Jungle of Snakes (11 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
In Algeria, when the Europeans recovered from their initial shock and assessed the situation, they quickly perceived the rebels’
weaknesses. Among the
pieds-noirs
a deep sense of outrage replaced initial fears. The FLN campaign slogan calling on the Europeans to leave or risk death, “The
suitcase or the coffin,” amazed them. For generations they had made this country their home and it was inconceivable that
anyone should challenge their right to call themselves Algerians.
In France itself, the All Saints’ Day revolt presented a major political challenge. There were two alternatives to war: rapid
and fair integration of Algeria into metropolitan France and disengagement. Neither choice was politically acceptable. Ethnic,
religious, cultural, and racial divisions between French and Algerians made equitable integration a nonstarter. Disengagement
was psychologically difficult. French leaders, the army, and the people still reeled from the humiliating events of 1940,
when a German blitzkrieg overran the fatherland. Postwar loss of the colonial empire threatened to reduce France to second-rate
status. The gallant but futile defense of Dien Bien Phu was still very much in everyone’s mind. France’s Algerian lobby and
the army were powerful political influences and neither body could countenance losing another valuable and prestige-conferring
colony. The politicians bent with the prevailing wind.
French determination to hold Algeria arose from the interplay of multiple factors, the most salient of which were the presence
of close to a million settlers, the legal fiction that Algeria was an integral part of France, wounded pride, and last but
not least the discovery of oil in the Sahara desert in Algeria’s far south.
For these reasons the mandate to retain Algeria as part of metropolitan France extended across political parties. The French
premier representing the Radical Party, Pierre Mendès-France, told the National Assembly in November 1954 that Algeria was
part of France and that it was inconceivable that it should be otherwise. He emphasized that a “blow struck at the French
of Algeria, be they Moslem or European, is a blow struck at the whole nation.” Applause from delegates of all stripes greeted
his words as he emotionally intoned there could be no compromise when it came to “defending the internal peace of the nation
and the integrity of the Republic.”
3
Mendès-France pledged to send massive military reinforcements to restore order. His minister of the interior, François Mitterrand,
a member of the left wing, added that “the only possible negotiation is war.”
4
Later, Mendès-France’s successor, the Socialist premier Guy Mollet, said, “France without Algeria would be no longer France.”
5
This viewpoint and its undergirding logic dictated how France responded to the crisis. For the duration of the conflict the
French government treated the insurgents as citizens engaged in outlaw behavior. They were subject to the law in the same
way a citizen of Paris or Marseilles was subject to the law. The government sent the military to Algeria to restore and maintain
order in the same way it dispatched riot police to a city on the mainland. This legal distinction that described Algeria as
part of metropolitan France carried significant implications. In the arena of foreign affairs, no international law prevented
a government from suppressing an internal rebellion. No foreign power could legitimately support the rebels or intervene on
their behalf. In the arena of French military conduct, counterinsurgency efforts were nominally subject to French law. This
would be observed in the breach, with the government itself permitting and encouraging extralegal measures with a wink and
a nod.
The French Military
From a military standpoint, the outbreak of terror in Algeria came at a bad time. The army’s most experienced guerrilla fighters
were still in slow transit from Indochina. Troubles in neighboring Morocco and Tunisia, both of which were also asserting
their right to self-rule, tied down another 140,000 men. Commitment to NATO occupied additional divisions. Few trained reserves
remained. In Algeria itself, there were about 49,000 security forces of all types among whom a mere 3,500 were combat effective
soldiers. The available air transport was indicative of the military’s poor state of combat readiness: eight leftover World
War II–era Junkers transport planes, a type already obsolete ten years earlier, and one helicopter. Given that the insurgents’
tactic of choice was terror, the role of the police would be crucial. Yet the total number of police in Algeria barely exceeded
the size of the Parisian police force. The logical answer to the manpower shortage was to recall French reserves, but such
strong medicine was politically unpalatable.
Instead, French authorities brazenly dismissed the initial wave of terrorist acts as “ordinary banditry.” This failure to
appreciate the true challenge enabled the rebels to pass through the revolution’s precarious first stage. Henceforth, its
spread became inevitable. By the time French authorities recognized the rebellion for what it was, there was no easy recourse.
Firm, even bold political and military action was the only possible strategy for victory. Instead, the succession of weak
French governments tried hastily devised reforms to undercut the insurgents. These economic and social reforms only hardened
the insurgents’ resolve and encouraged the FLN to limit the alternatives they presented to the French colonists to two: “the
suitcase or the coffin.”
IN ALGERIA THE initial official response to the outbreak of violence was the predictable overreaction of an embarrassed administration.
First came heavy-handed, indiscriminate arrests of suspects, thereby converting neutrals to the cause of the insurgency. Next
came French government resistance to reform, a stance widely acclaimed by hard-liners in France and the
pieds-noirs
. And then, too late, came official proposals for meaningful reform.
During the winter of 1954–55, the French army conducted several clumsy operations featuring conventional, large-scale pincer
operations designed to trap and eliminate the guerrillas. The insurgents were seldom to be found. Somehow their intelligence
network—the Arab “bush telegraph,” using beacon fires lit from peak to peak—outpaced both the French mechanized columns and
their foot-slogging brethren. It was soon apparent that in the battle for intelligence the insurgents held a big edge. Worse,
the large scale sweeps proved counterproductive. One French analyst caustically observed, “To send in tank units, to destroy
villages, to bombard certain zones, this is no longer the fine comb [
ratissage
]; it is using a sledgehammer to kill fleas. And what is much more serious, it is to encourage the young—and sometimes the
less young—to go into the maquis.”
6
Indeed, an FLN leader confirmed that this style of French operations was “our best recruiting agent.”
7
After one typical French military operation caused the death of an innocent Muslim woman, an FLN leader remarked, “
Voilà
, we’ve won another battle. They hate the French a little more now. The stupid bastards are winning the war for us.”
8
At this time French leaders still failed to understand thoroughly the po-liti cal dimensions of the struggle. FLN appeals
to nationalism were useful insurgent tools in the competition for popular support inside Algeria. More effective was the endless
repetition of a potent propaganda message delivered to Algerian Muslims who sat on the fence: “The French swore they would
never leave Indochina; they left. Now they pledge to never abandon Algeria.” In 1956, after France announced the in dependence
of neighboring Morocco and Tunisia, revolutionary propagandists had two examples much closer to home of France reneging on
its solemn vows.
Jacques Soustelle, soon to be appointed governor-general to Algeria, described the essential question asked by all French
sympathizers: “ ‘Are you leaving or staying?’ There is no officer, who assuming command of his post in a village . . . has
not been asked this question by the local notables. What it meant was: ‘If the village raises the French flag, if this or
that family head agrees to become mayor, if we send our sons and daughters to school, if we hand out weapons of self-defense,
if we refuse to supply the fellaghas roaming around the djebel with barley, sheep and money, will you, the army, be here to
defend us from reprisals?’”
9
If armed French regulars possessed too much firepower for the insurgents to risk an attack and European civilians were not
yet on the target list, French sympathizers among the Muslim population remained vulnerable. A village policeman found with
his throat slit—a particularly humiliating death normally reserved for slaughtering sheep and goats—and an FLN placard pinned
to his corpse, an Algerian vineyard manager employed by a French owner found tortured and killed, and an outspoken pro-French
village elder subjected to slow death within a few hundred yards of a French army base, all conveyed the terrorist message
to cease collaborating with the French.
Targeted terrorism also sought to drive a wedge between the Muslim and the French population by compelling rural Muslims to
burn schools and destroy public properties in order to bring French repression. The FLN also worked to raise Muslim political
consciousness by rigid enforcement of Islamic rites. One notable tactic was to enforce a ban on public tobacco consumption.
A few public chastisements where a smoker’s nose was cut off went a long way toward enforcing a national tobacco boycott.
The Front also organized local political cadres whose main job was to collect taxes to support the insurgency. Having initially
made the strategic error of impatience, the FLN focused on building revolutionary infrastructure by mobilizing the population
through persuasion and terror.
The Philippeville Massacre
THE STRATEGY PROMOTED BY FRENCH president Mendès-France called for simultaneous reform and military pressure. When the insurrection
began there were 2,000 employees in the general government of Algeria. Eight were Muslims. To help redress this imbalance
a new school of administration gave Muslim Algerians access to public sector management positions. Nationwide, only 15 percent
of Muslim children attended school. Proposed educational measures addressed this issue. The average European’s salary was
twenty-eight times that of the Muslim. Economic measures sought to reduce the gap between Algerian and European salaries.
In sum, comprehensive economic and social reforms would give Algeria more equal standing within France’s political structure.
The problem with this approach was obvious: it threatened the
pieds-noirs
, who wanted to preserve the status quo, but failed to satisfy the FLN, which wanted nothing less than full in dependence.
Lack of progress in Algeria and fierce opposition from the Algerian lobby brought down the Mendès-France government in February
1955. The Algerian lobby in France and many
pieds-noirs
celebrated the government’s collapse. In their view, now could begin the proper employment of force. FLN leaders likewise
welcomed Mendès-France’s ouster. They regarded his promise of liberal reform as a dire political threat to their goal of total
in dependence.
One of Mendès-France’s last acts before his ouster was to appoint a new governor-general for Algeria, Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle
was a remarkable man who by age forty-three had already enjoyed an outstanding career as academic, political thinker, administrator,
and World War II partisan. In February 1955 Soustelle toured Algeria and quickly saw that the situation was much worse than
metropolitan France realized. The French military had understood the paramount importance of recruiting and employing large
numbers of Muslims. In turn, the guerrillas made examples of these “loyal” Muslims, subjecting them to torture, mutilation,
and death. Soustelle realized that FLN terror had driven the Muslim majority into fearful neutrality. “The Administration
and the Army,” Soustelle wrote, “had seen information dry up . . . Fear closed mouths and hardened faces.”
1
Soustelle represented the school of thought that poverty breeds revolution. His response, the so-called Soustelle Plan, and
its subsequent variants sought to combat the insurrection through social and economic reforms. This school of analysis had
superficial validity. The impoverished peasants of the Aurès mountains had little to lose by joining the insurrection. However,
the urban poor were equally destitute yet did not initially participate in the insurrection. A grand strategy based on the
wrong diagnosis could not succeed. Expensive social and economic reforms designed to conquer poverty were of limited value
when the conflict was really about politics. The FLN did not fight to banish poverty; they fought to banish French rule.
The arrival of substantial French reinforcements in Algeria frustrated the insurgents’ hopes for a quick victory. French military
pressure drove many guerrilla bands into hiding, where the hard winter of 1954–55 seriously depleted their ranks. In March
1955 Soustelle asked the government for the right to adapt legislation to war time conditions. At month’s end the National
Assembly, while refusing to use the word
war
, voted for a state of emergency that strengthened the powers of the army. But these powers applied only to a limited zone
of the Aurès. The National Assembly also authorized the first population regroupments in order to move “contaminated” populations
to “settlement camps.”
2
During this time the insurgents continued to have trouble obtaining arms and ammunition—probably only half of the guerrillas
who had participated in the All Saints’ Day attacks were armed—so they could not openly challenge French security forces.
FLN leaders realized that there would be no war-winning Algerian version of Dien Bien Phu. Henceforth, insurgent strategy
relied upon fighting a low-level war of attrition that pitted their scarce armed manpower and ammunition against French national
will.
Yet they had to be seen to remain active in order to prevent the Muslim population from rallying to the French cause and to
encourage foreign support. So the FLN lifted restrictions on attacks against European civilians and embarked on a terror campaign
without limits. Civilians became targets for indiscriminate bombings and shootings. The goal was to provoke repressive French
military responses in order to alienate both the Algerian and the French people. A hand grenade tossed into a crowded cafe
or a homemade bomb detonated on a school bus carrying French children could be expected to bring furious reprisals against
the local Muslim population. The new policy came into sharp focus on August 20, 1955, in and around the harbor city of Philippeville.
The man who had the covert assignment of identifying and eliminating the FLN in Philippeville was Paul Aussaresses. He was
a Special services intelligence officer and a veteran of clandestine operations in World War II and Indochina—in other words,
an experienced, discreet officer perfectly at ease with following orders and keeping his mouth shut. He had killed men and
had participated in interrogations but up to this time never tortured anyone. That was about to change.
The Philippeville police, whose ranks composed exclusively
pieds-noirs
and “assimilated” Muslims, told him that the terrorists were up to something but that no one knew precisely what. They matter-of-factly
stated that the only way to extract information from unobliging prisoners was torture. They asserted that torture was legitimate
to obtain information that would save lives. Specifically, if they arrested a suspect who was involved in preparing a terrorist
act such as setting a time bomb in a French grade school, a forced confession could foil the plot. Their logic persuaded Aussaresses
and men like him: it was better to torture a suspected terrorist, to make a single person suffer, than to allow scores of
innocent people be killed and maimed.
Aussaresses patiently assembled a list of FLN members and sympathizers. Many were common criminals, which made his job easier.
When they refused to talk the police took charge. Often a beating was enough. For particularly stubborn suspects the police
used a field radio as a power source and attached electrodes to the ears and testicles, the infamous
gégène
. Regardless of outcome, when the interrogation was over Aussaresses ordered the prisoners executed. He justified summary
executions on the basis that the regular justice system was suitable for a peacetime situation in metropolitan France but
this was Algeria, where a war of terror was under way.
In spite of Aussaresses’ efforts, FLN guerrillas goaded the civilian population in and around Philippeville into indiscriminate
acts of violence. Some of the worst atrocities came in the mining town of El-Halia, where Muslim workers who had seemed to
enjoy a rare degree of equality with the French mine managers brutally turned on the small European community. The village
constables were conveniently absent, so the attack came as a complete surprise. Guided by mineworkers, guerrillas first isolated
the village by cutting telegraph lines and disabling the emergency radio transmitter. Then attackers went house to house,
slaughtering Europe ans without regard to age or sex. The terrorist mob entered homes and used billhooks and pitchforks to
commit acts of unspeakable savagery, including ripping open the bellies of nursing mothers and hurling their infants against
the wall until their brains spilled out. Thirty-seven settlers including ten children under fifteen years of age perished.
Elsewhere, purportedly urged on by chants from mobs of Muslim women and muezzins’ broadcasts from the minarets exhorting the
attackers to slaughter Europeans in the cause of “holy war,” similar scenes of savagery played out. The victims of August
20, 1955, included seventy-one Eu rope ans and fifty Algerians killed and scores of others maimed. What was particularly notable
about the butchery was the careful planning that took place involving so many Muslims whom the French community regarded as
friendly. The sense of betrayal coupled with the many sites of blood-soaked horror produced a brutal French retaliation.
When paratroopers belonging to a crack French regiment arrived in Philippeville, they beheld the mob continuing the slaughter.
Under such circumstances the paratroopers had little interest in separating the insurgents from the civilians, a difficult
task under any circumstance. They fired on whoever ran. Later, they rounded up prisoners, lined them up against the wall,
and opened fire with machine guns. There were so many killed that burial teams used bulldozers to inter the corpses. French
sources acknowledged killing 1,273 “insurgents.” The actual figure is unknowable.
What is certain is that the Philippeville Massacre, as it became known, had profound consequences for the war. The rebel atrocities
implacably hardened the hearts of the
pieds-noirs
and forever altered the behavior of many members of the French army and security forces. But it was the retaliation that mattered
most. It handed the insurgents a victory and provided confirmation going forward for their strategy of indiscriminate terror.
All the terrorists needed to do was to create an incident and await the predictable French overreaction. The greatest threat
to the FLN strategic goal of full independence had been French political reform such as the measures proposed by Governor
Soustelle that led to Muslim integration into a French political entity. The French reprisal at Philippeville caused moderate
Muslims to repudiate integration. Guerrilla recruitment soared.
When he first heard the news, Soustelle flew to the scene of the massacre. The savagery inflicted on French women and children,
the suffering of the mutilated in the hospitals—fingers hacked off, throats half slit as a warning—sickened Soustelle. From
this time on his ideal of liberal reform became a remote priority, superseded by his determination to crush the rebellion.
Nonetheless, Soustelle was wise enough to understand that the massacre was a victory for the FLN because it created an abyss
separating the European and Muslim communities “through which flowed a river of blood.”
3
ON THE INTERNATIONAL front, the Philippeville Massacre caused the United Nations to address the Algerian problem for the first
time. This was an important political victory for the FLN. The insurgents received material and propaganda support from the
Communist bloc, from Iraq and Egypt, and most importantly from neighboring Morocco and Tunisia. At the United Nations it was
easy for France’s enemies to portray Algerian terrorists as nationalists striving to depose their colonial oppressors. An
examination of a graph showing FLN activity since the start of the insurgency revealed regular peaks in November-December
for the years 1955 to 1957. French intelligence called these peaks “United Nations fever” since they corresponded to the time
the UN General Assembly met to discuss the situation in Algeria.
In France, the Philippeville Massacre also led to a new Socialist government in January 1956, headed by Premier Guy Mollet.
Mollet’s policy toward Algeria was first to win the war and then to implement reforms. Mollet and like-minded French politicians
understood the vital importance of national will in murky counterinsurgency warfare. He acceded to the army’s request for
reinforcements by taking the important step of calling up a large number of reservists and extending the term of service for
conscripts by 50 percent, from nineteen to twenty-seven months. These measures effectively nationalized the war by putting
more citizens, instead of exclusively the military professionals, in harm’s way. By so doing, Mollet hoped to engage the French
people, to make it really matter to them who won in Algeria. He explained his calculation to a French newspaper in April 1956:
“The action for Algeria will be effective only with the confident support of the entire nation, with its total commitment.”
4
Mollet also appointed Robert Lacoste, a popular veteran of both world wars, to replace Soustelle as governor-general. The
strength of the army in Algeria swelled from around 50,000 in 1954 to more than half a million men by 1958, the largest overseas
military commitment in French history. Mollet’s emphasis on military action before political action notably shackled Lacoste.
Nonetheless, Lacoste raised the Algerian minimum wage, pushed land redistribution for Algeria’s land-hungry peasants, improved
education, and decreed that half of all vacancies in public service go to Muslims.
Had these measures been implemented a decade earlier they might have changed history. Instead, coming in the wake of the Philippeville
Massacre, most Muslims saw them as a tardy response to FLN pressure. By the summer of 1956 the rebels had won over a majority
of previously uncommitted political leaders. These were the men France had depended on to help them win the battle for the
hearts and minds of the Muslim masses. Then in October 1956 came an electrifying French intelligence coup.