo-China, in similar circumstances. A French lieutenant and ten men were killed and twenty wounded by the mutineers, who then cleaned out the company’s arms store of over a hundred weapons and joined the F.L.N. waiting ready with mules to haul off the booty. As Michael Clark of the
New York Times
remarks, “The fear of betrayal now stalked every native unit, casting its pall over European and Moslem alike.”

Non-Muslim recruits for the F.L.N
.

Recruitment in Algeria was bringing in a growing number of non-Muslims. Among the intellectuals and doctors sympathetic to the cause, one of the earliest committed to it was a young
pied noir
surgeon, son of a prominent trade unionist, called Pierre Chaulet. In May 1955 Chaulet carried out the first secret operation on a rebel wounded painfully in the knee and brought in by Ouamrane. He was Azedine, who later emerged as an important F.L.N. leader in the last stages of the war. To Abane, who the following year became an intimate friend of both Chaulet and his attractive wife, the doctor explained: “We are not coming to the aid of the F.L.N. We are Algerians like you. Our soil, our country, is Algeria. We shall defend it with you. We are of the F.L.N.”[
3
] The Chaulets were to afford immense assistance to the F.L.N. In addition to their succouring of F.L.N. wounded, Abane used their house as a kind of secret head-quarters, smuggling vital documents in and out in a cake box; some of the first F.L.N. tracts were printed on a duplicator set up there, and, with great audacity, the Chaulets smuggled Krim and Ouamrane back and forth in their Citroën 2 c.v. on their frequent trips between Algiers and Kabylia.

Another doctor to come over to the F.L.N., body and soul, at this time was the impassioned Martiniquais, Frantz Fanon. During the Second World War Fanon had joined the Free French, been wounded and decorated in the liberation of France, but then made the painful discovery that a black man was not treated as an equal in the French army. In 1956 he wrote a bitter letter to the governor-general, resigning his post at the Blida psychiatric clinic, and joined the underground. He became one of the revolution’s most articulate and extreme ideologues, and a violent exponent of anti-colonialism in any shape. He died of leukaemia in 1961, aged only thirty-six. Independent Algeria honoured his name with a university and a boulevard.

Among other intellectuals was André Mandouze, Professor of Literature at the University of Algiers, who formed around him an important sector of pro-F.L.N. sympathisers in the university. Mandouze had close contacts with Abane and Ben Khedda, attempting to create a bridge between them and the French government, and though he was never actually a member of the F.L.N., he was forced eventually to resign his post and return to France.

Yet another important group to be won over to the F.L.N., by an adroit combination of carrot and stick, came from the Jewish community of Algeria, notably its intellectuals. In August 1956 a group of Constantine Jews wrote a public letter, declaring that “One of the most pernicious manoeuvres of colonialism in Algeria was, and remains, the division between Jews and Muslims … the Jews have been in Algeria for over 2,000 years; they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people.…” The Jews were to provide invaluable services as “the eyes and ears of the revolution”, in the words of Frantz Fanon; often acting in the role of double agents against the French.

Abbas joins the F.L.N
.

Undoubtedly the most important single acquisition to the F.L.N. during this period was the person of the arch-apostle of moderation, Ferhat Abbas himself. In the spring of 1955 Abbas had made a powerful speech at the small port of Djidjelli that had come as a shock to Soustelle. If there were any “outlaws” in Algeria today, declared Abbas, they were to be found within the “colonialist regime”: “They are the prefects, they are the mayors, they are the administrators of the
communes mixtes
.” He ended with the challenging words: