A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  On his return from the Communist bloc, and following the deadlock at Melun, Krim warned the West — with considerable diplomatic skill — that Algeria was appealing for military assistance from the East, “including rockets”, and after his visits in the autumn of 1960 Abbas was telling the New York Times how he expected Chinese and Soviet arms deliveries to be substantially increased. Privately, in all their dealings the Algerian delegates had insisted that there should be no political strings attached, and it was clear that — even more than the actual arms supplies themselves (which never lived up to promises made) — the F.L.N. primarily valued their relationship with Peking and Moscow for the pressure it applied upon France, both directly and through the medium of her nervous Western allies.

  The coolness of the U.S.S.R. towards the Algerian revolution had several motives. In the first place they were committed to support the French Communist Party and its sister in Algeria, the P.C.A., both of whom had ambivalent attitudes in that they in turn were committed to support the petit pied noir workers, as well as the largely anti-Algerian workers of metropolitan France. Secondly, the advent of de Gaulle and his threats to break up the Atlantic Alliance persuaded the Kremlin that its longer-term interests lay better in doing nothing that might seriously upset de Gaulle. Thirdly, in its espousal of the new Khrushchev doctrine of “peaceful coexistence”, the Kremlin was compelled to pay lip-service to condemning violent revolution as “infantile disorders”; and, fourthly, it was increasingly clear that the F.L.N. was throughout a nationalist and not a Marxist liberation movement, and showed few signs of becoming one. In turn, the coolness of the Soviets was to freeze any inclination the F.L.N. might otherwise have nurtured for Soviet Communism, leaving it with a mistrust and an aversion that would linger significantly into the post-war Algerian world.

  Quoting Fidel Castro, Régis Debray says: “that there is no revolution without a vanguard; that this vanguard is not necessarily the Marxist—Leninist party”. This was certainly true of the Algerian revolution; but it was not even to succumb to Marxism—Leninism in the aftermath of war — in contrast to Cuba, and despite Boumedienne’s close friendship and admiration for Castro. Perhaps because of the language and proximity, the F.L.N. was always strongly influenced by the French Resistance, but if there was one Communist country — apart from Maoist China — with whose revolutionary struggle they felt a particularly warm identity, it was Tito’s Yugoslavia. From the earliest days, the Yugoslavs had given the F.L.N. staunch support both in arms and on international platforms; they were of the approved “third world”, not representing the massive, monolithic menace of the Soviet system; they did not thrust their ideology at the F.L.N.; and their brand of decentralised Socialism was not unappealing to the Algerians. In the style of the war of liberation there was also some kinship with the partisans’ experiences of 1941–5; the F.L.N. had been waging simultaneously a “war within a war” against the M.N.A., just as Tito had had his parallel struggle against the Četniks of Mihailović but, above all, both sets of revolutionaries were to emerge proclaiming in victory that they had won through their own courage and largely on their own resources, without “foreign” intervention. The mere fact of the Algerians’ proud insistence that their war of liberation was an act of pure nationalism, borrowed from no one else’s, is of itself a further point of comparison (though where it ends, of course, is that the F.L.N. never had — and as a matter of principle refused to have — a Tito).

  The fact is that, despite contemporary French claims to the contrary, Communism exerted but little influence on the F.L.N. war effort. As Abbas told a French Marxist towards the end of the war, “these Communists give people bread to eat, and that’s good; but man does not live by bread alone. We’re Muslims, you see, we believe in God, we want to elevate their minds; the mind must be nourished too.” Marxist materialism was at least as alien to the F.L.N. ethos as were other external Arab ideologies such as Moroccan monarchism, Tunisian Bourguibism, or Egyptian Nasserism. The F.L.N. had always been quite unyielding in never accepting Communists into their ranks as a “block membership”; if they came, they came as individuals, forswearing all former allegiances. The Communist world was, if anything, more exploited than exploiting; as Edgar O’Ballance aptly remarks: “The F.L.N. outsmarted the Communists all along the line by taking all it could from them, and then playing them off at their own game.”

  Although, because of the all-smothering blanket of secretiveness, it is hard to be categoric, the impression one has is that in general the wartime debates and dissents within the F.L.N. were far more a matter of personalities than of ideologies. Most of the leaders were men of simple learning. There was a paucity of well-read intelligentsia; few, like Boumedienne, had university educations, and they tended to be indoctrinated in Islamic rather than Marxist thought. Essentially inward-looking, the F.L.N. leaders as a whole do not impress one as having been well-read on revolutionary practice and theory; if they had absorbed the techniques of the Viet-Minh, it was through the direct experiences some had had as members of the ill-fated French forces in Indo-China. In reading El Moudjahid, once one has scraped away the thick gravy layers of propaganda, one finds little serious discussion of social aims of the future Algerian society, and this was especially so from the death of the super-political Abane onwards. The frustration of Abane’s hopes for a “dynamic” revolution on the Viet-Minh pattern was also exacerbated by the ever-increasing isolation of the “interior” from “exterior”. Communication between the two, constantly preoccupied with matters of sheer military survival, gave but little time for ideological speculation. But as the years rolled by the revolution did develop pragmatically it own social face. It was an austere one, materialistically and religiously, and borrowed more from the theological teachings of the interwar Ulema than from Karl Marx. Characteristically, the F.L.N. never offered prosperity, liberty or the pursuit of happiness as planks in its programme. Its leaders profoundly disapproved of Bourguibism, not just on account of its “cult of the personality” but also for its emphasis on the merits of bourgeois free enterprise. When one declared to the Braces, “We are not Communists, but we are not fighting and dying for a bourgeois capitalist state which will only benefit a few people,” he could hardly have taken a more representative line.

  On certain projected and far-reaching social reforms the F.L.N. had remained steadfastly consistent from the Soummam Declaration onwards; one of these was agrarian reform and land redistribution, which — combined with the high promises and sadly inadequate achievements of successive French programmes — made a progressively powerful impact on rural Algeria. With the revolt beginning in the country rather than in the cities, with educated urban rebels flowing to the bled in refuge from Algiers, a profound revolution had taken place in the traditionally conservative consciousness of agrarian Algeria, lying deeper than the devoted French S.A.S. administrators could gauge, let alone reverse. After only two years of war, in 1957 Germaine Tillion had noted pessimistically how almost the whole of Muslim society in Algeria was “to be found solidly, and efficaciously enclosed within a clandestine framework”. Though this “framework” had only come into being with the insurrection, it almost gave the impression “that these invisible cadres, a powerful weapon of war, had been prepared for a long time”. She had criticised then the failure of French politicians “not to comprehend the irreversible character of the movement which was accomplishing itself in the silent depths of the people who had neither newspapers nor representatives”. On returning to her beloved Algeria some four years later, Germaine Tillion observed how, out of those “silent depths”, had arisen a “national unitary, Algerian consciousness” through six years of war, which reminded her of the German unity achieved as a result of the Napoleonic wars. It was, she reckoned, “a trump card for the Algeria of tomorrow”.

  Proof that this kind of national consciousness existed, and of the control which the geographically absent G.P.R.A. exerted now over the Algerian people, was detectable
in the local elections held in May 1960 where, though still mainly supporting de Gaulle, only fifty-six per cent of the electorate voted; while in the Casbah of Algiers the turn-out was down to thirty per cent, and in Sétif (the home town of Ferhat Abbas) to only fourteen per cent. Then, at the end of that year, further evidence was to be forthcoming in a manner even more dramatic — and discountenancing to de Gaulle.

  Neutralising the “Bao-Dais”

  The more one studies the Algerian revolution, the more one comes to realise how well the F.L.N. leadership succeeded in spinning an impenetrable cocoon of secrecy around the incessant rifts and dissents at the top (and it may well contain a lesson for the West in its present-day fits of political self-destruction). Much as the maquisards of the “interior” may have railed and raged at the “exterior” in its failure to furnish military replenishment, to the Muslim masses of Algeria the mere appearance of this seemingly unruffled, undivided and unrelenting façade was immeasurably heartening and encouraging, and probably did more to keep the flame of the revolution alight than a steady flow of dozens of fresh katibas across the Morice Line would have done. The moral effect of the Melun talks and their skilful exploitation by the G.P.R.A. has already been indicated, and this in turn was more grist to the mill of the hard-liners. Their line of argument was that “self-determination” had been wrested from de Gaulle simply by five years of remorseless violence initiated by the F.L.N. — not by the softer methods of Abbas or Messali. The direct consequence of “self-determination” had been the negotiating table at Melun. And who had sat at it with the representatives of the French government? Not the men of Messali or Abbas, but delegates selected by the F.L.N.

  Early in November 1960 three leaders of French Black Africa had an interview with de Gaulle to discuss Algerian solutions. A few days later they were in Tunis, relaying to ministers of the G.P.R.A. de Gaulle’s current preoccupation with finding “acceptable” leaders that might head an “Algerian Algeria” of the future. This had at once thrown the Algerians into the normal state of agitation provoked whenever suspicions were aroused that de Gaulle was still looking around for that elusive “third force” to cut out the F.L.N. Ahmed Francis, the G.P.R.A. Minister of Finance and one of the older and more experienced members present, recalled how at the close of the Indo-China war the French had “produced out of a hat” the Annamite ex-Emperor Bao-Dai, whom they had then sought to impose as the “nationalist interlocutor” in preference to Ho Chi Minh. De Gaulle, warned Ahmed Francis, “would like to play the same trick on us again today…. And that’s why our task is clear. We must, above all, neutralise the little Algerian Bao-Dais.”

  In fact, from the earliest days the F.L.N. had never let up on their ruthless campaign to “neutralise” the Bao-Dais that might have challenged their supremacy. There were the various Muslim “liberal” apostles of “association” returned in the elections since de Gaulle had come to power: courageous men whose heads, however, had been progressively kept down by selective outrages of terrorism. But still the principal foes, the modern counterparts of Tito’s Četniks, were the brother nationalists of the M.N.A. With the demise of the last private army under Bellounis, the M.N.A. had all but lost its last claim to bring revolution sprouting out of its gun muzzles, and inside Algeria it no longer carried much weight as a coherent political force. Yet always there existed the fear that de Gaulle would produce it “out of a hat”, like Bao-Dai.

  It was inside France, though — and particularly in the Paris area, where Messali had exerted a traditionally potent influence from the days of the antediluvian Etoile — that the M.N.A. remained strongest. Starting in 1957, a savage internecine war had raged between the two factions, which by 1960 had already claimed hundreds of dead among the 250,000 Algerian workers in the Paris region alone. In 1960 the killings reached a crescendo as the F.L.N. stepped up its campaign to achieve total ascendancy. Barely a day went by without a corpse fished out of the Seine, or found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne. A favourite place of reckoning was the quiet Canal Saint-Martin, flowing towards the Bastille in the east of Paris, which with hideous regularity yielded up its crop of sacks containing the disfigured bodies of Algerians. As during the Battle of Algiers, women were often employed as executioners’ “liaisons”; they would take a pistol concealed in a handbag to the appointed place, slip it to the killer, then take it back immediately the deed was done, to disappear silently into the crowd. Under the blanket of terror successfully imposed by the F.L.N., the French police received a minimum of information — even from the relatives of victims — with which to track down the terrorists. Meanwhile, the perfected system of fund-raising was bringing in from the Paris region alone something like three hundred million francs a month.

  As the F.L.N. campaign hit a peak in 1960, the Paris authorities launched a counter-offensive, adopting methods that had proved so successful in Algeria. A small group of “loyal” harkis was created in the capital who infiltrated among the Algerian quartiers to track down the F.L.N. operatives. Some spectacular shoot-ups ensued in the streets and alleys of Paris; on one occasion two terrorists who made their getaway in the métro were pursued from station to station by harkis commandeering the next train, and finally catching them. Within less than a year the harkis suffered twenty-four dead and sixty-seven wounded, but the results seemed to pay off. In the 13th Arrondissement alone fund collections dropped by a half after the first month, while from spring 1960 to the end of the war nearly 1,200 terrorists were rounded up, including four leaders of the F.L.N.’s metropolitan network.

  Yet, even inside prison walls, these militants were far from being safely neutralised. Like the detention centres of Northern Ireland where I.R.A. members blatantly drilled and trained before the eyes of British troops, the French prisons were transformed into recruiting grounds and veritable staff-colleges for the F.L.N. At Fresnes prison, for example, holding 1,500 F.L.N. suspects, discipline was exerted not by the prison administration but by a committee under the direction of Bachir Boumaza, subsequently a minister in both the Ben Bella and Boumedienne governments. As F.L.N. spokesmen were fond of boasting to journalists at the time, “We have three O.P.A.s: one in action, a second in reserve and a third in prison”. Prison — so revolutionaries from the early Bolsheviks onwards have discovered — provides the best of schools.

  Jewish dilemmas

  Finally, as the F.L.N. raised the pressure against the “non-conformists” ever more relentlessly, there was one particular community in Algeria which found itself most cruelly caught between the fires: the Algerian Jews. Over the long years of the colonial era anti-semitism had seldom raised its head among the Muslim population, but soon after the revolt began the F.L.N. was applying the screw upon the Jewish community to force it to declare itself. As with the other uncommitted groupings, the Jews found themselves subjected to the persuasion of terrorism and economic sanctions. Typical was this threatening letter to a Jewish shopkeeper in Algiers:

  Sir,

  If on Wednesday you do not hand us a sum of two million francs, which must be deposited in the hall of the building situated at 1 Rue d’Isly, Wednesday 7th before 16.45 hours, near the staircase at the end near the cupboard, your daughter will be abducted and will serve as a mattress for the army of liberation. Useless to put her in safety, we have our eyes on her.

  If you do not follow our instructions, your shop will be blown up and we shall have your skins, yours and your wife’s.

  In the spring of 1956 a terrorist grenade attack in the Constantine ghetto had been followed by a nasty outbreak of inter-racial killings, which showed just how precarious the war had rendered coexistence between the two peoples. In March the following year Jacob Chekroun, the rabbi of Médéa, was assassinated on the steps of his synagogue, while the following month a boycott was imposed on the Jewish merchants of Tlemcen. And so the stick-and-carrot coercion had gone on, with the Jews being made to realise with brutal clarity as the prospects of an “Algerian Algeria” came ever closer
that, if they were to have any future in it, they would have to throw in their lot decisively with the F.L.N. During the latter months of the war such proclamations as this were addressed to the “Israelites of Algeria”:

  Your silence must cease and you must condemn such demonstrations organised in your quarters by the O.A.S.…many Israelites are militants in our ranks…the independence of Algeria is close, independent Algeria will have need of you, and tomorrow you will also have need of her as it is your country. Your Muslim brothers stretch out the hand frankly and loyally to you for solidarity coming from your side. IT IS YOUR DUTY TO REPLY TO THIS.

  The menace was thinly veiled, with pressures leading to uncharacteristic divisions among the Jewish community. Members of the intelligentsia and of the left-wing parties joined forces with the F.L.N., while the commercial bourgeoisie either strove for neutrality or supported Algérie française. Even families were tragically riven; in the Lévy family of Algiers, the father would later be assassinated by the O.A.S. as a F.L.N. sympathiser, while his son was killed by the F.L.N. on suspicion of belonging to the O.A.S. Thus there was never any such thing as a united front, or collective policy, established by the Jews of Algeria; nevertheless, when the day of reckoning came, they were all to be lumped into the same boat — a boat that was never to return to Algeria.

  Boumedienne consolidates