A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  Just two days after Bollardière’s offence, Governor-General Lacoste received a letter of resignation from an even more influential figure: Paul Teitgen, his secretary-general at the Prefecture. Teitgen, a Catholic and hero of the Resistance, had been deported by the Gestapo to Dachau, where he was tortured on no less than nine occasions. In August 1956 he took up his post in Algiers, which carried with it special responsibilities for overseeing the police and in which he found little that was congenial. In November he was confronted with an appalling moral dilemma. Fernand Yveton, the Communist, had been caught red-handed placing a bomb in the gasworks where he was employed. But a second bomb had not been discovered, and if it exploded and set off the gasometers thousands of lives might be lost. Nothing would induce Yveton to reveal its whereabouts, and Teitgen was pressed by his Chief of Police to have Yveton passé à la question.

  But I refused to have him tortured. I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because if you once get into the torture business, you’re lost…. Understand this, fear was the basis of it all. All our so-called civilisation is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear. The French, even the Germans, are not torturers by nature. But when you see the throats of your copains slit, then the varnish disappears.

  With Lacoste’s handling over of responsibility to Massu in January, Teitgen found that his hands were tied. Thus on 29 March he wrote to Lacoste, offering his resignation on the grounds that he had failed in his duty and that “for the past three months we have been engaged…in irresponsibility which can only lead to war crimes”. He added that, in visits to two centres d’hébergement, he had “recognised on certain detainees profound traces of the cruelties and tortures that I personally suffered fourteen years ago in the Gestapo cellars”. He feared that “France risks losing her soul through equivocation”.

  Lacoste begged Teitgen to remain at his post and keep his letter secret. Feeling that it would be better for him to continue as watchdog, rather than have no watchdog at all, Teitgen assented. As a consequence of the pressures of protest, he was permitted to retain powers of detention, which meant in theory that the paras could not hold suspects; secondly, in April a “Safeguard Committee of Individual Rights and Liberties” was instituted by Paris to investigate and redress excesses. Some moderation was achieved but, says Teitgen, torture was by no means stamped out, and in September he decided he could stay no longer.[11] By this time, he claims, over three thousand Algerians had “disappeared”.

  How effective was torture?

  There remains the vital question, with much relevance to today: what did torture achieve in the Battle of Algiers? Putting aside any consideration of morality, was it even effective? Massu, with a courage that demands respect, claims that the end justified the means; the battle was won and a halt was brought to the F.L.N.-imposed terror and the indiscriminate killing and maiming of both European and Muslim civilians. He also notes that, when critics compared them to the Nazis, his paras practised neither extermination nor the taking of hostages. And Edward Behr, who could by no stretch of the imagination be regarded as an apostle of torture, nevertheless reckons “that without torture the F.L.N.’s terrorist network would never have been overcome.… The ‘Battle of Algiers’ could not have been won by General Massu without the use of torture.” Had the Battle of Algiers indeed been lost by the French in 1957, then the whole of Algeria would almost certainly have been swamped by the F.L.N.—leading in all probability to a peace settlement several years earlier than was otherwise the case.

  This is certainly true of the short term, but in the longer term—as the Nazis in the Second World War, and as almost every other power that has ever adopted torture as an instrument of policy, have discovered—it is a double-edged weapon. In some of his last utterances even Massu’s chief lieutenant, Yves Godard, expressed doubts as to the efficacy of torture; especially when weighed against the emotional weapon it presented the enemy. In what seemed like an indirect criticism of his old commander, he added:

  If I had carried a lot of brass, having first warned the enemy, I would have shot publicly any assassin caught in flagrante—I say advisedly in flagrante—if within forty-eight hours he had not voluntarily handed over his secrets….

  There is no need to torture….

  From a purely intelligence point of view, experience teaches that more often than not the collating services are overwhelmed by a mountain of false information extorted from victims desperate to save themselves further agony. Also, it is bound to drive into the enemy camp the innocents who have wrongly been submitted to torture. As Camus declares: “torture has perhaps saved some at the expense of honour, by uncovering thirty bombs, but at the same time it has created fifty new terrorists who, operating in some other way and in another place, would cause the death of even more innocent people”. Torture, one feels, is never warranted; one should never fight for a good cause with evil weapons. Again, says Camus, “it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them…such fine deeds would inevitably lead to the demoralisation of France and the loss of Algeria”. In the long run, the facile tu quoque arguments, such as those offered by Massu on the Alleg case, can only lead to an endless escalation of horror and degradation. In answer to the standard plaint that Muslim intellectuals were rarely heard to protest against F.L.N. atrocities, Pierre-Henri Simon counters passionately: “I would reply—‘If really we are capable of a moral reflex which our adversary has not, this is the best justification for our cause, and even for our victory.’ ”

  One of the worst aspects of the admission of torture as an instrument is the wide train of corruption that inevitably follows in its wake. In a submission to the “Safeguard Committee” of September 1957, Teitgen wrote words that would apply equally to any latter-day authoritarian regime, whether it be Greece, Chile, Spain or the Soviet Union:

  Even a legitimate action…can nevertheless lead to improvisations and excesses. Very rapidly, if this is not remedied, efficacity becomes the sole justification. In default of a legal basis, it seeks to justify itself at any price, and, with a certain bad conscience, it demands the privilege of exceptional legitimacy. In the name of efficacity, illegality has become justified.

  In a civilised society, torture has no more counter-productive and insidious long-term effect than the way that it tends to demoralise the inflicter even more than his victim. Frantz Fanon, the militant Martiniquais psychiatrist, cites several examples of acute, lingering neurosis induced among the tortured; a kind of anorexia suffered by the innocent who had been put to la question wrongfully; pins-and-needles and a lasting fear of turning on a light switch, or touching a telephone, in those who had experienced the gégène. But just as psychically impaired were numerous cases like that of the European police inspector found guilty of torturing his own wife and children, which he explained as resulting from what he had been required to do to Algerian suspects: “The thing that kills me most is the torture. You just don’t know what it’s like, do you?”

  Louis Joxe, the man summoned by de Gaulle to negotiate the final peace settlement with Algeria, told the author:

  I shall never forget the young officers and soldiers whom I met who were absolutely appalled by what they had to do. One should never forget the significance of this experience in considering a settlement for Algeria; for practically every French soldier went through it. This is something that the supporters of Algérie française never properly understood.

  Simon declares that a policeman torturing a suspect “injures in himself the essence of humanity”, but for the military to resort to it was one degree worse because: “It is here that the honour of the nation becomes engaged.” Certainly the pernicious effect on the French army as a whole lasted many years after the war had ended, and many officers came to agree with General Bollardière in condemning Massu for ever having allowed the army to be brought into such a police action in the first place, thereby inevitably exposing it to t
he practice of torture. But could Massu, in fact, have refused? Outside the army, in Algeria the rifts created by torture led to a further, decisive step in eradicating any Muslim “third force” of interlocuteurs valables with whom a compromise peace might have been negotiated; while in France the stunning, cumulative impact it had was materially to help persuade public opinion years later that France had to wash her hands of the sale guerre. As Paul Teitgen remarked: “All right, Massu won the Battle of Algiers; but that meant losing the war.”

  By the end of March 1957—the first month in many when no bombs exploded in Algiers—it certainly looked as if, at any rate in the short term, the battle had been won. Sickened by what they had been forced to do, and breathing deep sighs of relief, Bigeard and his paras left the fetid city for the open air of the bled once more.

  The terrain. 1. Above: In Kabylia. A soldier keeps guard over a rocky pass.

  2. Below: The Aurès. The village on the spur of the gorge is almost invisible against the parched background.

  3. December 1954. Zouaves searching a Kabyle suspect.

  4. In contrast to the prosperous pied noir farms and suburbs, overpopulation and under-employment in the Muslim centres.

  5. Above: The funeral of the victims of the Philippeville massacres, August 1955.

  6. Below: The departure of Jacques Soustelle from Algiers in February 1956.

  7. Above: The five members of the G.P.R.A. detained at the Château d’Aulnoy. Left to right: Hocine Ait Ahmed, Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohamed Khider, Mohamed Boudiaf and Rabah Bitat.

  8. Below left: Ben Bella handcuffed after the arrest of the five leaders in October 1956.

  9. Below right: Belkacem Krim.

  10. Pierre Mendès-France (left) and Edouard Daladier.

  11. Paul Delouvrier.

  12. Jacques Soustelle.

  13. Guy Mollet.

  14. General Maurice Challe.

  15. General Jacques Massu.

  16. Above: Bigeard’s paras in their “lizard” headgear march into Algiers.

  17, 18. Below: The Battle of Algiers, 1957. Left: Paras in the Rue Caton, searching for Saadi Yacef and his fellow-insurgents. Right: The house in the Casbah where Ali la Pointe hid, after its destruction by the French forces.

  19. Above: 1958. The Provisional Government of the Algerian Revolution (G.P.R.A.) is proclaimed in Cairo. Left to right: Ben Youssef Ben Khedda, M’hamed Yazid (with arm outstretched), Ferhat Abbas, the first Prime Minister, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal.

  20. Below: 1958. Generals Massu (left, in beret) and Salan (at microphone) with Jacques Soustelle after the formation of the Committee of Public Safety in Algiers.

  21. Above: De Gaulle’s first Algerian visit, 1958 Mobbed by euphoric Muslims, French soldiers and pieds noirs alike.

  22. Below: Muslim labourers constructing the Morice Line along the Tunisian border.

  [1] Zabane had killed a gamekeeper and had been in prison since the first days of the war. Ferradj, condemned for the killing in an ambush of eight civilians, including a woman and a seven-year-old girl, had lost an eye and been crippled by his wounds. Had Ferradj in particular been reprieved, the outcry among the pieds noirs would have been violent.

  [2] Acknowledging responsibility for the bombing, one of the counter-terrorist leaders who was later to become chief of the O.A.S. death squads remarked light-heartedly to the author: “They must have put a bit too much gunpowder in it!” No European, however, was ever arrested for the Rue de Thèbes bombing.

  [3] In 1958 Zohra Drif was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour for her part in the Battle of Algiers; she survived the war and married Rabah Bitat, the only member of the neuf historiques holding power at the time of writing.

  [4] The whole episode is re-enacted with remarkable fidelity in the Pontecorvo film, in which Yacef’s role was played by himself.

  [5] It was not known until after Ali’s own death that he was the assassin of Froger; meanwhile, an innocent man had already been executed for the crime.

  [6] There is the famous encounter between de Gaulle and Massu, reputed to have taken place on the former’s arrival in Algeria after coming to power in 1958:

  De Gaulle, teasing: “Alors, Massu, toujours con?”

  Massu, respectful and straight-faced: “Oui, mon général, et toujours gaulliste!”

  Hence the popular, anti-Gaullist expression of the time: “con comme un général!”

  [7] Just to add confusion, it was during this same week, on 16 January, that Philippe Castille fired his “bazooka” at Salan. That an attempt to assassinate the French Commander-in-Chief should be made at the very moment when he was in the process of enacting measures which, in the whole war to date, were the most favourable to the pied noir cause seems to exemplify better than anything else the basic unreality — indeed, sheer lunacy — of the counter-terrorist groups.

  [8] A quantitative comparison could perhaps be made here between the Battle of Algiers’ bombings and those of the I.R.A. more recently in Northern Ireland and in England. Horrible as were the outrages in Algiers, the bombs were considerably less powerful, and consequent casualties far fewer than the twenty-one killed and 162 maimed in the Birmingham outrage of November 1974—perpetrated evidently as retribution for an I.R.A. member who blew himself up by mistake. What ratonnades and lynchings would have followed a bombing in Algiers on the Birmingham scale can only be imagined, and one may ask whether the restrained British reaction could be explained by national phlegm or the torpor of a world grown blasé to horror.

  [9] See Colonel Godard’s Organogram.

  [10] An episode which Salan in his memoirs also acknowledges, though with some discrepancy in the details.

  [11] In interviews with the author, Lacoste stated that he had “punished 480 officers for brutalisation”; Teitgen, however, counters that none of the punished suffered any serious setbacks to their careers.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lost Round for the F.L.N.:

  May–December 1957

  The common error of the one and the other is to believe that they are defending a just cause, killing for a just cause, and risking an unjust death. They become cruel like a hunted beast…. Those truly responsible keep a prudent distance.

  Mouloud Feraoun

  Yacef’s second offensive

  WHILE Bigeard and the paras were returning to their old hunting-grounds, the four surviving members of the C.C.E. were making their way painfully out of Algeria, carrying with them the leadership of the revolution. Krim and Abane had been smuggled out of Algiers in a Citroën 2 c.v. belonging to Madame Chaulet, just an hour after her husband had been arrested. The four leaders had then parted company, with Abane and Saad Dahlab heading westward for Morocco, whence they would fly to Tunis (this time taking a safer route than Ben Bella, via Madrid and Rome). Krim and Ben Khedda, moving eastwards for Tunis overland, were to make an odyssey lasting over three months, travelling most of the time by night, and on mules. Miraculously they were not apprehended by any French patrols on the nearly 500-mile “long march”, but in his native Kabylia Krim narrowly missed being swept up in a net that was closing on Mohamedi Said’s headquarters. In the ensuing fight 137 F.L.N. were killed, but Krim and Ben Khedda escaped.

  Meanwhile, in Algiers, though now totally isolated, Yacef remained as undisputed, supreme boss. His laboriously constructed networks lay in ruins, and all the time he himself felt the noose of Godard’s Deuxième Bureau tightening around his neck. But Yacef being Yacef, he refused to accept defeat, and in a remarkable fashion began to pick up the pieces, reconstitute his organisation and prepare for a fresh offensive. Early in May, after a long period of quiet, there was an incident followed by an outrage of “overkill” by the paras. Returning from the cinema in a suburb of Algiers, two paras had been shot down in the street by terrorists. In a spontaneous reprisal, some of their comrades, led by an informer from Trinquier’s D.P.U. to a Turkish bath that was supposed to be a hideout of the F.L.N., sub-machine-gunned all and sundry in it.
Nearly eighty Muslims were reported killed; a number of them were poor beggars who habitually came in to find night-time shelter in the baths. Not one of the paras involved was ever brought to justice, although their identity was said to be known at the Gouvernement-Général. At the same time it was increasingly obvious to Yacef that the F.L.N., through its mauling at the hands of the paras, was steadily losing ground in the city. So to avenge the one and arrest the other, Yacef decided upon a new round of bombings. This time he tried a new technique that was ingeniously simple but even more cruel in that it struck equally at ordinary, working-class Muslims and at Europeans.

  On 3 June four of Yacef’s operatives, dressed in the uniform of the E.G.A. electricity and gas corporation and equipped with special keys, opened the small inspection doors at the base of several street lamp standards by bus-stops in the centre of the city, and inserted bombs inside. One such lampadaire selected stood close to the Grande Poste building. Three hours later, in the midst of the rush hour, the bombs exploded, fragmenting the heavy iron bases of the lamps like shrapnel from a bursting shell. Fortunately one went off just as a trolley-bus had collected most of the crowd waiting round it, and only two people were injured. But two others claimed eight dead—including the inevitable schoolchildren—and some ninety wounded, with grievous fragmentation injuries. The casualties of the innocents were this time almost equally divided between Muslims and Europeans, which did little to improve the image of the F.L.N. among the Muslim population. So next Yacef returned to his former policy of selecting a purely pied noir target. His choice fell on the Casino, with gambling tables and a dance-floor, poised on a rocky promontory some half-dozen miles out on the western fringes of Algiers. Here there would be no children and no Muslims; only the pleasure- and sun-loving young pieds noirs from Bab-el-Oued that Camus used to write about, glowing from a day on the beach.