Breaking the general strike
The first major clash of wills facing Massu and his men was the general strike which the F.L.N. had called for Monday, 28 January 1957. The principle of the strike followed as a direct consequence of the priority of externalising the conflict, determined at Soummam the previous September, but specifically, in its timing and duration, it seems to have been the brain-child of Ben M’hidi. It was to coincide with the opening of the United Nations session in New York and was to last eight days. The reason for this protracted effort was spelled out in instructions issued by the C.C.E. in January:
to demonstrate in the most decisive manner the total support of the whole Algerian people for the F.L.N., its unique representative. The object of this demonstration is to bestow an incontestable authority upon our delegates at the United Nations in order to convince those rare diplomats still hesitant or possessing illusions about France’s liberal policy.
Ramdane Abane crossed the ts by explaining that: “Even if we take risks, our struggle must become known. We could kill hundreds of colonialist soldiers without this ever being publicly announced.” The F.L.N. leaders felt that the combination of Yacef’s grip of terror on Algiers and the F.L.N.’s acquired influence among the trade unions as a whole — in the shape of the recently-formed U.G.T.A. (Union Général des Travailleurs Algériens) — made them strong enough to accept the risks involved, and over so prolonged a period as eight days. In fact, it was to turn out to be perhaps the F.L.N.’s gravest tactical error of the entire war. The challenge, had it been carried out to the full, would have been only a degree or two removed from a general insurrection, and as such it was one that no French government of the time could ignore. Thus Lacoste’s orders to Massu were to break the strike at all costs — and by any means.
By the evening of the 27th, Algiers was already a dead city. The next morning, Monday, the shutters of the Muslim shops remained down in their overwhelming majority; workers in the essential public services failed to turn up; schoolchildren stayed at home. Army helicopters scattered leaflets over the Casbah, and jeeps with loud-speakers roamed the streets, ordering the population back to work. At first the strike looked like being a total success. Then Massu showed his mettle, applying the full force of his division. Armoured cars arrived, attached hawsers to the closed steel shutters of the shops, and simply dragged them off their fixings. With some relish, Salan describes how the contents of the shops became exposed to the world: “oranges, bananas, honey cakes, jars of multi-coloured sweets.… Urchins playing in the street rushed forward, helped themselves, and took flight.…” Algerian sources accused the paras of joining in the pillage; whatever the truth, the unhappy shop-owners were, in any event, forced to emerge in order to protect their unguarded goods, and were then ordered to remain open under threat of imprisonment. Similar scenes took place over the rest of the country; in one provincial centre of the Mitidja, Colonel Antoine Argoud went so far as to fire a tank shell at point-blank range into a shuttered shop, wounding one of his own men but effectively cowing the strikers. At the same time, fleets of trucks were despatched round Algiers collecting strikers at their homes and physically hustling them off to work. Many of the strikers revealed themselves to be relatively lukewarm in the face of such brutal determination, as typified by one denizen of the Casbah who whispered to a para captain: “Call two gendarmes so that they can rough me up a bit, and I’ll open.” Meanwhile, many of Yacef’s militants who might otherwise have been out stiffening resistance had either already been swept up in Massu’s net, or else had their heads well down. The next day the “collection service” was repeated; this time bringing in the young Muslim truants from school. Godard claims that, whereas only seventy attended at the end of January, numbers had risen to 8,000 a fortnight later.
On the first day of the strike the postal and telegraph service reported seventy-one per cent of its Muslim personnel absent in the Algiers area, forty-one per cent in Oran and only twenty-eight per cent in Constantine; on the railways there was an almost total walkout in Algiers, fifty per cent in Oran and twenty-five per cent in Constantine. The next day, the figures had dwindled substantially and forty-eight hours after the beginning of the strike it had been effectively broken. In the opinion of Colonel Godard, Ben M’hidi had committed a cardinal error in endeavouring to keep the strike going so long; a short strike would have been hard to break, but eight days made it much more vulnerable. Unconvincingly, the F.L.N. tried to claim a victory; but even at the United Nations the strike seemed to make little impact. One American correspondent, Michael Clark (writing, admittedly, still during the war), considered that the collapse of the strike “may well have been a turning-point” in the war for the French. The main benefit for the F.L.N., however, was to be derived, unexpectedly and indirectly, rather from the methods used in breaking the strike than from anything achieved by it.
More bombings by Yacef
Two days before the strike was due to begin, Yacef launched a back-up operation with another wave of three bombings in the smart centre of Algiers. Once again his bomb-carriers were a team of girls, all the more valuable now that Massu’s men were rigorously searching every Muslim leaving the Casbah, and this time one of them, Danièle Minne, was a European, the step-daughter of a militant Communist. Using more powerful explosive, the bombs provided by Taleb were far more sophisticated affairs than those of the Milk-Bar, and were little larger than a packet of cigarettes. The targets were the Otomatic, a favourite students’ bar on the Rue Michelet; the Cafétéria opposite (second time over), and the nearby Coq-Hardi, a popular brasserie. It was a spring-like Saturday afternoon and all three were crowded. Placed in the ladies’ lavatory, Danièle Minne’s bomb in the Otomatic seriously injured a young girl and several others. Almost immediately another explosion ripped open the Cafétéria opposite. At the Coq-Hardi, diners rushing to the window to see where the bombs had gone off were scythed down by Djamila Bouazza’s bomb which, exploding under a cast-iron table, turned the metal and plate-glass into lethal fragments like those of a grenade, slashing through veins and arteries. Altogether the day left sixty wounded and five killed — including an innocent young Muslim mechanic lynched in the immediate pied noir backlash. Fifteen days later, a Sunday, bombs were exploded in two crowded Algiers stadiums, placed by girls of sixteen and seventeen: ten dead and forty-five injured.[8]
Bigeard strikes: the organigramme
Because of the growing stranglehold of Bigeard’s forces on the Casbah, however, such “acts of war” were becoming increasingly hard to mount and the net was closing in all the time. After the Coq-Hardi explosion a waiter stated categorically that it had been a young woman who sat at the shattered table, and he was able to give an accurate description of Djamila Bouazza. All women leaving the Casbah were now subjected to thorough searches; at first with cumbersome mine-detectors to pick out any weapons concealed under their voluminous robes, later with less chivalrous means. A patch of cloth found on the scene of one of the stadium bombs led to the arrest of the two young terrorists, Djouher Akhror and Baya Hocine. French efforts were concentrated particularly on breaking down Yacef’s bomb network and its odious end-products. In October it had already suffered a setback when Kouache, the expert who had helped to set up the bombs of Zohra Drif and her comrades, blew himself up at the Villa des Roses outside Algiers. After that, bomb fabrication had been concentrated in Taleb Abderrahmane’s workshop in the Casbah. But by the end of January, after three days of interrogation, a locksmith picked up by Bigeard’s men with bomb blueprints on him gave its address away. Forewarned, Yacef managed to evacuate its members and hide the evidence, so that a first para raid on 8 February fell on open air. A week later, however, Bigeard made his biggest catch to date; Yacef’s chief bomb transporter and the mason who had constructed the factories. From the two of them, made to talk under extreme pressure, No. 5 Impasse de la Grenade was pinpointed and the names of Mostefa Bouhired and his niece, Djamila, given away—as well as, to t
he shock of the French, that of a respected bachaga, whose house was reported to contain a substantial depot of bombs. Bigeard’s troops moved with their customary speed and ruthless-ness, sometimes landing by helicopter on the flat roofs of the Casbah houses to make their raids. The bomb factory in the Impasse de la Grenade was finally located, as was the bachaga’s hoard. On 19 February a jubilant Bigeard announced that his 3rd R.P.C. had seized eighty-seven bombs, seventy kilos of explosive, 5,120 fulminate of mercury detonators, 309 electric detonators, etc.; many of the bomb network were either identified or already under lock and key. Yacef’s organisation, which had taken eighteen months to construct, had all but fallen apart. Algiers began to breathe again.
Meanwhile, threads of intelligence gathered in the course of rounding up the bombers were leading back closer and closer to the really big fish. To Godard, “the man who places the bomb is but an arm that tomorrow will be replaced by another arm”. It was essential to get at the brain behind the arm. Under his supervision, a complex organigramme[9] began to take shape on a large blackboard, a kind of skeleton pyramid in which, as each fresh piece of information came from the interrogation centres, another name (and not always necessarily the right name) would be entered. Until the actual capture of Ben M’hidi the name at the summit of the pyramid remained blank. But Yacef had already been identified by numerous cross-references. On the opening day of the general strike he had changed hideouts no less than fifteen times; to blend more inconspicuously into the background he had even grabbed a milk churn to pretend, with total audacity, that he was one of the “good Arabs” refusing the F.L.N.’s order to stay at home. Frequently he took to circulating in the Casbah disguised as a fatma, a sub-machine-gun concealed under yards of linen, and nothing would budge him from his post. But the leaders of the C.C.E. in Algiers were beginning to take serious alarm. On 9 February the paras arrested Ali Boumendjel, a young F.L.N. lawyer highly valued by the leadership, and closely in touch with it. On hearing of his arrest, Ben M’hidi, dejected and increasingly aware of his error in committing the F.L.N. to the strike, and the suffering and torture that this had imposed on his followers, is said to have remarked: “We are about to lose the battle.”
On the 15th there took place an anguished meeting of the five members of the C.C.E. remaining in Algiers. Abane urged that they should get out of Algiers forthwith, or be trapped like rats and have secrets of the whole movement ground out of them. Seizing the analogy, Ben M’hidi countered that they would be more like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Finally it was reluctantly agreed that, after a space of ten days in which to reorganise the Algiers command set-up, the C.C.E. would depart for safer ground. Yacef was to assume full charge of the Algiers Z.A.A.; Ben M’hidi, always loath to leave the city, decided that, as a temporary compromise, he would move from the dangerous confines of the Casbah to an F.L.N. “safe house” in the Rue Claude-Debussy. On one of his last meetings with Yacef, he is quoted as having remarked: “I would like to die in battle. Before the end.”
The death of Ben M’hidi
Ben M’hidi effected his move at the worst possible moment. Acting on a tip provided by Trinquier’s network of informers, the paras were, so they thought, on the track of Ben Khedda, and on 25 February the clues led them to the Rue Claude-Debussy—where, to their surprise, they found Ben M’hidi in pyjamas. In news-shots of the time the captured thirty-four-year-old ex-comedian, who had once played minor parts on Algiers radio, shows a cheerful, brave and rather distinguished face, concealing any awareness of what lay ahead. Then, on 6 March, Lacoste’s Press officer announced that Ben M’hidi had “committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell with the help of strips torn from his shirt”.
The exact truth about Ben M’hidi’s death remains a mystery to this day. Lebjaoui, who knew him, and other Algerians insist that the devoutness of his faith ruled out any possibility of his taking his own life. Yves Courrière, generally well-informed on French undercover activities, declares categorically that M’hidi was not tortured, but that he was shot at dawn after being rendered full military honours. What seems to be fact is that Bigeard himself interrogated M’hidi after his capture; was told that the F.L.N. was bound to win eventually, but no other useful details; was impressed by the dignity and courage of the F.L.N. leader; treated him with the respect due to a captured enemy commander, and left him alive and unharmed. According to a F.L.N. spy in Algiers police headquarters, who reported to the C.C.E. on 4 March, Bigeard then “was unable to prevent Ben M’hidi being handed over to men of a ‘special section’ of the paratroops. These interrogated him on their own initiative, and killed him last night.” Admitting that M’hidi had had to be transferred to another prison, at Maison Carrée, for administrative reasons, Massu claims that he hanged himself with an electric flex that night but was “still breathing” when taken to the Maillot hospital, while two French medical officers who examined him stated officially that M’hidi was already dead before reaching the hospital, but that “our attention was not attracted by apparent marks of wounds”. Perhaps of all those involved, few would have been more likely to know the truth than the late Colonel Godard. In his memoirs he says, simply but revealingly, that, after first discussing M’hidi’s death with Massu the following morning: “Massu made no comment. In my heart of hearts, I believe that Ben M’hidi would not have committed suicide had he remained chez Bigeard.”
La torture
The death of Ben M’hidi left, alive and at liberty, only Belkacem Krim out of the original neuf historiques of the F.L.N. Like an unsightly molehill, it also threw up the whole ugly but hitherto largely subterranean issue of the maltreatment of rebel suspects, of torture and summary executions; or what, in another context and depending upon the point of view, might perhaps be termed “war crimes”, and what in France came simply to be known as la torture. From the Battle of Algiers onwards this was to become a growing canker for France, leaving behind a poison that would linger in the French system long after the war itself had ended. The resort to torture poses moral problems that are just as germane to the world today as they were to the period under consideration. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1958, “Torture is neither civilian nor military, nor is it specifically French: it is a plague infecting our whole era.” But what is immediately of importance here is the influence, or influences, brought to bear by it upon the subsequent course of the Algerian war. And these were very potent indeed. It is one of the most difficult things in this world to establish the truth about torture; whether it did or did not take place, and the nature and scale of it. The plaintiff is as unlikely to tell the unadorned truth as his oppressor; for it is so superlative a propaganda weapon given into his hands. All the writer can do is to state what was claimed and admitted on both sides. Here one is aided by the fact that, among others, General Massu has come forward in the aftermath of the war and declared, in his forthright way: “In answer to the question: ‘Was there really torture?’ I can only reply in the affirmative, although it was never either institutionalised or codified…. I am not frightened of the word.” There was, he claimed, no other option in the circumstances then prevailing in Algiers but to apply techniques of torture.
It is essential to be clear about what one means by the word of which Massu was “not frightened”. In a conventional war, so-called “war crimes” generally fall into two distinct categories; those committed in hot blood—prisoners despatched out of hand on the battlefield, shot-down bomber crews lynched by enraged civilians after an air-raid; and those perpetrated in cold blood—the concentration camps. Similarly, in an unconventional war like Northern Ireland or Algeria, there are the brutalities, the roughing-up, the passage à tabac that may be inflicted immediately following the arrest of a suspected terrorist; and there is the prolonged and systematic application of physical or psychological pain expressly aimed at making a suspect “talk”, which constitutes torture as opposed to brutality. Though the passage à tabac has long existed as a police institution in France, to n
o people has torture been more abhorrent, morally and philosophically, especially following their own hideous experiences from 1940 to 1944. As an instrument of state, torture was expressly abolished by the French Revolution (which never practised it) on 8 October 1789, but even well before this French humanist writers had decided that it was both inhuman and inefficient. Article 303 of the French Penal Code (aiming specifically at highwaymen who had an unpleasant habit of “warming up the feet” of their victims) actually imposed the death penalty upon anyone practising torture. Nevertheless, in Algeria there appear to have been at least isolated incidents of torture even before 1954, as both Ben Khedda and François Mitterrand assured the author, and the fact of it seems confirmed by the forceful interventions made by French authorities on various occasions. In 1949, for instance, Governor-General Naegelen in an official circular ordered: “strong-arm techniques must be absolutely prohibited as a method of investigation. I am determined to punish with the utmost severity not only those members of the public service found guilty of using violence but also their superiors.” In 1955 Mendès-France declared categorically that all “excesses” “must stop everywhere and at once”, and Soustelle during his stewardship issued strict instructions that “every offence against human dignity…be rigorously forbidden”, and in his memoirs he insists that any proven cases of brutality or summary executions “did not rest without punishment”.
A Savage War of Peace Page 28