The Casino
It was 9 June—as usual, a Sunday—and just before seven the Casino was crowded with couples already beginning to dance. The bomb, a powerful one, had been placed underneath the orchestra platform itself by a fifteen-year-old Muslim employee. Massu, whose residence was nearby, heard the explosion and hurried to the spot, as did Salan a short time later. The scene was appalling, the carnage the worst yet. The tawdry night-club decor was splattered with blood; the whole of the orchestra platform had been ripped up, the piano smashed to pieces and the unhappy band-leader—Lucky Starway, the idol of Bab-el-Oued—disembowelled. His girl vocalist lay with both feet blown off. Altogether there were nine dead and eighty-five wounded, nearly half of them women, and many of them having lost legs as a result of the level at which the bomb had exploded. Says the hardened Massu: “I can still see that beautiful young girl of eighteen with both her legs blown off, lying unconscious, her blonde hair stained with blood.”
And Salan: “There were still fragments of feet in the slippers of the young dancers…. One had to have seen such a spectacle to understand our reactions towards these assassins.” On the day of the interments the following Tuesday, the pied noir reaction was one of greater violence than ever before. A spontaneous strike closed down all shops in the working-class European quarter of Bab-el-Oued; and then began the ratonnade, the most savage that riven Algiers had yet experienced.
John Gale, a young British correspondent, observed with revulsion the pied noir mobs sacking one Muslim shop after another. In a sheer lust of destruction, they
hurled live chickens to one another until the birds had lost their feathers and then trampled them to death…. They broke and emptied the tanks of motor bikes over meat torn from butchers, set fire to the petrol that soaked the carcasses, and armed themselves with meathooks…. Streets ran with milk and broken eggs; the mob pawed and stamped the debris like animals and poured wine over one another’s heads….
There seemed to be almost a curious lack of passion about it all; the young mobsters “didn’t seem angry to us; they were enjoying themselves”. One young girl explained cheerfully, “We’re sheep. We follow.” And in the background Gale noted sinister-looking men in black suits and dark glasses giving orders, one of whom, when questioned, admitted that he was a stranger to the area. Gradually, as the heat of the day built up, the raton-nade assumed a nastier mood. Gale saw how
One fat old Arab in blue denims, horribly beaten, staggered off, gasping with terror; another, much younger, his skull smashed, was dragged away and flung dead into the back of an army truck. Those were Arabs, perhaps small shopkeepers, who had chosen to live in a European quarter, and must have been well known to many of the rioters.
Later he saw young Muslims gaffed by the meat-hooks looted from the butchers’ shops. The old, old explanation was recited to him: “They’re not like another race, the Muslims. They’ve really overdone it, you see. Savages. Young girls with their legs amputated from that bomb in the Casino.”
What Gale found “the most frightening thing”, however, was the passive complicity of the police and soldiers; of two hundred European rioters arrested that day, apparently only four were detained, and these soon released. According to Salan’s rather curious account of the day, a mob now more than 10,000 strong descending on the centre of Algiers was only brought to order by Colonel Trinquier brandishing a tricolour from his jeep and shouting, “Everybody to the monument aux morts!” Here Salan in person called upon them to disperse which, after an impassioned singing of the Marseillaise, they did. The day’s results were five Muslims killed, fifty injured, a hundred shops sacked and twenty cars burnt out. Enraged at the failure of the troops, Massu issued stern orders
to avoid indulgence towards the European elements in the city. Certain individuals, men and women, have behaved themselves in a disgusting manner and should have been arrested on the spot.
The forces of order have the absolute duty to protect all elements of the population, and therefore the Muslims, when the Europeans “run wild”.
Gloomily Mouloud Feraoun recorded in his diary in the aftermath of the Casino bomb, “More and more it seems that there is no other way out than death…for there are no more innocents, on one side or the other, are there?”
At the Gouvernement-Général Robert Lacoste recognised that there was now nothing for it but to begin once again the whole toilsome process of cleaning out the Augean stables of Algiers. Back from the bled were summoned a reluctant Bigeard and his paras.
The hunt for Yacef
Now all was concentrated on the hunt for Yacef and his last remaining nucleus of terrorists. All his hideouts in the European quarters had been mopped up, and European helpers like Chaulet arrested, so the net could now constrict around the Casbah alone. Already in April one of Yacef’s closest and most faithful collaborators, Djamila Bouhired, had fallen into French hands. Walking out in the Casbah, with Yacef a few paces behind, disguised as a woman, with a sub-machine-gun concealed under his clothes, she had been arrested by a Zouave patrol. Yacef immediately drew his gun and fired at Djamila with intent to kill,[1] realising that she knew enough to lead to his instant betrayal, and fled. Only wounded, Bouhired on recovery was tortured but refused to give away any vital information. Yacef claims that he made more than one attempt to liberate her from the Maillot military hospital. On one occasion a message was smuggled to her, telling her to pretend that she was prepared to lead the French to Yacef. When she had arrived at the Impasse de la Grenade, he instructed “Throw yourself flat on the ground and we will open fire.” But Djamila refused; she did not wish, according to Yacef, that “any brothers should risk their lives to liberate her”. A further attempt to get Djamila out of the hospital was thwarted within minutes by paras coming to take her away in a military truck. In July she was sentenced to death, and Yacef let it be known that he would blow up entire city quarters in the event of her execution. There then followed a curiously improbable romantic episode where, brutality having failed, an attempt was made to soften up Djamila through the seductive attentions of a handsome para captain, but she still refused to give away Yacef’s whereabouts.
Meanwhile, the French were resorting to new and subtler techniques of penetration. Under the inspiration of Captain Léger, an Arabic expert with the 11th Shock, selected turncoats clad inconspicuously in workers’ dungarees, or bleus de chauffe, were unleashed in the Casbah to mingle with their former terrorist associates and lead Godard’s intelligence operatives to the bosses’ lairs. The technique was to achieve such success that the expression la bleuite, or “the blues”, later assumed a particularly sinister connotation in the war as a whole. Its first coup was the tracking-down of “Mourad” and “Kamel”, the noms-de-guerre respectively of Yacef’s new “bomb squad” chief and his military deputy. On 26 August the two terrorists were pinned down in a second-floor apartment in the Impasse Saint-Vincent. With helicopters whirring overhead, a massive force of Bigeard’s 3rd R.P.C. closed in. In the first encounter two Zouaves had been killed and two more wounded but, for the sake of the information Mourad and Kamel might give on Yacef, the paras were prepared to take any risk to capture them alive. Through a loud-hailer a para captain offered to guarantee their lives if they surrendered. After some confabulation, the trapped men replied that they would accept, provided they could have it in writing. It was agreed that they would lower their terms of surrender to the paras in a basket. As two paras ran forward to take the basket there was a violent explosion seriously injuring the two men and wounding in the leg the battalion commander. Immediately the two terrorists tried to make a run for it through the front door of the building; but Kamel was shot down and Mourad blown to pieces by his own grenade in the act of throwing it at the paras.
Germaine Tillion’s secret rendezvous
Despite this setback for the French, another bleu was bringing them perilously close to No. 3 Rue Caton where, in a cunningly constructed cache, Yacef now incarcerated himself m
ost of the time. But, in the meantime, an extraordinary encounter had taken place between the Casbah leader and a French representative. Having returned to France in January 1956, Germaine Tillion had become increasingly disturbed by accounts of torture and public executions in Algeria that percolated through to her from the centres sociaux she had set up under Soustelle’s administration. Consequently, reinforced by her own grim experiences of Ravensbrück, she had set to to organise a Commission Internationale contre le Régime Concentrationnaire en Algérie and, backed by a special dispensation from Prime Minister Mollet, she arrived with it in Algiers in June, just as Yacef’s new bombing offensive was getting under way. She was at once shocked to receive confirmation of just how bad the torture had become, and to discover how many of the liberal Muslims on whom had been founded her earlier hopes for a compromise peace were now incarcerated. On 2 July a Muslim woman friend came to the Hôtel Saint-George and told Germaine Tillion, elliptically, that “they” wanted to see her. At first disquieted by her friend’s involvement with the F.L.N., she expressed willingness to meet any of its leaders if they would contact her directly.
The next day Germaine Tillion received a note requesting her to be at the bus-stop opposite the hotel at two o’clock the following afternoon, from where she was to follow a young man recognisable to her “regardless of any changes of transport”. With considerable courage Germaine Tillion obeyed her instructions to the letter, changed buses three times, then—at a discreet distance—followed her guide into the Casbah, to No. 3 Rue Caton. Here she was received by Madame Fathia Bouhired, aunt of Djamila and whose husband had been killed by the paras some months previously. After a brief interval the door opened and in came Yacef, Zohra Drif and Ali la Pointe, the two men armed to the teeth with sub-machine-guns and grenades. Without giving his name, Zohra Drif introduced Yacef as le grand frère. At first the conversation was strained. “We did not know what to talk about, either of us—so we discussed economics!” recalls Madame Tillion, and she pointed out to them that she was the only one in the room “to know exactly what it was like to die of hunger”.
Then our conversation shifted to the French Resistance, talking about the traitors who had betrayed us (I was betrayed by a priest, for money) —hence our understanding of their situation. Yacef insisted, “But we have no traitors.” In fact, had they only known it, they had, and were being betrayed at that very moment—which, of course, I didn’t know at the time.
She vigorously assured Yacef that the F.L.N. would never defeat the French forces; to which le grand frère exclaimed in a desperate tone: “Then I shall never be a free man!”
From there they began to talk about the immediate horrors in Algiers, the bombings, reprisals and torture. Yacef revealed himself to be deeply concerned both by the fate of Djamila Bouhired, then in French hands, and the human consequences of his own bombings. But he claimed:
“We are neither criminals, nor assassins.” Very sadly and very firmly, I replied: “You are assassins.” He was so disconcerted that for a moment he remained without speaking, as if suffocated. Then his eyes filled with tears and he said to me, in so many words: “Yes, Madame Tillion, we are assassins…. It’s the only way in which we can express ourselves.”
Yacef then claimed that he had visited the scene of the Casino bombing, as usual disguised as a woman, and had been shocked to discover that one of the dead was a pied noir “football friend” and that his fiancée had lost both legs. “Perhaps you won’t believe me, but I cried all night.” He then added, to Germaine Tillion’s amazement: “I’ve had enough. There won’t be any further attack against the civil population of Algiers!” He explained, however, that the bombings had been undertaken only in riposte to the executions of the previous summer; and that if he were to halt the bombings, then the French government would have to reciprocate by “ceasing to guillotine patriots”.
The conversation lasted over four hours, and at the end of it Germaine Tillion undertook to fly at once to Paris to inform the new Bourgès-Maunoury government (Mollet having fallen in May) of Yacef’s proposed deal.[2]
In retrospect, it seems that Yacef may well have been motivated by no more transcending intention than to save his devoted Djamila Bouhired from the imminent prospect of the guillotine. At the time, however, Germaine Tillion felt passionately that the “hysteria of the two populations constituted an almost total obstacle to any solution”, and that nothing could be achieved without first lowering the temperature of hatred and terror. Now here, at last, there seemed a small glimmer of light; if only there could be a reciprocal deal, ending the bombing of European civilians in exchange for a halt to the executions…. It was, in effect, something like a renewal of Camus’ abortive quest for a “civil truce” of a year and a half earlier. In Paris Madame Tillion immediately made contact with a close friend on Bourgès-Maunoury’s staff. Yacef’s “deal” was passed on to the premier, and the first indications were encouraging. She was asked to return to Algiers and resume contacts with Yacef; but “at your own risk and peril”. (“Imagine!” she snorted afterwards: “to what a state French authority in Algiers had been reduced, in reality, that I had to go back at my own peril!”) At the same time she had also taken the opportunity of calling upon her old wartime chief, General de Gaulle, in his private office in the Rue Solférino. He had listened to her gravely as she described the horrors of the prison executions and of the tortures she had learned about in Algiers, and then made a remark that would seem full of significance a few years later: “This proves that one must talk, negotiate, prendre langue. One cannot abandon a people—whoever they may be—in quarantine!” But he refused her request that he intervene personally, adding gloomily, “If I make a declaration, it will be taken the wrong way by everybody.” As she left he remarked, by way of giving comfort, but enigmatically: “Everything that we do which is human earns its reward one day…” (pause) “But generally after we are dead!”
No deal.…
Then, on the very morning of her return to Algiers on 20 July, Germaine Tillion was telephoned from the premier’s office to be told that. despite everything, two executions were scheduled for the 25th. She wept tears of frustration, and considered cancelling her flight. Nevertheless, she returned to discover that Yacef had exploded a further ten bombs following the sentencing to death of Djamila Bouhired and Taleb Abderrahmane; but miraculously not a single civilian had been harmed. On the 23rd she wrote to Yacef, in thinly disguised allusion, informing him of the forth-coming executions and begging him not to retaliate—“despite the breach of faith by my old father [the French government]”. She added: “My uncle [de Gaulle] deplores what is happening.” Yacef replied in a similar vein:
Chère cousine,
I have received your letter which, I must admit, did not surprise me excessively. The volte-face of your father was not unexpected….
…we are totally responsible for what we do. But, alas, in your family, what is its line of conduct? One never knows. When we believe that at last reason is going to prevail, we are, alas, destined for a disappointment….
I am anxious to draw your attention to the fate of my two young sisters [the two condemned terrorists]. If they succumb to their injuries, I and my brothers and all the family and kinsmen of Algiers will be very strongly affected. Their reactions will be very violent….
The next day Germaine Tillion was horrified to discover that not two but a further three terrorists had been guillotined; the third being the man wrongfully condemned for the murder of Amédée Froger. The day after that eight more bombs exploded in Algiers, one quite close to Germaine Tillion herself. In disgust she decided to return forthwith to Paris. Then she learned that, in fact, the bombs had been so placed that there had not been a single civilian victim. Changing her mind, she settled down to wait for another summons from Yacef, which she hoped would lead her to one of the C.C.E. leaders. Another two weeks elapsed before it came, and this time Germaine Tillion had to disguise herself as a Muslim woman in ord
er to penetrate the para blockade of the Casbah without betraying Yacef’s whereabouts. It was the first time that she learned the true identity of Yacef.
With Zohra Drif once again in attendance, Germaine Tillion told Yacef: “If there had been one single victim after the explosion of those bombs, I should not be here…. We can thank God!”
To which Yacef replied: “I had taken my precautions. It’s not God that must be thanked, but me!”
She duly thanked Yacef and, after a further discussion, left. A week later, on 16 August, there were two further executions. On the point of returning to Paris, Germaine Tillion wrote a last hasty and frantic note to Yacef, on her own initiative, begging him—despite her inability “to apply brakes, on the French side, to this ferocious and stupid mechanism”—not to retaliate in kind, and to adopt unilaterally a “position of moderation”. In reply, Yacef “let me know that there would not be any reprisals, and there were not any”. It was the last time she was to see Yacef, or any other F.L.N. leader. She returned to Paris gravely disheartened, feeling that if the “deal” with Yacef could only have been implemented,
then at least we could have talked. But I failed. That was the last moment when I felt it might be possible to talk; after the Battle of Algiers it always seemed to be too late. For that was the moment when—Lacoste having handed over responsibility to the army—the French ceased to govern Algeria….
A Savage War of Peace Page 31