A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (43 page)

[
1
] Zabane had killed a gamekeeper and had been in prison since the first days of the war. Ferradj, condemned for the killing in an ambush of eight civilians, including a woman and a seven-year-old girl, had lost an eye and been crippled by his wounds. Had Ferradj in particular been reprieved, the outcry among the
pieds noirs
would have been violent.

[
2
] Acknowledging responsibility for the bombing, one of the counter-terrorist leaders who was later to become chief of the O.A.S. death squads remarked light-heartedly to the author: “They must have put a bit too much gunpowder in it!” No European, however, was ever arrested for the Rue de Thèbes bombing.

[
3
] In 1958 Zohra Drif was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour for her part in the Battle of Algiers; she survived the war and married Rabah Bitat, the only member of the
neuf historiques
holding power at the time of writing.

[
4
] The whole episode is re-enacted with remarkable fidelity in the Pontecorvo film, in which Yacef’s role was played by himself.

[
5
] It was not known until after Ali’s own death that he was the assassin of Froger; meanwhile, an innocent man had already been executed for the crime.

[
6
] There is the famous encounter between de Gaulle and Massu, reputed to have taken place on the former’s arrival in Algeria after coming to power in 1958:
De Gaulle, teasing: “
Alors, Massu, toujours con?
”
Massu, respectful and straight-faced: “
Oui, mon général, et toujours gaulliste!
”
Hence the popular, anti-Gaullist expression of the time:
“con comme un général!”

[
7
] Just to add confusion, it was during this same week, on 16 January, that Philippe Castille fired his “bazooka” at Salan. That an attempt to assassinate the French Commander-in-Chief should be made at the very moment when he was in the process of enacting measures which, in the whole war to date, were the most favourable to the
pied noir
cause seems to exemplify better than anything else the basic unreality — indeed, sheer lunacy — of the counter-terrorist groups.

[
8
] A quantitative comparison could perhaps be made here between the Battle of Algiers’ bombings and those of the I.R.A. more recently in Northern Ireland and in England. Horrible as were the outrages in Algiers, the bombs were considerably less powerful, and consequent casualties far fewer than the twenty-one killed and 162 maimed in the Birmingham outrage of November 1974—perpetrated evidently as retribution for an I.R.A. member who blew himself up by mistake. What
ratonnades
and lynchings would have followed a bombing in Algiers on the Birmingham scale can only be imagined, and one may ask whether the restrained British reaction could be explained by national phlegm or the torpor of a world grown blasé to horror.

[
9
] See
Colonel Godard’s Organogram.

[
10
] An episode which Salan in his memoirs also acknowledges, though with some discrepancy in the details.

[
11
] In interviews with the author, Lacoste stated that he had “punished 480 officers for brutalisation”; Teitgen, however, counters that none of the punished suffered any serious setbacks to their careers.

CHAPTER TEN
Lost Round for the F.L.N.:
May–December 1957

The common error of the one and the other is to believe that they are defending a just cause, killing for a just cause, and risking an unjust death. They become cruel like a hunted beast…. Those truly responsible keep a prudent distance.

Mouloud Feraoun

Yacef’s second offensive

WHILE Bigeard and the paras were returning to their old hunting-grounds, the four surviving members of the C.C.E. were making their way painfully out of Algeria, carrying with them the leadership of the revolution. Krim and Abane had been smuggled out of Algiers in a Citroën 2 c.v. belonging to Madame Chaulet, just an hour after her husband had been arrested. The four leaders had then parted company, with Abane and Saad Dahlab heading westward for Morocco, whence they would fly to Tunis (this time taking a safer route than Ben Bella, via Madrid and Rome). Krim and Ben Khedda, moving eastwards for Tunis overland, were to make an odyssey lasting over three months, travelling most of the time by night, and on mules. Miraculously they were not apprehended by any French patrols on the nearly 500-mile “long march”, but in his native Kabylia Krim narrowly missed being swept up in a net that was closing on Mohamedi Said’s headquarters. In the ensuing fight 137 F.L.N. were killed, but Krim and Ben Khedda escaped.

Meanwhile, in Algiers, though now totally isolated, Yacef remained as undisputed, supreme boss. His laboriously constructed networks lay in ruins, and all the time he himself felt the noose of Godard’s Deuxième Bureau tightening around his neck. But Yacef being Yacef, he refused to accept defeat, and in a remarkable fashion began to pick up the pieces, reconstitute his organisation and prepare for a fresh offensive. Early in May, after a long period of quiet, there was an incident followed by an outrage of “overkill” by the paras. Returning from the cinema in a suburb of Algiers, two paras had been shot down in the street by terrorists. In a spontaneous reprisal, some of their comrades, led by an informer from Trinquier’s D.P.U. to a Turkish bath that was supposed to be a hideout of the F.L.N., sub-machine-gunned all and sundry in it. Nearly eighty Muslims were reported killed; a number of them were poor beggars who habitually came in to find night-time shelter in the baths. Not one of the paras involved was ever brought to justice, although their identity was said to be known at the Gouvernement-Général. At the same time it was increasingly obvious to Yacef that the F.L.N., through its mauling at the hands of the paras, was steadily losing ground in the city. So to avenge the one and arrest the other, Yacef decided upon a new round of bombings. This time he tried a new technique that was ingeniously simple but even more cruel in that it struck equally at ordinary, working-class Muslims and at Europeans.

On 3 June four of Yacef’s operatives, dressed in the uniform of the E.G.A. electricity and gas corporation and equipped with special keys, opened the small inspection doors at the base of several street lamp standards by bus-stops in the centre of the city, and inserted bombs inside. One such
lampadaire
selected stood close to the Grande Poste building. Three hours later, in the midst of the rush hour, the bombs exploded, fragmenting the heavy iron bases of the lamps like shrapnel from a bursting shell. Fortunately one went off just as a trolley-bus had collected most of the crowd waiting round it, and only two people were injured. But two others claimed eight dead—including the inevitable schoolchildren—and some ninety wounded, with grievous fragmentation injuries. The casualties of the innocents were this time almost equally divided between Muslims and Europeans, which did little to improve the image of the F.L.N. among the Muslim population. So next Yacef returned to his former policy of selecting a purely
pied noir
target. His choice fell on the Casino, with gambling tables and a dance-floor, poised on a rocky promontory some half-dozen miles out on the western fringes of Algiers. Here there would be no children and no Muslims; only the pleasure- and sun-loving young
pieds noirs
from Bab-el-Oued that Camus used to write about, glowing from a day on the beach.

The Casino

It was 9 June—as usual, a Sunday—and just before seven the Casino was crowded with couples already beginning to dance. The bomb, a powerful one, had been placed underneath the orchestra platform itself by a fifteen-year-old Muslim employee. Massu, whose residence was nearby, heard the explosion and hurried to the spot, as did Salan a short time later. The scene was appalling, the carnage the worst yet. The tawdry night-club decor was splattered with blood; the whole of the orchestra platform had been ripped up, the piano smashed to pieces and the unhappy band-leader—Lucky Starway, the idol of Bab-el-Oued—disembowelled. His girl vocalist lay with both feet blown off. Altogether there were nine dead and eighty-five wounded, nearly half of them women, and many of them having lost legs as a result of the level at which the bomb had exploded. Says the hardened Massu: “I can still see that beautiful young girl of eighteen with both her legs blown off, lying unconscious, her blonde hair stained with blood.”

And Salan: “There were still fragments of feet in the slippers of the young dancers…. One had to have seen such a spectacle to understand our reactions towards these assassins.” On the day of the interments the following Tuesday, the
pied noir
reaction was one of greater violence than ever before. A spontaneous strike closed down all shops in the working-class European quarter of Bab-el-Oued; and then began the
ratonnade
, the most savage that riven Algiers had yet experienced.

John Gale, a young British correspondent, observed with revulsion the
pied noir
mobs sacking one Muslim shop after another. In a sheer lust of destruction, they

hurled live chickens to one another until the birds had lost their feathers and then trampled them to death…. They broke and emptied the tanks of motor bikes over meat torn from butchers, set fire to the petrol that soaked the carcasses, and armed themselves with meathooks…. Streets ran with milk and broken eggs; the mob pawed and stamped the debris like animals and poured wine over one another’s heads….

There seemed to be almost a curious lack of passion about it all; the young mobsters “didn’t seem angry to us; they were enjoying themselves”. One young girl explained cheerfully, “We’re sheep. We follow.” And in the background Gale noted sinister-looking men in black suits and dark glasses giving orders, one of whom, when questioned, admitted that he was a stranger to the area. Gradually, as the heat of the day built up, the
raton-nade
assumed a nastier mood. Gale saw how

One fat old Arab in blue denims, horribly beaten, staggered off, gasping with terror; another, much younger, his skull smashed, was dragged away and flung dead into the back of an army truck. Those were Arabs, perhaps small shopkeepers, who had chosen to live in a European quarter, and must have been well known to many of the rioters.

Later he saw young Muslims gaffed by the meat-hooks looted from the butchers’ shops. The old, old explanation was recited to him: “They’re not like another race, the Muslims. They’ve really overdone it, you see. Savages. Young girls with their legs amputated from that bomb in the Casino.”

What Gale found “the most frightening thing”, however, was the passive complicity of the police and soldiers; of two hundred European rioters arrested that day, apparently only four were detained, and these soon released. According to Salan’s rather curious account of the day, a mob now more than 10,000 strong descending on the centre of Algiers was only brought to order by Colonel Trinquier brandishing a tricolour from his jeep and shouting, “Everybody to the
monument aux morts!
” Here Salan in person called upon them to disperse which, after an impassioned singing of the
Marseillaise
, they did. The day’s results were five Muslims killed, fifty injured, a hundred shops sacked and twenty cars burnt out. Enraged at the failure of the troops, Massu issued stern orders

to avoid indulgence towards the European elements in the city. Certain individuals, men and women, have behaved themselves in a disgusting manner and should have been arrested on the spot.

The forces of order have the absolute duty to protect all elements of the population, and therefore the Muslims, when the Europeans “run wild”.

Gloomily Mouloud Feraoun recorded in his diary in the aftermath of the Casino bomb, “More and more it seems that there is no other way out than death…for there are no more innocents, on one side or the other, are there?”

At the Gouvernement-Général Robert Lacoste recognised that there was now nothing for it but to begin once again the whole toilsome process of cleaning out the Augean stables of Algiers. Back from the
bled
were summoned a reluctant Bigeard and his paras.

The hunt for Yacef

Now all was concentrated on the hunt for Yacef and his last remaining nucleus of terrorists. All his hideouts in the European quarters had been mopped up, and European helpers like Chaulet arrested, so the net could now constrict around the Casbah alone. Already in April one of Yacef’s closest and most faithful collaborators, Djamila Bouhired, had fallen into French hands. Walking out in the Casbah, with Yacef a few paces behind, disguised as a woman, with a sub-machine-gun concealed under his clothes, she had been arrested by a Zouave patrol. Yacef immediately drew his gun and fired at Djamila with intent to kill,[
1
] realising that she knew enough to lead to his instant betrayal, and fled. Only wounded, Bouhired on recovery was tortured but refused to give away any vital information. Yacef claims that he made more than one attempt to liberate her from the Maillot military hospital. On one occasion a message was smuggled to her, telling her to pretend that she was prepared to lead the French to Yacef. When she had arrived at the Impasse de la Grenade, he instructed “Throw yourself flat on the ground and we will open fire.” But Djamila refused; she did not wish, according to Yacef, that “any brothers should risk their lives to liberate her”. A further attempt to get Djamila out of the hospital was thwarted within minutes by paras coming to take her away in a military truck. In July she was sentenced to death, and Yacef let it be known that he would blow up entire city quarters in the event of her execution. There then followed a curiously improbable romantic episode where, brutality having failed, an attempt was made to soften up Djamila through the seductive attentions of a handsome para captain, but she still refused to give away Yacef’s whereabouts.