A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (40 page)

Then there were the various forms of water torture: heads thrust repeatedly into water troughs until the victim was half-drowned; bellies and lungs filled with cold water from a hose placed in the mouth, with the nose stopped up. “I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments,” says Alleg; “I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. ‘That’s it! He’s going to talk,’ said a voice.” And there were the instances (perhaps less common than publicity made them seem at the time) of the tortures still more degrading of human dignity: bottles thrust into the vaginas of young Muslim women; high pressure hoses inserted in the rectum, sometimes causing permanent damage through internal lesions.

The torturers tortured

Almost as painful as the torture inflicted on oneself was the awareness of the suffering of others nearby: “I don’t believe that there was a single prisoner who did not, like myself, cry from hatred and humiliation on hearing the screams of the tortured for the first time,” says Alleg, and he records the horror of the elderly Muslim hoping to appease his tormentors: “Between the terrible cries which the torture forced out of him, he said, exhausted: ‘
Vive la France! Vive la France!
”’

But the humiliation was double-sided; as many other nations have discovered, torture ends by corrupting the torturer as much as it breaks the victim. The
centre de tri
where he was held had, says Alleg, become “a school of perversion for young Frenchmen”, and his view is shared by paratrooper Pierre Leulliette of the 2nd R.P.C. who was forced, unwillingly, to take part in the torturing. Initially, says Leulliette, the paras “tackled these methods, rather new to them, first with reluctance, and then whole-heartedly”. Based in an unused sweet factory, he recalls one big Alsatian sergeant who seemed particularly to relish his work: “With his fist, which could have strangled an ox, he would plunge in the heads of his clients, who were often choking with apprehension long before they touched the water…. He would have liked to interrogate Europeans; but they were rare….” Reactions among the paras varied: “Those who flaunted their vices embroidered on it at leisure, and found it all quite normal; the ‘humanists’ thought they should merely be shot. Very few seemed to realise that there might have been some innocent men among them.” Leulliette himself became deeply oppressed by what was going on round him in the sweet factory: “All day, through the floor-boards, we heard their hoarse cries, like those of animals being slowly put to death. Sometimes I think I can still hear them…. All these men disappeared….” Gradually, “I felt myself becoming contaminated. What was more serious, I felt that the horror of all these crimes, our everyday battle, was losing force daily in my mind.” Going on a month’s leave to Paris was like a deep breath of fresh air, and sufficient “to make me forget the suffering throughout poor Algeria. I felt ashamed. Ashamed of having been so happy.”

“
All these men disappeared
….”

On seeing Alleg in person at the Palais de Justice in 1970, Massu comments drily on his “reassuring dynamism”, and questions, “Do the torments which he suffered count for much alongside the cutting off of the nose or of the lips, when it was not the penis, which had become the ritual present of the
fellaghas
to their recalcitrant ‘brothers’? Everyone knows that these bodily appendages don’t grow again!” But, once taken away, nor does life itself “grow again”, and Massu does not mention those who did not survive arrest during the Battle of Algiers. “All these men disappeared,” says Leulliette, and he admits later of having “to bury one of the suspects, who had died at their hands, in the quicklime at the bottom of the garden. There were others….” During the Battle of Algiers, disposal of the “inconvenient”, of those who died under torture, or who refused adamantly to talk, apparently became prevalent enough to gain the slang expression “work in the woods”. Courrière writes of bodies dropped out in the sea by helicopter, and of a mass grave between Koléa and Zéralda, some thirty kilometres from Algiers (though no such grave has apparently been uncovered subsequently by the Algerian government); Vidal-Naquet cites the killing by suffocation in March 1957 of forty-one out of 101 detainees locked up in wine-cellars in Oran;[
10
] Lebjaoui lists the names of a series of men to whose families either Salan or Massu stated that they had been released, but who, Lebjaoui claims, were never seen again. The number of such “disappearances” may never be verified; the distinguished secretary-general at the Algiers prefecture, Paul Teitgen, put it at just over 3,000. Though Godard disputes it vigorously and arithmetically, this was to become the figure generally accepted by the opponents of para excesses during the Battle of Algiers.

There was, inevitably, a mass covering-up within the army. As “Major Marcus” in Servan-Schreiber’s
Lieutenant en Algérie
remarks: “The captains and the mayors lie to the generals and the prefects…when a
saloperie
is committed in my regiment by some of my men on an operation, do you think I ever hear about it? No. It’s covered up ‘between pals’.” The cases which did, however, lift the lid to public gaze were those concerning well-known, or at least identifiable, figures. There was the ill-explained death of Ben M’hidi, and later there was the detailed account of his own tortures by Henri Alleg. Meanwhile, following closely on the revelation of Ben M’hidi’s “suicide”, there came the radio announcement that on 23 March the prominent young lawyer, Ali Boumendjel, had thrown himself out of a window of a building in El-Biar tenanted by the 2nd R.C.P. “to escape interrogation to which he was going to be subjected”. Supporting the official statement, Salan claims that numerous incriminating documents were found in Boumendjel’s possession and that he had wished “to escape from justice”. Godard adds that either he “had wished to die for the cause, or was deranged in his mind”. Whether or not either explanation was satisfactory, Boumendjel’s death was to cause an uproar in France.

L’Affaire Audin

An even greater and more persistent outcry, however, was sparked off by the disappearance of Maurice Audin in June 1957. Audin was a twenty-five-year-old lecturer in the science faculty of Algiers University and a member of the same Communist cell as Henri Alleg. He was arrested by Colonel Mayer’s 1st R.C.P. on suspicion of harbouring and aiding terrorists and—according to Salan, who cites statements made by both the sergeant and the lieutenant in charge of him—managed to escape into the night while being transported in a jeep. Shots were fired after Audin, but no body was ever found, and the sergeant was sentenced to fifteen days’ arrest for his negligence. The official story was that Audin had made his way to Tunisia; but he has never been seen since. Courrière claims that he was “liquidated” by operatives of the 11th Shock in mistake for Alleg; Vidal-Naquet says categorically that “It was at Fort Emperor that Maurice Audin was secretly buried after he had been murdered.”

Bollardière and Teitgen protest

The French liberal conscience and instinct for humanity being what they are, however, soon powerful voices, both in Algeria and metropolitan France, were being raised against torture. One of the first was General Jacques de Bollardière—Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, Companion of the Liberation, etc.—whose outstanding wartime career has already been noted in the previous chapter. Arriving in the latter part of 1956, he had been given command of a sector near Blida and had then been brought into the Battle of Algiers. Early on, when dressed in plain clothes, he had been shocked to overhear a young cavalry officer remark, “In Algiers, now, there is nothing but genuine chaps, paras, the Legion, fine big blond fellows, stalwarts not sentimentalists.”

Bollardière intervened: “Doesn’t that remind you of anything,
des grands gars blonds, pas sentimentaux
?”

The young officer replied, quite unashamedly: “If I had been in Germany at that moment, I too would have been a Nazi.”

Bollardière’s sense of outrage was further increased when approached by weeping Muslim women who told him that their sons or husbands had “disappeared in the night”, and finally he sought an interview with Massu, telling him that the orders he had been issued were “in absolute opposition to the respect of man, which was the foundation of my life”. After this Bollardière commented: “if the leadership yielded on the absolute principle of respect for human beings, enemy or not, it meant an unleashing of deplorable instincts which no longer knew any limits and which could always find means of justifying itself”. He then wrote to the Commander-in-Chief requesting to be posted back to France. On returning to France he gave voice to his indignation by writing, on 27 March 1957, a letter to his friend Servan-Schreiber for publication in
L’Express
, in which he pointed to “the terrible danger there would be for us to lose sight, under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency, of the moral values which alone have, up until now, created the grandeur of our civilisation and of our army”. For this fundamental breach of military discipline the general was sentenced to sixty days of “fortress arrest”, the most severe punishment meted out to any senior officer during the Algerian war.

Just two days after Bollardière’s offence, Governor-General Lacoste received a letter of resignation from an even more influential figure: Paul Teitgen, his secretary-general at the Prefecture. Teitgen, a Catholic and hero of the Resistance, had been deported by the Gestapo to Dachau, where he was tortured on no less than nine occasions. In August 1956 he took up his post in Algiers, which carried with it special responsibilities for overseeing the police and in which he found little that was congenial. In November he was confronted with an appalling moral dilemma. Fernand Yveton, the Communist, had been caught red-handed placing a bomb in the gasworks where he was employed. But a second bomb had not been discovered, and if it exploded and set off the gasometers thousands of lives might be lost. Nothing would induce Yveton to reveal its whereabouts, and Teitgen was pressed by his Chief of Police to have Yveton
passé à la question
.

But I refused to have him tortured. I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because if you once get into the torture business, you’re lost…. Understand this, fear was the basis of it all. All our so-called civilisation is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find
fear
. The French, even the Germans, are not torturers by nature. But when you see the throats of your
copains
slit, then the varnish disappears.

With Lacoste’s handling over of responsibility to Massu in January, Teitgen found that his hands were tied. Thus on 29 March he wrote to Lacoste, offering his resignation on the grounds that he had failed in his duty and that “for the past three months we have been engaged…in irresponsibility which can only lead to war crimes”. He added that, in visits to two
centres d’hébergement
, he had “recognised on certain detainees profound traces of the cruelties and tortures that I personally suffered fourteen years ago in the Gestapo cellars”. He feared that “France risks losing her soul through equivocation”.

Lacoste begged Teitgen to remain at his post and keep his letter secret. Feeling that it would be better for him to continue as watchdog, rather than have no watchdog at all, Teitgen assented. As a consequence of the pressures of protest, he was permitted to retain powers of detention, which meant in theory that the paras could not hold suspects; secondly, in April a “Safeguard Committee of Individual Rights and Liberties” was instituted by Paris to investigate and redress excesses. Some moderation was achieved but, says Teitgen, torture was by no means stamped out, and in September he decided he could stay no longer.[
11
] By this time, he claims, over three thousand Algerians had “disappeared”.

How effective was torture?

There remains the vital question, with much relevance to today: what did torture achieve in the Battle of Algiers? Putting aside any consideration of morality, was it even effective? Massu, with a courage that demands respect, claims that the end justified the means; the battle was won and a halt was brought to the F.L.N.-imposed terror and the indiscriminate killing and maiming of both European and Muslim civilians. He also notes that, when critics compared them to the Nazis, his paras practised neither extermination nor the taking of hostages. And Edward Behr, who could by no stretch of the imagination be regarded as an apostle of torture, nevertheless reckons “that without torture the F.L.N.’s terrorist network would never have been overcome.… The ‘Battle of Algiers’ could not have been won by General Massu without the use of torture.” Had the Battle of Algiers indeed been lost by the French in 1957, then the whole of Algeria would almost certainly have been swamped by the F.L.N.—leading in all probability to a peace settlement several years earlier than was otherwise the case.

This is certainly true of the short term, but in the longer term—as the Nazis in the Second World War, and as almost every other power that has ever adopted torture as an instrument of policy, have discovered—it is a double-edged weapon. In some of his last utterances even Massu’s chief lieutenant, Yves Godard, expressed doubts as to the efficacy of torture; especially when weighed against the emotional weapon it presented the enemy. In what seemed like an indirect criticism of his old commander, he added: