A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (65 page)

Terrorist offensive in France

Hand in hand with all this went a new offensive of terrorism, launched as soon as the F.L.N. had regained its breath after the events of May. It had been presaged by
El Moudjahid
in its issue of 13 June 1958, which had singled out de Gaulle’s remarks praising the French army for a particularly savage attack: “These words will remain engraved in letters of fire on the heart of each Algerian man and woman. Never before has French cynicism been displayed with such impudence…the torturers of the Algerian people have been travestied as heroes and magicians….” In another issue of the same week it published a directive ordering an intensification of terrorism throughout Algeria. In Algiers, peaceful for so many months now, a grenade thrown into a café on 20 June claimed nineteen civilian victims, of whom seventeen were Muslims. During July incidents rose to 2,024 compared with the June total of 1,585 and in one week alone there were eighty-one assassination attempts—principally against Muslims as part of the F.L.N.’s vigorous drive to deter them from voting in the forthcoming referendum and elections. A general strike invoked for 5 July, the anniversary of the French Occupation of 1830, proved a signal failure, but in September incidents had again risen to 2,368. By January 1959 terrorist attacks were still running at a frequency of some fifty per week, and during the ensuing year no less than 148 municipal councillors were assassinated.

But it was in the mother country that the F.L.N.—similarly to the I.R.A. in times of maximum stress in the 1970s—now concentrated its terrorist activities. Between 24 August and 28 September there were 181 attacks on property and 242 against people, causing eighty-two deaths and injuring another 168. Many were Algerians belonging to the M.N.A. or other dissident groups; Janet Flanner recalled the sight of an Algerian dying in a pool of blood outside the fashionable Brasserie Lipp, while a Parisian flower-vendor looked on, quite unmoved. For the first time the networks set up by Lebjaoui and taken over by Boudaoud turned their attention to specifically French targets. The night of 24 August was like a repeat of All Saints, 1954. Across the breadth of France a miscellany of blows was struck: a train derailed near Cagnes-sur-Mer; police stations attacked at Lyon and Paris, killing four policemen; a bomb placed in a boat at Marseilles; fuel dumps blown up at a number of places in southern France which supplied the French army in Algeria. The assaults on the fuel dumps were particularly effective, and were reckoned to have sent up in flames the equivalent of one whole day’s petroleum consumption in France. On 15 September Jacques Soustelle had a miraculous escape when his car was shot up by terrorists in the Avenue Friedland, right in the heart of Paris; but the would-be assassin, Ouragui, was seized by Soustelle’s police bodyguard after a dramatic chase through the Étoile métro. That same night police cars were shot at in the Rue de Rivoli and other parts of Paris, while in Metz a para captain was badly wounded. A few days later an F.L.N. frogman tried unsuccessfully to place limpet charges under the battleship
Jean Bart
in Toulon harbour, while another bomb was found in the ladies’ lavatory at the top of the Eiffel Tower. It was harmlessly defused.

In all this wave of terrorism it should be noted, however, that there was not one act of promiscuous bombing against civilians such as had been commonplace in Algiers and was to become so on a larger scale in Britain under the scourge of the I.R.A. a decade and a half later.

Nevertheless, the campaign provoked unexpectedly violent reactions among French workers and the Left where the F.L.N. could most expect to find friends. The Communist leader, Maurice Thorez, was particularly severe in his condemnation: “The methods employed by the F.L.N. in France have not, it must be stated categorically, served the just cause of the Algerian people…. If the F.L.N. is proposing to arouse public opinion, it is practising self-deception. It is arousing feelings against itself….” At the same time, by taking vigorous police action of the kind familiar in Algiers, the French were soon successful in tracking down the terrorist networks, and with this went the danger that the fund-collecting organisation—considerably more important to the F.L.N. war effort—might also be caught up in the security net. Therefore on 28 September, the day of the referendum, a cease-fire was called in the terrorist offensive—an admission of failure clad under the rather thin pretext of a conciliatory gesture of goodwill.

One of the objectives of the F.L.N. offensive had also been to attempt to secure the release of Ben Bella and his colleagues, still languishing in the Santé prison after two years without trial. This too was unsuccessful, though as part of his general amnesty measures on assuming the presidency in January 1959 de Gaulle ordered the prisoners transferred to the slightly more comfortable surroundings of the île d’Aix, the fortress isle in the Bay of Biscay where Napoleon had passed his last days on French soil in July 1815 before being transported to his ultimate exile aboard H.M.S.
Bellerophon
. The boredom and frustration there were extreme. Ben Bella devoted much of his long leisure hours to reading
Temps Modernes
and
France Football
, though he claims to have got through some seven hundred books in the course of his imprisonment. Through the remarkable “Arab telegraph” set up in the prisons of France, and frequent visits from his lawyers, he still managed to maintain regular contact with the new G.P.R.A.

The abrupt calling-off of the terrorist campaign in France also had, in all probability, a subsidiary effect of encouraging de Gaulle to make his
paix des braves
a few weeks later. From early in the summer a delicate and highly secret link had been established between, on the one hand, de Gaulle and Abderrahmane Farès, the former president of the Algerian Assembly, and, on the other, between Farès and Ferhat Abbas. At a clandestine meeting in Montreux in August, Farès informed Abbas (then not yet appointed president of the G.P.R.A.) that de Gaulle was ready to “open serious negotiations with the rebels”. Abbas seemed receptive, declaring that he personally would be prepared to participate in “any kind of conversation on neutral ground”. A period of nearly five weeks elapsed, during which time the F.L.N.’s terrorist campaign in France and the repressive measures it provoked had caused a distinct drop in the temperature between the two sides, as indeed was desired by the hard-liners of the F.L.N. On 17 September a message drafted by Georges Pompidou, then de Gaulle’s
chef-de-cabinet
, was passed to Farès for onward transmission. It offered safe passage for an F.L.N. delegation to come to Paris to discuss conditions for a cease-fire; the discussion would centre on military matters, but “other problems” could be brought up. At the same time it suggested that the F.L.N. create “a climate of confidence” by not opposing the referendum fixed for the 28th. Abbas reacted coolly to all this, insisting that any meeting must be held on neutral territory. The G.P.R.A. followed up with a still sharper refusal, strongly attacking the referendum, and condemning the Pompidou proposal of an encounter in Paris as a “humiliating gesture”.

A further rebuff for de Gaulle

Next, after its humiliation in the referendum, the G.P.R.A. issued a stinging rebuff over Cairo Radio to de Gaulle’s Constantine Plan speech of 31 October: “De Gaulle offers war or fraternity. Algeria and the whole Algerian people have chosen war.” At this point the F.L.N., not for the first or the last time, seem to have been speaking with two voices, for in quick succession there now followed Ferhat Abbas’s much more conciliatory and widely reported interview with Artur Rosenberg. De Gaulle meanwhile was manifestly piqued by the F.L.N.’s hostility to his referendum, which he regarded in terms of the kind of “free election” which the Algerian nationalists had so persistently clamoured for in the past. In a conversation with the Moroccan politician Ben Barka, de Gaulle acidly criticised “these F.L.N. leaders who believe that the possession of sub-machine-guns and rifles gives them automatically the right to come to discuss politics with him [de Gaulle]”. On other occasions he held strongly to his view that negotiations for a cease-fire should be largely restricted to military spheres. Nevertheless, despite this evident gulf between the two sides, the G.P.R.A. was apparently prepared to announce at its session of 24 October that a “dialogue” had been opened with de Gaulle.

Then, the day before, came de Gaulle’s Press conference and his bomb-shell of the
paix des braves
. The proposition had been most carefully rehearsed and could not in any way be dismissed as a “slip of the tongue” like the “
Vive l’Algérie française!
” of Mostaganem. Here was de Gaulle the soldier, believing that he was addressing himself to enemy soldiers in the language of the soldier, and offering what he genuinely considered to be preliminaries to a “peace with honour”. But in fact he was addressing hardened politicians, and his phraseology betrayed the most complete failure to understand the psychology of the F.L.N. leaders. To them, however de Gaulle might construe it, the mention of the
drapeau blanc des parlementaires
could mean one thing and one thing only: capitulation. On the 25th the G.P.R.A. replied: “The declaration of General de Gaulle constitutes a refusal to negotiate….” In slamming the door as brusquely as they did, the G.P.R.A. were, from their point of view, absolutely right. For, with the shaky state of morale both among the civilians and A.L.N. units inside Algeria, had they accepted the
paix des braves
, even only as preliminary parley, the revolution might well have begun to flicker out and would have been extremely difficult to rekindle if the talks assumed a course unfavourable to the F.L.N. De Gaulle would have won the war; on the other hand, by rejecting the
paix des braves
the F.L.N. were, eventually, to win it.

One of the first consequences of the F.L.N.’s intransigence towards the
paix des braves
was to confront de Gaulle with, at best, a half-defeat at the legislative elections of the following month. Out of the forty-six Muslim deputies sent to France, not one could be reckoned to constitute a potential
interlocuteur valable
. All were supporters of “integration”, none represented a genuine, liberal “third force”. As Michael Clark correctly observes, “the centrifugal pressure of events had driven the moderates from an untenable middle position. The chief weakness of the middle position was that it had no popular support. None but fools could expect many aspiring Muslim politicians in 1958 to risk their lives in defense of it.”

The rejection of the
paix des braves
was also to mark the beginning of the decline within the G.P.R.A. of the influence of the moderates—notably, at this stage, Ferhat Abbas. Despite the collapse of his initiatives in October, over the next nine months Abbas visited no less than fifteen foreign capitals in pursuit of a new peace formula. Then, disillusioned, he withdrew increasingly from the scene. Abbas, it may be assumed, was quite genuine in his pursuit still of some kind of compromise peace solution; the same cannot be said of the increasingly powerful hard-liners behind the G.P.R.A. by whom negotiations were regarded primarily as a device for getting France involved in an endless procedure, which would provide the F.L.N. with time it so badly needed in 1958–9, and, by wearing down the patience of the enemy negotiators, eventually lead to peace on F.L.N. terms.

The A.L.N. under extreme pressure

Meanwhile, de Gaulle, thwarted in his first peace initiative, had set to prosecuting the military war with unprecedented vigour, with means that will be seen in the following chapter. As will be recalled, between its defeat in the Battle of Algiers and the spring of 1958 the A.L.N. had come under fiercest pressure, its attempts to breach the Morice Line broken with bloody losses, its valiant
moudjahiddine
isolated and hard-pressed in the Wilayas. Yet, seen in retrospect, the A.L.N. of the interior would seem to have reached its apogee of military power in 1958. At the beginning of the year French estimates had put the total strength of A.L.N. regulars, or
moudjahiddine
, at about 30,000, of whom approximately half were operating in the interior at any one time. On top of this were reckoned to be another 30,000 irregulars, or
moussebiline
, most of whom were in the interior. Of these effectives, the French claimed that 25,534 had been killed or captured during the first seven months of the year. Although (as with the notorious United States army “head counts” in Vietnam) it may be questioned just how many of these casualties were actually genuine, hard-core
moudjahiddine
, they nevertheless represented a serious drain of effectives. By the end of 1958 the G.P.R.A.’s new Ministry of Information under Yazid proclaimed triumphantly that, from 40,000 in 1957, the total of men under arms had risen to over 100,000; but, again, the proportion of
moudjahiddine
in the total could be questioned, while at the same time the ratio of effectives inside Algeria to those outside was steadily widening to the advantage of the latter.

By June 1958 the A.L.N. had been forced to reduce its basic fighting unit to the
katiba
, or company; by the following year it was to be found seldom operating on larger than a platoon level. The shortage of arms and ammunition was becoming particularly pronounced; by December 1958 Wilaya 1 (Aurès) was reporting to the G.P.R.A. that no less than 600 of its combatants were without weapons. The loss in leaders was proving equally grave; in November 1958 Wilaya 4 (Algérois) lost its military chief, Azedine, captive to the French,[
1
] and two months later one of its best field commanders, Captain Si Rachid, was also killed. In March 1959 there followed the deaths of the leaders of both Wilayas 6 and 3, Si Haouès and the ferocious Amirouche, in circumstances shortly to be described. The consequence of all this on the morale of the Wilayas could be detected in the fact that, whereas in 1956 the monthly total of
moudjahiddine
defectors to the French would barely occupy the fingers of one hand, by July—August 1958 it had risen to an average of 300. At the same time the recovery of arms by the French showed a noteworthy increase. In the new year of 1959 the Wilayas were to be found concentrating on the relatively unrisky pastime of derailing trains. It was a gross excess of optimism for the veteran
pied noir
marshal, Juin, to declare in November that “the war is virtually over”, but the coming of General Challe the following month was to impose upon the A.L.N. the gravest threat it had yet faced, as well as the beginning of a decline from which it would never fully recover. On the other hand, because of timely political developments, the military potential of the A.L.N. would cease to a decisive factor in the war.