A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (23 page)

In his book
Les Français d’Algérie
, Pierre Nora recounts an episode that was to become, depressingly enough, perhaps not so exceptional as the war dragged on: near Sidi-Bel-Abbès a Foreign Legion patrol systematically searched a
pied noir
farm where they believed
fellaghas
were hiding, and discovered two in the corner of a barn. They were interrogated, with blows of rifle butts, but appeared not to understand French. This enraged the Foreign Legion lieutenant, who accused nine agricultural workers on the farm of complicity. After further interrogation had produced nothing, the two rebels, plus the nine farmhands, were put against a wall forthwith and shot in the presence of wives and children, according to the
pied noir
proprietor (who told the story). He attacked the Legionnaires violently: “How could you shoot down workers who saw me born! Without warning me? How do you expect me to continue to work now? Even the
fellagha
respect the harvest. Assassins, vandals — is this how you pacify…?”

This was the road along which “collective responsibility” inevitably led. Pierre-Henri Simon, the Catholic writer, who had spent nearly five years in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps and was to become a fierce critic of his own country’s conduct in Algeria, comments that “collective responsibility” was “exactly the principle by which Hitler’s men justified the massacre of Oradour”. Happily, during the Algerian war nothing took place approaching the atrocity of Oradour, when in June 1944 an entire French village — totalling 643 men, women and children — was massacred in reprisals by the German S.S. But the doctrine of “collective responsibility” threatened to annual at one stroke the work of conciliation by the “left wing” of Soustelle’s cabinet, Germaine Tillion and Commandant Monteil. As Madame Tillion warned General Parlange: “the cycle of repression getting ever tougher, and the rebellion ever stronger, will ruin all your efforts of pacification.…”

Soustelle under cross-fire

By the summer of 1955 Soustelle, always trying in Algeria to find a delicate third path between the opposing extremes of the
pied noir
lobbies and the Muslim nationalists, was being buffeted by mounting pressures from a multiplicity of directions. A second visit to the Aurès in May had left him profoundly depressed; on the one hand, the security situation was still deteriorating, the “smallpox” spreading; on the other hand, he was shocked by the human consequences of the policy of tougher measures which the hard-pressed army imposed on him. At a clinic where Soustelle was shown a child with its eyes eaten away by trachoma, his own feelings were voiced by an aide who was heard to murmur: “Do we really have to bombard such poor devils?” It was typical of the conflicting emotions that the sight of actual suffering, or inhumanity, invariably aroused in Soustelle. Meanwhile, in Paris, resistance to his “integration” concept was gathering momentum as opponents warned of the implications that parliament would eventually be “swamped” by the populous Muslims; that, in its present delicate state of balance, the Assembly might find the casting vote held steadily by a cohesive Algerian bloc. Faure, too, under the customary pressures of the Fourth Republic, was threatening to back-slide on the support promised to Soustelle’s reforms. Already on 23 March Soustelle had threatened to resign when it seemed his budget was menaced; and again in June he had written protesting that his policy was constantly being impeded by “petty politics in Algiers and Paris, and by the daily harassing of the Press” — as well as by rebel activity.

Like “assimilation” before it, “integration” (once the novelty had worn off) was viewed with distrust by Europeans and Muslims alike. With the parliamentary and bureaucratic delays in Paris holding up both ratification of Soustelle’s policy and the necessary cash, Algerian Muslims could still find few enough concrete examples of integration at work. There remained curious, and sometimes insulting, anomalies in the administration; as a minor example, because of the merging of the departments of Beaux Arts et Cultes, a devout marabout visiting the Gouvernment-Général on a religious mission would be gravely affronted by a print of
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
. The State of Emergency Bill, finally introduced on 1 April, had also resulted in some additional absurdities; control of press and cinema banned such films as
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(because it showed Europeans in humiliating circumstances) and
Ill Met by Moonlight
(because the kidnapping of a German general by British and Cretan partisans might have seemed altogether too suggestive!). But it also resulted in more serious irritations; there were
mesures d’exception
, rights of night searches and powers of arrest, that seemed to strike indiscriminately at Muslim citizens. Germaine Tillion had been particularly disturbed by the little alienating unfairnesses she observed — such as Muslims being subjected to the humiliations of personal frisking, while Europeans were tacitly exempt. Soustelle was also not helped when, playing to the
pied noir
gallery, Bourgès-Maunoury in a hard-line speech to the Algerian Assembly on 27 May promised that his government “will never look about for what are called
interlocuteurs valables
. I go still further; I claim that no national government after ours will be able to venture upon this path.”

Meanwhile, by resorting to all manner of procedural devices, the adroit and ultra-conservative president of the Algerian Assembly, Laquière, had managed repeatedly to delay debate on the Soustelle programme, so that it was not ready for presentation to the government in Paris until 1 June. As a result, what chances Soustelle might have had of gaining the enthusiasm of the moderate Muslim leaders slipped by. Once again it was to be the old story of too little, too late.

As fresh incidents of terrorism succeeded each other unimpeded by the army, the frightened
pied noir
community also — and not altogether unreasonably — showed itself less and less inclined to surrender its existing privileges in the name of “integration”. With the heat of summer, Soustelle noted a steady build-up of passions, and of pressure on himself for not being “tough enough”; in July, Deleplanque’s sub-prefecture at Batna had been “literally besieged” after two
colons
had been horribly killed. It was becoming more and more difficult for Soustelle to manoeuvre between the opposing poles, and one of the inevitable consequences of these external stresses was a split between the “hawks” and “doves” within Soustelle’s own cabinet. At the end of June Commandant Monteil resigned. The original
casus belli
had been an episode where five Kabyles from Ighil-Ilef had been arrested under “collective responsibility” and had been tortured. Soustelle, informed of this by Monteil, had been outraged and ordered the prompt release of the suspects; but all five were almost immediately rearrested by the police. Monteil considered this a breach of trust by Soustelle, and had threatened to resign then. By June he felt events were passing totally out of his control, and in his letter of resignation he explained: “arbitrary arrests are increasing; the so-called ‘lodgement camps’ are filling up with more and more innocents (in a proportion of 167 in 200, on the evidence of the Prefect of Constantine himself, M. Dupuch); the army destroys, bombards, summarily executes.…” “Integration”, he concluded, was already a dead letter. Germaine Tillion, too, found herself at odds with Soustelle. When, at the end of May, she came to him with proposals for a new initiative towards the Algerian nationalists, he turned a deaf ear. From that moment until her departure the following January she was hardly to see Soustelle again. Although there was no question of her resigning, “We were no longer”, she said, “on the same wavelength.”

Though Soustelle himself denies it, it seems that a change of heart set in somewhere about this time. In a private visit to Mendès-France he confessed despondently “I am discouraged … the government is against me … everybody is against me.” He too wanted to resign, but Mendès-France persuaded him to stay on — as “a good liberal”. What is also on record, however, is that on 28 May Soustelle had shown himself to be deeply affected at the emotion-charged funeral in Tébessa of the murdered administrator from Guentis, the “saintly” and much loved Dupuy. Pinning a posthumous Legion of Honour on the oldest of Dupuy’s eight children, a boy in shorts, Soustelle — himself on the verge of tears — declared with meridional vehemence: “Let us swear before these coffins to do everything, without sparing anything, to revenge those who have been taken away from us.…” The use of the word “revenge” by the governor-general certainly shocked Monteil, and the funeral of Dupuy with its demonstration of what F.L.N. terrorism meant to the French families of Algeria may well have marked an important milestone in the conversion of Soustelle — a conversion that was to be completed later that summer by the most appalling events yet witnessed in the rebellion.

The Philippeville massacres

The strategy for modern terrorism was recently well defined by the Brazilian guerrilla leader, Carlos Marighela, before he was hunted down and killed:

It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.

Marighela’s essential philosophy was that a resort to blind terrorism would inevitably provoke the forces of law and order into an equally blind repression, which in turn would lead to a backlash by the hitherto uncommitted, polarise the situation into two extreme camps and make impossible any dialogue of compromise by eradicating the “soft centre”. “The government can only intensify its repression,” wrote Marighela in a passage of transcending importance for the modern world:

thus making the life of its citizens harder than ever; homes will be broken into, police searches organised, innocent people arrested and communications broken; police terror will become the order of the day, and there will be more and more political murders—in short a massive political persecution. The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in having recourse to the actual physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the country will become a military situation.…

It was along this road of war without quarter against the civil population that the F.L.N. now began to move, as other terrorist bodies have done since. The consequences would not be all that far-removed from the situation envisaged by Marighela.

Since the death in January, at the hands of Ducournau’s paras, of Mourad Didouche, the F.L.N.’s Wilaya 2 covering the North Constantine region had come under the command of Youssef Zighout, a thirty-four-year-old wheelwright, and his right-hand man, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal. Both men had been veterans of the underground O.S. from the 1950s onwards, and both had been present at the “Meeting of the Twenty-two” in the summer of 1954. Ben Tobbal was the more intellectual of the two, was well-versed in guerrilla theory and was to prove himself one of the more ruthlessly efficient of the F.L.N. leaders; aged thirty-two, and of peasant background, his rather oriental features (possibly a consequence of Yemeni blood) earned him the nickname of
le Chinois
. Deeply attached to the youthful Didouche, Zighout had been anguished by his death and subsequently outraged by the mounting brutality of the
ratissages
conducted within his Wilaya by the French army, and their refusal to accord to any captured F.L.N.
djounoud
the rights of a combatant. His own forces had taken a severe hammering from the hands of Ducournau (worse than the French High Command realised), and by May had been reduced to two hundred men with only seventy weapons between them. Yet — as a direct consequence of “collective responsibility” — by August they had risen again to five hundred, each armed with at least a sporting rifle. Although cut off from contact with the other Wilayas, Zighout and Ben Tobbal were aware that these were in poor shape; Wilayas 5 (Oranie) and 4 (Algérois) were only capable of feeble efforts, and 3 (Kabylia) was little better off, while, since the capture of Ben Boulaid, the vigorous Wilaya 1 in the Aurès was partly paralysed by bitter dissensions within the leadership. Only Wilaya 2 seemed in a position to strike a major blow to keep the revolution going.

In a mood almost of desperation, Zighout and Ben Tobbal convened a council of war at the end of June to launch, for the first time, a policy of total war on all French civilians, regardless of age and sex. Justifying it, Zighout declared: “To colonialism’s policy of
collective repression
[author’s italics] we must reply with collective reprisals against the Europeans, military and civil, who are all united behind the crimes committed upon our people. For them, no pity, no quarter!” Simultaneously with military action by cadres of the F.L.N., a true “people’s revolt” was to be unleashed in the Constantine region, in which “the largest possible number of Algerians, even hastily armed with only sticks, pitchforks, axes, sickles and knives”, was to be involved. Principal targets were the harbour city of Philippeville and its surrounding neighbourhood, El-Milia and the area around Contantine itself. It would, in effect, be another Sétif — only worse — and Zighout and Ben Tobbal accepted that the losses would be severe.