A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (28 page)

U.D.M.A. addresses itself to the French government to tell it the following: as long as you continue to proclaim that Algeria is French, we shall reply that, as for us, “Algeria is Arab!” If the French government changes its line, then it and ourselves will begin to proclaim the same truths: “Algeria is Algerian!”

It marked a long march from Abbas’s oft-quoted statement of 1936 — “I will not die for the Algerian nation, because it does not exist.” A few weeks later, Abbas had an “exploratory” meeting with Abane, Krim and Ouamrane in Algiers. With outright frankness, Abane told him: “The revolution has been unleashed, and it is the work of neither Messali, nor the U.D.M.A. All that is out of date. Your duty is to join the Front.” When Abbas asked Abane what precisely he should do, he was told: “Dissolve the U.D.M.A., and announce that you are going over to the Front.”

Lest there should be any wavering by Abbas, unmistakable pressure was applied on him in the form of the “execution” of his own nephew during the Philippeville massacres of August 1955 already described. Abbas now undertook a series of final attempts to put out a tentative hand to the French government, including a trip to France where he tried, through the French delegate to the United Nations, Senator Edmond Michelet, to see de Gaulle. It was in vain, and Abbas was generally to encounter a cold shoulder.

At a further meeting with Abane on his return to Algeria, Abbas was asked: “Well, is it peace?”

He replied: “No, it’s war.”

In an interview with the Tunisian paper,
L’Action
, during January 1956, Abbas stated in tones of grim disillusion:

My party and I have thrown our entire support into the cause defended by the National Liberation Front. My role, today,
is
to stand aside for the chiefs of the armed resistance. The methods that I have upheld for the last fifteen years—co-operation, discussion, persuasion—have shown themselves to be ineffective; this I recognise.…

In April he was in Switzerland negotiating with Ben Bella; a few days later in Cairo, declaring to the world by radio the dissolution of the U.D.M.A., and its incorporation within the F.L.N. That August, at the Soummam Conference, he was elected a member of the F.L.N.’s newly created governing body, the C.N.R.A. (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne).

Thus, by this time, the absorption or neutralisation of its principal political rivals, M.N.A., P.C.A. and U.D.M.A., had transformed the F.L.N. into a “mass movement” in the truest sense of the word.

Rifts within the F.L.N.: the Aurès

When Soustelle departed in early 1956 the total of F.L.N. “regulars” had already grown to between 15,000 and 20,000 from the few handfuls which had launched the revolution on All Saints’ Day 1954. They had killed 550 members of the security forces, gendarmes and soldiers included, while their own losses were reckoned at three thousand, of whom a number rated as “irregulars” killed in the course of the Philippeville uprisings. By the second anniversary of the war the F.L.N. could claim to have destroyed or stolen in rural Algeria (their figures, so a margin of exaggeration for propaganda purposes should be discounted):

906 farms

38,340 head of cattle or sheep

404 agricultural machines

4,432,000 vine roots

4,583 hectares of standing crops

283 schools.

During this period of overall success and political consolidation, on the debit side the gravest threats to the F.L.N. came from within. From a largely military point of view, the worst situation had arisen in Wilaya 1, the Aurès, the very cradle of the revolt in its earliest days. Its leader, Ben Boulaid, had been captured, it will be recalled, in February 1955. Nine months later he achieved a remarkable escape from the condemned cell in Constantine prison,[
4
] and on returning to the Aurès discovered that it had more or less reverted to its traditional state of parochial anarchy. Morale was very low, and his successor, Bachir Chihani, leader of the detachment that had ambushed the Monnerots, had aroused mounting opposition. Coming from the Nementchas, fifty miles away, he was regarded as a “foreigner”; he was accused of pederasty and other more savage excesses; and he appears to have made a series of grave tactical errors. The worst occurred at the end of September, when Chihani allowed his headquarters at Djeurf, deep in the most inaccessible wastes of the Nementchas, to be surrounded by French troops. Refusing to heed the urgings of his aides, Adjoul and Laghrour, to break out of the net, Chihani lost most of his escort and all his arms; and gravest of all, a large quantity of undestroyed documents, including directives from Ben Bella, that were to present the French Deuxième Bureau with its most valuable windfall to date. Chihani himself made a miraculous escape, having been buried for six days underground after the French had dynamited the entrance of the cave in which he was hiding, but his prestige had gone, and Adjoul and Laghrour decided on his execution. After several attempts to avoid a trap, Chihani was cornered, formally sentenced and executed — followed subsequently by eight of his “young men”.

On the instructions of Adjoul, Chihani’s death was kept a strict secret, and it remains uncertain whether it took place before (as Adjoul claims) or after Ben Boulaid’s return. Whichever it was, the state of disintegration he found in the Aurès was extreme. Over the next few months he seems to have been partly successful in picking up the pieces. Then a French cloak-and-dagger field unit called the 11th Shock Regiment entered the scene. By carefully contriving what looked like a badly placed parachute drop, the 11th Shock floated down a booby-trapped radio close to Ben Boulaid’s headquarters. As it was the latest model available to the French army, the assumption was that curiosity would induce an important rebel leader to investigate. That leader proved to be Ben Boulaid, who was blown to pieces in the ensuing explosion, together with his chief aide and two
djounoud
. The date was 27 March 1956; a short time later Adjoul defected to the French. For another six months the fact of Ben Boulaid’s death appears to have been kept concealed even from the other F.L.N. leaders, a further testimony to the level of secrecy within the watertight compartments of the F.L.N. For the next two years the Aurès lapsed back substantially into fratricidal warfare, contributing little to the common cause.

Serious as this was for the F.L.N., more intrinsic was the widening rift between Ben Bella in Cairo and the F.L.N. leaders of the “interior” — notably Abane. In the first instance the row was over the continued failure of the external delegation to provide the arms demanded by the “interior”. An angry exchange of correspondence in April 1956 culminated with this insulting ultimatum to Ben Bella: “If you cannot do anything for us outside, come back and
die
with us. Come and fight. Otherwise consider yourselves as traitors!” It was followed by the despatch of Dr Lamine Debaghine to Cairo with full powers to supervise the activities of the external delegation. Ben Bella, who had set himself up as something of a
primus inter pares
in Cairo, seethed with resentment and refused to accept Debaghine’s appointment. The differences were papered over temporarily, but beneath them also lay to some extent, dangerously latent, the mutual suspicions between Kabyles (Abane, Krim, Ouamrane) and Arabs (Ben Bella). Not a whisper of these dissensions, however, was to reach the world outside, either then or later.

“
Summit” at Soummam

Already in the spring of 1956 Abane and the Algiers leaders had begun to contemplate the calling of a “summit” conference to iron out these internal differences and re-establish the basic unity of the revolution, and at the same time attempt to define its principles. The proposition was put by Ben M’hidi, then in Cairo on a liaison mission, to Ben Bella, who approved the idea and agreed that such a meeting should be held on Algerian soil. There were obvious emotive and propaganda reasons for this, but equally it cannot have escaped Abane’s astute political brain that the primacy of the “interior” over the “exterior” would thereby become incontestable. The risk and sheer logistics, however, of holding such a “summit” under the very noses of the French were more than daunting. After thorough reconnaissance, choice was made of a simple forester’s cottage set in idyllic but wild country of mountains and chestnut forests at Igbal, above where the Soummam valley marks the boundary between Greater and Lesser Kabylia; the date, 20 August. A hint that something was afoot seems to have reached the Deuxième Bureau, for in July there was a sharp increase of military operations in the designated area; Ouamrane himself was slightly wounded and narrowly escaped being taken in a French ambush. So, to protect the “summit”, Amirouche (in whose sector it lay) concentrated several hundred men and a skilful feint was mounted to draw off security forces to another part of Kabylia.

Meanwhile, Ben Bella and his colleagues were instructed to go to San Remo in Italy and await a boat which would smuggle them into Algeria. For three weeks they sat on the Italian Riviera, kicking their heels impatiently. Various messages arrived from Abane, postponing their voyage on the grounds that French operations made it too dangerous. Finally, they received word to go to Tripoli, whence they would be “escorted” overland to the “summit”. There they heard the astonishing news that the Soummam Conference had been held without them and was already over. Abane had played and won a major trick.

When the conference opened, sixteen delegates were present with the Kabyles and the Constantinois the most strongly represented. Kabylia itself sent Krim, Mohamedi Said, Amirouche and Kaci. Krim (who, following the arrest of Bitat and the break-up of his organisation, had been sent with Ouamrane to run Algiers and the neighbouring Algérois region) was doubling up as chief representative for Algiers, and Ouamrane for the Algérois. From Constantine came Zighout, the Wilaya 2 boss, his deputy, Ben Tobbal, and five others. From the stagnant Wilaya 5 of Oranie came Ben M’Hidi alone, who was also called upon to deputise for the “externals”
in absentia
, as being the delegate to have been most recently in contact with their views. The first session was presided over by Ben M’hidi, with Abane as secretary, but from the beginning it was clear that the initiative lay with Abane — and with the “interior” rather than the “exterior” — and, secondarily, with the Kabyles as opposed to the Arabs. Immediately, despite the absence of the “externals”, there was dissent and mutual recrimination. Ben M’hidi criticised “uselessly bloody operations” that made a bad impression on public opinion, citing Zighout’s massacre at El-Halia of exactly one year previously and a new excess by Amirouche where perhaps over a thousand dissident Muslims had been “liquidated” in a village near Bougie. (Krim, though he severely castigated his subordinate, Amirouche, in private, defended him in public at Soummam.)

As the conference progressed, bitter under-currents flowed around the personality of Abane himself. Some delegates thought him well-suited to assume the supreme leadership of the revolution, others insisted on adherence to the 1954 principle of collective leadership. Ben Tobbal made no secret of his personal antipathy to Abane; Krim, the veteran maquisard, was resentful of the way in which Abane, the politician, seemed to be acquiring more and more power; Zighout warned pointedly of the disastrous consequences that a “cult of the personality” had had for Algerian nationalism in the shape of El-Zaim, “the one and only” Messali Hadj; while Amirouche went so far as to suggest to Krim that Abane should be “despatched” before it was too late.

Soummam was, however, very much Abane’s conference, and after twenty days of heated debates the lapidary conclusions which it reached strongly bore the imprint of his authority. On his urging, rigid military and political hierarchies were established with the express aim of avoiding the excesses and schisms of the past. Within the military command, ranks were ordained from private, or
djoundi
, to colonel (so as not to foster in any way the “cult of the personality”, there would deliberately be no generals); units were defined from a
faoudj
, or section, of eleven men to a
failck
, or battalion, of 350 men (though, in practice this was to prove unwieldy, and operationally the biggest unit was most commonly the 110-strong
katiba
, or company). The six Wilayas, themselves subdivided into zones (
mintakas
), regions and sectors, were henceforth to be closely co-ordinated and controlled by a new supreme body, the C.C.E. or Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution. This would replace the loose, old boys’ structure of the original C.R.U.A., or “Committee of the Nine”, and it was designed to pre-empt situations where the Wilayas existed in a state of autonomy and out of contact with each other for months at a time. Another institution created at Soummam (and closely modelled on the French wartime Resistance) was the Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne (C.N.R.A.), a kind of sovereign parliament composed of thirty-four elected delegates from all parts of the country, to be convened at regular intervals. To the all-powerful C.C.E., presiding in Algiers, were elected three members, Abane, Krim and Ben M’hidi, to whom another two “outsiders” acquired from the M.N.A., Ben Khedda and Saad Dahlab, were subsequently co-opted.