A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  Serious as this was for the F.L.N., more intrinsic was the widening rift between Ben Bella in Cairo and the F.L.N. leaders of the “interior” — notably Abane. In the first instance the row was over the continued failure of the external delegation to provide the arms demanded by the “interior”. An angry exchange of correspondence in April 1956 culminated with this insulting ultimatum to Ben Bella: “If you cannot do anything for us outside, come back and die with us. Come and fight. Otherwise consider yourselves as traitors!” It was followed by the despatch of Dr Lamine Debaghine to Cairo with full powers to supervise the activities of the external delegation. Ben Bella, who had set himself up as something of a primus inter pares in Cairo, seethed with resentment and refused to accept Debaghine’s appointment. The differences were papered over temporarily, but beneath them also lay to some extent, dangerously latent, the mutual suspicions between Kabyles (Abane, Krim, Ouamrane) and Arabs (Ben Bella). Not a whisper of these dissensions, however, was to reach the world outside, either then or later.

  “Summit” at Soummam

  Already in the spring of 1956 Abane and the Algiers leaders had begun to contemplate the calling of a “summit” conference to iron out these internal differences and re-establish the basic unity of the revolution, and at the same time attempt to define its principles. The proposition was put by Ben M’hidi, then in Cairo on a liaison mission, to Ben Bella, who approved the idea and agreed that such a meeting should be held on Algerian soil. There were obvious emotive and propaganda reasons for this, but equally it cannot have escaped Abane’s astute political brain that the primacy of the “interior” over the “exterior” would thereby become incontestable. The risk and sheer logistics, however, of holding such a “summit” under the very noses of the French were more than daunting. After thorough reconnaissance, choice was made of a simple forester’s cottage set in idyllic but wild country of mountains and chestnut forests at Igbal, above where the Soummam valley marks the boundary between Greater and Lesser Kabylia; the date, 20 August. A hint that something was afoot seems to have reached the Deuxième Bureau, for in July there was a sharp increase of military operations in the designated area; Ouamrane himself was slightly wounded and narrowly escaped being taken in a French ambush. So, to protect the “summit”, Amirouche (in whose sector it lay) concentrated several hundred men and a skilful feint was mounted to draw off security forces to another part of Kabylia.

  Meanwhile, Ben Bella and his colleagues were instructed to go to San Remo in Italy and await a boat which would smuggle them into Algeria. For three weeks they sat on the Italian Riviera, kicking their heels impatiently. Various messages arrived from Abane, postponing their voyage on the grounds that French operations made it too dangerous. Finally, they received word to go to Tripoli, whence they would be “escorted” overland to the “summit”. There they heard the astonishing news that the Soummam Conference had been held without them and was already over. Abane had played and won a major trick.

  When the conference opened, sixteen delegates were present with the Kabyles and the Constantinois the most strongly represented. Kabylia itself sent Krim, Mohamedi Said, Amirouche and Kaci. Krim (who, following the arrest of Bitat and the break-up of his organisation, had been sent with Ouamrane to run Algiers and the neighbouring Algérois region) was doubling up as chief representative for Algiers, and Ouamrane for the Algérois. From Constantine came Zighout, the Wilaya 2 boss, his deputy, Ben Tobbal, and five others. From the stagnant Wilaya 5 of Oranie came Ben M’Hidi alone, who was also called upon to deputise for the “externals” in absentia, as being the delegate to have been most recently in contact with their views. The first session was presided over by Ben M’hidi, with Abane as secretary, but from the beginning it was clear that the initiative lay with Abane — and with the “interior” rather than the “exterior” — and, secondarily, with the Kabyles as opposed to the Arabs. Immediately, despite the absence of the “externals”, there was dissent and mutual recrimination. Ben M’hidi criticised “uselessly bloody operations” that made a bad impression on public opinion, citing Zighout’s massacre at El-Halia of exactly one year previously and a new excess by Amirouche where perhaps over a thousand dissident Muslims had been “liquidated” in a village near Bougie. (Krim, though he severely castigated his subordinate, Amirouche, in private, defended him in public at Soummam.)

  As the conference progressed, bitter under-currents flowed around the personality of Abane himself. Some delegates thought him well-suited to assume the supreme leadership of the revolution, others insisted on adherence to the 1954 principle of collective leadership. Ben Tobbal made no secret of his personal antipathy to Abane; Krim, the veteran maquisard, was resentful of the way in which Abane, the politician, seemed to be acquiring more and more power; Zighout warned pointedly of the disastrous consequences that a “cult of the personality” had had for Algerian nationalism in the shape of El-Zaim, “the one and only” Messali Hadj; while Amirouche went so far as to suggest to Krim that Abane should be “despatched” before it was too late.

  Soummam was, however, very much Abane’s conference, and after twenty days of heated debates the lapidary conclusions which it reached strongly bore the imprint of his authority. On his urging, rigid military and political hierarchies were established with the express aim of avoiding the excesses and schisms of the past. Within the military command, ranks were ordained from private, or djoundi, to colonel (so as not to foster in any way the “cult of the personality”, there would deliberately be no generals); units were defined from a faoudj, or section, of eleven men to a failck, or battalion, of 350 men (though, in practice this was to prove unwieldy, and operationally the biggest unit was most commonly the 110-strong katiba, or company). The six Wilayas, themselves subdivided into zones (mintakas), regions and sectors, were henceforth to be closely co-ordinated and controlled by a new supreme body, the C.C.E. or Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution. This would replace the loose, old boys’ structure of the original C.R.U.A., or “Committee of the Nine”, and it was designed to pre-empt situations where the Wilayas existed in a state of autonomy and out of contact with each other for months at a time. Another institution created at Soummam (and closely modelled on the French wartime Resistance) was the Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne (C.N.R.A.), a kind of sovereign parliament composed of thirty-four elected delegates from all parts of the country, to be convened at regular intervals. To the all-powerful C.C.E., presiding in Algiers, were elected three members, Abane, Krim and Ben M’hidi, to whom another two “outsiders” acquired from the M.N.A., Ben Khedda and Saad Dahlab, were subsequently co-opted.

  Triumph for Abane

  The imposing document, forty pages long, that emerged after the twenty-day conference declared categorically the sole legitimacy of the C.N.R.A. in the nation; it alone had the right to make engagements concerning national sovereignty, such as ordering a cease-fire. Two important principles were established, both of them triumphs for Abane; first, the primacy of the political over the military; secondly, the primacy of the “forces of the interior” (i.e. the newly constituted C.C.E.) over the “exterior”. On the other hand, as a sop to the anti-Abane lobby, the doctrine of collective leadership at all levels was emphatically reaffirmed. The Soummam platform was vastly ambitious, embracing almost every aspect remotely concerned with the revolution: relations with the P.C.A. and the Jewish minorities, the role of women and youth, of the peasants and trade unions, and social reforms to be enacted following independence. But its most remarkable feature was the terms it laid down for peace negotiations with France. Inter alia, there was to be no cease-fire before recognition of independence, and negotiation only on the basis of the existing Algerian territory (i.e. including the Sahara) and of no double citizenship privileges for the pieds noirs. Uncompromising and unrealistic as these terms may have seemed in the autumn of 1956, the F.L.N. negotiators were to stick to them, without amendment or modification, all the way through to the final act, thereb
y deriving an inestimable advantage over successive French governments, unable to define their war aims and negotiating from premises built on constantly shifting sands.

  Still waiting in Tripoli for the invitation that never came, Ben Bella angrily received the edited “platform” as a fait accompli. In Algeria the consequences of Soummam were soon perceptible; returning in 1957, Germaine Tillion noted that the single most striking new factor was “the structuring of the politically clandestine organisations that had been achieved in one year”. Certainly morale rose immeasurably, and a great wave of optimism pulsed through the revolution; for, as Abane pointed out, possibly the most outstanding achievement had been the mere fact of holding “for twenty days the Soummam Conference, in the heart of a Kabylia cross-gridded [quadrillé] and supposedly pacified by the French armed forces”.

  At the same time, however, over the short term the military analysis derived at Soummam was to lead the F.L.N. into its worst strategical error of the war, and to a very nearly catastrophic defeat: the Battle of Algiers.

  [1] By way of “keeping up with the Joneses”, shortly after the F.L.N. had launched the revolution, Messali had reshaped his M.T.L.D. into the tougher sounding Mouvement Nationaliste Algérien, or M.N.A.

  [2] Subsequent history might have led him to add: in Vietnam also.

  [3] Dr Chaulet, his cover “blown”, was forced to flee to Tunisia in 1958 where he spent the rest of the war administering to the Algerian wounded and working for El Moudjahid. After 1962 he and his wife were among the few pieds noirs to remain and assume Algerian nationality.

  [4] This was so remarkable that pied noir “ultras” later suggested that Soustelle’s “liberal” adviser, Commandant Monteil, who had interviewed Ben Boulaid while in prison, might have had a hand in it; in fact, however, Monteil had already left the country.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Second Fronts of Guy Mollet:

  February–December 1956

  I saw the problem durement, but could see no solution.… They did not see it durement, but saw every conceivable solution.

  Robert Lacoste to the author, 1974

  Mollet visits Algiers

  1956, crammed with events of far-reaching import, was the year of Eden and Mollet, of Khrushchev and the Twentieth Party Congress; of Budapest and Suez. It was the year that Chancellor Macmillan shocked an inflationary Britain by imposing the highest bank rate in a generation — all of 5½ per cent; and it was the last year that France and Britain would be able to strut the world stage wearing morality play masks as “Great Powers”. If it was a watershed for the world as a whole, it was also a crucial year for Algeria. Here the year opened with two manifestations of hysteria, and closed with two far greater ones.

  Barely had Algiers got over the intoxication of its adieu to Jacques Soustelle than it had to prepare, in a very different mood, to receive Guy Mollet, France’s new Socialist prime minister and the first to visit Algeria since the centenary celebrations of 1930. The date chosen, 6 February, had unfortunate associations in recent French history: on that day twenty-two years previously, bloody confrontations between Left and Right on the Paris streets had looked almost like a prologue to civil war. Sensing that Mollet’s visit might unleash similar passions, the liberal mayor of Algiers, Jacques Chevallier, and others urged him to reconsider. Mollet, seldom lacking courage, stoutly refused. Much of the pied noir wrath generated by his visit was directed against the unpopular appointment of General Catroux, whom it was generally assumed Mollet would be bringing with him in his baggage to install as Soustelle’s successor. Catroux, at seventy-nine, haggard and weighed down with medals, was of an age hardly likely to recommend him for so arduous an office to the machismo-conscious pieds noirs. Moreover, in their eyes he was also the man who, as wartime high commissioner, had lifted the lid of Pandora’s box by his proposed reforms; had then sold out France in Syria and, more recently, in Morocco. He was the quintessence of a bradeur (literally, a “seller-out”, or capitulator), and the mere thought of his name was as a red rag to a bull in excitable Algiers. It had not been reassured even by a resolute statement by Catroux to Le Monde guaranteeing that the new government “does not under any circumstances intend to turn the country into a national state, inevitably marked for independence. Nor can there be any question of reducing the French to minority status.…” Wild talk began to ferment in Algiers about a possible putsch to seize Mollet.

  The “ultras” prepare a hot reception

  In all this atmosphere of fever various organisations crystallised and personalities emerged among the pied noir “ultras” which were to play a persistent and decisive role on the Algiers stage over the coming six years. Well to the fore, and grouped together under a comité d’entente, were the anciens combattants; suddenly every other able-bodied male in Algiers appeared to have been a veteran of the Second World War, loudly reminding the mother country (not unlike Ian Smith’s Rhodesians at the time of U.D.I.) of the debt she owed her colonial sons. Next there was the Association des Élus[1] d’Algérie, headed by ultra-conservatives like Laquière, Amédée Froger, and Sérigny of the Écho d’Alger. Among the more virulent formations was L’Action of Jo Ortiz, and the Union Française Nord-Africaine (or U.F.N.A.) founded by Robert Martel. Ortiz was a restaurateur owning the Bar du Forum, a stone’s throw from the Gouvernement-Général and a leading disciple of Poujade in Algiers, a loud-mouthed demagogue with several hundred toughs at his behest who believed (especially since the pro-Soustelle demonstrations of 2 February, in which he had been a prime mover) in the power of the street. Ortiz held the black and white view that there were only two kinds of French in Algeria: “those attached to the soil … and the ‘Communists’; that’s to say all those who want to negotiate with the Arabs.…” Robert Martel was a young farmer from the Mitidja, representing the petits blancs who had begun to feel painfully exposed to F.L.N. terrorism there.

  Then there were recently formed counter-terrorist groups, among whom the names of René Kovacs, Philippe Castille and André Achiary figure. Achiary, a dedicated right-wing Gaullist from earliest days, had been an intelligence chief in Algiers during the war and had helped ease the way for de Gaulle’s arrival there. A close associate of Achiary’s from those days was a boundlessly energetic Corsican practising law in Paris, Maître Jean-Baptiste Biaggi. Wounded in the stomach in 1940, Biaggi had survived to found a commando in the Resistance; arrested, he had managed to saw out a plank on the train taking him to Buchenwald and escaped together with thirty-nine compatriots. Another devout Gaullist of the Right, with a considerable following among former Resistance members, he was a born revolutionary with a Corsican’s instinct for passionate crowd oratory. Sought out by Achiary in Paris, he descended on Algiers like a tornado, assuming the lead in stirring up the anciens combattants, to whom he remarked: “We must raise the temperature and bring down the regime. The Fifth Republic must arise from the street like its most illustrious predecessors. The Fourth has had it.…” Biaggi was strongly influenced by what he saw in Algiers and returned to France to announce, with prescience: “The catalyst [force vive] is to be found on the other side of the Mediterranean.…”

  Although differing degrees of violence were advocated by these various pied noir factions in Algiers, all basically agreed on one thing: a “second front” should be opened, both against F.L.N. terrorism and the government in Paris, and now. Martel was all for seizing the Palais d’Été and holding Mollet hostage; while other hotheads went so far as to suggest that Catroux should be assassinated like his wartime forerunner, Admiral Darlan. One ancien combattant urged that they should all go and throw their decorations in disgust at the foot of the monument aux morts, and finally a proposal by Ortiz was adopted that a massive protest demonstration should convene around the monument when Mollet came to lay the traditional wreath. Thus this sombre example of necrological architecture so dear to French hearts was to become ritualistically the focal centre of all pied noir protest henceforth. On 5 February a
grim-faced procession of 20,000 anciens combattants, headed by the legless on crutches arm-in-arm with the blind in dark glasses, marched in silence through Algiers, their black-trimmed banners sodden by a glacial rain. For the following day a general strike was proclaimed.

  In anticipation of trouble, Paris despatched a dozen extra companies of Compagnies Républicaines de Securité (in itself an additional irritant to the “ultras”) and backed them up, for the first time, with paras commanded by a tough, newly-arrived general called Jacques Massu. Mollet arrived at Maison-Blanche airport without Catroux; which was well advised, for otherwise serious violence might have been provoked as some of Martel’s demonstrators from the Mitidja appear to have come in heavily armed. It was a day of penetrating cold, and the reception was more frigid even than that accorded Soustelle just a year previously. Only the barest minimum of pied noir officials had turned out at the airport to greet Mollet; the road into the city was empty of all but C.R.S. and vigilant troops; Algiers itself was a silent, dead city with an occasional sign pinned to shuttered shop-windows: “Closed on account of mourning.” In the European quarters the strike had been totally effective. Arriving at the Forum, Mollet found it surrounded by a vast sea of hostile pieds noirs. As he climbed up the steep steps to deposit his wreath solemnly on the monument aux morts, the chanting started:

  “Throw Catroux into the sea!”

  “Mollet, resign!”

  “Mollet to the stake!”

  Then followed the clods of earth and volleys of tomatoes supplied by the obliging restaurateur, Jo Ortiz. The impassioned mob, carried away by its own fury, broke through the C.R.S. cordon and was repelled by savage flailing of batons followed by tear gas; and correspondents present reckoned that, had it not been for the security reinforcements present, the day might well have ended with the lynching of the prime minister of France. Minutes after his departure the mob burst through the barriers to trample to pieces Mollet’s wreath.