The coincidence was, if anything, extenuated when, less than two months later, Amirouche’s other ally, Colonel Si M’hamed of Wilaya 4 disappeared mysteriously in the course of an operation. His body was never found, but it is generally believed that he was executed by his comrades, in all probability the victim of French Intelligence bleuite, like so many of the young Algiers students whose deaths he had himself ordered. With the disappearance of Si M’hamed, however, the purges in Wilaya 4 by no means ceased. Shortly after being appointed, his successor, Si Salah, reported to the G.P.R.A. that he personally had interrogated, judged and sentenced to execution 312 djounoud, fifty-four non-commissioned officers and twenty officers.
In all this saga of upheaval in the echelons of Wilaya 4, French Intelligence suffered one notable reverse at the hands of Major Azedine, the former boiler-maker and deputy military commander to Si M’hamed. In November 1958 Massu had mounted a powerful sweep of the country round Palestro in the course of which Azedine had been captured, with a shattered forearm. Under interrogation Azedine declared convincingly that he was at odds with the conduct of the war by the G.P.R.A. He felt it should now make peace with de Gaulle, whose return to power had made the whole struggle “senseless”. Azedine offered to negotiate a surrender with the leaders of Wilaya 4, and actually made several trips into the maquis to this end, on “parole”. At the same time he fed his captors with quantities of false information, and exploited a local cease-fire to get a shipment of supplies through to his Wilaya. Then one day in December he vanished quietly into the mountains behind Blida and was never seen again—until he emerged as the F.L.N. commander negotiating the take-over of Algiers in the last days of the war.[2]
Revolt of the four colonels: enter Boumedienne
The commands of the Wilayas were in disarray; there was too much autonomous power on the part of their chiefs, verging on a “cult of the personality”. All this was abhorrent to the whole philosophy of the F.L.N., opening wounds which still festered since the liquidation of Abane, and revealed anew that the military authority of the “exterior” G.P.R.A. was as frail as that of its predecessor, the C.C.E. On top of this there were, as ever, the numerous papered-over conflicts that needed only an increase of stress for them to burst through to the surface: conflicts of ideology between the veteran F.L.N. members and the former supporters of Messali and Abbas, and between the conservatives and progressives; conflicts between city intellectuals and illiterate peasant maquisards; conflicts between the thousands of refugees living, like the Palestinians, miserable and hungry in wretched camps in Tunisia and Morocco, and the growing force of comfortable bureaucrats serving the G.P.R.A. in Tunisia; conflicts between the G.P.R.A. and Bourguiba; conflicts, as always, between the “interior” and “exterior”, and finally conflicts between the A.L.N. military command in Ghardimaou and the supreme leadership in Tunis. Seldom before had a strong hand seemed more necessary.
Then, in November 1958, what looked like the threat of a major revolt appeared on the Tunisian frontier. All through the year the command of that particularly hard-pressed, key front under the former S.S. legionnaire, Mohamedi Said, with his inseparable coal-scuttle helmet, had been in a far from happy state of discord and disorder. Selecting, symbolically, the All Saints anniversary of 1 November, a full-scale offensive had been mounted to breach the Morice Line and get supplies through to the suffering Wilayas 1 and 2. It was too obvious a date for the French army to be caught napping, and—like so many of those disastrous “big pushes” on the Western Front of 1914–18—it ended in a welter of blood and total failure in the barbed wire of the Morice Line. Morale among those involved hit rock bottom and four colonels, led by Colonel Lamouri, decided to act. With secret support, apparently, from Nasser (whose relations with the new G.P.R.A. were icy) they intended to march on Tunis, chuck out the G.P.R.A. and liquidate the “three Bs”, replacing it with a completely “military” regime. Lamouri tried unsuccessfully to make contact with the disenchanted Amirouche but, before he was able to, reports of his plans reached the ears of Boussouf’s intelligence network.
During the night of 16 November the four colonels were seized at a conspiratorial meeting near El-Kef, together with some twenty of their supporters. Altogether fifty-four suspects were rounded up on Krim’s orders, and in March the ringleaders appeared before a court-martial on Tunisian territory. The presiding judge was an austerely efficient but little-known young colonel who first appeared as Boussouf’s aide in Morocco. He had then taken over command of the Western Front where he had permitted none of the discords which had so riven its Tunisian counterpart. His name was Houari Boumedienne. The four colonels were condemned to death, and shot the following day; while the majors who had followed them, considered corrupted by their seniors, were given only two years’ imprisonment.[3] But the sentences passed by Boumedienne were unprecedentedly harsh by (official) F.L.N. standards, and exemplary. The A.L.N.’s strong man had arrived, and from this moment on its whole character began to show a steady change.
For all his eminence in the post-war decade, Boumedienne remains one of the least known of all the war leaders of either side, and in his secretiveness and retiring modesty he is most characteristically Algerian. In 1973 one leading Western ambassador was unable to tell the author where the then President of Algeria lived, or whether he was married or not;[4] in three years he had met him once. There exists no official—or even unofficial—biography of Boumedienne, only the scantiest of entries in International Who’s Who, and pen-portraits differ widely as to the date he was born, and whether it was in Oranie or Constantinois, at opposite ends of the country. There are contradictions as to where and when he received his military training; some say at a guerrilla school in Egypt, one of his closer collaborators thought it was in General Kassem’s Iraq, while there were extravagant French rumours that Boumedienne had somehow found time for training in both Moscow and Peking. Yet there is, apparently, no truth in any of these speculations. Even after years of being not only President of Algeria but also one of the most influential leaders of the Third World, he has never shaken off his intense dislike of any form of publicity, and in his rare interviews with writers and journalists he steadfastly declines to discuss the war, or his role in it.
What is known with reasonable certainty of Boumedienne is that he was born in 1927 near Guelma with the name of Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharouba, and that his father was an impoverished small wheat-farmer with seven children, an Arab and a strict Muslim speaking no French. “Houari” and “Boumedienne” were both noms-de-guerre he assumed while serving his first apprenticeship with the A.L.N. in Oranie; the one from a mountain range, the other from a local Muslim patron saint. Using both, for a considerable time Boumedienne deceived French intelligence as to his true identity. It was evidently at Guelma, during the Sétif revolt of 1945, that Boumedienne as a youth gained his first experience of conflict with the French. He had been sent, aged fourteen, to school in Constantine, at one of the few centres dedicated to Arab-Islamic studies, where he stayed for six years. In about 1950 he went to Cairo to study in that great fount of Muslim learning, El Azhar University. His background was thus already totally different from that of the francophone nationalist leaders of the pre-war generation, like Ferhat Abbas, and his age when the revolution started places him among the rising leaders who belonged truly to the new generation created by the war itself. In the maquis he seems first to have emerged in 1955, carrying out a beach-landing of arms west of Oran from the “borrowed” yacht of the Queen of Jordan, and was then picked out for his silent efficiency by Boussouf, currently commander of Wilaya 5, to be his adjutant. On Boussouf’s promotion to the C.C.E. in July 1957, Boumedienne was himself appointed to command the Wilaya as the youngest colonel in the A.L.N. The following year he was given command of the whole Western Front, and subsequently transferred to the A.L.N. High Command at about the time of the plot of the four dissident colonels over whose judgement he was to preside.
With his c
uriously gaunt, high-cheekboned face, reddish hair, harshly intense green eyes and wispy moustache, to some Western journalists Boumedienne looked “more like a starving Irish poet than a guerrilla veteran”. The fact that it was a face seldom seen smiling (“Why should I smile just because a photographer is taking the trouble to photograph me?” he asked an Egyptian interviewer when President) underlined the salient characteristic of Boumedienne: his deadly seriousness. It was a seriousness that permitted him no time for the frippery of rank, uniform or decorations; no time for the foibles of personal ambition or boasting; and no time for the petty feuds with which the F.L.N. was riven. All of this made him much revered by the men under him. He was deeply serious about the study of war, particularly in its organisational aspects. Dedicated to one cause only, an independent Algeria, he had no Marxist leanings yet had closely studied the revolutionary teachings of Mao. He was an utterly unromantic revolutionary, with a coldly searching intellect, of whom it was said that he only emerged from his withdrawn taciturnity to ask a question—and his thirst for information was insatiable.[5] One English newspaper pen-portrait of Boumedienne (David Leitch in the Sunday Times of 6 August 1967) describes him as having no known vices “except chain-smoking Gauloises, and apparent total indifference to human relationships”. His spartan headquarters were enlivened only by a large portrait of Abdel-Kader, the national hero. A tremendous worker, he had the eye and memory for detail of a staff officer of genius, and his organisation left a mark on both Wilaya 5 and the Western Front that was exceptional within the A.L.N.
Following the execution of the rebel colonels, Boumedienne was given the Herculean task of restoring discipline and organisation to the army in Tunisia. Soon his efforts began to show results, one of his early tactical innovations being to halt the costly frontal assaults on the Morice Line. As 1959 progressed, it was also clear that Boumedienne had become the most influential soldier in the A.L.N.; for, having called him in to crush the insurgent colonels, the G.P.R.A. would find it difficult to check his growing influence over the “exterior” army in both Morocco and Tunisia. At the third C.N.R.A. congress held in Tripoli during January 1960, Boumedienne was confirmed in the all-powerful post of chief-of-staff of the whole A.L.N.—which he had, in effect, already been filling for some months past. Under pressure from the French army, he adopted a decisive new strategy: instead of attempting to back up the Wilayas at appalling cost across the Morice Line, the A.L.N. would be regrouped and reorganised inside the Tunisian sanctuary, and held there in readiness for future military and political opportunities. It was a strategy that would, to some extent, deceive the French Army Command into believing the military successes of the Challe Plan were greater than in fact they were—with consequences that will shortly be seen.
Thus a new star had been born with an import for the future which, at the time of writing, remains still incalculable. In general, however, 1958–59 had been a thoroughly bad and dangerous time for the F.L.N. Both politically and militarily it had been caught off balance by the coming of de Gaulle. If de Gaulle could have followed up the momentum of his first weeks with a concerted peace drive, or if the Challe offensive had begun in 1958 instead of 1959, the prospects would have looked incomparably bleak. But, as it happened, the long build-up to the referendum and the November legislative elections, followed by the run-down from the paix des braves olive-branch, had given the F.L.N. an invaluable respite in which to regain its breath. And when in 1959 the A.L.N. was confronted with the gravest military threat to its existence, it was already moving in—and under—a new direction.
[1] Though he was to outwit his captors and make good his escape at a later date.
[2] The decamping of Azedine was humiliating for French pride to swallow, but the damage may not have stopped there. A year and a half later a genuine peace offer was made by the then commander of Wilaya 4, Si Salah, perhaps one of the most important “breaks” of the whole war. But it was turned down by a mistrustful de Gaulle, no doubt in part influenced by the Azedine debacle.
[3] It is worth noting that, while fulsome tributes were paid to Amirouche and Si Haouès by Krim and others in succeeding issues of El Moudjahid, no reference was made to the execution of the four A.L.N. colonels.
[4] He was in fact married in 1973.
[5] According to one of his close entourage at the time of his flying visit to Moscow during the “Ramadan War” of 1973, Boumedienne taxed his staff to the limits by demanding almost hourly bulletins of news from home, “and you know how difficult that is to obtain in Moscow…!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Neither the Djebel nor the Night:
1959
We have pacified the country so well…that the fellagha have almost disappeared. Nowadays, almost no one joins the guerrillas….
French captain’s report, quoted by Edward Behr
The Challe Plan
WITH the end of fighting in Cyprus, 1959 revealed a world with only one major active battle front: Algeria. Despite all the problems besetting it, the A.L.N. of the interior was still making its presence felt. In small packets they would descend from the djebel, blow up power pylons, mine a train or an army convoy, murder a pro-French caid or shoot up the isolated outpost of one of the heroic corps of French S.A.S. officers; and then vanish again whence they came. Existing as they did under terrible conditions of cold, hunger, and constant pursuit by the French army, that they could still act at all must of itself be a testimony to the remarkable stoicism, tenacity and dedication of the individual moudjahid. Revisiting his pied noir brother, a small farmer at Ménerville less than forty miles east of Algiers, Colonel Jules Roy found him and his wife placing flimsy metal trays (“such as you find in bakery ovens”) over all the windows, like Kenya settlers in the Mau-Mau era. “We’ve had to do this every night for the last four years,” the brother explained: “they don’t kill because they have anything against you. These days they kill for the sake of killing.” He added gloomily: “They’ll never stop, that’s for sure. We kill one whenever we manage to catch him, but the next day another starts all over again. They want us to get out.” Year after year, night after night, the nervous tension among the European colons in the outlying bled must have become almost intolerable. There was virtually no corner of the country where, in the fifth year of the war, they could feel totally secure. The truth was that, for all the massive injections of men and material, the security forces were just too thinly spread to meet every possible threat everywhere.
In appointing General Maurice Challe as Commander-in-Chief, says de Gaulle, “I expected operations to take a dynamic turn which would result in our undisputed mastery of the field.” Conversely, in political terms, “Nothing could have been more disastrous than some untoward incident in which we came off worst.” This sense of urgency was reinforced by de Gaulle’s newly appointed Prime Minister, Michel Debré, in his first visit to Algeria early in the new year. To Challe he insisted that there be swift “military successes” before the spring, and that “We must be able to put out a victory bulletin in the month of July; for France is beginning to get bored with the war.” There was also a looming problem of manpower; France was entering into the “hollow classes” of the young men of military age who should have been born during the Second World War. Beyond an aim of improving security for pied noir colons, like the Roy family (which was never one of his highest priorities), and the more conventional one of pressing the F.L.N. into accepting a paix des braves, de Gaulle may have had more complex psychological motives for intensifying military operations. As Raymond Aron had noted perceptively, that deep ingrained sense of past humiliations had to be exorcised, and “If the army could achieve an incontestable success, it might be less hostile to the creation of an Algerian state.”
No sooner had he arrived in his new post than Challe set to work enthusiastically to devise a new, winning strategy. He analysed carefully the shortcomings of the past. Under the established system of quadrillage, the army had endeavoured to
be everywhere at the same time, a system that had succeeded in limiting the free movement of A.L.N. katibas and their infiltration into the populated centres. But it had also resulted in there not being enough troops to go round for the army to have a powerful, mobile, offensive force with which to go out and destroy the A.L.N. in its mountain strongholds. In fact, at the time of Challe’s appointment this force, composed chiefly of paras and the Legion, seldom amounted to more than 15,000 men, or roughly the same strength as the total of A.L.N. moudjahiddine available for operations in the interior. Scattered across the four corners of Algeria, it was employed rather in fire-brigade fashion—or, indeed, like the penny-packet handling of the French armour which had brought such disaster in 1940. Algeria was divided into no less than seventy-five separate sectors—which meant there were “seventy-five ways of making war”—and offensive operations tended to be carried out haphazardly, without any co-ordinated plan. “Mounted several days in advance,” noted Challe, “they often struck nothing but emptiness.” The blows were too ponderous:
They achieved success when they cornered one or two katibas, but this was a rare act…. The populace was warned not to remain in the area and would be regrouped in the plains or the plateau, then, by plane or artillery, the area would be bombarded or fired at on sight. The results, as one could verify, were nil for a veritable orgy of ammunition.
The “stirred-up” rebels would simply slip over into the neighbouring sector, which had rarely been synchronised with the operations; then, as soon as the attacking troops withdrew, the A.L.N. would return to become “master of the mountain” once more. As Challe described it to Delouvrier, in the past the war in Algeria had been fought as “a succession of blows, sometimes spectacular, but without any political or military follow-through. In the eyes of the people, the F.L.N. remains master of the country.”
A Savage War of Peace Page 48