A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (46 page)

The causes behind Mélouza date back to the summer of 1955 when Amirouche had encircled and wiped out at Guenzet in Kabylia an armed camp of the dissident M.N.A. under a chieftain called Bellounis. Bellounis and a handful of his men had escaped and made their way to the Mélouza area, arid and inaccessible country sloping down to the Sahara on the intersections of four Wilayas. In 1956 it had gone over to the F.L.N. after Colonel Antoine Argoud had conducted a particularly severe reprisal there, and the French had more or less abandoned the area. Around Mélouza, however, the people of the Beni-Illemane tribes constituted an important pocket of M.N.A. supporters, and it was to them that Bellounis came and assumed leadership. Soon there was friction, and after Bellounis’s men had waylaid and killed several of his emissaries, the commander of Wilaya 3 gave orders to a captain and former Paris taxi-driver to “exterminate this vermin”. This he had done, with deadly effect; but Bellounis himself, once again, had slipped away unscathed. In the meantime, before the Mélouza massacre, the French, who in 1955 had already toyed with notions of turning Bellounis to their own advantage, had been putting out feelers to the M.N.A. leader. Now, after Mélouza, Bellounis and the survivors of the Beni-Illemane went over lock, stock and barrel to the French. Allowed their own flag, uniforms and “programme” as a Muslim “third force” allied but not subordinate to the French, the Bellounists became the principal of several private armies. For comparisons in the Second World War, one needs to look at aspects of General Vlasov’s Ukrainians, the Croat Ustaši, or the Serb četniks. By August 1957 Bellounis already had 1,500 men under his control, operating in the marginal areas just north of the Sahara, and backed by official funds (promised, but never realised
in toto
) of 70 million old francs a month. Though in fact the whole show, under the code name of “Opération Ollivier”, was “managed” by the ubiquitous 11th Shock, Bellounis took to appearing vested in the two stars of a general and a steadily inflating self-importance. As time went on he was to become an even greater thorn in the side of his Frankenstein, but for the time being his divisive activities caused the F.L.N. gravest anxiety.

More defections from the F.L.N.
…

At about this same time, and in the same vast marginal area which the F.L.N. had recently designated Wilaya 6, a still more menacing potential threat presented itself with the defection of Si Chérif and a whole rebel
katiba
. Aged thirty-two and an Arab, Si Chérif had spent eleven years in the French army, including two tours in Indo-China, and had been captured in an F.L.N. ambush when serving with the Spahis. After being employed for some time as a mere “coolie” by his captors, Si Chérif had risen to become military chief of the newly-formed Wilaya 6. This had been created out of a nucleus of Kabyles despatched southwards by Krim. Its political commissar was a wild and brutal figure operating under the pseudonym of “Rouget”, whose apparently insatiable sexual appetites drove him to claim a kind of
droit de seigneur
whereby the prettiest girls in the villages he passed through were earmarked for his personal pleasure. As most of the villages were Arab, this fanned a violent hatred between the two races, always latently smouldering. One day, in an angry argument, Si Chérif pulled out his revolver and shot Rouget through the head in front of his men. Then, over the next six days, Si Chérif and his Arab followers killed all the Kabyles they could lay their hands on. In July 1957 he “rallied” to the French at the head of an entire
katiba
330 strong. Turned into a
harki
—or Muslim private army fighting with the French—Si Chérif’s men operated with even greater effectiveness than Bellounis, inflicting in a pitched battle the following March some seventy-two casualties on the A.L.N., as well as recovering a considerable amount of arms.

For a time the French cherished hopes that Si Chérif might bring over with him the whole of the south, but eventually the F.L.N. skilfully managed to seal off the damage. Nevertheless, in that hard-pressed summer of 1957 the Si Chérif affair opened up to the F.L.N. one of its greatest latent nightmares: the prospect of a sectarian split between Arabs and Kabyles. It was an opportunity for which French intelligence was constantly, and obviously, on the look out. At the same time, after the notable successes of Captain Léger and his
bleus
during the latter stages of the Battle of Algiers, the 11th Shock had got busy burrowing into the demoralised Wilayas outside, sowing insidious suspicions of treason at every hand.

…
and rifts at the top

Although it was always less visible to the French (and in fact remained almost entirely invisible until years later), the continuing dissension in the F.L.N. leadership still posed an even greater menace to the coherence of the whole movement than any number of defections, single or collective, at lower levels. Greatly exacerbated by the defeat in Algiers and the forced withdrawal of the C.C.E. from the city, internal rifts had brought the F.L.N. leadership to the brink of disaster by the spring of 1957. Once again the basic issue lay in the contention between the “interior” and the “exterior”; and, once again, the figure of Ramdane Abane was at the storm centre. With the four surviving members of the C.C.E. themselves become, through force of circumstances, “exterior”, the sniping now spilled over into Habib Bourguiba’s newly independent capital of Tunis. The first shots were actually being fired while Ramdane Abane and his colleagues were on their “long march” from beleaguered Algiers. In a remarkable fashion Ben Bella, who had been under lock and key in the Santé prison since his hijacking the previous October, had managed to keep up a running correspondence with his faithful deputy, Ali Mahsas, in Tunis. Acting in harmony with Ben Bella’s directives, Ali Mahsas launched a violent attack on the C.C.E. at a meeting of the like-minded held in March. He refused to recognise the motions passed at the Soummam Conference the previous September because “No representative of the ‘exterior’ was present. Therefore, for us the C.C.E. is nothing.” The Soummam Conference, he charged, had broken the “moral contract” between the
neuf historiques
, and he accused Abane of “playing personal politics”. The C.C.E.’s decision to launch the eight-day general strike in Algiers was, he said:

the greatest folly ever committed by the Revolution. We ought to conduct a guerrilla war in the
djebel
with the support of the people. We always believed that the city ought not to intervene until the last moment…. Those of the C.C.E. have decided otherwise and now the repression is terrible. It could cut us off from the people. We have risked the dismantling of the revolutionary organisation to make a noise at the United Nations. It’s stupid and ridiculous!

When it appeared that Ali Mahsas was gaining support, Ouamrane, the tough ex-sergeant with the lantern jaw and, as Krim’s ever-loyal lieutenant, the most senior F.L.N. representative then in Tunis, decided to act promptly and forcefully. Sending fifty armed men into the centre of Tunis, he had Mahsas arrested at F.L.N. headquarters and placed in a guarded villa. For a moment it looked as if Mahsas was facing imminent liquidation. Then Bourguiba himself, apparently, intervened. A short time previously he had flown into a fierce rage on hearing of a series of killings between groups of rival Auresian tribesmen who had taken refuge on Tunisian soil. There were some 150,000 Algerians in Tunisia, many of them heavily armed and outnumbering the infant Tunisian army itself. Thus Bourguiba saw the whole basis of his authority undermined and reacted by arresting and disarming over a thousand of the squabbling F.L.N. He now criticised Ouamrane sharply for this new “settling of accounts”; the dissident Ali Mahsas was released and put on a plane for Rome and exile.

Abane versus the rest

Once again a breach within the top echelons of the F.L.N. seemed to have been healed over, with the C.C.E. emerging ascendant. Then, in June, Abane and Saad Dahlab arrived via Tétouan in Morocco, having been preceded shortly by Krim and Ben Khedda. Meanwhile, at various intervals, the “colonels”—as the military leaders of the Wilayas were now titled—were also congregating in Tunis. There was Mahmoud Chérif, the new chief of the troubled Wilaya 1 in the Aurès, where the revolt had first established itself; Mohamedi Said, the former S.S. man from Wilaya 3 in Kabylia; Ouamrane standing in for the absent and hard-pressed leaders of the Algérois Wilaya 4; but most noteworthy were Ben Tobbal, who had taken over the Constantine Wilaya 2 on the death of his chief, Zighout, and Boussouf, a powerful new figure who had assumed command of Wilaya 5 (Oranie) upon the elevation of Ben M’hidi.

Boussouf

Abdelhafid Boussouf was born at Milia near Constantine—like Ben Tobbal, with whom he retained a close and enduring friendship—and at thirty-one was the youngest of the Wilaya commanders. He was also the most educated, having qualified before 1954 as a teacher and taken a correspondence course in psychology. A large man with a full face, close-cropped black hair and eyes concealed behind tinted glasses, Boussouf gave an unassuming impression. Yet he was held by his subordinates in considerable awe, had imposed a strong stamp of his own personality on Wilaya 5 and would henceforth assume a central role in the F.L.N. leadership. The Wilaya had been in a state of considerable disorder when he took over, and gradually he had introduced a scrupulously co-ordinated infrastructure, intelligence and signals system that more closely resembled that of the French army itself than of the other Wilayas. Operations, though few enough to give the impression that the Wilaya was relatively inactive, were meticulously planned, and there were none of the hazard encounters that had often proved so disastrous elsewhere. Instead, Boussouf was concentrating on building up an impressive military machine. Seldom far from his side was another young man as reticent, efficient and ambitious as himself, whom Boussouf had been bringing on as his deputy: Houari Boumedienne.

On arriving in Tunis, Abane immediately singled out Boussouf for attack. He had passed through Wilaya 5 (where he had nearly been captured) on his journey from Algiers, and had not liked at all what he had seen. By his reckoning, Boussouf reigned there by sheer terror; he and Boumedienne comported themselves like “real dictators”, and they controlled not only the Wilaya but also everything that went on over the border in Morocco, too. He also criticised them for their affinity with Ben Bella, his arch-enemy. From attacking Boussouf in person Abane then spread his fire to blanket the military in general. Reminding his colleagues of the Soummam decision that the political should have primacy over the military, Abane declared that it was intolerable that the latter should presume to feudal rights, and heatedly described them as “robots”. Krim, the veteran maquisard, began to bridle under these attacks and, although he had staunchly supported his fellow Kabyle in the battle against Ben Bella the previous year, now warned him to have a care in what he was saying. But for all his subtlety as a political tactician, Abane was becoming more and more intractable. It appears that his ulcers may have been at least partly to blame; and in turn his rages inflamed the ulcers. Forgetting all such good tactical principles as divide and conquer, and not fighting a war on more than one front, Abane hit out at Ouamrane, accusing him of being militarily incapable. Such an assault on his faithful lieutenant was intolerable to Krim, and he now definitively withdrew his allegiance from Abane.

In his criticism of “Wilayism” Abane was not without reason. As a consequence of the Battle of Algiers the Wilayas had become extensively isolated from the C.C.E. besieged in the capital. Thus they had had increasingly to rely upon their own day-to-day decisions, and had equally achieved freedom to develop their own distinctive styles. For instance, whereas Boussouf’s Wilaya 5 was evolving into a closely-knit, disciplined military machine, with all the hierarchical formality that that implies, Wilaya 4 was evolving in quite the opposite direction—largely under the influence of the numbers of students and intellectuals that had joined it, seeking refuge from the Battle of Algiers. Equality had become the catchword, insignias of rank had been abolished, political commissars and “self-criticism” instituted, and operations initiated by communal decisions. Inevitably, the Wilayas found themselves with greater autonomy, and thus power, thrust upon them in the absence of regular directives from the C.C.E. United as never before by Abane’s barbs, the Wilaya colonels now counter-attacked vigorously against the C.C.E. as a whole for its mismanagement of the war. It was criticised for its failure to maintain arms supplies, but above all for its essential strategic error in getting committed to the Battle of Algiers. Clearly the principal target was Abane, who was finding himself increasingly isolated, with only his faithful allies, Ben Khedda and Saad Dahlab, still supporting him.

On 27 July it was decided to hold, in Cairo, a second full reunion of the C.N.R.A. Abane’s isolation was now final. A new, nine-man C.C.E. was elected from which Ben Khedda and Saad Dahlab were pointedly eliminated. Instead there were five colonels: Krim, Boussouf, Ben Tobbal, Ouamrane and Mahmoud Chérif, to four “politicals”: Ferhat Abbas, Dr Lamine Debaghine, Abdelhamid Mehri, and Ramdane Abane. More significant still was the nomination of a permanent “inner” council within the C.C.E. consisting of the five colonels and one solitary political: Ramdane Abane. Defeated, Abane raged at the colonels: “You are creating a power based on the army. The maquis is one thing, politics is another, and it is not conducted either by illiterates or ignoramuses!” The words must have stung savagely, and Ferhat Abbas reportedly attempted to intervene and calm Abane, telling him soothingly: “We know you’re very nervous, and ill. You must look after your ulcers, go and take time off to rest in Switzerland.…” Abane’s response was apparently to tap the butt of his pistol, declare that everybody was out to “eliminate” him, but that he was on his guard. He then threatened to return to the maquis and inform it of what was happening, a threat that the colonels could not possibly ignore because, after the death of Ben M’hidi, Abane remained incontestably still the most influential political figure in the ranks of the F.L.N. On 1 November, in the declaration commemorating the third anniversary of the war, a meaningful sentence was inserted which stated, “The cult of the personality is strictly condemned.” Meanwhile, there were disturbing rumours that Abane was planning to march on Tunis at the head of an Auresian battalion and “arrest” the C.C.E. The colonels decided that Abane had to go; but how?