In all this wave of terrorism it should be noted, however, that there was not one act of promiscuous bombing against civilians such as had been commonplace in Algiers and was to become so on a larger scale in Britain under the scourge of the I.R.A. a decade and a half later.
Nevertheless, the campaign provoked unexpectedly violent reactions among French workers and the Left where the F.L.N. could most expect to find friends. The Communist leader, Maurice Thorez, was particularly severe in his condemnation: “The methods employed by the F.L.N. in France have not, it must be stated categorically, served the just cause of the Algerian people…. If the F.L.N. is proposing to arouse public opinion, it is practising self-deception. It is arousing feelings against itself….” At the same time, by taking vigorous police action of the kind familiar in Algiers, the French were soon successful in tracking down the terrorist networks, and with this went the danger that the fund-collecting organisation—considerably more important to the F.L.N. war effort—might also be caught up in the security net. Therefore on 28 September, the day of the referendum, a cease-fire was called in the terrorist offensive—an admission of failure clad under the rather thin pretext of a conciliatory gesture of goodwill.
One of the objectives of the F.L.N. offensive had also been to attempt to secure the release of Ben Bella and his colleagues, still languishing in the Santé prison after two years without trial. This too was unsuccessful, though as part of his general amnesty measures on assuming the presidency in January 1959 de Gaulle ordered the prisoners transferred to the slightly more comfortable surroundings of the île d’Aix, the fortress isle in the Bay of Biscay where Napoleon had passed his last days on French soil in July 1815 before being transported to his ultimate exile aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon. The boredom and frustration there were extreme. Ben Bella devoted much of his long leisure hours to reading Temps Modernes and France Football, though he claims to have got through some seven hundred books in the course of his imprisonment. Through the remarkable “Arab telegraph” set up in the prisons of France, and frequent visits from his lawyers, he still managed to maintain regular contact with the new G.P.R.A.
The abrupt calling-off of the terrorist campaign in France also had, in all probability, a subsidiary effect of encouraging de Gaulle to make his paix des braves a few weeks later. From early in the summer a delicate and highly secret link had been established between, on the one hand, de Gaulle and Abderrahmane Farès, the former president of the Algerian Assembly, and, on the other, between Farès and Ferhat Abbas. At a clandestine meeting in Montreux in August, Farès informed Abbas (then not yet appointed president of the G.P.R.A.) that de Gaulle was ready to “open serious negotiations with the rebels”. Abbas seemed receptive, declaring that he personally would be prepared to participate in “any kind of conversation on neutral ground”. A period of nearly five weeks elapsed, during which time the F.L.N.’s terrorist campaign in France and the repressive measures it provoked had caused a distinct drop in the temperature between the two sides, as indeed was desired by the hard-liners of the F.L.N. On 17 September a message drafted by Georges Pompidou, then de Gaulle’s chef-de-cabinet, was passed to Farès for onward transmission. It offered safe passage for an F.L.N. delegation to come to Paris to discuss conditions for a cease-fire; the discussion would centre on military matters, but “other problems” could be brought up. At the same time it suggested that the F.L.N. create “a climate of confidence” by not opposing the referendum fixed for the 28th. Abbas reacted coolly to all this, insisting that any meeting must be held on neutral territory. The G.P.R.A. followed up with a still sharper refusal, strongly attacking the referendum, and condemning the Pompidou proposal of an encounter in Paris as a “humiliating gesture”.
A further rebuff for de Gaulle
Next, after its humiliation in the referendum, the G.P.R.A. issued a stinging rebuff over Cairo Radio to de Gaulle’s Constantine Plan speech of 31 October: “De Gaulle offers war or fraternity. Algeria and the whole Algerian people have chosen war.” At this point the F.L.N., not for the first or the last time, seem to have been speaking with two voices, for in quick succession there now followed Ferhat Abbas’s much more conciliatory and widely reported interview with Artur Rosenberg. De Gaulle meanwhile was manifestly piqued by the F.L.N.’s hostility to his referendum, which he regarded in terms of the kind of “free election” which the Algerian nationalists had so persistently clamoured for in the past. In a conversation with the Moroccan politician Ben Barka, de Gaulle acidly criticised “these F.L.N. leaders who believe that the possession of sub-machine-guns and rifles gives them automatically the right to come to discuss politics with him [de Gaulle]”. On other occasions he held strongly to his view that negotiations for a cease-fire should be largely restricted to military spheres. Nevertheless, despite this evident gulf between the two sides, the G.P.R.A. was apparently prepared to announce at its session of 24 October that a “dialogue” had been opened with de Gaulle.
Then, the day before, came de Gaulle’s Press conference and his bomb-shell of the paix des braves. The proposition had been most carefully rehearsed and could not in any way be dismissed as a “slip of the tongue” like the “Vive l’Algérie française!” of Mostaganem. Here was de Gaulle the soldier, believing that he was addressing himself to enemy soldiers in the language of the soldier, and offering what he genuinely considered to be preliminaries to a “peace with honour”. But in fact he was addressing hardened politicians, and his phraseology betrayed the most complete failure to understand the psychology of the F.L.N. leaders. To them, however de Gaulle might construe it, the mention of the drapeau blanc des parlementaires could mean one thing and one thing only: capitulation. On the 25th the G.P.R.A. replied: “The declaration of General de Gaulle constitutes a refusal to negotiate….” In slamming the door as brusquely as they did, the G.P.R.A. were, from their point of view, absolutely right. For, with the shaky state of morale both among the civilians and A.L.N. units inside Algeria, had they accepted the paix des braves, even only as preliminary parley, the revolution might well have begun to flicker out and would have been extremely difficult to rekindle if the talks assumed a course unfavourable to the F.L.N. De Gaulle would have won the war; on the other hand, by rejecting the paix des braves the F.L.N. were, eventually, to win it.
One of the first consequences of the F.L.N.’s intransigence towards the paix des braves was to confront de Gaulle with, at best, a half-defeat at the legislative elections of the following month. Out of the forty-six Muslim deputies sent to France, not one could be reckoned to constitute a potential interlocuteur valable. All were supporters of “integration”, none represented a genuine, liberal “third force”. As Michael Clark correctly observes, “the centrifugal pressure of events had driven the moderates from an untenable middle position. The chief weakness of the middle position was that it had no popular support. None but fools could expect many aspiring Muslim politicians in 1958 to risk their lives in defense of it.”
The rejection of the paix des braves was also to mark the beginning of the decline within the G.P.R.A. of the influence of the moderates—notably, at this stage, Ferhat Abbas. Despite the collapse of his initiatives in October, over the next nine months Abbas visited no less than fifteen foreign capitals in pursuit of a new peace formula. Then, disillusioned, he withdrew increasingly from the scene. Abbas, it may be assumed, was quite genuine in his pursuit still of some kind of compromise peace solution; the same cannot be said of the increasingly powerful hard-liners behind the G.P.R.A. by whom negotiations were regarded primarily as a device for getting France involved in an endless procedure, which would provide the F.L.N. with time it so badly needed in 1958–9, and, by wearing down the patience of the enemy negotiators, eventually lead to peace on F.L.N. terms.
The A.L.N. under extreme pressure
Meanwhile, de Gaulle, thwarted in his first peace initiative, had set to prosecuting the military war with unprecedented vigour, with means that will be seen in the following cha
pter. As will be recalled, between its defeat in the Battle of Algiers and the spring of 1958 the A.L.N. had come under fiercest pressure, its attempts to breach the Morice Line broken with bloody losses, its valiant moudjahiddine isolated and hard-pressed in the Wilayas. Yet, seen in retrospect, the A.L.N. of the interior would seem to have reached its apogee of military power in 1958. At the beginning of the year French estimates had put the total strength of A.L.N. regulars, or moudjahiddine, at about 30,000, of whom approximately half were operating in the interior at any one time. On top of this were reckoned to be another 30,000 irregulars, or moussebiline, most of whom were in the interior. Of these effectives, the French claimed that 25,534 had been killed or captured during the first seven months of the year. Although (as with the notorious United States army “head counts” in Vietnam) it may be questioned just how many of these casualties were actually genuine, hard-core moudjahiddine, they nevertheless represented a serious drain of effectives. By the end of 1958 the G.P.R.A.’s new Ministry of Information under Yazid proclaimed triumphantly that, from 40,000 in 1957, the total of men under arms had risen to over 100,000; but, again, the proportion of moudjahiddine in the total could be questioned, while at the same time the ratio of effectives inside Algeria to those outside was steadily widening to the advantage of the latter.
By June 1958 the A.L.N. had been forced to reduce its basic fighting unit to the katiba, or company; by the following year it was to be found seldom operating on larger than a platoon level. The shortage of arms and ammunition was becoming particularly pronounced; by December 1958 Wilaya 1 (Aurès) was reporting to the G.P.R.A. that no less than 600 of its combatants were without weapons. The loss in leaders was proving equally grave; in November 1958 Wilaya 4 (Algérois) lost its military chief, Azedine, captive to the French,[1] and two months later one of its best field commanders, Captain Si Rachid, was also killed. In March 1959 there followed the deaths of the leaders of both Wilayas 6 and 3, Si Haouès and the ferocious Amirouche, in circumstances shortly to be described. The consequence of all this on the morale of the Wilayas could be detected in the fact that, whereas in 1956 the monthly total of moudjahiddine defectors to the French would barely occupy the fingers of one hand, by July—August 1958 it had risen to an average of 300. At the same time the recovery of arms by the French showed a noteworthy increase. In the new year of 1959 the Wilayas were to be found concentrating on the relatively unrisky pastime of derailing trains. It was a gross excess of optimism for the veteran pied noir marshal, Juin, to declare in November that “the war is virtually over”, but the coming of General Challe the following month was to impose upon the A.L.N. the gravest threat it had yet faced, as well as the beginning of a decline from which it would never fully recover. On the other hand, because of timely political developments, the military potential of the A.L.N. would cease to a decisive factor in the war.
Death of Amirouche the Terrible
Under mounting French military pressure, a fresh set of rifts had been provoked in the higher echelons of the F.L.N., both between the Wilayas and the “exterior” of the G.P.R.A., and within the various Wilayas themselves. The years of 1958 and 1959 were, above all, a time when the Wilaya leaders were scourged by terrible apprehensions of treachery, or purported treachery. Genuine acts of betrayal had existed, certainly, but they had been used with extreme cunning by French intelligence operatives to demoralise the maquis through playing upon the innate suspiciousness of the Algerian. It has already been noted how teams of bleu double-agents controlled by Captain Christian Léger during the Battle of Algiers had subsequently succeeded in penetrating the Western Zone headquarters of Wilaya 3 (Kabylia), rounding it up in its entirety. Colonel Godard, the expert on counter-revolutionary warfare, followed up the confusion and distrust generated in the wake of this coup by adroitly “dropping” incriminating correspondence with French intelligence among other immaculate leaders in the Wilayas. The bait was snapped up greedily by Amirouche, the jeweller from the Beni-Yenni and the most ruthless of any Wilaya commander, entering into the “game” with unparalleled zest and instituting massive purges like a latter-day Vyshinsky. Under appalling inquisitions supervised by an F.L.N. captain nicknamed “La Torture” who had worked with the S.S. during the Second World War, admissions of treachery were extorted which led to vast chain-reactions of suspicion. Orders were given to arrest all recent Muslim deserters from the French forces, and any recruits who had come from Algiers since the beginning of the battle. A kind of madness seized Amirouche, who is said to have caused the execution of possibly as many as 3,000, women as well as men, in the course of his reign of terror. Mouloud Feraoun wrote in his diary: “Sad epoch, sad Kabylia. Sad Kabylia because every day one discovers traitors, the traitors are killed, and those who killed them end by being killed in their turn.”
During this period activities against the French were all but paralysed, and, not satisfied with purging his own Wilaya, Amirouche urged similar measures upon the neighbouring Wilayas 2 (Constantine) and 4 (Algérois), Mistrust is contagious, and in rapid succession the leaders of both Wilayas followed suit. The havoc was particularly pronounced in Wilaya 4, which, with its “progressive” attitudes towards discipline and innovations of communal decision-taking, had for some time been a model sector. By the summer of 1959 all was havoc, its leader, Si M’hamed, having been encouraged—partly by the example of Amirouche, partly as a result of assiduous “moling” by Léger’s teams—to carry out a murderous purge of the numerous young students and intellectuals who had joined the Wilaya on fleeing from the Battle of Algiers. The “capital” crimes of which they were found guilty often amounted to little more than asking questions, or revealing an “incorrect revolutionary stance”.
By the end of 1958 Amirouche and his fellow commanders had their Wilayas in a grip of terror, while jointly the power they exerted in relation to the absentee G.P.R.A. was hardly less daunting. Hard on the heels of the purge in his own Wilaya, Amirouche was writing a fierce letter to the G.P.R.A. in Tunis, accusing it of bourgeois taints and of half-heartedness in its attempts to breach the Morice Line, and calling upon it to launch a “national purification” similar to his own. At the same time he endeavoured to canvass the support of his peers at an inter-Wilaya meeting held in December in the mountainous country round El-Milia, close to the boundary between Wilayas 2 and 3. Colonel Lotfi of Wilaya 5, who enjoyed close relations with his predecessor, Boussouf, now a powerful minister of the G.P.R.A., refused to take part, but Amirouche found degrees of support particularly from Si M’hamed (Wilaya 4) and Si Haouès (Wilaya 6). Having expressed fears (that were highly exaggerated) of the immense scale of French intelligence penetration of the entire F.L.N. movement, Amirouche persuaded the meeting to send a communiqué to the G.P.R.A. in which it was sternly criticised, summoned to “correct its errors”, and exhorted to devolve greater powers upon the Wilaya leaders. It was also agreed that one or more representatives at the meeting should go to Tunis to confront the G.P.R.A. the following April.
Evidently with this ultimate objective in mind, towards the end of March 1959 Amirouche was heading south-eastwards from his Kabyle fiefdom for a rendezvous with the czar of the Sahara, Si Haouès. In the barren wastes of the Hodna that lie between Kabylia and the true Sahara, harki scouts attached to Colonel Georges Buis came across a fresh latrine, with signs of it having been used by a large number of men. Swiftly flying in elements of three para regiments, Buis succeeded in trapping a whole A.L.N. katiba. Seventy-three were killed and eight captured alive, one of them being Amirouche’s private secretary on whom was found a number of helpful documents—including details of the inter-Wilaya meeting of December 1958. Amirouche himself had made his getaway only a few hours earlier. A week later, on 28 March, in a state of exhaustion he had reached Si Haouès in the desert south-east of Bou Saada. Almost immediately units under the command of Colonel Ducasse, Massu’s former chief-of-staff, who (like most of those present in May 1958) had been posted away from Algiers by de G
aulle, were attacking the rebel encampment. After a brief but fierce one-sided fight between 2,500 French troops and forty moudjahiddine, the bodies of the two Wilaya leaders were picked up. It was a notable success for the French, by whom Amirouche was regarded as one of the deadliest enemy commanders, and Ducasse was promptly made a Commander of the Legion of Honour. But the suspicion lingered long that possibly the tip-off on the leaders’ whereabouts might have been passed on by those of his colleagues to whom Amirouche, in particular, had become an embarrassment in his ruthless cruelty and lust for power. Certainly it seems a curious coincidence that, after so many years of frustration, the French should be able to lay their hands on two such important leaders of the A.L.N. at once.
A Savage War of Peace Page 47