A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (99 page)

Monsieur
,

The O.A.S. sees everything, knows everything. We know, therefore, that you went on holiday to France….

As a consequence, the O.A.S. condemns you to pay 2,000 francs to 1 help our organisation. This sum must be paid within twenty-four hours.

If your response is negative, we shall know it and will act accordingly….

The O.A.S.

Later windfalls from astutely executed bank robberies helped swell the O.A.S. “treasury”, which at one point allegedly reached the staggering figure of two and a half milliard (old) francs (or neary three million pounds) for the three main cities of Algeria alone. This was also despite the considerable siphoning off of funds, diverted into the bistros or boutiques of the “collectors”.[
2
]

What, then, was the overall aim of the O.A.S., in embarking upon what, by the summer of 1961, already looked like a lost cause? In simplest terms, it was to make it impossible for de Gaulle’s representatives to govern in Algeria; beyond that, there was little coherent, or unified, thought. Though studiously vague at the time, Salan told the author in 1973: “I thought that we could somehow orient opinion in France towards some kind of solution like South Africa — a kind of Apartheid for Algeria.” He expressed admiration for Ian Smith: “a man of spirit — and, look, Britain still has Rhodesia”! For many of the
pieds noirs
the ideal of
Algérie française
was now but a fantasy — though had it ever genuinely been much more? — and thoughts did gravitate towards a fascist kind of South Africa, with the Muslims “kept in their places”. But the O.A.S. was, as one of its chroniclers, Paul Henissart, remarks: “a very odd organisation, an uncooked pudding of conflicting freakish ideas and aspirations and principles”. The idealist Gardes, for instance, who still claims to have joined the O.A.S. because he “could not abandon the Muslims”, continued to aim for a utopian Algeria in which the Muslims would be fully integrated. Susini, who admired the “fanaticism of the Jews of Palestine” and their passionate attachment to the soil (though he thought the
pieds noirs
too soft by comparison with the Israelis), wanted a kind of “… Algerian Haganah, a civil army powerful and with conviction, which would regain Muslim confidence from the F.L.N., and carry along the Europeans … to seize power in Algeria, in order to assume it one day in France.” At the end of the road he desired a true revolution introducing reforms and a kind of socialist corporate state, but retaining French rule. Pérez, on the other hand, considered the struggle for
Algérie française
as “the last battle for White Christian civilisation in the northern part of Africa”. If a common denominator in O.A.S. policy could be arrived at, it was to render peace talks impossible by killing off the remaining “men of good will”, the moderates of both sides, and by random outrages against the Muslim population which would create an atmosphere in which neither negotiation nor compromise could exist. In this they would be eminently successful — but it would produce quite the opposite results from those desired.

First O.A.S. successes

On 3 May a tract was circulated round Algeria, signed by the O.A.S. and making the resounding announcement: “A great army of the maquis is organising itself…. Listen to us and all can be saved. Don’t give up your arms. Regroup in small sections. Kill those who try to arrest you. Burn the government offices. Kill all the traitors, little and big.” At the same time a flood of posters and graffiti appeared on walls across the country. The first to appear showed a crude dagger striking from a map of France and simultaneously stabbing to pieces both the F.L.N.’s crescent and star and the Cross of Lorraine; others bore the bold caption, “
La France Reste
”, or declared menacingly, “The O.A.S. strikes where it wants, when it wants”; a pair of glaring eyes daubed on walls was surmounted by the words “The O.A.S. sees everything”; and there was one produced by the ever-optimistic Gardes showing a Muslim and an European head sandwiched between the two words “
Frères
… O.A.S.”. War had been declared.

On 19 May, the eve of the “scandalous” negotiations at Evian, the O.A.S. set off nineteen of the
plastique
explosions in Algiers, known as
la strounga
in
pied noir
parlance, and striking at European or Muslim liberals. As the conference went on, the
stroungas
occurred daily with the Algiers gendarmerie showing themselves helpless to intervene. On 13 June the O.A.S. celebrated the breakdown of the talks with a particularly powerful
strounga
right in the centre of Algiers. Up to the end of May, however, only property had been attacked, but on 31 May the O.A.S. under its new management carried out the first
opération ponctuelle
— the sinister euphemism used by Degueldre when issuing orders to kill. The target was Commissaire Gavoury, the senior police officer charged with tracking down the O.A.S. It was reckoned by Degueldre that the “execution” of so prominent a figure would both act as a deterrent to other “traitors”, and at the same time show that the O.A.S. really meant business. Two Delta Commandos were sent out, one under Bobby Dovecar tracking the Commissioner down to his apartment. Spotting the ambush, he tried to escape, shouting in vain for help, but was stabbed to death by repeated blows of a para dagger.

At this time the Deltas were quartered in a sumptuous villa loaned them by
pieds noirs
in the garden suburb of Bouzaréah. Right opposite them lived a senior official of Morin’s Délégation-Générale staff, with known liberal sympathies, Maurice Perrin. After the Gavoury killing Perrin reported to the police his suspicions about the neigbouring villa; but — lending substance to their boast, “The O.A.S. knows everything” — the Deltas received an immediate tip-off. Evacuating the villa, they returned a few days later to riddle Perrin with bullets in front of his horror-stricken wife. Then, between 9 and 10 June, the F.L.N. terrorist squads responded by killing four and wounding thirty-seven in Algiers. A similar picture prevailed in Oran, where the police proved both inadequate and unreliable; the prefect, freshly arrived from France, soon discovered that he could trust perhaps no more than half-a-dozen of his officers. In July the dwellings of no less than thirty-three Oran
pieds noirs
received a
strounga
after their owners had ignored the O.A.S. warning not to leave the country, even on holiday. With the onset of the summer heat tempers were rising violently, and a deadly pattern established itself, with the F.L.N. generally killing between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m., so as to catch victims on their way to work, the O.A.S. Deltas carrying out their
opérations ponctuelles
in the evening when their victims were returning from work.

On 5 August, the O.A.S. scored its first major propaganda success. Minister Joxe was in Algiers to discuss the current situation with Morin; in Tripoli, the Fourth C.N.R.A. was convening. It was a Saturday, and at 1 p.m. most
pieds noirs
were clustered around their television sets for the lunch-time news bulletin. Suddenly the screens flickered, and went blank. Then out of the pictureless sets came the voice of General Gardy, speaking for the O.A.S. as Salan’s delegate. There followed an unhurried speech by Gardy, inciting the army to revolt and calling on both Europeans and Muslims to rise up and join the O.A.S. against the “Gaullist dictatorship”. The coup had been achieved by Degueldre’s Deltas blowing up the television cables and then using O.A.S.-recruited technicians to play a tape of Gardy’s speech over the transmitter. The broadcast had a powerful effect on the
pieds noirs
of Algiers, who persuaded themselves that it meant that the O.A.S. might be about to seize power. Crowds thronged the streets, and cars beat out on their horns the old familiar refrain of “
Al-gé-rie fran-çaise
”. On 21 September a second pirate transmission by Salan himself summoned the people of Algiers to join in a three-day demonstration to attest to their unity of thought and action behind the O.A.S. Two days later, for five solid hours thousands of
pieds noirs
, seemingly from every window and balcony in the city, hammered out the
Algérie française
rhythm on pots and pans. The din was deafening. Black-and-white O.A.S. banners fluttered from public buildings, or hung from cranes in the harbour — or were paraded quite openly throughout the city.

At about the same time the Deltas grabbed eighty million francs in a first daring raid in the port; Jean Morin and his staff moved out of Algiers to the new government complex at Rocher Noir, and General Ailleret (the new army commander replacing General Gambiez, humiliated during the putsch) to Reghaia. Although both moves had been scheduled many months previously, the timing now made it look as if Algiers had been abandoned to the O.A.S. It was a situation of which the O.A.S. was not tardy in taking advantage, proclaiming itself boss of whole areas of the city. Coupled with the apparent inability of the authorities to check the O.A.S., this new self-confidence in turn caused a pronounced rise in the morale of the
pieds noirs
, shaken as it had been by so many shocks and reverses since “Barricades Week” of January 1960.

How much support, then, could the O.A.S. count upon from the
pied noir
population at large? Harassed constantly by the French security forces, scattered and often out of communication with each other, continually wrangling among themselves, the O.A.S. would have been unlikely to have got off the ground — let alone have survived as long as it did — without the utmost civil co-operation. By and large the
pieds noirs
were led to believe and trust in the O.A.S. as an organisation protecting their interests, just as the F.L.N. had fought so successfully for Muslim interests over the past seven years. In their growing despair, and with principles distorted by the isolation in which they had so long existed, perfectly decent citizens turned to the O.A.S. to reverse the trend of history. Much as the German working classes had flocked to the Nazi party in the 1930s out of fear of the Bolshevik bogey, so the poor whites — the
petits blancs
— in particular now rallied strongly to the O.A.S.

Degueldre’s killers

By the autumn of 1961, it could be said that the O.A.S. had well and truly established itself, at least in the cities of Algiers and Oran. In September Degueldre’s Deltas killed fifteen and wounded 144, and the volume of their operations continued to increase — with apparent impunity. A car would slow down alongside a group of Muslims and promiscuously mow them down with machine-pistol fire; a Jewish and Socialist police inspector would be shot dead at the wheel of his car on his way home through the Tunnel des Facultés. Often there was a certain carelessness about the identity of the victims; for instance, two Deltas on a motor scooter shot down the Socialist Party’s secretary-general for Algiers, William Lévy,[
3
] then found that the
opération ponctuelle
had been scrubbed by O.A.S. headquarters a week earlier. Likewise, a man taken to be de Gaulle’s hated “listening post”, Colonel François Coulet, was “executed” — then it was revealed that the victim was just a small baker from the suburbs of Algiers. Grisly rumours (probably manufactured by the O.A.S.) circulated about young
pieds noirs
being bled to death in Muslim clinics to provide blood transfusions for wounded
fellaghas
; groups of whites would then take their own reprisals, cornering a passing Muslim motor-cyclist at random and setting him alight with petrol. Sometimes the
pieds noirs
’ patronal instincts would lead them into grotesquely contradictory acts; A.-P. Lentin, a
pied noir
journalist, tells of one Bab-el-Oued
bistrotier
who, at the beginning of a
ratonnade
, helped his own Muslim “boy” to escape to safety, and then “went to despatch a little street vendor fifty yards away”. Almost inevitably, it seemed, when the killings took place the
gendarmerie
would not arrive until it was all safely over, giving the populace a further assurance that they too were on the side of the O.A.S.

By the end of November Jouhaud in Oran was expressing disgust at the promiscuous killings, while Salan was increasingly aggravated by his lack of control over what was going on, or of any prior consultation on the acts of the Deltas. On 31 August he was surprised to read of the assassination of the Socialist mayor of Fort de l’Eau (another “third force” moderate, but condemned by Susini as “one of the most disquieting and the most contemptible personalities of Algeria, one of those old corrupters who had hoped to found their political fortune on the success of the rebellion”). The following week Salan was even more taken aback by the attempt in France to blow up de Gaulle at Pont-sur-Seine.[
4
] On 3 November the Muslim garage opposite Salan’s current hiding-place was blasted by an O.A.S.
strounga
, shattering the general’s window and covering him with fragments of glass. The “Mandarin” “remained passive about it”, says Ferrandi, but “asked me to inform him on the exact targets pursued by the
plastiqueurs
”. A few days later, as Degueldre stepped up his
opérations ponctuelles
another notch, Ferrandi noted: “It is difficult to know the feelings of Salan on this subject. He contents himself by showing astonishment not to have known until after the incident of each enterprise.” Then, on 10 November, the Muslim garage opposite was blown up a second time, once again smashing the general’s windows. This was too much for him and (according to Ferrandi), losing his temper, he declared: “The order must be given to stop at once this kind of stupidity.” After the killing of Lévy, Salan in anger wrote a personal letter to Guy Mollet disowning it, and blaming “extremist splinter groups”. Nevertheless, the bombing and killing went on, gathering momentum all the time.