A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (52 page)

In the spring of 1957 Wilaya 4 had achieved a character all of its own by replacing the hitherto rigidly hierarchical structure by a system of “democratic equality” and political commissars, for which Si M’hamed’s influence was largely responsible. Bearing a close resemblance to Marxist techniques, though none to Marxist political ideology, Si M’hamed’s system was largely designed to counter the effectiveness in political warfare of Lacoste’s S.A.S. teams that had become progressively entrenched in the Algérois villages. Altogether Wilaya 4 was demonstrating a new skill in revolutionary warfare, in all its aspects, that caused the French command considerable concern. With his wound still unhealed, Azedine followed up his success against the Spahis by ambushing a battalion of Tirailleurs, killing some ten—including their French captain—and causing numerous others to defect, together with their weapons. Bigeard was now rushed back to the
bled
, having won the first round of the Battle of Algiers, and with a vast sigh of relief at quitting the detested, grimy role of policeman in the city. Accurate intelligence reports revealed that two of Si Lakhdar’s
katibas
, or companies, totalling 300 men, were heading westwards towards Médéa for a meeting with Azedine, following his successful ambush of the Tirailleurs. A major politico-military show of strength was then intended. Bigeard acted on this intelligence with utmost speed. During the night of 22–23 May he placed his paras astride the F.L.N.’s axis of movement near a small mountain village called Agounennda that lay south of the road from Blida to L’Arba. Employing a favourite technique, he sited his battle headquarters post on a commanding height with his companies deployed in an arc around him, his 3 Company in a rather more isolated position to the north. Close by his headquarters was a support company, ready to be helicoptered in as a stopper in the bottle to any point in the area where the main F.L.N. force might run into the net he had strung out.

The companies concealed themselves so as to be virtually undetectable among the rock and scrub of the mountainside, and settled down to one of those agonising night watches so familiar to both sides in the Algerian war. Broken up into small packets each of five groups, then a space, then another five groups, Azedine’s commando ran into Bigeard’s isolated 3 Company early on the morning of the 23rd. Apparently tipped off by a shepherd look-out, Azedine realised Bigeard’s intentions and decided to move the main force round to the north of 3 Company in its exposed position and then take the whole ambush from the rear. For a brief period the 100-strong para company found itself dangerously outnumbered by 300 of Si Lakhdar’s and Azedine’s
djounoud
. Urgently the company commander radioed Bigeard “Send the
ventilos
(helicopters).” With the rapidity typical of Bigeard, the
ventilos
picked up the support company troops, dropped them without landing from six feet above the ground on a crest behind Azedine’s attacking force, then flew back for another load. Within less than half an hour two whole companies had been shifted into position, in a manoeuvre that Bigeard had practised to perfection for this kind of eventuality. The stopper was well and truly in the bottle.

Meanwhile, Azedine had committed the fundamental tactical error of taking his force along the bed of the
oued
, instead of the crests of the hills, with the result that the paras were able to occupy the high ground overlooking the F.L.N. trapped below. Nevertheless, attacked by ground-strike aircraft and all the superiority of weapons in the French armoury, Azedine’s men fought back with ferocious tenacity. The pitched battle raged for three days, with the F.L.N. trying to infiltrate through Bigeard’s lines in small packets at night. With an area thirty kilometres square of particularly broken country covered by one solitary regiment, it proved impossible to intercept all of them. By the morning of the 26th the firing had virtually ceased. When the counts came in, the F.L.N. dead were listed at ninety-six and only nine prisoners; French losses totalled eight dead and twenty-nine wounded. But to Bigeard’s disappointment only forty-five weapons had been recovered; Azedine’s men had carried off most of the weapons of the fallen just as they had removed their wounded.

Militarily speaking, the encounter at Agounennda—a model of well-applied intelligence and hard-hitting mobility—looked like a triumph for the French. Yet it was an incomplete success; the well-laid ambush had not succeeded in wiping out the main body of the force trapped in it. Ideally set up for the French style of warfare, it was also the kind of opportunity that would seldom occur again. Therefore, while the French military might deduce from Agounennda as from the Battle of Algiers that the F.L.N. could never beat them in a clear confrontation, a more dispassionate observer might have questioned whether, if Bigeard’s crack unit could not score a
total
victory on its own terms, there was much hope for winning more elusive engagements in a war that might be indefinitely prolonged. On the other side the conclusions drawn were that Agounennda was the kind of engagement the A.L.N. could only lose, and lose heavily, and that henceforth it must be avoided at all costs. The success of the Soustelle—Lacoste S.A.S. system in the villages (there were now nearly 600 S.A.S. administrators scattered across Algeria) and of the harsh regroupment policy also meant that the Wilayas were finding it increasingly difficult to obtain succour from the local populations for their military operations. Instead of relying on the
mechtas
and
douars
for supply depots and refuges, they were forced to use the caves that riddle the calcareous mountains of Algeria like the holes in a Gruyère cheese. As Abd-el-Kader had done before them, the A.L.N. exploited these natural caches with utmost ingenuity, but they could seldom suffice for sustaining any major operation. Thus, in the interior, the small hit-and-run actions would be resumed, while in the inviolate sanctuaries behind the Tunisian and Moroccan frontiers new
katibas
and
faileks
could be prepared, armed and trained, and then sent over into Algeria when the time was ripe.

The harkis

As the desired “killing” battles like Agounennda became the exception rather than the rule, so the minds of France’s army planners turned more and more to “special” operations—of varying kinds and with mixed results. There were the
commandos noirs
of General de Bollardière, lightly equipped semi-guerrilla detachments with the role of “nomadising” with the Muslim populations in the
bled
. Contrary to the sadly accepted norm in the army, they pledged themselves to regard every Muslim “as a friend, and not as a suspect, except when proved to the contrary”. With this policy of never firing first, they were often involved in situations of high risk—as well as being viewed with some suspicion by the conventional-minded authorities. Then 1957 saw the development on a serious scale of
harki
units, comprised of what the French considered “loyal” Algerians—“traitors” to the F.L.N. These were principally the brainchild of the ethnologist, Jean Servier, whose defence of Arris on the first day of the war was, it will be remembered, largely facilitated by exploiting the rivalries of two Auresian tribes. After noting instances where villagers in the Orléansville area had killed F.L.N. scouts with hatchets, Servier—despite considerable official opposition—had gained permission initially to create “light companies” from some thousand men, the able-bodied and trustworthy defectors from the F.L.N., or
anciens combattants
. Servier insisted that his
harki
units should be based near their homes, on the sensible grounds that a Muslim soldier away from his family was at the mercy of a threatening letter, and would desert—quite naturally—to save his wife and children.

Knowing every track in their neighbourhood and armed with shotguns loaded with heavy shot designed for wild boar, a terrible weapon at fifty yards’ range in the forest, Servier’s
harkis
soon proved a redoubtable instrument for tracking down the F.L.N. News of the good pay and conditions of the
harkis
spread like wildfire, and loyal
caids
—like the Bachaga Boualem, dedicated to the cause of
Algérie française
and in whose fiefdom the
maquis rouge
had been rounded up—came forward to form what were in effect yet more private armies. In the two years from January 1957 the numbers of
harki
“self-defence” villages rose from 18 to 385, and their total manpower was eventually to reach 60,000. Perhaps surprisingly, one American professor, stressing the equality and fairness with which the Algerians serving in the French army were treated, states categorically that “At no time from 1954 to 1962 did the numbers of Algerians fighting with the A.L.N. for independence match the number of Algerians fighting on the French side.”

The value and reliability of the
harki
units varied enormously, generally in direct proportion to the quality of the S.A.S. administrator under whose jurisdiction they came. Jean Servier describes one disillusioning debacle concerning a
harki
he had created himself, where the official report stated baldly: “The treachery of elements of a
harki
facilitated an ambush against the forces of order.” Servier flew in by helicopter, and what he discovered was as follows: the local S.A.S.
képi bleu
had been sacked by the military command which had disapproved of his methods. Since then a French artillery unit had gone out on patrols, quite ineffectively, using the same route every day, and employing the
harkis
as transport troops to lug munitions and radios—instead of searching the ravines and mountain crests, tasks for which they were formed and at which they excelled. Not surprisingly, in the middle of one heavy lunch hour the French gunners were taken unawares by rebels attacking from a high ridge. They panicked and scattered into the forest, while only the
harkis
held their ground. When reinforcements arrived all the
harkis
were found dead, one machine-gunner having felled fourteen rebels; in a burnt
mechta
were the remains of the French gunners who had surrendered and had had their throats slit and been thrown into the fire. Yet the
harkis
were blamed for “treachery”; in despair Servier bemoaned “the uselessness of all my efforts, all the sacrifices that I had imposed on the men that France was going to abandon”.

“Oiseau Bleu” and other “special operations”

It was a regular complaint of the
harki
leaders, like the Bachaga Boualem, that the French authorities too often showed themselves less than half-hearted towards them, that they were refused automatic weapons, and that the “loyal”
caids
—always priority targets for the F.L.N.—should have had to protect themselves with pistols and shotguns. But mistrust was part of the game; and not always without reason. In one of their first “special operations”, a shadowy and highly secret enterprise with the code-name
Oiseau Bleu
, the French had already had their fingers painfully burned. Exploiting the age-old hatreds between Kabyles and Arabs, an anti-F.L.N. guerrilla had been formed in Kabylia (during the Soustelle era and apparently, in the first instance, under police auspices), from Kabyle separatists. Known as “Force K”, it had risen to over a thousand men clamouring for more effective arms, and responsibility for it had passed to the army. In the spring of 1956 a Captain Hentic was summoned to Army G.H.Q. in Algiers and placed in charge of “controlling” the operation. Hentic was a member of the cloak-and-dagger 11th Shock unit, which had just scored a triumph in the secret war by blowing up Ben Boulaid with a booby-trapped radio. He himself had recently arrived in Algeria, convalescent after serving in Indo-China, and from an early stage would be involved with Jean Servier in the formation of the
harkis
.[
1
] Initially, says Hentic, the impression he received of “Force K” was quite good, and an arsenal of some 300 rifles and sub-machine-guns was distributed to it. But there was immediately an element of mystery about its highly secret operations; they never seemed to be witnessed by any French units in the neighbourhood; bodies of F.L.N. rebels claimed were seldom identified; and at each receipt of a report of the elusive Krim’s whereabouts he had moved on by the time “Force K” reached the spot.

Captain Hentic’s suspicions grew. Jean Servier, brought in to advise, spotted with the expertise of the ethnologist that some of the “Force K” Kabyles did not come from the
douars
they claimed to; then, on the body of a dead F.L.N., Hentic found a group photograph in which one of the “Force K” operatives was clearly identifiable. The final revelation came when, at the end of October, a French unit was ambushed by what seemed unmistakably a “Force K” detachment, and the next morning Hentic was informed that the governor-general had just received the following anonymous letter: