It happened to be a market day, and—as has occurred many times since in the course of Israeli reprisal raids against Al Fatah camps across the Lebanese frontier—the bombs and rockets hit a school and hospital (which the Tunisians claimed was well marked with a red cross visible from the air), as well as the F.L.N. base. Some eighty people, including a number of women and children, were killed. Foreign journalists were immediately ferried by the Tunisians to the still smoking scene of the raid; “We visited the wreck of a schoolroom,” wrote Herb Greer. “A bomb had blown it apart in the middle of a lesson, just as the teacher had begun to sketch an airplane on the blackboard to illustrate her lecture. The blackboard was still intact and the sketch still there, pitifully crude and unfinished….” The Tunisians made sure the journalists missed nothing. Hundreds of photographs were produced: “a naked child perched on a hospital bed, staring curiously at the camera, legs carefully spread out to show an obscene mutilated stump….”
Angrily, Bourguiba ordered the immediate evacuation of the French garrisons still in Tunisia under treaty, in the meantime blockading them in their barracks, and accused France of “aggression” before the Security Council. Dismayed at the disarray of an ally, the United States and Britain offered to send a “good offices” mission, comprised of the veteran Robert Murphy and Harold Beeley of the Foreign Office, to heal the breach with Tunisia. The offer was accepted by Félix Gaillard but widely criticised by the French Press, who derisively dubbed the envoys Messieurs les bons offices. Their brief, ostensibly, was to restore relations between Paris and Tunis, regularise the presence of the French garrisons in Tunisia, and supervise the frontier. But the United States government made little secret of its hopes that the “good offices” mission might also provide a first foot in the door to direct peace negotiations between the F.L.N. and France. That France should even have accepted the principle of such foreign arbitration was, in F.L.N. eyes, something of a victory in itself. Messieurs les bons offices bustled back and forth between Paris and Tunis, but nothing in fact came of the mission. Bourguiba for one (under strong pressure from the F.L.N.) firmly refused any kind of international supervision of his western frontier. Its functions were in any case soon to be overtaken by events in France.
No effort of Yazid or Chanderli, or of the whole F.L.N. leadership to date, could have done more to “internationalise” the war than the French bombing of Sakiet. It also set in motion the chain of events that led directly to the final disintegration of the Fourth Republic. For what preceded this gross miscalculation, and its potent consequences, one must return to the French army in Algeria.
[1] In fact, it later turned out that these early estimates may have been considerably exaggerated. The greater value of her energy resources probably lies in Algeria’s natural gas.
[2] According to Bourguiba (in an interview with the author), there existed just such a secret contingency plan under the code-name “Charrue Longue”, and Massu had once declared that he would “sleep in Bourguiba’s bed”.
[3] In his sumptuous presidential office in Carthage Palace he still leads visitors with great pride to a frame on the wall containing his prison fiche; while in the neighbouring Council Chamber busts of the four historic heroes of Tunis—Jugurtha, Hannibal, St Augustine and Ibn Khaldoun—are dominated by an immense portrait of the President.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Le Dernier Quart d’Heure:
1957–May 1958
It is not out of any love for the Arabs or the French Algerians that I am fighting, but because it is no longer permitted to us to lose this war. Beaten, we would be the torturers of Algiers, Fascist bands in the service of the big colonialists. Victors, they will leave us alone….
“Capitaine Esclavier” in Jean Lartéguy’s The Praetorians, 1963
The Battle of Agounennda
DURING the months of 1957 that the Battle of Algiers lasted, apart from the regular interception of frontier-crossing bands and gun-runners there had been few military operations of major importance in the interior. The exception had been in Wilaya 4, or the Algérois department that surrounds the capital, embracing the rich Mitidja plains and running up into the wild Atlas ranges to the south. Security forces in this area had been substantially thinned out in order to meet the needs of Massu in the city, and in this semi-vacuum the Wilaya 4 chiefs had been urged to intensify activities so as to draw off the heat from Yacef and his besieged cadres in the Casbah. Before the Battle of Algiers the Wilaya effectives had been hard-pressed by Bigeard’s crack 3rd Para Regiment, at the same time as losing political headway through the growing success of Lacoste’s S.A.S. system. But the withdrawal of Bigeard had afforded them a period of relative respite in which they had reorganised to some effect.
For the time being, the Wilaya had assembled perhaps the most impressive command structure of any in Algeria, headed by an unusually cultured maquisard, Colonel Si Sadek (his real name, Slimane Dehiles), who had taken over the command from Ouamrane on his removal to Tunis and the C.C.E. Sadek’s political chief was Si M’hamed (his real name Ahmed Bougarra), who, though aged only twenty-seven, was considered to be possibly the most astute political brain in the Wilayas at that time. Working with him was Omar Oussedik, in charge of intelligence, a militant Marxist and friend of Frantz Fanon, and Si Salah (real name Mohamed Zamoun), in charge of communications. The military formations were commanded by Si Lakhdar, a mason who had achieved rapid promotion through his reputation for courage and who had—together with Ali Khodja, the A.L.N. leader responsible for the Palestro “massacre” of the twenty-one French reservists in 1956—created the A.L.N.’s hard-hitting “zonal commando” units. Under him was Si Azedine (real name Rabah Zerrari), formerly a humble coppersmith and currently commanding the commando which had taken its name from Ali Khodja. Not politically orientated, Azedine was first and foremost a guerrilla fighter of outstanding toughness and endurance. At the beginning of May 1957 his “Ali Khodja” commando had ambushed a Spahi unit, killing some sixty of them for a cost of seven dead djounoud. Disengaging, the commando had been strafed by French aircraft and Azedine had had his right forearm shattered by a 50 mm. calibre bullet. For two days he lay in a coma, apparently half-blinded with pain, but had refused the ministrations of even the primitive A.L.N. field hospital, dressing and removing splinters of bone from the wound himself. Exactly two years previously he had been smuggled into Algiers to have a painful knee wound treated by the pro-F.L.N. French doctor, Pierre Chaulet.
In the spring of 1957 Wilaya 4 had achieved a character all of its own by replacing the hitherto rigidly hierarchical structure by a system of “democratic equality” and political commissars, for which Si M’hamed’s influence was largely responsible. Bearing a close resemblance to Marxist techniques, though none to Marxist political ideology, Si M’hamed’s system was largely designed to counter the effectiveness in political warfare of Lacoste’s S.A.S. teams that had become progressively entrenched in the Algérois villages. Altogether Wilaya 4 was demonstrating a new skill in revolutionary warfare, in all its aspects, that caused the French command considerable concern. With his wound still unhealed, Azedine followed up his success against the Spahis by ambushing a battalion of Tirailleurs, killing some ten—including their French captain—and causing numerous others to defect, together with their weapons. Bigeard was now rushed back to the bled, having won the first round of the Battle of Algiers, and with a vast sigh of relief at quitting the detested, grimy role of policeman in the city. Accurate intelligence reports revealed that two of Si Lakhdar’s katibas, or companies, totalling 300 men, were heading westwards towards Médéa for a meeting with Azedine, following his successful ambush of the Tirailleurs. A major politico-military show of strength was then intended. Bigeard acted on this intelligence with utmost speed. During the night of 22–23 May he placed his paras astride the F.L.N.’s axis of movement near a small mountain village called Agounennda that lay south of the road from Blida to L’Arba. Employing a favourite technique
, he sited his battle headquarters post on a commanding height with his companies deployed in an arc around him, his 3 Company in a rather more isolated position to the north. Close by his headquarters was a support company, ready to be helicoptered in as a stopper in the bottle to any point in the area where the main F.L.N. force might run into the net he had strung out.
The companies concealed themselves so as to be virtually undetectable among the rock and scrub of the mountainside, and settled down to one of those agonising night watches so familiar to both sides in the Algerian war. Broken up into small packets each of five groups, then a space, then another five groups, Azedine’s commando ran into Bigeard’s isolated 3 Company early on the morning of the 23rd. Apparently tipped off by a shepherd look-out, Azedine realised Bigeard’s intentions and decided to move the main force round to the north of 3 Company in its exposed position and then take the whole ambush from the rear. For a brief period the 100-strong para company found itself dangerously outnumbered by 300 of Si Lakhdar’s and Azedine’s djounoud. Urgently the company commander radioed Bigeard “Send the ventilos (helicopters).” With the rapidity typical of Bigeard, the ventilos picked up the support company troops, dropped them without landing from six feet above the ground on a crest behind Azedine’s attacking force, then flew back for another load. Within less than half an hour two whole companies had been shifted into position, in a manoeuvre that Bigeard had practised to perfection for this kind of eventuality. The stopper was well and truly in the bottle.
Meanwhile, Azedine had committed the fundamental tactical error of taking his force along the bed of the oued, instead of the crests of the hills, with the result that the paras were able to occupy the high ground overlooking the F.L.N. trapped below. Nevertheless, attacked by ground-strike aircraft and all the superiority of weapons in the French armoury, Azedine’s men fought back with ferocious tenacity. The pitched battle raged for three days, with the F.L.N. trying to infiltrate through Bigeard’s lines in small packets at night. With an area thirty kilometres square of particularly broken country covered by one solitary regiment, it proved impossible to intercept all of them. By the morning of the 26th the firing had virtually ceased. When the counts came in, the F.L.N. dead were listed at ninety-six and only nine prisoners; French losses totalled eight dead and twenty-nine wounded. But to Bigeard’s disappointment only forty-five weapons had been recovered; Azedine’s men had carried off most of the weapons of the fallen just as they had removed their wounded.
Militarily speaking, the encounter at Agounennda—a model of well-applied intelligence and hard-hitting mobility—looked like a triumph for the French. Yet it was an incomplete success; the well-laid ambush had not succeeded in wiping out the main body of the force trapped in it. Ideally set up for the French style of warfare, it was also the kind of opportunity that would seldom occur again. Therefore, while the French military might deduce from Agounennda as from the Battle of Algiers that the F.L.N. could never beat them in a clear confrontation, a more dispassionate observer might have questioned whether, if Bigeard’s crack unit could not score a total victory on its own terms, there was much hope for winning more elusive engagements in a war that might be indefinitely prolonged. On the other side the conclusions drawn were that Agounennda was the kind of engagement the A.L.N. could only lose, and lose heavily, and that henceforth it must be avoided at all costs. The success of the Soustelle—Lacoste S.A.S. system in the villages (there were now nearly 600 S.A.S. administrators scattered across Algeria) and of the harsh regroupment policy also meant that the Wilayas were finding it increasingly difficult to obtain succour from the local populations for their military operations. Instead of relying on the mechtas and douars for supply depots and refuges, they were forced to use the caves that riddle the calcareous mountains of Algeria like the holes in a Gruyère cheese. As Abd-el-Kader had done before them, the A.L.N. exploited these natural caches with utmost ingenuity, but they could seldom suffice for sustaining any major operation. Thus, in the interior, the small hit-and-run actions would be resumed, while in the inviolate sanctuaries behind the Tunisian and Moroccan frontiers new katibas and faileks could be prepared, armed and trained, and then sent over into Algeria when the time was ripe.
The harkis
As the desired “killing” battles like Agounennda became the exception rather than the rule, so the minds of France’s army planners turned more and more to “special” operations—of varying kinds and with mixed results. There were the commandos noirs of General de Bollardière, lightly equipped semi-guerrilla detachments with the role of “nomadising” with the Muslim populations in the bled. Contrary to the sadly accepted norm in the army, they pledged themselves to regard every Muslim “as a friend, and not as a suspect, except when proved to the contrary”. With this policy of never firing first, they were often involved in situations of high risk—as well as being viewed with some suspicion by the conventional-minded authorities. Then 1957 saw the development on a serious scale of harki units, comprised of what the French considered “loyal” Algerians—“traitors” to the F.L.N. These were principally the brainchild of the ethnologist, Jean Servier, whose defence of Arris on the first day of the war was, it will be remembered, largely facilitated by exploiting the rivalries of two Auresian tribes. After noting instances where villagers in the Orléansville area had killed F.L.N. scouts with hatchets, Servier—despite considerable official opposition—had gained permission initially to create “light companies” from some thousand men, the able-bodied and trustworthy defectors from the F.L.N., or anciens combattants. Servier insisted that his harki units should be based near their homes, on the sensible grounds that a Muslim soldier away from his family was at the mercy of a threatening letter, and would desert—quite naturally—to save his wife and children.
Knowing every track in their neighbourhood and armed with shotguns loaded with heavy shot designed for wild boar, a terrible weapon at fifty yards’ range in the forest, Servier’s harkis soon proved a redoubtable instrument for tracking down the F.L.N. News of the good pay and conditions of the harkis spread like wildfire, and loyal caids—like the Bachaga Boualem, dedicated to the cause of Algérie française and in whose fiefdom the maquis rouge had been rounded up—came forward to form what were in effect yet more private armies. In the two years from January 1957 the numbers of harki “self-defence” villages rose from 18 to 385, and their total manpower was eventually to reach 60,000. Perhaps surprisingly, one American professor, stressing the equality and fairness with which the Algerians serving in the French army were treated, states categorically that “At no time from 1954 to 1962 did the numbers of Algerians fighting with the A.L.N. for independence match the number of Algerians fighting on the French side.”
The value and reliability of the harki units varied enormously, generally in direct proportion to the quality of the S.A.S. administrator under whose jurisdiction they came. Jean Servier describes one disillusioning debacle concerning a harki he had created himself, where the official report stated baldly: “The treachery of elements of a harki facilitated an ambush against the forces of order.” Servier flew in by helicopter, and what he discovered was as follows: the local S.A.S. képi bleu had been sacked by the military command which had disapproved of his methods. Since then a French artillery unit had gone out on patrols, quite ineffectively, using the same route every day, and employing the harkis as transport troops to lug munitions and radios—instead of searching the ravines and mountain crests, tasks for which they were formed and at which they excelled. Not surprisingly, in the middle of one heavy lunch hour the French gunners were taken unawares by rebels attacking from a high ridge. They panicked and scattered into the forest, while only the harkis held their ground. When reinforcements arrived all the harkis were found dead, one machine-gunner having felled fourteen rebels; in a burnt mechta were the remains of the French gunners who had surrendered and had had their throats slit and been thrown into the fire. Yet the harkis were blamed for “treachery”; i
n despair Servier bemoaned “the uselessness of all my efforts, all the sacrifices that I had imposed on the men that France was going to abandon”.
“Oiseau Bleu” and other “special operations”
It was a regular complaint of the harki leaders, like the Bachaga Boualem, that the French authorities too often showed themselves less than half-hearted towards them, that they were refused automatic weapons, and that the “loyal” caids—always priority targets for the F.L.N.—should have had to protect themselves with pistols and shotguns. But mistrust was part of the game; and not always without reason. In one of their first “special operations”, a shadowy and highly secret enterprise with the code-name Oiseau Bleu, the French had already had their fingers painfully burned. Exploiting the age-old hatreds between Kabyles and Arabs, an anti-F.L.N. guerrilla had been formed in Kabylia (during the Soustelle era and apparently, in the first instance, under police auspices), from Kabyle separatists. Known as “Force K”, it had risen to over a thousand men clamouring for more effective arms, and responsibility for it had passed to the army. In the spring of 1956 a Captain Hentic was summoned to Army G.H.Q. in Algiers and placed in charge of “controlling” the operation. Hentic was a member of the cloak-and-dagger 11th Shock unit, which had just scored a triumph in the secret war by blowing up Ben Boulaid with a booby-trapped radio. He himself had recently arrived in Algeria, convalescent after serving in Indo-China, and from an early stage would be involved with Jean Servier in the formation of the harkis.[1] Initially, says Hentic, the impression he received of “Force K” was quite good, and an arsenal of some 300 rifles and sub-machine-guns was distributed to it. But there was immediately an element of mystery about its highly secret operations; they never seemed to be witnessed by any French units in the neighbourhood; bodies of F.L.N. rebels claimed were seldom identified; and at each receipt of a report of the elusive Krim’s whereabouts he had moved on by the time “Force K” reached the spot.
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