A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (88 page)

Meanwhile, among the civilian F.A.F. conspirators there were those who were bent on nothing less than the death of de Gaulle, with four separate “freelance” operators set up for the purpose — apparently unbeknown to the military faction.

9 December: de Gaulle’s reception

Landing in Oranie on the morning of the 9th in pouring rain, de Gaulle had an immediate shock in his first stop at the small town of Ain-Témouchent. Some 5,000
pieds noirs
were mustered, waving hostile placards and sounding out on whistles and car hooters the familiar “dit-dit-dit, dah-dah” of
Algérie française
. De Gaulle betrayed only a gesture of annoyance at the loud chants of “
à bas de Gaulle!
”; then, to the horror of Government-Delegate Morin and his escort, he strode off into the crowd to shake hands with a minority group of Muslims who, in antithesis, were shouting: “
Algérie algérienne
…
Vive de Gaulle!
” Already the previous month word had reached French security of a crazy plot to kidnap de Gaulle from the Elysée, hatched by a highly decorated sergeant-major of the Indo-China war who headed a group called the National Revolutionary Committee. Now there were recurrent warnings of an assassination attempt, and not least one from the ubiquitous and well-informed Israeli Intelligence Service, based, no doubt, on information supplied by Algeria’s divided Jewish community. Sent to accompany de Gaulle were four hand-picked
gorilles
, each secreting two weapons in case the first should be wrested from him by an out-of-hand mob. De Gaulle plunging off among the demonstrators was a contingency for which they were least equipped. But at that precise moment — so the story has it — the threat of death to de Gaulle came from a totally different direction, and it was never to be closer. One of de Gaulle’s C.R.S. motor-cycle escort, moving almost within touching distance of the President, was a
pied noir
who — revolted by the 4 November speech — had volunteered to shoot him down, then ride off to safety. It would have been too easy. While de Gaulle was on his walkabout, the C.R.S. telephoned his F.A.F. bosses for confirmation; but — for reasons that remain obscure, possibly a veto by the military — the answer he got was: “No”. Serenely unaware, de Gaulle and his cavalcade moved on to Tlemcen, where, despite a violent hailstorm, another crowd turned out to boo de Gaulle, interspersed with Muslim applause. Right from the beginning the two communities showed themselves divided as at no time since the coming of de Gaulle; the Muslims displaying more audacity than ever before to proclaim
Algérie
algérienne
. At the end of that first day de Gaulle’s expression was as bleak as the weather outside.

The next day, Saturday the 10th, de Gaulle was due to visit Orléansville, a city of 40,000 midway between Oran and Algiers. On the way Morin, however, received an urgent call from his office; the Intelligence now fully corroborated the Israeli tip-off, and a team of “ultra” killers had left Algiers to ambush the President on his entry into Orléansville. Nervously, knowing de Gaulle’s antipathy to having his plans altered, Morin warned him and requested a change of itinerary. Quite unperturbed, de Gaulle replied: “It’s you who are responsible for the maintenance of order. You decide….”

At top speed the cavalcade roared up a mountain detour and swept into Orléansville by a different route. On the outskirts of the town five “ultras” had been waiting under the orders of an operative known as “Nani”, who had been arrested several times for counter-terrorist acts against the F.L.N. and would later become a leading killer for the O.A.S. They were equipped with a small arsenal of weapons — machine-guns, dynamite and hand grenades — but on realising that they had been outwitted they turned tail dejectedly back to Algiers. At Blida a more bizarre, free-enterprise attempt was apparently in the offing. A handsome young
pied noir
playboy, tired of life, decided to ram de Gaulle’s helicopter with his private plane. But on arriving over Blida airfield he was appalled to see a veritable cloud of helicopters take off. It was impossible to tell which one was de Gaulle’s. He, too, abandoned the exercise. De Gaulle’s only comment about the two visits was that he had “found the atmosphere oppressive”; while he remarked acidly to Morin on the undue “tolerance” of the local military authorities.

On the Sunday (11 December) there was yet a fourth abortive plot against his life, at the Reghaia air base on the other side of Algiers where Delouvrier and Challe had taken refuge the previous January. A second lieutenant, a much-decorated
pied noir
veteran of Indo-China who had married a Vietnamese and remained obsessed by France’s “betrayal” of her empire, was waiting “to shoot down the head of this police state” when he inspected his unit of airborne commandos. But on the way from his quarters in Algiers the would-be assassin became entangled with rioting Muslims and missed the boat.

F.A.F. riots in Algiers

Meanwhile, all hell had been let loose in Algiers (and Oran, too). F.A.F. bombs exploded, wrecking cars in the centre of Algiers. Six thousand gendarmes and C.R.S. moved in, this time backed with armoured machine-gun-carriers, and even tanks. As Jouhaud had planned, gangs of F.A.F. youths attacked them, hurling stones, bottles, cast-iron bolts and every projectile that came to hand. The C.R.S. replied with tear-gas, percussion grenades and baton charges. The chic Rue Michelet became a writhing mass of demonstrators intermingled with blue-clad security forces, covered by a grey pall of tear-gas. Cars were overturned and burnt. The violence now switched to the university where, in a familiar manner, students began to tear down hoardings for barricades. But these were swiftly broken up when two gendarmerie tanks appeared. Young
pieds noirs
waved their fists at the tanks like the anti-Soviet demonstrators in Budapest or Prague. By nightfall on the first day there were 400 arrested and 100 injured. Shaken by the ferocity of the screaming mobs, British correspondents reported back: “The long-awaited fury by Frenchmen who say they will die to keep Algeria French has started — and now anything can happen…,” while in Témouchent de Gaulle was declaring: “The shouts and the clamour…they signify nothing!”

The next day, Saturday, the battle resumed with even greater fury. F.A.F. action groups poured oil on steep hillside tram tracks, and parked cars athwart intersections. An attack was made in the direction of the Palais d’Été, where a helicopter pad had been built, and it was rumoured that de Gaulle was going to fly in. Although, as far as bloodshed was concerned, nothing comparable to 24 January had yet occurred, the forces of order were, as Jouhaud had hoped, tiring; there were cases of detachments being submerged, or even being disarmed. But the F.A.F. “shock troops” were also feeling discouraged. There was still no sign of the promised para intervention, and that night — as it had done at the crisis point of “Barricades Week” — a drenching, cold rain fell to dampen their spirits further. Of the F.A.F. demonstrations, Mouloud Feraoun wrote contemptuously, “they resemble senile beggars who masturbate in a corner to make people believe that they are virile. No one wants to take them seriously.” Meanwhile, fighting had broken out in the mixed poor suburb of Belcourt, to the east of Algiers. It appears that confused over-zealous (and now preposterously out of touch) Europeans had approached Muslims with the purpose of getting them on to the streets to declaim against de Gaulle, and against
Algérie algérienne
. Force had been used, and the Muslims retaliated by stabbing Europeans and setting fire to a large store.

11 December: the Muslim backlash

Sunday, 11 December, was the day for which Larbi Alilat and the reconstituted F.L.N. organisation in Algiers had been so carefully preparing. It was to turn out to be one of the key days of the Algerian war for the Muslim cause. Thousands of green-and-white F.L.N. flags had been sewn together by the women of the Casbah, and distributed — together with banners and placards — clandestinely throughout the Muslim quarters. But the resultant chain reaction far exceeded anything anticipated by the organisers. Partly it may have been sparked by the
pieds noirs
’ demonstrations of the two preceding days; partly by word on the swift “Arab telegraph” of the racial violence in Belcourt the previous night. At heart, however, it seems to have been one of those inexplicable explosions caused by long-pent-up forces. Early that morning European residents of Algiers were astonished to see a green-and-white flag fluttering from the top of the Kouba mosque. Gendarmes were sent to take it down. Then more appeared from other mosques. From windows of Muslim homes first one flag was unfurled, rather tentatively — then a score along the length of the street. Out into the mean alleys of the Casbah and Belcourt Muslim youths poured — not the expected hundreds, but thousands — chanting: “
Yahia[
3
] Ferhat Abbas! Yahia F.L.N.! Yahia de Gaulle!
” while others took up the refrain of, “
Algérie algérienne! Algérie musulmane!
” In Belcourt Edward Behr observed a scene

which summed up the situation…a Moslem came careering round a corner on a motorcycle, tied to which was an enormous F.L.N. flag. A gendarmerie captain told him to put it away. “
Pourquoi? On ne fait pas de mal
,” he replied. “
Le Général de Gaulle a dit: Algérie algérienne. On est Algérien, non
?”

Soon the tide of chanting, flag-waving Muslims began to debouch from their own quarters, sweeping aside the thin cover of local gendarmes whose main force was occupied elsewhere in the turbulent city. Behind this ever-growing mass of Muslims there arose the blood-curdling
you-you-you
ululations from a myriad of invisible women. A terrible atavistic fear ran through the adjacent
pied noir
quarters with a passing of the word: “
They
are coming!” As the crowd surged into the narrow streets of Belcourt, shots cracked out from tenements inhabited by poor whites, and one or two marchers fell. The word ran through the Muslim ranks, and a blind mob-madness took over. A
pied noir
caught up in the street had his throat slit; another was burnt to death in his car. Armed with iron bars and wooden staves the Muslim mob smashed up and pillaged European shops and villas, devastating everything in their path like a horde of soldier ants.

Confronted with this new and utterly unforeseen factor, the F.A.F. leaders performed a swift turnabout. Their “shock troops” were now ordered to cease attacking the C.R.S. and the gendarmes — so that these could protect
pied noir
lives and property from the Muslim terror! This all-too-human display of fickle capriciousness disgusted Sergent and the military purists. In any event, the jaded security forces rapidly proved themselves inadequate to the task. Colonel Masselot’s 18th R.C.P. was rushed up in haste. The situation hoped for by Jouhaud had arrived, but not in the way he had expected it. As the picture darkened in the course of the day, with Alilat’s F.L.N. members now firing back on the
pieds noirs
with their own weapons, Morin left de Gaulle’s entourage in Kabylia for Algiers and gave the army an uncompromising order to shoot at the mob, whether European or Muslim, if the necessity arose. In the shabby quarter of Belcourt, where for the past six years of war the two working-class communities had coexisted in a state of uneasy peace, scenes of unprecedented savagery now took place. A shocked young reporter of the London
Daily Express
, Ian Aitken, wrote how:

I saw the Frenchwomen lean from the windows and balconies and yell “Kill them, kill them” as the paratroops fired on the Algerians with rifles and machine-guns…I saw a mob of hysterical French youths try to tear one prisoner to pieces — and then embrace the paratroops and plant kisses on their stubbly chins.

Old ladies joined in by hurling their precious potted geraniums down on the heads of the Muslims in the street below.

On the 12th the F.L.N.-impelled mobs extended the scope of their operations to sack the Great Synagogue in the heart of the Casbah which had been built during the reign of Napoleon III and was one of the most important houses of Jewish worship in Algeria. The beautiful building was gutted, the Torah scrolls ripped and desecrated, the walls inscribed with swastikas and slogans of “Death to the Jews”. Several Jewish officials were kidnapped and assassinated in a series of acts of violence which fell on the Jewish community like a thunderbolt.

Sixty miles away in Tizi-Ouzou, the capital of Kabylia, de Gaulle was again risking his life by walking into the middle of a Muslim crowd. “A Franco-Algerian fraternity will take shape once the blood has stopped flowing…,” he told them. But the blood flowing in Algiers was to mark the beginning of true civil war, and the end of any Gaullist dream of a multi-racial “
Algérie algérienne
, associated with France”.

Collapse of the Jouhaud coup

Meanwhile, grotesquely enough, in Algiers Jouhaud was still cherishing hopes of a military coup. On the 10th, already appearing disguised in cloth cap and spectacles, the general had made up his mind to act, and Masselot had positively committed himself — the first of the para leaders to do so. But Sergent was shocked by the “brief briefing” given by Jouhaud, presupposing that all was ready to go — which it was not. By the 12th Masselot had changed his mind. As always when the paras were confronted with having to make a direct choice between the
pieds noirs
and the Muslims, especially when it involved shooting demonstrators, ambivalence set in. The colonel was disgusted by an F.A.F. leader who warned him that he could hold his men back no longer, and that there would be a
ratonnade
. He reminded him that “I too am a
pied noir
, and get it into your head that there cannot be any
Algérie française
without the Arabs!” And then, the principal booty of the coup, the President himself, was heading ever farther away from Algiers and showing no sign of visiting the turbulent city for which he had always nursed a particular distaste, harking back to 1942. On Monday the 12th Sergent, acting once again the role of messenger, was told by a thoroughly fatigued Masselot: