A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (51 page)

Below the surface, however, international victories were being chalked up by the F.L.N.; not least of all in the shifting of American policy. At the end of February 1957 an Arab “summit” composed of Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt convened in Cairo and, in a first display of Middle East unity, declared its total support for the Algerian cause. All this was duly noted in Washington, and the following month Vice-President Nixon arrived in Tunis to help celebrate the first anniversary of her independence. Following his meetings with Bourguiba, Nixon proposed to President Eisenhower a referendum whereby the Algerians could choose freely between the
loi-cadre
statute being prepared by Lacoste, or total independence. Then, in July, Chanderli’s influential friend in the Democratic opposition, Senator John F. Kennedy, rose to make an important pronouncement in the United States Senate. He challenged Eisenhower and Dulles “to place the influence of the United States behind efforts… to achieve a solution which will recognise the independent personality of Algeria and establish the basis for a settlement interdependent with France and the neighbouring nations”. He accused United States policy of representing “a retreat from the principles of independence and anticolonialism”; and, elsewhere, that it “furnished powerful ammunition to anti-Western propagandists through Asia and the Middle East”. No speech on foreign affairs by Senator Kennedy attracted more attention, both at home and abroad, and under such pressure United States official policy on Algeria now began to shift. Henceforth, instead of backing France at the United Nations, the United States would abstain. It was a serious blow for French policy, and a triumph for Chanderli, Yazid and the F.L.N. Finally, at the end of December, another success was registered by the Algerians when, at a new Afro-Asian conference hosted by Nasser in Cairo, they were accepted on an equal footing among the sovereign powers. At the same time an important first contact was made through their delegations with the U.S.S.R. and Red China.

Bourguiba

In all the F.L.N.’s aspirations for international influence over the period, there was no more important element than the dynamic figure of Habib Bourguiba. With blazing blue eyes and prognathous features that give him an appearance of determined aggressiveness, the Tunisian leader was as unashamedly unretiring and as dedicated to the “cult of the personality” as the F.L.N. was opposed to it. The world produced few more remarkable statesmen in the turbulent third quarter of the twentieth century; still in power after two unbroken decades of paternalistic though moderate rule, in terms of years at the helm Bourguiba is surpassed by few modern statesmen. But only a remarkable leader could have survived the powerful opposing pressures exerted on him: on the one hand by the French, at various times apparently poised to re-occupy his infant state;[
2
] on the other by the F.L.N., its more extreme moods backed up by the presence on Tunisian soil of seasoned, well-equipped
djounoud
that would soon be several times stronger than Tunisia’s own embryo army (hence, partly, the urgency of Bourguiba’s plea for Anglo-American arms). In addition, there was always the arch-enemy, Nasser, subverting from the sidelines.

Under these constant pressures Bourguiba was to remain unswervingly constant to his two principal ideals (though they were often thrown into mutual conflict); to gain independence for Algeria, while retaining a generally pro-French and pro-Western stance. Despite being imprisoned by the French during the Tunisian struggle for independence,[
3
] he seldom wavered in his francophilia, and his repeated services as a bridge between the Arabs and the Western world deserve an even greater place in history than they have achieved heretofore. Nevertheless, without Bourguiba in Tunisia, the F.L.N. would probably have been crushed—militarily—before the fall of the Fourth Republic. Though Morocco and its king, Mohammed V, were also of great importance throughout to the F.L.N. war effort, for both political and geographical reasons Bourguiba always took pride of place. To the Algerians, Bourguiba fulfilled five functions: he provided

1. The most convenient and safe route for arms supplies.

2. The most convenient and safe sanctuary for A.L.N. troops, training, resting or preparing for operations inside Algeria.

3. Military and political headquarters for the C.C.E. in exile.

4. A persuasive and articulate ally in international forums.

5. A potential bridge for negotiations with the French.

The rage of the French army in Algeria was mounting increasingly against functions 1 and 2. The F.L.N. hardliners condemned as the sin of
bourguibisme
any quest for compromise peace solutions and criticised the Tunisian leader’s bourgeois style of rule at home. He, in return, barred any relations between his Néo-Destour and the F.L.N. out of fear of contagion from their “revolutionary socialism”. The F.L.N. leaders chafed when he intervened to bring the unruly A.L.N. camps under his control; yet both sides had to recognise the over-riding importance of Bourguiba.

Sakiet blasts Bourguiba’s olive branch

Thus, armed with this vast influence, in October 1957 Bourguiba tried—once more in conjunction with King Mohammed V, their joint efforts of the previous autumn having been blighted by the hijacking of Ben Bella—to force France and the F.L.N. into negotiations. Already, at the time of the March independence celebrations in Tunis, Bourguiba had been mooting the idea of a Maghreb confederation associated with France, in which Algeria would be a self-governing and equal member; which, could it have proved workable, would have offered a generous and far-sighted solution. But it was sharply rejected by both parties. Now Bourguiba and King Mohammed returned to the theme, but this time offering themselves as mediating agents under the umbrella of the United Nations. The beleaguered Premier Gaillard replied with a brusque turn-down, repeating the formula of each of his Fourth Republic predecessors since Mendès-France: “Whatever the terms and the periphrasis, we shall never accept Algerian independence.” Bourguiba responded by requesting to purchase arms from the United States and Britain, and then, on 8 February 1958, an incident took place that, in the most literal sense, blew sky-high all Bourguiba’s latest hopes of a compromise peace.

Over the previous six months there had been more than eighty shooting incidents on the Tunisia—Algeria frontier. These had culminated on 11 January in the ambushing of a strong French patrol by F.L.N. bands operating in the unusual strength of a
failek
(a battalion, or three hundred men). The band had come across from Tunisia (allegedly driven to the frontier in Tunisian army trucks), laid their well-prepared ambush, in which fifteen French troops were killed, then escaped back into Tunisia, taking four French prisoners with them, before a riposte could be mounted. A few days later, in this same sector of the frontier, an investigating French plane was shot down by machine-gun fire from a Tunisian village called Sakiet, which gave every appearance of being a strong F.L.N. base. Angry warnings emanated from the French authorities, but early on the morning of 8 February another French plane was hit by machine-gun fire from Sakiet, and made a forced landing behind the Morice Line. Three hours later a squadron of American-built B.26 bombers appeared overhead and flattened the village with a massive bombing retaliation.

It happened to be a market day, and—as has occurred many times since in the course of Israeli reprisal raids against Al Fatah camps across the Lebanese frontier—the bombs and rockets hit a school and hospital (which the Tunisians claimed was well marked with a red cross visible from the air), as well as the F.L.N. base. Some eighty people, including a number of women and children, were killed. Foreign journalists were immediately ferried by the Tunisians to the still smoking scene of the raid; “We visited the wreck of a schoolroom,” wrote Herb Greer. “A bomb had blown it apart in the middle of a lesson, just as the teacher had begun to sketch an airplane on the blackboard to illustrate her lecture. The blackboard was still intact and the sketch still there, pitifully crude and unfinished….” The Tunisians made sure the journalists missed nothing. Hundreds of photographs were produced: “a naked child perched on a hospital bed, staring curiously at the camera, legs carefully spread out to show an obscene mutilated stump….”

Angrily, Bourguiba ordered the immediate evacuation of the French garrisons still in Tunisia under treaty, in the meantime blockading them in their barracks, and accused France of “aggression” before the Security Council. Dismayed at the disarray of an ally, the United States and Britain offered to send a “good offices” mission, comprised of the veteran Robert Murphy and Harold Beeley of the Foreign Office, to heal the breach with Tunisia. The offer was accepted by Félix Gaillard but widely criticised by the French Press, who derisively dubbed the envoys
Messieurs les bons offices
. Their brief, ostensibly, was to restore relations between Paris and Tunis, regularise the presence of the French garrisons in Tunisia, and supervise the frontier. But the United States government made little secret of its hopes that the “good offices” mission might also provide a first foot in the door to direct peace negotiations between the F.L.N. and France. That France should even have accepted the principle of such foreign arbitration was, in F.L.N. eyes, something of a victory in itself.
Messieurs les bons offices
bustled back and forth between Paris and Tunis, but nothing in fact came of the mission. Bourguiba for one (under strong pressure from the F.L.N.) firmly refused any kind of international supervision of his western frontier. Its functions were in any case soon to be overtaken by events in France.

No effort of Yazid or Chanderli, or of the whole F.L.N. leadership to date, could have done more to “internationalise” the war than the French bombing of Sakiet. It also set in motion the chain of events that led directly to the final disintegration of the Fourth Republic. For what preceded this gross miscalculation, and its potent consequences, one must return to the French army in Algeria.

[
1
] In fact, it later turned out that these early estimates may have been considerably exaggerated. The greater value of her energy resources probably lies in Algeria’s natural gas.

[
2
] According to Bourguiba (in an interview with the author), there existed just such a secret contingency plan under the code-name “Charrue Longue”, and Massu had once declared that he would “sleep in Bourguiba’s bed”.

[
3
] In his sumptuous presidential office in Carthage Palace he still leads visitors with great pride to a frame on the wall containing his prison
fiche
; while in the neighbouring Council Chamber busts of the four historic heroes of Tunis—Jugurtha, Hannibal, St Augustine and Ibn Khaldoun—are dominated by an immense portrait of the President.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Le Dernier Quart d’Heure:
1957–May 1958

It is not out of any love for the Arabs or the French Algerians that I am fighting, but because it is no longer permitted to us to lose this war. Beaten, we would be the torturers of Algiers, Fascist bands in the service of the big colonialists. Victors, they will leave us alone….

“Capitaine Esclavier” in Jean Lartéguy’s
The Praetorians
, 1963

The Battle of Agounennda

DURING the months of 1957 that the Battle of Algiers lasted, apart from the regular interception of frontier-crossing bands and gun-runners there had been few military operations of major importance in the interior. The exception had been in Wilaya 4, or the Algérois department that surrounds the capital, embracing the rich Mitidja plains and running up into the wild Atlas ranges to the south. Security forces in this area had been substantially thinned out in order to meet the needs of Massu in the city, and in this semi-vacuum the Wilaya 4 chiefs had been urged to intensify activities so as to draw off the heat from Yacef and his besieged cadres in the Casbah. Before the Battle of Algiers the Wilaya effectives had been hard-pressed by Bigeard’s crack 3rd Para Regiment, at the same time as losing political headway through the growing success of Lacoste’s S.A.S. system. But the withdrawal of Bigeard had afforded them a period of relative respite in which they had reorganised to some effect.

For the time being, the Wilaya had assembled perhaps the most impressive command structure of any in Algeria, headed by an unusually cultured maquisard, Colonel Si Sadek (his real name, Slimane Dehiles), who had taken over the command from Ouamrane on his removal to Tunis and the C.C.E. Sadek’s political chief was Si M’hamed (his real name Ahmed Bougarra), who, though aged only twenty-seven, was considered to be possibly the most astute political brain in the Wilayas at that time. Working with him was Omar Oussedik, in charge of intelligence, a militant Marxist and friend of Frantz Fanon, and Si Salah (real name Mohamed Zamoun), in charge of communications. The military formations were commanded by Si Lakhdar, a mason who had achieved rapid promotion through his reputation for courage and who had—together with Ali Khodja, the A.L.N. leader responsible for the Palestro “massacre” of the twenty-one French reservists in 1956—created the A.L.N.’s hard-hitting “zonal commando” units. Under him was Si Azedine (real name Rabah Zerrari), formerly a humble coppersmith and currently commanding the commando which had taken its name from Ali Khodja. Not politically orientated, Azedine was first and foremost a guerrilla fighter of outstanding toughness and endurance. At the beginning of May 1957 his “Ali Khodja” commando had ambushed a Spahi unit, killing some sixty of them for a cost of seven dead
djounoud
. Disengaging, the commando had been strafed by French aircraft and Azedine had had his right forearm shattered by a 50 mm. calibre bullet. For two days he lay in a coma, apparently half-blinded with pain, but had refused the ministrations of even the primitive A.L.N. field hospital, dressing and removing splinters of bone from the wound himself. Exactly two years previously he had been smuggled into Algiers to have a painful knee wound treated by the pro-F.L.N. French doctor, Pierre Chaulet.