One such group five hundred strong was created, armed and uniformed in eastern Kabylia under a former M.T.L.D. municipal councillor called Bellounis. At first the F.L.N. reacted by slitting a few random throats. In Algiers, Soustelle’s psychological-warfare experts began to toy with the idea of using Bellounis’s dissident force as an “anti-guerrilla” along lines that had proved profitable in Indo-China. Then, with the summer of 1955, the ferocious Amirouche—in whose sector Bellounis had appeared—moved in, encircling Bellounis’s camp at Guenzet and attacking it by surprise. The internecine massacre lasted forty-eight hours, watched gleefully by neighbouring French troops without intervening. Only Bellounis and a handful of his five hundred men escaped alive. Bellounis now directed his footsteps towards the French. Amirouche’s operation did, however, signify the end of the M.N.A. challenge in Kabylia, and the beginning of its elimination as a serious rival to the F.L.N. throughout the country followed in the second half of 1956; an elimination that was to have meaningful echoes when, by the first Evian negotiations of 1961, Gaullist France toyed vainly with hopes of the all but extinct M.N.A. providing an interlocuteur valable alternative to the F.L.N.
After what the Parisian Press scathingly dismissed as this “settling of accounts between North Africans”, the F.L.N. concentrated its attentions on the Algerian Communist Party (P.C.A.). All Saints’ Day had placed the P.C.A. in an awkward predicament. Back in 1945 it had strongly condemned the Sétif uprising, and was actually reported to have taken part in the reprisals; in turn, it had been attacked by the rebels, who went so far as to seize the local party secretary and cut off his hands. The P.C.A. role at Sétif had never been forgotten. With Europeans comprising the large proportion of its membership (which was only 12,000), the P.C.A. tended to support the petits blancs rather than the Muslims, and, not without reason, Algerian nationalists had come to regard it as being tarred with the racist and anti-religious brush of Stalinism. It was closely associated with the French Communist Party and aligned to Moscow, where the acquisition of the soul of the French worker (who had only the most meagre natural sympathy for the Algerian, seen either as an immigrant worker threatening his own job, or as a rebel killing and mutilating working-class pieds noirs) clearly rated a higher priority than the national aspirations of a few million non-Communist Algerians. In November 1954 the P.C.F. had supported Mendès-France, offered lukewarm “solidarity” to the Algerian people, but condemned “individual acts” likely to play into the hands of the worst colonialists. When Mollet was to call for “special powers” to enable him to send conscripts to Algeria in 1956, the P.C.F. would again support the government, and as late as March 1956 it declared in words that could have come from almost any other French politician at the time: “We are for the existence and permanence of political, economic, and cultural bonds between France and Algeria…. Peace must be re-established in Algeria.…”
Meanwhile, however, in Algeria individual members of the P.C.A. had become restive at the party’s policy towards the rebellion. Feelers were put out to the F.L.N. about collaboration but were rebuffed on the grounds that the F.L.N. would accept members of the P.C.A. into its ranks, but only as individuals. In July 1955 the central committee of the P.C.A. decided to participate in the revolution, but under its own organisation. Stalemate. Then, in September, it found itself dissolved by the Gouvernement-Général. On 4 April 1956 a twenty-eight-year-old pied noir called Henri Maillot, who was a Communist and the son of a Communist, and who had been recalled to serve with the army as an officer cadet, left Miliana with a convoy of arms for Algiers, seventy-five miles to the north-east. Arriving in a wood just outside Algiers, Maillot dismissed the escort to get their breakfast, tied the driver of the arms truck to a tree, and drove off into the blue with a booty including over two hundred automatic weapons as well as a large quantity of grenades and ammunition. It was all too ridiculously easy. Two days later a body calling itself the Combattants de la Libération announced the setting up of a maquis rouge, which Maillot had now joined. On 5 June, in a previously unaffected region near Orléansville, militiamen under the command of a prominent “loyal” Muslim, the Bachaga Boualem, reported the presence of a new armed band. With surprising speed it was located, pinned down and wiped out. Among the dead picked up was Maillot, easily identified despite his hair and eyebrows having been bleached.
At about the same time, delicate negotiations were under way between the adroit Ben Khedda (for the F.L.N.) and P.C.A. representatives for a “takeover bid” of the party membership. In the course of them it was revealed that Maillot’s arsenal lay buried in a tomb at the Clos Salembier cemetery. Disinterred, the weapons were smuggled by truck to Palestro on the western fringes of Kabylia, where, a few weeks later, they were to help Ouamrane perpetrate the bloodiest reverse to date on the French army itself. By September 1956 the remaining survivors of the short-lived maquis rouge had been mopped up. Then, in November, the Algiers police, evidently acting on a tip-off, caught a militant European Communist called Fernand Yveton red-handed in the act of placing a bomb in a gasworks. Yveton was tried and, though adamantly denying that his bomb was intended to inflict human casualties, guillotined a few months later.
Both he and Maillot have since been enshrined as “Heroes of the Revolution” by the F.L.N., but at the time grave suspicions existed that the maquis rouge might have been betrayed to Boualem’s men by the F.L.N. itself. Such suspicions have never been either allayed or confirmed; while even the circumstances of Yveton’s arrest strike a curious note. Whatever the truth, the F.L.N. undoubtedly viewed the rival maquis rouge with ill-concealed hostility, and this liquidation marked in fact the end of the P.C.A. as a separate entity. On 1 July a communiqué attributed to the Combattants de la Libération announced their dissolution and integration within the F.L.N. At the same time the important trade union, the Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens (U.G.T.A.), now came completely under the control of the F.L.N. The Secretary-General of the P.C.A., Bachir Hadj Ali, withdrew in exile to Moscow where he spent the remainder of the war. P.C.A. members were, however, never fully trusted by the F.L.N., and were frequently detailed to undertake “suicide missions”. From this background — and the prolonged Soviet reluctance to send the F.L.N. effective arms support — stems the markedly cool relations between Algeria and the U.S.S.R. that were to continue beyond the end of the war itself.
Tirailleurs desert
The reduction of the M.N.A. and P.C.A. as political rivals and the swallowing of their members constituted major successes and milestones for the F.L.N. during this period of consolidation. With less coercion, other useful allies were also flowing in to join the rebellion of their own accord. Of growing concern to the French was the effect that the more sophisticated propaganda of the F.L.N. under Abane was having on the reliability of veteran Algerian units within the army. In his novel The Centurions Jean Lartéguy relates how, on killing a fellagha leader, Si Lahcen, French paras found in his pockets a médaille militaire and a mention in despatches from Indo-China. “There’s something wrong about this war,” one para officer remarks to another. There was indeed. At night on 9 February 1956 a platoon of the 46th Tirailleurs stationed near Tlemcen was called out on an alarm — to be mown down by one of their own number, a caporal-chef, who wounded six soldiers before running off with the attackers. Worse followed ten days later when fifty men of the 50th Tirailleurs defected under another caporal-chef, a returned veteran from Indo-China, in similar circumstances. A French lieutenant and ten men were killed and twenty wounded by the mutineers, who then cleaned out the company’s arms store of over a hundred weapons and joined the F.L.N. waiting ready with mules to haul off the booty. As Michael Clark of the New York Times remarks, “The fear of betrayal now stalked every native unit, casting its pall over European and Moslem alike.”
Non-Muslim recruits for the F.L.N.
Recruitment in Algeria was bringing in a growing number of non-Muslims. Among the intellectuals and doctors sympathetic
to the cause, one of the earliest committed to it was a young pied noir surgeon, son of a prominent trade unionist, called Pierre Chaulet. In May 1955 Chaulet carried out the first secret operation on a rebel wounded painfully in the knee and brought in by Ouamrane. He was Azedine, who later emerged as an important F.L.N. leader in the last stages of the war. To Abane, who the following year became an intimate friend of both Chaulet and his attractive wife, the doctor explained: “We are not coming to the aid of the F.L.N. We are Algerians like you. Our soil, our country, is Algeria. We shall defend it with you. We are of the F.L.N.”[3] The Chaulets were to afford immense assistance to the F.L.N. In addition to their succouring of F.L.N. wounded, Abane used their house as a kind of secret head-quarters, smuggling vital documents in and out in a cake box; some of the first F.L.N. tracts were printed on a duplicator set up there, and, with great audacity, the Chaulets smuggled Krim and Ouamrane back and forth in their Citroën 2 c.v. on their frequent trips between Algiers and Kabylia.
Another doctor to come over to the F.L.N., body and soul, at this time was the impassioned Martiniquais, Frantz Fanon. During the Second World War Fanon had joined the Free French, been wounded and decorated in the liberation of France, but then made the painful discovery that a black man was not treated as an equal in the French army. In 1956 he wrote a bitter letter to the governor-general, resigning his post at the Blida psychiatric clinic, and joined the underground. He became one of the revolution’s most articulate and extreme ideologues, and a violent exponent of anti-colonialism in any shape. He died of leukaemia in 1961, aged only thirty-six. Independent Algeria honoured his name with a university and a boulevard.
Among other intellectuals was André Mandouze, Professor of Literature at the University of Algiers, who formed around him an important sector of pro-F.L.N. sympathisers in the university. Mandouze had close contacts with Abane and Ben Khedda, attempting to create a bridge between them and the French government, and though he was never actually a member of the F.L.N., he was forced eventually to resign his post and return to France.
Yet another important group to be won over to the F.L.N., by an adroit combination of carrot and stick, came from the Jewish community of Algeria, notably its intellectuals. In August 1956 a group of Constantine Jews wrote a public letter, declaring that “One of the most pernicious manoeuvres of colonialism in Algeria was, and remains, the division between Jews and Muslims … the Jews have been in Algeria for over 2,000 years; they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people.…” The Jews were to provide invaluable services as “the eyes and ears of the revolution”, in the words of Frantz Fanon; often acting in the role of double agents against the French.
Abbas joins the F.L.N.
Undoubtedly the most important single acquisition to the F.L.N. during this period was the person of the arch-apostle of moderation, Ferhat Abbas himself. In the spring of 1955 Abbas had made a powerful speech at the small port of Djidjelli that had come as a shock to Soustelle. If there were any “outlaws” in Algeria today, declared Abbas, they were to be found within the “colonialist regime”: “They are the prefects, they are the mayors, they are the administrators of the communes mixtes.” He ended with the challenging words:
U.D.M.A. addresses itself to the French government to tell it the following: as long as you continue to proclaim that Algeria is French, we shall reply that, as for us, “Algeria is Arab!” If the French government changes its line, then it and ourselves will begin to proclaim the same truths: “Algeria is Algerian!”
It marked a long march from Abbas’s oft-quoted statement of 1936 — “I will not die for the Algerian nation, because it does not exist.” A few weeks later, Abbas had an “exploratory” meeting with Abane, Krim and Ouamrane in Algiers. With outright frankness, Abane told him: “The revolution has been unleashed, and it is the work of neither Messali, nor the U.D.M.A. All that is out of date. Your duty is to join the Front.” When Abbas asked Abane what precisely he should do, he was told: “Dissolve the U.D.M.A., and announce that you are going over to the Front.”
Lest there should be any wavering by Abbas, unmistakable pressure was applied on him in the form of the “execution” of his own nephew during the Philippeville massacres of August 1955 already described. Abbas now undertook a series of final attempts to put out a tentative hand to the French government, including a trip to France where he tried, through the French delegate to the United Nations, Senator Edmond Michelet, to see de Gaulle. It was in vain, and Abbas was generally to encounter a cold shoulder.
At a further meeting with Abane on his return to Algeria, Abbas was asked: “Well, is it peace?”
He replied: “No, it’s war.”
In an interview with the Tunisian paper, L’Action, during January 1956, Abbas stated in tones of grim disillusion:
My party and I have thrown our entire support into the cause defended by the National Liberation Front. My role, today, is to stand aside for the chiefs of the armed resistance. The methods that I have upheld for the last fifteen years—co-operation, discussion, persuasion—have shown themselves to be ineffective; this I recognise.…
In April he was in Switzerland negotiating with Ben Bella; a few days later in Cairo, declaring to the world by radio the dissolution of the U.D.M.A., and its incorporation within the F.L.N. That August, at the Soummam Conference, he was elected a member of the F.L.N.’s newly created governing body, the C.N.R.A. (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne).
Thus, by this time, the absorption or neutralisation of its principal political rivals, M.N.A., P.C.A. and U.D.M.A., had transformed the F.L.N. into a “mass movement” in the truest sense of the word.
Rifts within the F.L.N.: the Aurès
When Soustelle departed in early 1956 the total of F.L.N. “regulars” had already grown to between 15,000 and 20,000 from the few handfuls which had launched the revolution on All Saints’ Day 1954. They had killed 550 members of the security forces, gendarmes and soldiers included, while their own losses were reckoned at three thousand, of whom a number rated as “irregulars” killed in the course of the Philippeville uprisings. By the second anniversary of the war the F.L.N. could claim to have destroyed or stolen in rural Algeria (their figures, so a margin of exaggeration for propaganda purposes should be discounted):
906 farms
38,340 head of cattle or sheep
404 agricultural machines
4,432,000 vine roots
4,583 hectares of standing crops
283 schools.
During this period of overall success and political consolidation, on the debit side the gravest threats to the F.L.N. came from within. From a largely military point of view, the worst situation had arisen in Wilaya 1, the Aurès, the very cradle of the revolt in its earliest days. Its leader, Ben Boulaid, had been captured, it will be recalled, in February 1955. Nine months later he achieved a remarkable escape from the condemned cell in Constantine prison,[4] and on returning to the Aurès discovered that it had more or less reverted to its traditional state of parochial anarchy. Morale was very low, and his successor, Bachir Chihani, leader of the detachment that had ambushed the Monnerots, had aroused mounting opposition. Coming from the Nementchas, fifty miles away, he was regarded as a “foreigner”; he was accused of pederasty and other more savage excesses; and he appears to have made a series of grave tactical errors. The worst occurred at the end of September, when Chihani allowed his headquarters at Djeurf, deep in the most inaccessible wastes of the Nementchas, to be surrounded by French troops. Refusing to heed the urgings of his aides, Adjoul and Laghrour, to break out of the net, Chihani lost most of his escort and all his arms; and gravest of all, a large quantity of undestroyed documents, including directives from Ben Bella, that were to present the French Deuxième Bureau with its most valuable windfall to date. Chihani himself made a miraculous escape, having been buried for six days underground after the French had dynamited the entrance of the cave in which he was hiding, but his prestige had gone, and
Adjoul and Laghrour decided on his execution. After several attempts to avoid a trap, Chihani was cornered, formally sentenced and executed — followed subsequently by eight of his “young men”.
On the instructions of Adjoul, Chihani’s death was kept a strict secret, and it remains uncertain whether it took place before (as Adjoul claims) or after Ben Boulaid’s return. Whichever it was, the state of disintegration he found in the Aurès was extreme. Over the next few months he seems to have been partly successful in picking up the pieces. Then a French cloak-and-dagger field unit called the 11th Shock Regiment entered the scene. By carefully contriving what looked like a badly placed parachute drop, the 11th Shock floated down a booby-trapped radio close to Ben Boulaid’s headquarters. As it was the latest model available to the French army, the assumption was that curiosity would induce an important rebel leader to investigate. That leader proved to be Ben Boulaid, who was blown to pieces in the ensuing explosion, together with his chief aide and two djounoud. The date was 27 March 1956; a short time later Adjoul defected to the French. For another six months the fact of Ben Boulaid’s death appears to have been kept concealed even from the other F.L.N. leaders, a further testimony to the level of secrecy within the watertight compartments of the F.L.N. For the next two years the Aurès lapsed back substantially into fratricidal warfare, contributing little to the common cause.
A Savage War of Peace Page 20