A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (109 page)

[
2
] At this point, the French had been holding out for a lease of twenty-five years while Krim was offering only ten — to which Joxe had countered that this would not make it worth while. (In the event, the French were to evauate Mers-el-Kébir in five years.) Krim was demanding that French troops in Algeria be reduced to 80,000 men (from 600,000) within six months, and withdraw completely within two years at the latest; Joxe was proposing eighteen months and three years.

[
3
] According to Salan’s aide, Captain Ferrandi, the shooting of Feraoun was a mistake; the main target was the missing man, “a certain Petitbon, a senior official of the national education services”, who had decided not to attend the meeting at the last moment — so the O.A.S. squad just killed whoever was there. In view of the singling out of “the best Muslim elements in the liberal professions” in Salan’s
Instruction
No. 29, the excuse — such as it is — hardly convinces.

[
4
] This ban, and the tragedies which it led to, were explained by one of the O.A.S. leaders responsible for the decision on the ground that the F.L.N. had ordered all Muslim workers to supply information on their European employers. “In Algiers there were a mass of O.A.S. command posts, so for our own security we had to persuade the Muslims not to come into the European areas to protect our organisation against espionage. It was hard, and horrible, but it was essential; it was more than a strategic effort for apartheid, it was a tactical means of survival.”

[
5
] The explanation given by one of the O.A.S. leaders for the “scorched earth policy” is as follows: “You have to remember Arab mentality — to impress the Arabs, you’ve got to make a solemn performance of killing a man. Don’t just shoot him, but put him up against a wall with a firing squad. In revolutionary war the riposte must be, if possible, both rapid and spectacular. So it was with the ‘scorched earth policy’. We had to do something that would really make them understand the significance of what was happening….”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Page is Turned:
1962 onwards

Come then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason….

Frantz Fanon, 1965

The dangers of liberty

“LIBERTY is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is exciting,” declared Albert Camus on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1957. The hard truth of this was to be brought home to the jubilant Algerians even before the French flag had been lowered in July 1962. After seven and a half years of war and grim hardship there would still be neither peace nor order for tragic Algeria. A period of turbulence lay ahead, comparable in miniature to that which Shakespeare depicts as following upon the removal of the established order of King Richard II. Moving into the vacuum left at all levels by the departing
pieds noirs
, the infant nation at once found itself enmeshed in the most acute administrative problems. Through their objective of wiping out the rebel Organisation Politico-Administrative, General Challe and his predecessors had also effectively killed off many of the best-educated and politically most sophisticated Algerians: the country’s potential leaders. At the same time the corps of native administrators which France — laboriously and always too slowly — had been expanding since 1954 was still far from numerous enough to fulfil the roles so suddenly imposed upon it; added to which, in the first passions of independence many were regarded by the victorious F.L.N. as “quislings” and were promptly sacked — or worse. Whereas, in the 1950s, Tunisia and Morocco were endowed with established systems of government and administration, when Algerian independence came her government had existed only in exile. Thus she was afflicted by a lack of cadres and a lack of experience; but, worst of all, the many latent rifts within the leadership now burst through the thin papering with which the exigencies of war had covered them heretofore. Frantz Fanon had predicted that war would achieve unity among the Algerian élite; peace produced quite the opposite.

The explosion had begun at the end of June. The C.N.R.A. was meeting once again in Tripoli, this time to forge a programme for the future that would be the most important statement of F.L.N. principles and aims since the Soummam Conference of 1956. A new ingredient of dissent had immediately been injected into the proceedings by the arrival of Ben Bella and his comrades, at last liberated from their years of incarceration. The Ben Bella faction, backed by Boumedienne and the General Staff and, more improbably, by Ferhat Abbas and his ex-U.D.M.A. faithfuls, launched a vigorous attack on the G.P.R.A. on its “surrender” to the French at Evian specifically, and its conduct of affairs in general. Ben Bella called for the substitution of the G.P.R.A. by a “Political Bureau”, consisting chiefly of the five ex-prisoners. Mohamed Khider had already resigned from his post as a Minister of State to the G.P.R.A. Even among the five, however, personal relations were far from rosy:

Boudiaf and Ben Bella, after spending five years in jail together, couldn’t stand each other. They would argue over anything — whether the tea should be served hot or cold, how much sugar should be in it. It was just like a scene out of Sartre’s
No Exit
. The crisis was simply a scramble for power. Abbas backed Ben Bella because he was bitter over having been replaced by Ben Khedda [said Mabrouk Belhocine, who had attempted to act as mediator].

Meanwhile, in its turn the General Staff came under fierce fire from the representatives of Wilayas 2, 3 and 4, i.e. the “heartland” Wilayas farthest removed from the Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers and the tentacles of the General Staff. In asking the G.P.R.A. to restrain the General Staff from interfering with them, these Wilayas reflected wartime resentments at the failure of Boumedienne’s Army of the Exterior to assist them, as well as throwing a last beam of light of blazing relevance on the whole affair of Si Salah and the Wilaya 4 “separate peace” initiative of 1960.

On 30 June, the day before Algeria held its referendum, the G.P.R.A. took the unprecedented step of dissolving the General Staff and dismissing Boumedienne, amid scenes that were the most tumultuous ever witnessed within the leadership of the F.L.N. Writing of this period in
Le Monde
one pro-F.L.N. French journalist, Jean Daniel, was “shocked by the intensity and vindictiveness of the rivalry, and astonished to find that mutual recrimination among Muslim leaders was much worse than it had been between the rebels and the French”. The essentially uncombative Ben Khedda withdrew from this bear-garden to Tunis before the end of the Tripoli congress, a tactical error thereby leaving the way open to Ben Bella. Boumedienne refused to recognise the G.P.R.A.’s sanctions against him, and began moving his powerful A.L.N. into the interior. Over the next two months Algeria had, in effect, three governments: the G.P.R.A., under President Ben Khedda; Ben Bella’s Political Bureau (backed by Boumedienne and the army); and, squeezed like an insignificant and brittle nut between these two powerful opposites, President Farès’s Provisional Executive as set up under Evian. There were further hostile groupings within the country as each Wilaya took up its own position, with Wilaya 4 capriciously moving in to take control of Algiers. Kabylia began to show signs of returning to its traditional separatist animosities vis-à-vis the Arabs, with Krim returning to his homeland to set up Wilaya 3 as an anti-Ben Bella stronghold. For the rest of this bitter summer warring cliques and bands marched and counter-marched across the prostrate body of the so-recently jubilant country, in scenes reminiscent of Brecht’s
Mother Courage
. There were rival killings in the cities and the country-side; dissident groups took, once again, to the mountains where, as guerrillas, they would have to be wiped out in actions as savage as anything against the French. One Wilaya leader challenged another to a duel with machine-guns, and total civil war loomed close, with the distraught population crying to the warring factions: “
Sba’a snine, barakat!
[Seven years, that’s enough!]”

The massacre of the harkis: overall war casualties

According to Ait Ahmed, these convulsions of the summer of 1962 cost the lives of a further 15,000 Algerians. But the worst fratricidal horrors were reserved for those Muslims who, like the
harkis
, had continued to fight for France. De Gaulle had never shown much sympathy for them; to a Muslim deputy, ten of whose family had already been killed by the F.L.N. and who had protested that on “self-determination” “we shall suffer”, de Gaulle had replied coldly, “
Eh bien! vous suffrirez
.” As General Challe had feared (and it was one of the prime factors in his revolt), the peace agreements contained no guarantee sufficient to save these Algerians now from the wrath of their countrymen, in whose eyes they were nothing but traitors. Out of the quarter of a million who had worked for the French less than 15,000 had managed to escape from Algeria — many of them with Bachaga Boualem. In France they were, for the most part, to live lives of poverty, unappreciated and unassimilated. Of the fate of those that remained, however, harrowing stories came out of Algeria. Hundreds died when put to work clearing the minefields along the Morice Line, or were shot out of hand. Others were tortured atrociously; army veterans were made to dig their own tombs, then swallow their decorations before being killed; they were burned alive, or castrated, or dragged behind trucks, or cut to pieces and their flesh fed to dogs. Many were put to death with their entire families, including young children. Compelled by the terms of the Evian Agreements to stand by and witness this massacre of their former allies, the agony of the French army was extreme. In some cases, acting under orders, units had been forced to disarm the wretched
harkis
on the promise of replacing them with better weapons — then sneaked away in the middle of the night, abandoning them to their fate. It was a tragedy even more odious than that of the Russian prisoners-of-war handed back by the Western allies in 1945. Estimates of the numbers of Algerians thus killed vary wildly between 30,000 and 150,000.

These aftermath killings also help make the total Muslim casualty lists of the seven and a half years of war all the more difficult to compute accurately. According to French figures, their forces lost 17,456 dead (including no less than 5,966 killed “accidentally”, and 892 officers killed in action); 64,985 wounded and injured, and 1,000 missing (including deserters). Far less severe than American casualties in Vietnam, the French casualty rate during most of the war ran at lower than that claimed by road accidents in France. European civilian casualties, caused by 42,090 listed acts of terrorism, are put at over 10,000, among them 2,788 killed (including the O.A.S. victims in the final year of the war) plus 500 “disappeared”. French estimates put the Muslim dead as follows: 141,000 male combatants killed by the security forces; 12,000 members of the F.L.N. killed in internal purges; 16,000 Muslim civilians killed by the F.L.N.; 50,000 Muslim civilians abducted, and presumed killed, by the F.L.N. On top of this has to be added the killing of
harkis
and other Algerians in the settlement of accounts during the summer of 1962, as well as a further 4,300 Algerians from both the F.L.N. and M.N.A. killed in metropolitan France in the course of the war. The number of overall Muslim wounded can only be guessed at. To General Jacquin, Challe’s former Deuxième Bureau chief, Belkacem Krim claimed after the war that it had cost the Algerians a total of 300,000 in dead. Today, however, Algeria adopts the round figure of
one million
as representing her war dead. When one takes into account additionally the numbers of Muslim wounded who must have succumbed, civilians who were killed accidentally during French
ratissages
, those who disappeared mysteriously in such operations as the Battle of Algiers, and those who died from starvation and exposure (recalling that no less than 1.8 million Muslims were uprooted from their homes during the war), then, even if figures do not justify the total of one million, they must stand well in excess of the computations of either the French army or Krim.

Finally, what, in purely material terms, did the war and the resultant severance of Algeria cost France? Computations are complex and confused by the division between what was purely military and what was economic expenditure, as well as by the problem of just how much of France’s defence budget was spent exclusively on Algeria. One reasonable set of figures puts the military cost of the war
per annum
as rising from 2,800 million (new) francs in 1955 to 10,000 million by 1960, showing a total of between fifty to fifty-five milliard for the seven and a half years of war. Substantial as were France’s contributions to Algerian economic reforms, even at the peak of the Constantine Plan expenditure here barely exceeded a quarter of the military outlay. This latter accounted for between fifty to sixty per cent of France’s defence budget, and is set by Hartmut Elsenhans in
Frankreichs Algerienkrieg
as representing ten to fifteen per cent of the total French budget. The burden of this is more readily apparent when one recalls that, until the end of the Fourth Republic and the early years of Gaullism, France already lived with a heavy deficit. One additional, hidden cost of considerable significance came as a consequence of a labour shortage in France caused by the absence in Algeria, from 1956 onwards, of half a million men with the colours. It was a shortage that coincided with a time when both the French population graph was suffering from the “hollow classes” (the children not born during the Second World War) and resurgent West Germany was making her first bid for world export markets. The result was serious inflation and loss of productivity; the latter estimated conservatively even by economists of the “hawk” faction to have run at three to four milliard (new) francs per year, representing an almost greater strain to the French economy than the actual military costs.