CHAPTER NINE
The Battle of Algiers:
January–March 1957
A strong dilemma in a desperate case
To act with infamy or quit the place.
Jonathan Swift
Preliminaries
IN Algeria the year of 1957 was occupied by one of the most dramatic and best-publicised episodes in the entire war. The actual date of the first salvo in the Battle of Algiers is as arguable as who actually fired it, although the assumption of civil power in the city by General Massu’s paras presents a convenient one. As with the outbreak of any major confrontation it was preceded by a long chain of events, starting on 19 June the previous year. That day two members of the F.L.N., Zabane and Ferradj, who had been under sentence for many months, were guillotined in Barberousse prison after Lacoste — under heavy pressure from pied noir public opinion, and wanting to placate it so as to push through his own intended “bill of rights”, or loi-cadre — had refused clemency. In the appallingly over-crowded prison where conditions were already atrocious (“It is hell,” wrote Bitat, who was already imprisoned there, “men are beaten with iron bars, the heat is horrible and they are given salted water to drink.”), the immediacy of the executions — the sinister preparations, the defiant shouts of the condemned, the very audible thud of the blade — provoked most violent reactions, and these were amplified outside. To the Algerian mind such judicial executions were particularly shocking, and in this instance exacerbated by the fact that Ferradj was a cripple.[1]
Announcing that for every guillotined member of the F.L.N. a hundred French would be killed indiscriminately, Ramdane Abane ordered immediate reprisals. Saadi Yacef (who, on the arrest of Bitat, had taken over the Algiers network) was told to “kill any European between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four. But no women, no children, no old people.…” Between 21 and 24 June Yacef’s squads roaming Algiers shot down forty-nine civilians. It was the first time that Algiers had been hit by this kind of random terrorism, and the ineluctable escalation now began here. On 10 August an immense explosion rocked the Casbah. A house in the Rue de Thèbes had been blown up; reputedly it had housed F.L.N. terrorists involved in the June reprisals, but also destroyed with it were three neighbouring houses, and the Muslim death-roll ran to seventy, including women and children. At first it was alleged that a secret bomb factory had gone off by mistake, but soon pied noir counter-terrorist groups associated with Kovacs and Achiary were making no secret of their responsibility.[2] The F.L.N. claim that, up to this point, no bomb directed against human life, as opposed to property, had yet been detonated in Algiers. A month later, however, under Abane’s influence indiscriminate terrorism was espoused at the Soummam Conference, and orders were passed to Ben M’hidi, who had become the political leader of the Algiers Zone (Z.A.A.), and Yacef, his operational executive, to prepare for a major offensive.
Yacef was the twenty-nine-year-old son of a Casbah baker, seventh out of a family of fourteen, who had begun work for his father at the age of fourteen, a highly self-possessed young man with big, mocking brown eyes, a sensual mouth under a thick black moustache and immense confidence in himself. A keen footballer, he was daring and inventive. Arrested in France, he had managed to talk his way out of Barberousse by persuading the French gaolers of his willingness to act as double agent — to such effect that for some time he was regarded with distrust by his former colleagues. Knowing every inch of the tortuous alleys of the Casbah, so narrow that one can often jump from one roof-top to another, and where one square kilometre housed a teeming populace of 100,000 Muslims, he had persuaded Abane of the advantage of “purging” it of all doubtful elements and turning it into a fortress from which a campaign could be launched. With the aid of skilful masons Yacef had created a whole series of secret passages leading from one house to another, bomb factories, caches and virtually undiscoverable hiding-places concealed behind false walls.
By the end of 1956 Yacef had assembled in a meticulously organised hierarchy some 1,400 operators. These included a number of attractive and presentable young Muslim women. Chief among them were Hassiba Ben Bouali, Zohra Drif, Djamila Bouhired and Samia Lakhdari. All were of bourgeois background. Aged eighteen, Hassiba was the daughter of a former caid, and, having once wanted to become a nurse, she was currently employed in a welfare office. Djamila Bouhired, who appears to have been personally devoted to Yacef, acted as his chief procureuse of suitable girls. Samia Lakhdari and Zohra Drif were both law students at Algiers university and the daughters of respected cadis. Aged twenty-two, Zohra Drif recalled how, as a child during the Second World War, she had heard her parents explain that Hitler’s invasion of France was “God’s revenge on the Frenchmen for their treatment of the Muslims”. Already at the Lycée she had become aware of the Sétif massacres, and cites as her motive for joining “an essentially terrorist group” the fact that France had “consistently refused the least reform”. Increasingly oppressed by the curfew, searches and daily interruptions to Muslim life in Algiers, what had shocked her most violently had been the recent executions of Zabane and Ferradj in Barberousse, which she regarded “of all the horrors of war, the most atrocious”. Meanwhile, she noted angrily: “the European population, in its tranquil quarters … lived peacefully, went to the beach, to the cinema, to le dancing, and prepared for their holidays.…” She had studied Malraux’s La Condition Humaine and strongly disagreed with his pre-war ideal of the terrorist as an heroic, solitary individualist; instead, she exulted in the anonymous collectivity of the group, and as such was ideal material for Yacef.[3]
Yacef’s girls; the first bombs
On 30 September Zohra Drif, Djamila Bouhired and Samia Lakhdari, veiled, attended a meeting with Yacef in one of his Casbah hideouts. They were told that, the same afternoon, they were to place three bombs in the heart of European Algiers. They had been chosen for the job because, with their feminine allure and European looks, they could pass where a male terrorist could not. Noting the shock on their faces, Yacef treated them to a vivid description of the horrors of the Rue de Thèbes outrage, and told them that they were to avenge the Muslim children killed in it. Taking off their veils, the girls tinted their hair and put on the kind of bright, summery dresses and slacks that pied noir girls might wear for a day at the beach.[4] Each was given a small bomb of little more than a kilogramme prepared by Yacef’s bomb-maker, a twenty-four-year-old chemistry student called Taleb Abderrahmane operating from a secret laboratory established, appropriately enough, in the Casbah’s Impasse de la Grenade. The girls concealed the bombs, set to go off at one-minute intervals from 18.30 hours, inside their beach bags under a feminine miscellany of bikinis, towels and sun-oil. On leaving the Casbah Zohra Drif was stopped at a check-point by a Zouave who, after examining the forged identity card provided by Yacef, said with a leer: “I’d like to give you a real going over, but it’s not so easy here!”
To which she replied coquettishly: “That could be, perhaps, if you often come to Saint-Eugène beach.”
Her target was the Milk-Bar, on the corner of Place Bugeaud, across from Salan’s 10th Region headquarters. It was a particularly popular spot for pieds noirs on their way home from the beach, and on that Sunday it was filled with children and their mothers. Looking at the young faces sipping their milk shakes, Zohra Drif suffered a moment of revulsion at her task, but steeled herself by recalling Yacef’s account of the Rue de Thèbes, pushed her beach-bag under the table, paid, and left at exactly 18.20 hours. Meanwhile, Samia Lakhdari, accompanied by her mother, had made for the Cafétéria on the smart Rue Michelet, a favourite haunt of European students. Several young couples were dancing to a mambo blaring from the juke-box, and on the point of departure she had to decline an invitation to dance from a good-looking young pied noir.
When the two bombs went off a few minutes later the carnage was particularly appalling in the Milk-Bar, where the heavy glass covering the walls was shattered into lethal splinters. Altogether there were three
deaths and over fifty injured, including a dozen with amputated limbs, among them several children. Only Djamila Bouhired’s bomb, placed in the hall of the Air France terminus, failed to go off, due to a faulty timer. Pied noir reactions were expectedly violent, and those sympathetic to the F.L.N. cause were shocked by the callous placing of the bombs. Dr Pierre Chaulet, who was sheltering Ramdane Abane, expressed his disapproval but was told coldly: “I see hardly any difference between the girl who places a bomb in the Milk-Bar and the French aviator who bombards a mechta or who drops napalm on a zone interdite.”
Although the Ben Bella and Suez interludes provided a temporary distraction from what was happening in the city, by the last weeks of 1956 violence had reached an unprecedented crescendo. Yacef’s organisation, now effectively and deeply rooted, and with its morale boosted by France’s defeat at Suez, had both Muslim and European populations of Algiers in a grip of terror. Schools had remained closed in October; Europeans took to going out on the streets with automatics concealed on them, and when they saw a Muslim walking behind them on the pavement they would slow down to let him pass out of fear of an attack from behind. With the F.L.N. clearly winning more points in Algiers than out in the bled, Yacef, in agreement with his superior, Ben M’hidi, decided to exacerbate further the rift between the two communities by assassinating a prominent pied noir leader. The victim selected was seventy-four-year-old Amédée Froger, the “ultra” mayor of Boufarik and President of the Federation of Mayors of Algeria, a distinguished ancien combattant from the First World War and a figure of considerable power and influence; the assassin, Ali Amara, was better known as Ali la Pointe.
Mayor Froger assassinated by Ali la Pointe
Aged twenty-six, Ali la Pointe came of poor parents and had never been to school; instead, he had found his education in the underworld of the Casbah, selling combs and chewing-gum on the street, preyed upon as a pretty boy by pederast beggars, and joining up with gangs of shoe-shine boys reminiscent of Fagin’s urchins in Oliver Twist. On his chest he had tattooed “Go forward or die” (“Marche ou crève”), and on his foot “Shut up”, exhortations which he followed to the end. Growing up, he graduated to becoming a card-sharper and pimp, and was serving a two-year sentence for resisting arrest when the rebellion broke out in 1954. In Barberousse he was “got at” by F.L.N. militants, told that he was a “victim of colonialism”, and urged to join the cause. On being transferred to another prison he escaped and, returning to his old haunts, made contact with Yacef, who submitted him to the accepted test of shooting down a flic. Ali was slipped a pistol by a veiled women, but on firing it three times at the designated victim he discovered it was unloaded. Smashing it in the man’s face, he made his getaway and raged at Yacef for tricking him, but was mollified on realising that it was all part of an exacting initiation; and from that moment — with his unique knowledge of the Casbah, its petty crooks, tarts, dope-pedlars and thugs — he became Yacef’s most loyal and valuable lieutenant.
As Amédée Froger left his house on the Rue Michelet on the morning of 28 December, Ali was there waiting and killed the mayor with three shots at point-blank range.[5] The next day, a Saturday, the whole of pied noir Algiers turned out, seething with anger, for the funeral procession of the murdered leader. As a last straw, a bomb was exploded inside the cemetery which would have gone off in the midst of the cortège had it arrived on time. The crowd ran wild. Innocent Muslims (Yacef had made a point of ordering all his operatives off the streets that day) were dragged out of their cars and lynched; young thugs smashed in the heads of veiled women with iron bars. The ugly ratonnade continued all day, leaving four Muslim dead and fifty injured.
“Call in Massu.…”
Governor-General Lacoste’s patience was now at breaking-point, and after another series of assassinations he took a fateful decision. On 7 January he summoned to his office the newly-arrived Commander-in-Chief, General Salan, and the commander of the élite 10th Para Division who had recently led it back, frustrated, from Suez: General Jacques Massu. He explained to Massu that, since the 1,500 police in Algiers had proved unable both to prevent the F.L.N. outrages and to control the backlash of the pied noir mobs, he proposed reinforcing them with the 4,600 soldiers from Massu’s division. More than this, Massu was to be granted full responsibility for maintenance of order in the city. On a purely tactical level, Lacoste’s decision meant that, virtually for the first time in the two years of war, France was accepting the F.L.N.’s challenge, confronting it with total force and backed by the will to use it. The confrontation would have to end in a clear-cut defeat for one side or the other. But beyond this, the calling in of the paras was to signify far more than just a transient cession of power by the civil authorities to the military; for it was never fully to be restored for another five years. That good Socialist and democrat, Robert Lacoste, was in effect placing his signature on the death warrant of the Fourth Republic.
In his customary robust, military language, Massu reported to his chief-of-staff, Colonel Yves Godard, “I can tell you right away we’re going to have some heaps of emmerdements!” It was a masterly understatement, but Lacoste could hardly have chosen an officer better equipped for coping with a really disagreeable job. Everything about the stocky, vital figure that was to become one of the best known on the world’s screens and in the Press over the next few years bespoke toughness: the growling voice, the vigorous hair en brosse and the down-turned eyes that reminded one a little of his fierce First World War predecessor, General Charles (“The Butcher”) Mangin, the square, set jaw and the aggressive, all-dominant nose, and the rugged features that altogether looked as if they had been hewn, like a Swiss bear, from a block of wood. On meeting Massu for the first time one was a little surprised to find that he was not eight feet tall — in fact, rather less than medium height. His presence commanded, and he was, as he looked, every inch a fighting soldier — and a superb fighting soldier at that, of the ilk of the campaign-hardened veterans of the Grande Armée. After leaving St Cyr he had served before, during and after the Second World War with colonial units in the vastness of French West Africa. The capitulation of 1940 caught him on a “pacification” mission in mid-Sahara as a captain; he joined up with General Leclerc on his historic march from Lake Chad and was with his 2nd Armoured Division when it entered Paris. After the war he had pioneered one of the first para units, had gained experience in maintenance of civil order when called in to “pacify” striking French miners, and had done his time in Indo-China. In 1955, at the age of 47, he had been promoted general — although, as he noted proudly, his records had contained the adverse comment: “Magnificent warrior … but this is not necessarily the material for a general!” On the eve of Suez he had declared, without bravado, that the 10th Para Division (which he had formed) was prepared to accept “thirty to forty per cent” casualties, and in his memoirs he states that, with it, “I would have gone to the ends of the world. Its command has been my greatest pride!”
Massu’s pride in his profession, in the army itself, was quite single-minded and, a stern disciplinarian, he distrusted anything that was not of it. But if he lacked subtlety of thought, le bon Massu was also incapable of deviousness (his name itself denotes a heavy, blunt instrument). Although he had been a dedicated Gaullist since 1940 and (with one notable slip) was to remain outstandingly loyal right to the end, he abhorred all kinds of political involvement, in sharp contrast to his superior, Salan, as well as several of the para colonels under his command — notably Yves Godard, Massu’s éminence grise.[6]
Godard
None of the “Indo-China hands” had taken the lessons of politico-subversive warfare there more closely to heart than Godard. Only three years younger than his chief, Godard was in Poland when the Second World War broke out, training with the ski troops (he was a champion skier). Returning home, he was captured in the 1940 campaign and after two attempts to escape was sent once again to Poland, whence he finally succeeded in making his way to Paris
in March 1944. He then joined the maquis in Haute-Savoie. Back with the regular army, in 1948 he was given the newly formed 11th Shock, the “dirty tricks” battalion that was the joint child of the paras and the French secret intelligence organisation answerable directly to the prime minister, the S.D.E.C.E. (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-éspionnage). For the next five years he had commanded it, taking it to Indo-China where, in the disastrous year of 1954, he had been with a column attempting to relieve Dien Bien Phu from behind the lines in Laos. Appointed to be chief-of-staff to the 10th Para Division in 1956, he was praised by Massu in his memoirs as having been “a precious right arm”, though Massus added of his highly intellectual subordinate that, “reflective to the point of lacking spontaneity, he often had a tendency to miss the bus”. In the coming Battle of Algiers, however, Godard was determined to miss no buses and was to make himself the expert on the underground world of the city, in all its conspiratorial complexities.
Massu’s four para regiments began to move into Algiers the week after he had received his orders from Lacoste, with all the military precision of an army moving up to the front.[7] Under a system called quadrillage, Algiers was divided into squares, each one conforming to a regimental command, with the focal point of the Casbah allotted to Colonel Bigeard and his redoubtable 3rd R.P.C. They cordoned off the whole area with its teeming population, established check-points at all its exits and inaugurated a system of minute house-to-house searches. With the most recent humiliation of Suez grafted upon all the other motives that constituted for them a grim determination to prevail, the paras operated from the beginning with a swift ruthlessness that was to characterise the whole Battle of Algiers. On the eve of the takeover a major of Godard’s old unit, the 11th Shock, presented himself at Sûreté headquarters with an armed escort and demanded of the flabbergasted police officials that they hand over all their dossiers on F.L.N. suspects. After an unremitting twenty-four hours’ examination of the dossiers, lists of suspects for summary arrest were sent out to each regiment. A mass round-up then took place, accompanied by none of the judicial formalities of warrants or preferring of charges as required by cumbersome civil procedure, and with the suspects subjected to questionable methods of interrogation.
A Savage War of Peace Page 27