A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (45 page)

At 5 a.m. on the 24th, the Rue Caton was sealed off by Colonel Jeanpierre’s 1st R.E.P. Warned by the widow Bouhired, Yacef and Zohra Drif, both half-undressed, managed to get into a cache, ingeniously constructed by one of Yacef’s masons in a small space between the bathroom and staircase, before the paras entered the house. But, by tapping the wall, the cavity was soon discovered. A para swinging a pick-axe opened a hole in it, out of which Yacef promptly threw a grenade. Three paras were wounded, as well as the colonel himself. Meanwhile, behind the partition, Zohra Drif coolly set to burning vital documents. Godard, now arrived on the scene, took over personally and, determined to take Yacef alive, carried out a dialogue at a discreet distance, trying to persuade the Casbah leader to give himself up. Within Yacef’s sight a charge of plastic fell at the bottom of the false partition, and Godard shouted to him that he was lighting a fuse to go off in exactly ten minutes. Claiming that he reckoned that, had it exploded, the charge would also have killed Hassiba, Ali la Pointe and Petit Omar across the street as well as the tenants of No. 3, Yacef capitulated. Half-naked and coughing from the smoke of the burning papers, he and Zohra Drif emerged from the cache. A jubilant Salan telephoned to Paris the news of the capture of the most wanted man in Algiers; by return he received a telegram from the prime minister ordering that on no account were Yacef and Zohra Drif to be maltreated in any way. They were not, as Yacef himself admits. Nevertheless, Yacef filled over a hundred pages in the course of his interrogation, often in a tone somewhat vaunting of his past achievements. Condemned to death three times by military tribunals the following year, he was finally reprieved by de Gaulle on his becoming president.

Ali la Pointe

Meanwhile, in the jubilation at catching Yacef the occupants of No. 4 Rue Caton were completely neglected. Creeping through a cellar exit, Ali la Pointe and his two comrades made a safe getaway to another bolt-hole; at 5 Rue des Abderames, near the top of the Casbah. But within two weeks Godard, acting on information provided by a
bleu
who had given himself the
nom-de-guerre
of “Safy-le-Pur” (Safy is the Arabic for “pure”) and who had already helped in the tracking down of Yacef, had located this last refuge. Inside were Ali la Pointe, Hassiba Ben Bouali, and the twelve-year-old Petit Omar, who passed the painfully long hours snipping paper cut-outs. At nightfall on 8 October the house was surrounded by the 1st R.E.P. Three times Ali was called upon to surrender, but not a sound came back. Remembering what had happened at the siege of Mourad and Kamel, the paras decided to take no chances and laid three hollow charges with the aim of bringing down the partition behind which Ali la Pointe was hiding. A shattering explosion rocked the whole Casbah. The charges had apparently detonated a store of bombs hidden in the cache. Virtually nothing remained of the house, and several adjacent to it also collapsed. Beneath the ruins the bodies of Ali la Pointe (easily identified by his tattoos), Hassiba Ben Bouali and Petit Omar were dug out; but seventeen other Muslims, including four small children, died in the neighbouring houses which the paras had neglected to evacuate. Four paras were also injured in the blast.

The Battle ends

With the death of Ali la Pointe in the autumn of 1957 the grim Battle of Algiers was truly ended. The city breathed afresh. Work began again, the schools reopened, and the old agreeable life of the
pieds noirs
returned to normal with remarkable speed. The curfew was lifted, and cinemas no longer required to be searched; the Rue Michelet filled with shoppers once again, as did the cafés,
dancings
and stadiums over the beloved week-ends. The joyous picnics resumed at Pointe Pescade, where the Casino bombing was all but forgotten. Even in the Casbah fear subsided; though it was to some extent replaced by another kind of fear—that of the midnight call by Massu’s all-powerful paras, and the never to be entirely absent threat of the
gégène
.

To the
pieds noirs
the glorious paras now became the toast of Algiers, enjoying a peak of popularity shared even (though briefly) by Robert Lacoste himself. As Christmas approached, the toyshops filled with red berets, “leopard” camouflage jackets, and plastic sub-machine-guns; somewhat to the chagrin of the
macho
-minded
pied noir
male, every golden-skinned beauty of Algiers had to be seen with a para boyfriend on her arm. News films showed tough but relaxed paras in shorts dancing
Il était un petit navire
with happy Muslim children. All of a sudden the army was everywhere, and everything.

No one could doubt that the paras had scored a major victory for the French army, the first clearly definable one of the war. They had faced up to a confrontation with the F.L.N. and won hands down. Some commentators went so far as speak of a “Dien Bien Phu” for the F.L.N. Says Massu in retrospect: “We had rounded up the leaders and broken up the system. There were no more assassinations or bomb attempts. And the proof of it all was the Muslim support we were to get on 16 May 1958.” Certainly, if only on a strictly military level, the para commanders could be excused for considering that they had achieved success where the Lacostes, Soustelles, Mollets and Mendès-Frances—the civil leaders as a whole—had all failed miserably. The army would not now be easily persuaded to relinquish the powers which Lacoste had ceded it in January 1957. If the
pieds noirs
had shown they could sway Paris following Mollet’s disastrous visit in February 1956, here now was a new factor; the army as ultimate arbiter.

For the F.L.N. the immediate consequence was to force it to face up to a serious defeat and completely review its strategy. Henceforth it realised that large-scale terrorism in the cities would have to be abandoned; and, moreover, the failure in Algiers led it to the appreciation that nowhere in Algeria was its military organisation, the A.L.N., strong enough to face any major armed confrontation with the French army. Thus, it would conclude, the war could really no longer be won inside Algeria itself. Through its defeat in Algiers the F.L.N. also lost important ground in the struggle for the souls of the uncommitted “third force” Muslims, now giving increased indication of war-weariness. Finally, as will be seen shortly, the Algiers defeat was to impose stresses on the leadership resulting in the gravest internal dissension to date. But all this was in the immediate present: in the longer term there were ways in which the Battle of Algiers was to prove a blessing in disguise (though, as Winston Churchill remarked of his electoral defeat in 1945, at the moment it may have seemed “quite effectively disguised”). First of all, by making the C.C.E. quit Algiers, the French would be assisting it to find a base of relative tranquillity in Tunis. Secondly, by pressing upon it the correct strategic conclusions it would help the C.C.E. turn a short-term defeat into a long-term victory. Thirdly, with utmost irony, the Battle of Algiers, by focusing the TV cameras, newsfilms and journalists of the world upon it, had probably done infinitely more to achieve the sought-for “internationalisation” of the war than all Ben Bella’s efforts in Cairo, or Yazid’s at the United Nations. Fourthly, through the reaction they produced both in France herself and elsewhere, the repugnant methods with which the paras had won in Algiers were materially to help bring victory from the outside.

Black moments for the F.L.N
.

None of this, however, could be seen by the harried members of the C.C.E. as they reached sanctuary in Bourguiba’s Tunis. Everything looked at its blackest. Throughout Algeria the loss of face (so important to the Muslim mentality) resulting from Massu’s victory was bound to lead to a falling off of support for the cause throughout Algeria. Apart from the consequences of Massu’s victory, there was a variety of additional factors acting against F.L.N. interests in 1957 and 1958. The excellent S.A.S. service, inaugurated by Jacques Soustelle, had begun to make its mark and was restoring confidence in the
présence française
in wide areas of the
bled
. The number of primary schools opened by the army had trebled, and between April 1956 and August 1957 the numbers of Muslim functionaries had been augmented from 6,847 to 9,979; not enough, but something. Reports from F.L.N. operatives in the field complained that: “Today the people of the sector no longer want to work for us; there are many others where the population has turned against us, because we do not keep our promises.” Or that the
djounoud
were not receiving their pay (which in any case often amounted to no more than 10 new francs a month). Or, “We are short of everything. The colonialists are everywhere. Too many enemy posts, we cannot move.
We must have some automatic weapons, to show them to the population
.” In 1957 A.L.N. losses were double those of the previous year. Morale had slumped and desertions risen; between May 1957 and May 1958 the French claimed 928
ralliements individuels
—or four times as many as the preceding year. Much more serious, though, were the
ralliements collectifs
, as will be seen shortly.

On the other side of the balance-sheet, however—even if little visible to F.L.N. eyes—there remained the steady and disheartening drift away from France of the middle ground, the potential “third force”: liberals like Camus’ friend, the writer Mouloud Feraoun, and the Kabyle poet, Jean Amrouche, who, in September 1957, wrote in anguish: “What causes me to despair…is to see France engaged unwittingly in a tragedy in which she may lose herself…my inner France, the only [nation] that every man, white, red or black can choose as the fatherland of the mind.” Servan-Schreiber recalls the
pied noir
liberal who remarked angrily that there were

a few Muslim groups who were still prepared to talk, but within one or two months it’s finished. No one any longer. As a result of bullying them, arresting them, interning them, and occasionally killing them—you’ve won; but everybody who represents anything of importance in this country has gone over to the F.L.N. There are no more intermediaries.

One factor that was costing the French much goodwill was a new policy designed in the first instance to protect the loyal and the uncommitted from F.L.N. terrorism. This was
regroupement
, or resettlement, which—to rephrase the oft-quoted axiom—aimed at emptying the water away from the fish by isolating communities from the F.L.N. and thus denying it refuge and supplies. It involved the resettlement of over a million peasants from “exposed” communities to barbed-wire encampments, which often looked horribly like concentration camps. Through faulty organisation, privations in these camps were often excessive. Describing conditions in one such settlement, a
Figaro
correspondent wrote in 1958:

Crammed together in unbroken wretchedness, fifteen to a tent since 1957, this human flotsam lies tangled in an indescribable state. There are 1,800 children living at Bessombourg…. At the moment, the whole population is fed entirely on semolina. Each person receives about four ounces of semolina a day…. Milk is given out twice a week: one pint per child…. No rations of fat have been distributed for eight months. No rations of chick-peas for a year…. No rations of soap for a year….

The following year a priest returning from Algeria claimed that the “regrouped” were sometimes receiving no more than a quarter to a third of the minimum calories necessary for sustaining life, and told of children dying of hunger. “An evacuated
mechta
is not a
mechta
that has migrated…the regrouped
mechta
is a broken, ruined
mechta
,” declared Frantz Fanon, while Germaine Tillion’s sense of history evoked the
grand dérangement
, the cruel displacement of the French Acadians by the British in eighteenth-century Canada.

By uprooting these Algerians from their homes and fields and placing them in camps where they led listless and largely unemployed existences, the French only created a new area of profound social discontent; while by helping “to break up an antiquated rural and tribal structure”, says Dorothy Pickles, they also encouraged “a sense of national solidarity”. Thousands fled over the border into Tunisia or Morocco to join the ranks of the F.L.N. there. Regroupment undeniably made life much more difficult for the A.L.N., but—as so often in the Algerian war—French policy found itself caught in the insoluble paradox of what was good militarily being bad politically, and
vice versa
. It was a pitfall into which, to some extent, the Americans were to stumble in South Vietnam. By the Battle of Algiers, Germaine Tillion concluded gloomily, “The implantation of the F.L.N. in the Algerian masses was too deep for any
détente
whatever to occur without the global agreement which it alone could give.”

Mélouza and Bellounis

The F.L.N. could not entirely share her views, for it was still locked in its own struggle of intense internecine rivalry with resuscitated elements of Messali Hadj’s M.N.A., a struggle which exploded in an act of appalling savagery right in the middle of the Battle of Algiers, and temporarily distracted the world’s eyes from it. On 31 May the Gouvernement-Général announced that the army had stumbled upon a massacre of peasants at a
mechta
called Mélouza, down in the remote south of Kabylia. Three nights earlier, apparently, the F.L.N. had rounded up every male above the age of fifteen from the surrounding area, herded them into houses and into the mosque and slaughtered them with rifles, pick-axes and knives: a total of 301 in all, with another fourteen severely wounded survivors. Swiftly appreciating the propaganda value of this new outrage, Lacoste promptly despatched a group of French and foreign correspondents to the scene of the incident to write up and photograph what they found. At first the F.L.N. attempted to bluster that it had all been the work of the wicked paras, but the evidence—including statements later made by Yacef, and finally clinched from documents found on the dead body of Amirouche, the Wilaya 3 leader—pointed overwhelmingly to their own responsibility. Sickened by the massacre, world opinion—less hardened to atrocity in those distant days—for a brief time animadverted against the F.L.N.