A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  Often it was boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty who were the gunmen. To step up the offensive, Salan had ordered the “general mobilisation” of the whole French population of Algeria. Special “courts” were set up to “sanction” those refusing to co-operate; a “sanction” generally meant being turned over to Degueldre’s Deltas. By the end of February the death toll had risen to 553 for the one month. A grim pall of fear had settled over all Algiers, European and Muslim alike.

  But as the O.A.S. bombed Communists and hostile editors in France, fought the barbouzes and liquidated dissidents within its own ranks, and slaughtered innocent and insignificant Muslims in Algiers, so it seemed increasingly to lose sight of its primary objectives (impossible though they might be) while all the time setting the world against it and those objectives. The provocation against the F.L.N. in their endeavours to reach a peace settlement were indeed great. After the O.A.S. killings of December, the General Staff’s Bulletin d’Information repeated earlier threats by declaring even more pointedly: “We solemnly warn those Algerian Europeans who blindly follow the Fascists of the O.A.S. against the incalculable consequences which this unleashing of racist fury could have, which risks compromising forever the future of the Algerian Europeans.”

  Then, on the very last day of the “Yéti” talks, two French T.6 planes made a rocket and machine-gun attack on the F.L.N. “Ben M’hidi” base at Oujda, just inside Moroccan territory. The O.A.S. immediately claimed responsibility for the raid, though it appears that it was in fact a “free enterprise” affair by two aero-club flyers, one of whom was avenging a brother killed by the F.L.N. In itself it was indicative of the growing anarchy in Algeria. The “Ben M’hidi” base contained some ten thousand people, including refugees and a hospital centre equipped by Yugoslavia and East Germany and well marked by a red cross. With unfortunately directed aim, bullets from the T.6s killed a wounded man actually on the operating table and a nurse tending him. Three others in the base were slain and several wounded. The raid bore a close resemblance to the Sakiet raid of 1958, which had had so profound an influence on the course of the war. This time, however, the F.L.N. gritted its teeth and with remarkable restraint said nothing — at least for the time being. But the net effect of the Oujda incident, and all the other O.A.S. outrages compounded, was to play into the hands of Boumedienne and the hard-liners and make it progressively more difficult for the negotiators of both sides to arrive at satisfactory guarantees for the pieds noirs. Cooped up in the “Yéti” Robert Buron wondered gloomily to himself who would win: “De Gaulle or Salan? … De Gaulle no doubt, but the loser will not be his adversary…. The poor pieds noirs for whom, with all our hearts, we are building a possible future, possible on paper, but which the multiplying violations are striving to make unrealisable, risk paying the bill….”

  De Gaulle cuts the knot

  Whether as a result of the O.A.S.’s activities or whatever other factors, by midday on Saturday, 17 February Louis Joxe felt that the talks had reached an impasse. There was a whole list of fundamental points on which, according to their brief, the French delegates could yield no further concession, and the Algerians would make no concessions:

  The acquisition of Algerian nationality for the European minority; their rights during the transitory period; and the guarantees to be accorded them afterwards.

  The length of the lease on Mers-el-Kébir naval base.

  The length of the leases on the Saharan rocket and atomic bases.

  That afternoon Joxe proposed a suspension of the talks while he telephoned de Gaulle for fresh instructions. On the Sunday de Gaulle came back with a statement of vital importance to the whole peace talks. This time he was not speaking in the sibylline manner as he had so often in the past when issuing guidance to his subordinates on Algeria.

  The essential thing [said de Gaulle], is to reach an agreement composed of a cease-fire followed by self-determination…. It is this result, I repeat, this result that must be realised today….

  Having said this, there is obviously an interest in then obtaining the longest lease possible for Mers-el-Kébir as well as for our military presence for experimental purposes. But since our presence at Mers-el-Kébir would be of the order of some ten, fifteen or twenty years and in the Sahara of several years only, we must concede these details rather than reject an agreement; for there is no comparison between the primary interest, which consists of reaching an agreement, and the secondary interest, which consists of holding a little longer certain things which, anyway, we do not reckon to hold forever.[2]

  Although de Gaulle was here specifically referring to the tenure of Mers-el-Kébir and the Sahara bases, in the context of the rest of his instructions it was clear that — by the “things we do not reckon to hold forever” — he also had in mind the whole présence française in Algeria, i.e. the future of the pieds noirs. Who can tell what will happen in ten or twenty years, speculated the seventy-one-year-old President? “Let us not exaggerate too much the importance of the wording of what we agree today…. If a sincerity of will is not there, the very finest agreements would be of no avail….”

  Joxe returned from the telephone, notes Buron, equipped with a wide margin of manoeuvre. After an all-night session, by 5 a.m. the following morning, in an atmosphere of exhaustion all round, Krim and Joxe “exchanged two brief declarations, grey in tone, but which allow a certain relief on both sides. For the first time we all shook hands.” Buron, for one, felt only limited satisfaction at what had been achieved. Remarking on the strength of the “orientals” in negotiation because of their imperviousness to the passage of time, he noted regretfully: “They guessed our own haste to get things finished, while moderating their own; but they are convinced that he who can dissimulate his impatience the best will obtain at the eleventh hour the profit of some final concessions.” On his return to Paris Buron was asked by one of his colleagues in the M.R.P. whether he felt that results would not “either condemn the Algeria of tomorrow, or the validity of the agreements?” “Hélas, it’s a little like that,” he replied. Michel Debré he found already “profoundly unhappy”, fearing the reaction of the pieds noirs, apprehensive for the future of the Muslims “compromised with ourselves”, and with doubts about the practical functioning of the agreements the day after tomorrow. Nevertheless, an agreement of sorts had been reached — as instructed by de Gaulle. It now remained for the experts and lawyers to turn it into a viable document — and for the last outstanding details to be ironed out. The final phase of the negotiations was fixed to begin on 7 March. Leaving the homely confines of the “Yéti” (the location of which had succeeded in baffling the world Press right up to the very last), the delegates agreed to meet once again amid the pomp and circumstance of the Hôtel du Parc at Evian.

  Salan declares total war

  The reaction feared by Premier Debré in Algeria was not slow in coming once both sides announced that the makings of an agreement had been reached at the “Yéti”. On 23 February the O.A.S. published a six-page Instruction No. 29, bearing the signature of Salan, and possibly the most important document of its whole career. “The irreversible is about to happen,” it began: “I want us, wherever possible, to control the situation. I want to bring events about: in short, at the outset, I reject any idea of defence in favour of a generalised offensive,” continued Salan. For the moment the anticipated cease-fire was proclaimed, he ordered: “The systematic opening of fire against C.R.S. and gendarmerie units. ‘Molotov cocktails’ will be thrown against their armoured vehicles … night and day.” On another front, the objective was “to destroy the best Muslim elements in the liberal professions so as to oblige the Muslim population to have recourse to ourselves”. It seemed characteristically twisted thinking. The overall target was

  to paralyse the powers that be and make it impossible for them to exercise authority. Brutal actions will be generalised over the whole territory. They will aim at influential personalities of the Communist Party, at work
s of art and all that represents the exercise of authority, in a manner to lead towards the maximum of general insecurity and the total paralysis of the country.

  It was nothing less than a formal declaration of war against the authority of France, and as such was bound to lead to a direct confrontation between the O.A.S. and the army.

  As far as the general paralysis of the country was concerned, Salan was to prove as good as his word; the previous week he had congratulated the O.A.S. on its achievements — a week during which “brutal actions” had resulted in the “execution” of more than fifty people. On 22 February five postmen were shot down with careful selectivity: two Europeans, two Muslims, one Jew. Henceforth the mail was no longer delivered. Next the O.A.S. singled out the pharmacists, Muslim and European, on suspicion that some of them were aiding the F.L.N. Then came the tram-workers and railwaymen, employees of Algiers Electricity and Gas, the coiffeuses and the doctors; finally the wretched flower vendors, shot down at street corners among the pathetic debris of their carnations and roses. On 24 February, following the killing by the F.L.N. of a Bab-el-Oued taxi-driver, a pied noir mob trapped a score of Muslim workers in a cul-de-sac and stabbed and beat them to death. Increasingly a kind of apartheid, which had never previously existed, was growing up in the cities as Muslim workers declined to enter the European quarters — and vice versa.

  Algiers alone was now averaging a rate of thirty to forty killings a day — not to mention the wounded. On 27 February, in the space of one hour at midday, right in the centre of Algiers thirteen people were killed within a radius of five hundred yards, in totally unrelated incidents. In Oran, the situation was hardly better; on 1 March, during Ramadan, two 105 mm. shells exploded in booby-trapped cars parked in the Oran Casbah, killing twenty-three Muslims and wounding another thirty-two. When the gendarmes arrived, they were in turn set upon by enraged Muslims, resulting in a further fifteen victims. Like the citizens scourged by the bubonic plague in La Peste, the residents of both cities began to acquire a growing familiarity with death.

  If the victim was dead [wrote Paul Henissart] a sheet of newspaper was placed over his face. If he was not, he lay on the pavement. Some passers-by detoured around him, very few would stop to assist him. An ambulance eventually arrived and he was removed. Firemen hosed off the bloodstains on the pavement.

  Nor was the foreign community entirely immune. With the approach of a settlement, scores of foreign correspondents had been drawn to Algiers. The Japanese among them had already displayed nervousness at being mistaken for the barbouze Vietnamese and had taken to wearing little national emblems on their lapels. Then, on 3 March, two Italian journalists who had written unflattering accounts of the O.A.S. were kidnapped at gun-point from the Aletti bar, driven to an O.A.S. hideout, and given twenty-four hours to leave the country. The next day nine of the ten Italian newsmen in Algiers scurried back home. That same day the O.A.S. murdered Maître Pierre Garrigues, successor to their first victim, Maître Popie. The following day joint communiqués from Paris and Tunis announced the talks due to begin at Evian in three days’ time, and the O.A.S. offensive slipped into a higher gear still. Between 120 and 130 plastiques went off in Algiers alone that night. On the 10th the residents of Bab-el-Oued were treated to the grand-guignol spectacle of a naked corpse strung from a complicated system of pulleys stretched across the street, and dancing above their heads in broad daylight. “It’s a barbouze!” acclaimed the crowd, far from revolted, as the unknown man hung there for half an hour before being cut down. Then, on 15 March, the day after the stickiest session at Evian, the O.A.S. performed perhaps the most wantonly savage of its “brutal actions” to date. At 11 a.m. three young men drove up to a building in El Biar housing one of the centres sociaux which had been created by Germaine Tillion, under the aegis of Soustelle back in 1955, to improve Franco-Muslim relations. Inside a conference was under way, discussing vocational training for homeless Algerian children. The leader of the O.A.S. Delta squad took a piece of paper from his pocket and read out a roll-call of seven names. One was absent, but two school principals and four French and Muslim inspectors were led outside. Among the latter was Mouloud Feraoun, the prize-winning Kabyle author, liberal humanitarian and personal friend of the late Albert Camus. The six men were lined up against a wall; the Deltas opened fire, shooting first at the legs, then finishing off the educators where they lay on the ground.[3]

  Feraoun: last of the moderates

  The last to die was Mouloud Feraoun, hit by twelve bullets in the chest. The previous month he had entered in his Journal on a rare note of joy: “The war in Algeria is ending. Peace to those who are dead. Peace to those who are going to survive. Let the terror cease. Vive la liberté!” Then, on the night before his death, he had written in a different vein:

  In Algiers, c’est la terreur…. One can no longer distinguish the brave from the cowards. Unless, as a result of living in fear, we have all become insensitive and unaware. Certainly, I don’t want to die and I absolutely do not want my children to die, but I am taking no particular precaution beyond those which have become habit over the past fortnight; limitation of going outside, expeditions to buy “in bulk”, an end to the visits of friends. But each time one of us goes out, on his return he describes an incident or reports a victim.

  These were the last words Feraoun ever wrote. His death caused a ripple of shock passing beyond the frontiers of Algeria and France. Only forty-nine years old and born of impoverished Kabyle fellahs living in a one-room hut, Feraoun had established himself by his prize-winning novel La Terre et le Sang as one of Algeria’s most distinguished writers. A Kabyle patriot, but whose humanist scholarship reflected the best of French educational influence, he was never ashamed to proclaim his dual allegiances: “There is French in me, there is Kabyle in me. But I have a horror of those who kill…. Vive la France, such as I have always loved! Vive l’Algérie, such as I hope for! Shame on the criminals! Shame on the cheaters!… When Algeria lives and raises its head (again) … it will remember France and all it owes to France,” he had declared at various times during the war. Bespectacled and mild-mannered, his uncompromising courage belied his appearance, and he had never ceased to condemn the excesses of either side. As a French reviewer of his posthumously published Journal wrote, “In killing Feraoun, Frenchmen had attacked the very best of their Algerian achievement.”

  The death of the writer meant more than that; it symbolised the final snuffing out of the light of hope of a “third force”, of moderation and liberalism, that had flickered up occasionally during the war. Attacked by such members of the Left in France as Francis Jeanson for being but an opiate of the masses and of knowing only how to spend vast sums of money on “neo-colonial” schemes, besieged by the F.L.N., and now finally extinguished by the O.A.S., the battered ideal of the “third force” died at a time when Algeria had never been more in need of men of goodwill, and enemies of excess and violence. As is so often the tragic path of revolution, it was the Montagne that triumphed over the Gironde.

  Back to Evian

  When the second Evian Conference opened on 7 March the atmosphere was quite different from that established within the close confines of the “Yéti”. Much had happened during the few weeks’ interval. Between 22 and 28 February a Fifth C.N.R.A. was swiftly convened in Tripoli to ratify the agreements reached between Krim and Joxe. Against the sombre background of Salan’s offensive in Algeria, Krim immediately came under hot fire from Boumedienne and the General Staff representatives. He had been “had” by the French, claimed Boumedienne; they had been granted loopholes through which they could wriggle out of honouring their side of the bargain, thus maintaining a “neo-colonial” grip on Algeria; through petroleum concessions made to the French Algeria’s birthright had been sold out so that she would realise only one-twentieth of the royalties that should be her due. Backed by Ben Bella, the General Staff lobby also challenged the agreement whereby the Europeans would be entitled to representation in the fu
ture Algerian Assembly. Krim is said to have riposted acidly to Boumedienne: “And you who are at the head of the army, explain to us how you will expel the French? By arms?” In mistrusting the validity of the French undertakings, Boumedienne was supported by Krim’s once inseparable deputy, Colonel Ouamrane, and another veteran fighter, Colonel Mohamedi Said. But, with the bulk of the military engaged in countering the O.A.S. and making dispositions for the future inside Algeria, Krim and the “politicians” had a majority in excess of the two-thirds required by the G.P.R.A. for ratifying a peace treaty. Accordingly, the Fifth C.N.R.A. “mandated” the G.P.R.A. delegates to “pursue the negotiations in course”. An important rider was attached, however, pressing Krim that “clarifications” and further concessions should still be sought on the points criticised at the conference — notably, those concerning the future of the Europeans.

  Unaware of the arguments at Tripoli, Joxe and his team were taken aback by the new rigidity their opposite numbers promptly displayed at Evian. Buron was soon noting that the Algerians seemed to be “even more frightened of their colleagues in Tunis” than of the O.A.S. But over the past few weeks the O.A.S. had left so great a mark that the French recognised that they were in a considerably worse position to negotiate than the previous month. Then, with neither Krim nor Dahlab actively seeking the departure of the Europeans, both sides had taken gambles on the future; now the ground had shifted perceptibly, and Joxe’s hard-fought efforts on behalf of guarantees for the pieds noirs already seemed largely academic. In the words of Yves Courrière:

  Backed by the Europeans, the O.A.S. had done so much that it was no longer a question of the majority of the pieds noirs remaining. Perhaps a tiny minority would cling on. And meanwhile the repeated crimes were burning each day a few more of the bridges between the two communities. Hatred was building up.