A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  Institutionalise torture?

  In March 1955, however, even more suggestive evidence came in a highly controversial proposal made in the Wuillaume Report by a senior civil servant quite unconnected with the police. Wuillaume opined that, like the legalising of a rampant black market, torture should be institutionalised because it had become so prevalent, as well as proving effective in neutralising many dangerous terrorists. From his researches, Wuillaume recommended:

  The water and electricity methods, provided they are carefully used, are said to produce a shock which is more psychological than physical and therefore do not constitute excessive cruelty…. According to certain medical opinion which I was given, the water-pipe method, if used as outlined above, involves no risk to the health of the victim. This is not the case with the electrical method which does involve some danger to anyone whose heart is in any way affected…. I am inclined to think that these procedures can be accepted and that, if used in the controlled manner described to me, they are no more brutal than deprivation of food, drink, and tobacco, which has always been accepted….

  It was a view that would not necessarily be shared by Algerians subjected to the gégène or having had their bellies pumped full of water during the Battle of Algiers. Noting how police morale had been affected by the “pillorying” of “such excesses as have taken place”, Wuillaume concluded: “There is only one way of restoring the confidence and drive of the police—to recognise certain procedures and to cover them with authority.”

  Although Soustelle “categorically refused” to accept the Wuillaume conclusions, they may well have taken root already in Algeria. Citing a letter from a soldier written well before the Battle of Algiers, Pierre-Henri Simon recounts how the writer had been invited by gendarmes to attend the torture of two Arabs arrested the previous night:

  The first of the tortures consisted of suspending the two men completely naked by their feet, their hands bound behind their backs, and plunging their heads for a long time into a bucket of water to make them talk. The second torture consisted of suspending them, their hands and feet tied behind their backs, this time with their head upwards. Underneath them was placed a trestle, and they were made to swing, by fist blows, in such a fashion that their sexual parts rubbed against the very sharp pointed bar of the trestle. The only comment made by the men, turning towards the soldiers present: “I am ashamed to find myself stark naked in front of you.”

  But the fact that in the army torture was by no means institutionalised yet seems to be implicit in Servan-Schreiber’s Lieutenant en Algérie (1957), which, highly critical as it is of French army excesses, omits any specific reference to torture as such. By way of explaining the essential atmosphere in which torture could become institutionalised within the French army in Algeria, one needs to take into account all those factors touched upon in the previous chapters: horror at the atrocities of the F.L.N., a determination not to lose yet another campaign, and the generally brutalising effect of so cruel and protracted a war. Noting the growing indifference to the “enemy” as a human being, such a tough para commander as Colonel François Coulet himself admits that the army had come to regard a prisoner as “no longer an Arab peasant” but simply “a source of intelligence”.

  Interrogation techniques

  “Intelligence”, said Godard, “is capital.” Massu’s system of quadrillage and the rifling of the police dossiers was augmented by the work of a new body called the Dispositif de Protection Urbaine (D.P.U.). Created by order of Lacoste and placed under the control of that Indo-China expert on subversive warfare, Colonel Roger Trinquier, in its operation the D.P.U. carried with it sinister undertones that also could not help but recall French experiences under the Third Reich. It divided the city up into sectors, sub-sectors, blocks and buildings, each bearing a number or letter (even today the hieroglyphs can still be found painted on the fronts of houses in the Casbah). To each block was nominated a responsable, generally a Muslim ancien combattant considered trustworthy, and to this block-warden fell the duty of reporting all suspicious activities occurring within his territory. In the short term the D.P.U.—which Trinquier describes as forming “a flexible bond bond between the authorities and the populace”—undeniably produced results. It was through its information that Ben M’hidi had been caught, and, according to Trinquier, it meant that “no Muslim was able to enter the European quarters without being reported”. But in the long run it was to place the “loyal” Muslim block-wardens in a thoroughly invidious position, often resulting either in their assassination or in the end of their loyalty to France.

  The numbers of Muslim suspects passing through the hands of the paras as a result of the D.P.U. and the other forms of intelligence collection ran into enormous figures, with Edward Behr reckoning that between thirty and forty per cent of the entire male population of the Casbah were arrested at some point or other during the course of the Battle of Algiers. The suspects were generally, as a matter of principle, arrested at night so that any colleagues they named under interrogation could be grabbed before the lifting of the curfew, and before they would have a chance of being warned and disappearing. A directive marked “Secret” and signed by Massu (dated 4 April 1957) ordered that: “The most absolute secrecy must be ensured on anything concerning the number, identity and the nature of suspects arrested. In particular, no mention of whatever kind is to be made to any representative of the Press.” This was designed as much to confuse the public as to what was going on as it was to heighten terror among the suspect’s entourage at the uncertainty of his fate. He would then be handed over to a Détachement Opérationnel de Protection (D.O.P.) which Massu describes as being “specialists in the interrogation of suspects who wanted to say nothing”, and would then either be released or passed on to a centre d’hébergement, where he might be hauled out for further and protracted interrogation.

  At first his D.O.P. interrogators would attempt to trap him into admissions by displaying omniscient knowledge about the personalities and workings of his group. Often he would be confronted with a boukkara or cagoulard, a Muslim with his head covered in a sack with eye-slits who had broken under interrogation and was now acting as an informer—a particular horror for the Algerians. Then, says Trinquier:

  If the suspect makes no difficulty about giving the information required, the interrogation will be over quickly, otherwise specialists must use all means available to drag his secret out of him. Like a soldier he must then face suffering and perhaps even death which he has so far avoided.

  And this is what happened. Because of the numbers of suspects involved, the D.O.P. “experts” often had to rely on outside help; “in certain cases”, admits Massu, “each of the regimental interrogation teams of the 10th Paratroop Division was obliged to have recourse to violence”. It was at this point, one might say, that torture became institutionalised in the army in Algeria.

  “Little electrodes….”

  The most favoured method of torture was the gégène, an army signals magneto from which electrodes could be fastened to various parts of the human body—notably the penis. It was simple and left no traces. Massu states that he, as well as other members of his staff, tried it out on himself in his own office; what he failed, however, to note in his “experiment” was the cumulative effect of prolonged application of the gégène, as well as of all deprivation of the element of hope—the essential concomitant of any torture. Robert Lacoste also belittles the gégène; it was, he claims, “nothing serious. Just connecting little electrodes. And Massu’s paras were, after all, des garçons très sportifs!” But what the gégène was really like is vividly described by Henri Alleg (among many others) in his book The Question, which caused an uproar in France in 1958 when it first revealed the systematisation of torture in Algeria. Alleg, a European Jew whose family had settled in Algeria during the Second World War, was the Communist editor of the Alger Républicain and had been held under interrogation by the paras for a whole month in the summer o
f 1957. Of his first subjection to the gégène, with electrodes attached merely to his ear and finger, he says: “A flash of lightning exploded next to my ear and I felt my heart racing in my breast.” The second time a large magneto was used: “Instead of the sharp and rapid spasms that seemed to tear my body in two, it was now a greater pain that took possession of all my muscles and tightened them in longer spasms.” Next the electrodes were placed in his mouth: “my jaws were soldered to the electrode by the current, and it was impossible for me to unlock my teeth, no matter what effort I made. My eyes, under their spasmed lids, were crossed with images of fire, and geometric luminous patterns flashed in front of them.” He was left with an intolerable thirst, which his torturers refused to assuage.

  Then there were the various forms of water torture: heads thrust repeatedly into water troughs until the victim was half-drowned; bellies and lungs filled with cold water from a hose placed in the mouth, with the nose stopped up. “I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments,” says Alleg; “I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. ‘That’s it! He’s going to talk,’ said a voice.” And there were the instances (perhaps less common than publicity made them seem at the time) of the tortures still more degrading of human dignity: bottles thrust into the vaginas of young Muslim women; high pressure hoses inserted in the rectum, sometimes causing permanent damage through internal lesions.

  The torturers tortured

  Almost as painful as the torture inflicted on oneself was the awareness of the suffering of others nearby: “I don’t believe that there was a single prisoner who did not, like myself, cry from hatred and humiliation on hearing the screams of the tortured for the first time,” says Alleg, and he records the horror of the elderly Muslim hoping to appease his tormentors: “Between the terrible cries which the torture forced out of him, he said, exhausted: ‘Vive la France! Vive la France!”’

  But the humiliation was double-sided; as many other nations have discovered, torture ends by corrupting the torturer as much as it breaks the victim. The centre de tri where he was held had, says Alleg, become “a school of perversion for young Frenchmen”, and his view is shared by paratrooper Pierre Leulliette of the 2nd R.P.C. who was forced, unwillingly, to take part in the torturing. Initially, says Leulliette, the paras “tackled these methods, rather new to them, first with reluctance, and then whole-heartedly”. Based in an unused sweet factory, he recalls one big Alsatian sergeant who seemed particularly to relish his work: “With his fist, which could have strangled an ox, he would plunge in the heads of his clients, who were often choking with apprehension long before they touched the water…. He would have liked to interrogate Europeans; but they were rare….” Reactions among the paras varied: “Those who flaunted their vices embroidered on it at leisure, and found it all quite normal; the ‘humanists’ thought they should merely be shot. Very few seemed to realise that there might have been some innocent men among them.” Leulliette himself became deeply oppressed by what was going on round him in the sweet factory: “All day, through the floor-boards, we heard their hoarse cries, like those of animals being slowly put to death. Sometimes I think I can still hear them…. All these men disappeared….” Gradually, “I felt myself becoming contaminated. What was more serious, I felt that the horror of all these crimes, our everyday battle, was losing force daily in my mind.” Going on a month’s leave to Paris was like a deep breath of fresh air, and sufficient “to make me forget the suffering throughout poor Algeria. I felt ashamed. Ashamed of having been so happy.”

  “All these men disappeared….”

  On seeing Alleg in person at the Palais de Justice in 1970, Massu comments drily on his “reassuring dynamism”, and questions, “Do the torments which he suffered count for much alongside the cutting off of the nose or of the lips, when it was not the penis, which had become the ritual present of the fellaghas to their recalcitrant ‘brothers’? Everyone knows that these bodily appendages don’t grow again!” But, once taken away, nor does life itself “grow again”, and Massu does not mention those who did not survive arrest during the Battle of Algiers. “All these men disappeared,” says Leulliette, and he admits later of having “to bury one of the suspects, who had died at their hands, in the quicklime at the bottom of the garden. There were others….” During the Battle of Algiers, disposal of the “inconvenient”, of those who died under torture, or who refused adamantly to talk, apparently became prevalent enough to gain the slang expression “work in the woods”. Courrière writes of bodies dropped out in the sea by helicopter, and of a mass grave between Koléa and Zéralda, some thirty kilometres from Algiers (though no such grave has apparently been uncovered subsequently by the Algerian government); Vidal-Naquet cites the killing by suffocation in March 1957 of forty-one out of 101 detainees locked up in wine-cellars in Oran;[10] Lebjaoui lists the names of a series of men to whose families either Salan or Massu stated that they had been released, but who, Lebjaoui claims, were never seen again. The number of such “disappearances” may never be verified; the distinguished secretary-general at the Algiers prefecture, Paul Teitgen, put it at just over 3,000. Though Godard disputes it vigorously and arithmetically, this was to become the figure generally accepted by the opponents of para excesses during the Battle of Algiers.

  There was, inevitably, a mass covering-up within the army. As “Major Marcus” in Servan-Schreiber’s Lieutenant en Algérie remarks: “The captains and the mayors lie to the generals and the prefects…when a saloperie is committed in my regiment by some of my men on an operation, do you think I ever hear about it? No. It’s covered up ‘between pals’.” The cases which did, however, lift the lid to public gaze were those concerning well-known, or at least identifiable, figures. There was the ill-explained death of Ben M’hidi, and later there was the detailed account of his own tortures by Henri Alleg. Meanwhile, following closely on the revelation of Ben M’hidi’s “suicide”, there came the radio announcement that on 23 March the prominent young lawyer, Ali Boumendjel, had thrown himself out of a window of a building in El-Biar tenanted by the 2nd R.C.P. “to escape interrogation to which he was going to be subjected”. Supporting the official statement, Salan claims that numerous incriminating documents were found in Boumendjel’s possession and that he had wished “to escape from justice”. Godard adds that either he “had wished to die for the cause, or was deranged in his mind”. Whether or not either explanation was satisfactory, Boumendjel’s death was to cause an uproar in France.

  L’Affaire Audin

  An even greater and more persistent outcry, however, was sparked off by the disappearance of Maurice Audin in June 1957. Audin was a twenty-five-year-old lecturer in the science faculty of Algiers University and a member of the same Communist cell as Henri Alleg. He was arrested by Colonel Mayer’s 1st R.C.P. on suspicion of harbouring and aiding terrorists and—according to Salan, who cites statements made by both the sergeant and the lieutenant in charge of him—managed to escape into the night while being transported in a jeep. Shots were fired after Audin, but no body was ever found, and the sergeant was sentenced to fifteen days’ arrest for his negligence. The official story was that Audin had made his way to Tunisia; but he has never been seen since. Courrière claims that he was “liquidated” by operatives of the 11th Shock in mistake for Alleg; Vidal-Naquet says categorically that “It was at Fort Emperor that Maurice Audin was secretly buried after he had been murdered.”

  Bollardière and Teitgen protest

  The French liberal conscience and instinct for humanity being what they are, however, soon powerful voices, both in Algeria and metropolitan France, were being raised against torture. One of the first was General Jacques de Bollardière—Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, Companion of the Liberation, etc.—whose outstanding wartime career has already been noted in the previous chapter. Arriving in the latter part of 1956, he had been given command of a sector near Blida and had then been brought into the Battle o
f Algiers. Early on, when dressed in plain clothes, he had been shocked to overhear a young cavalry officer remark, “In Algiers, now, there is nothing but genuine chaps, paras, the Legion, fine big blond fellows, stalwarts not sentimentalists.”

  Bollardière intervened: “Doesn’t that remind you of anything, des grands gars blonds, pas sentimentaux?”

  The young officer replied, quite unashamedly: “If I had been in Germany at that moment, I too would have been a Nazi.”

  Bollardière’s sense of outrage was further increased when approached by weeping Muslim women who told him that their sons or husbands had “disappeared in the night”, and finally he sought an interview with Massu, telling him that the orders he had been issued were “in absolute opposition to the respect of man, which was the foundation of my life”. After this Bollardière commented: “if the leadership yielded on the absolute principle of respect for human beings, enemy or not, it meant an unleashing of deplorable instincts which no longer knew any limits and which could always find means of justifying itself”. He then wrote to the Commander-in-Chief requesting to be posted back to France. On returning to France he gave voice to his indignation by writing, on 27 March 1957, a letter to his friend Servan-Schreiber for publication in L’Express, in which he pointed to “the terrible danger there would be for us to lose sight, under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency, of the moral values which alone have, up until now, created the grandeur of our civilisation and of our army”. For this fundamental breach of military discipline the general was sentenced to sixty days of “fortress arrest”, the most severe punishment meted out to any senior officer during the Algerian war.