From Ben Bella to Boumedienne
By the end of that first turbulent summer of 1962 Ben Bella had established his ascendancy, and in late September he pushed out Ben Khedda to become independent Algeria’s first president. The problems — economic, cultural, administrative and political — that he inherited seemed never-ending. The economy was still totally tied to that of France, and — with 4½ million Algerians deemed to be in a state of total poverty — it was only American surplus wheat that kept the population alive over the first months of independence. Almost immediately, Ben Bella demanded a revision of the Evian Agreements (with which, of course, de Gaulle had never permitted him to be formally associated), declaring his government not bound by them, and holding them to be incompatible with the Tripoli Programme of June in its far-reaching schemes of socialisation. Laws were passed to nationalise all “vacant properties” and take over pied noir farms, turning them into collectives run by self-appointed comités de gestion. Though these actions were strictly in breach of the Evian Agreements, in 1963 France — under her part of the articles of “co-operation” — nevertheless handed Algeria generous sums of financial aid to cover her mountainous deficits.[1] But despite foreign aid and the respite granted by living off the “fat” of the pied noir holdings, Ben Bella’s grandiose schemes of socialisation caused the infant state to totter from crisis to economic crisis.
Out of touch with external reality after his long incarceration, Ben Bella veered more and more towards measures of abstract socialism, more and more towards left-wing orientations; in his personal rule, more and more towards authoritarianism and the “cult of the personality” so primordially repugnant to the F.L.N. Observing his triumphal entry into Tunis, the Braces remarked: “In a crowd Ben Bella moves as though he were alone. He is intent on his own vision and seems scarcely aware of what people about him are doing.” Speaking to William Quandt, an old schoolmate of Ben Bella’s recalled how he had been “a good soccer player, but he never forgot the galleries. He wanted to be number one. Ben Bella always wanted his team-mates to pass him the ball so that he could score. He was the same way in politics.”
One by one his former colleagues fell away, or were purged. Ferhat Abbas, the old-school liberal who had helped him to power, was soon at odds with his anti-Western policies and was expelled from the F.L.N. in 1963. In April 1963 the influential Khider resigned once again — this time from the post of Secretary-General of the F.L.N. At almost the same time Ben Bella’s Foreign Secretary, Mohamed Khemisti, was mysteriously assassinated outside the National Assembly. In June Boudiaf, one of the neuf historiques of 1954, was arrested on Ben Bella’s orders, and the following month the third of Ben Bella’s prison stablemates, Ait Ahmed, announced that he was going into opposition to “fight” Ben Bella. (“Are we in the country of Duvalier,” he asked, “or are we in Algeria?”) He then took to the maquis, together with another war veteran, the Kabyle leader Colonel Mohand Ou el Hadj. By the end of the year Ben Bella was at war with the King of Morocco (whom he described as a roi fantoche, un criminel) over territorial rights. Scandals and corruption became rife, and two million Algerians were unemployed. In 1964 Ben Bella’s residence came under fire, and armed revolt broke out round Biskra led by Colonel Chaabani. Ait Ahmed and Khider supported the revolt, with the latter declaring that the regime was “slipping dangerously towards fascism and totalitarianism”. With the aid of Boumedienne’s troops, Chaabani was rounded up and executed and Ait Ahmed imprisoned. Khider fled to Switzerland, together with the F.L.N. “treasury” so painstakingly collected from Algerians in France and at home during the war. He was followed into exile by Abbas and Bitat, among many others of the old guard.
In all this period Ben Bella had come to depend increasingly on the support of Boumedienne and the army. With most of his rivals dead, in prison or in exile, by the eve of the Afro-Asian Conference of June 1965 Ben Bella looked at last secure. Then Boumedienne moved with the army which, ironically, had put Ben Bella in power and kept him there, and the tanks supplied by Ben Bella’s Soviet allies (who had but recently awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize). Though himself under sentence of death from Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed warned him “There’s going to be a coup against you.” Ben Bella was arrested, and Boumedienne took over the Government. The reasons given for Ben Bella’s removal were his excessive addiction to the “cult of the personality”, his “liquidation of revolutionary cadres”, his ideological confusion, his proneness to foreign (i.e. Eastern bloc) influences, and his improvidence with Algeria’s vital resources. Boumedienne had at last arrived, and the arrival of this taciturn and unknown colonel took the world as much by surprise as it did Ben Bella, who was returned to prison or house-arrest for another fourteen years.
France — the settling of accounts
Though her predicament was in no way so grim as Algeria’s in 1962, after the long war France too had her house to put in order, accounts to settle. The first was the bringing to justice of the captured O.A.S. leaders. On 11 April 1962 General Edmond Jouhaud faced his judges. Now cleanshaven, the pied noir air force general declared that he had but one regret: “not to be able to die on Algerian soil”. Among the defence witnesses was the widow of Albert Camus, who made a plea for clemency tragically eloquent of the pied noir dilemma. “I feel divided,” she told the court, “half-French and half-Algerian, and, in truth, dispossessed in both countries which I no longer recognise, since I never imagined them separated.” Jouhaud was also helped by a letter from Salan, still at large, in which he assumed full responsibility for all Jouhaud’s acts in the O.A.S. Nevertheless, after three days, the death sentence was read out. Women fainted in court but Jouhaud accepted the verdict impassively. For six weeks execution hovered over him. His coffin had, allegedly, already been measured, and de Gaulle in his memoirs admits that “my first reaction was to allow Jouhaud’s case to take its course”. In L’Express Servan-Schreiber clamoured for immediate execution as a “signal of hope” for France, but a flood of appeals for mercy poured in to the Élysée, supported strongly by Premier Pompidou. Although it was not until November that Jouhaud heard that his sentence had been finally commuted to life imprisonment, what really saved him was the fate of his leader, now also captured and in the dock.
Amid powerful emotions, Salan’s trial opened on 15 May in the same court where once Marshal Pétain had been sentenced to death. To Janet Flanner’s unsympathetic eyes, the defendant resembled “an elderly, pessimistic silver fox”, looking as if the anticipated death sentence had already been carried out; his recently dyed hair, growing out white over his ears but still a mawkish henna colour on top, imparted a “clownlike” appearance. In fact, Salan was the one person at his trial never to lose his dignity, always the imperturbable “Mandarin”. In a calm voice he read out his particulars: “ex-general of the Colonial Army, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, Military Medal, Cross of the Liberation, wounded in action …” etc., etc., then, announcing that he would answer no questions, Salan read out a long statement. “When one has known the France of courage,” he declared, “one can never accept the France of capitulation.” Recalling May 1958, he claimed he had been “duped” by “the one I gave power to”. He insisted that his responsibility for the O.A.S. had been total, and that henceforth he would remain silent. Over a hundred witnesses, among them the highest personages in the republic, filed in and out of the stand. For Salan there appeared ex-President Coty, the Maréchale de Lattre de Tassigny (who — still in her widow’s weeds — made a powerful impression), and General Valluy, who questioned sorrowfully, “I wonder how we ever reached this point?” François Mitterrand rekindled the bizarre episode of the “bazooka” attempt on Salan in 1957, pointing an accusatory finger at Michel Debré. The ex-premier rose to refute the accusations. Salan was brilliantly defended by Tixier-Vignancour, and on the eighth day of the trial a verdict of guilty, but “with extenuating circumstances”, was read out to a packed court; the sentence was life imprisonment, but Salan’s life
was saved. His supporters broke into an ecstatic Marseillaise in the courtroom; at the Élysée de Gaulle erupted in rage at the judges’ leniency, and four days later had the tribunal suppressed.
With Salan’s life spared, it would hardly have been consistent to execute his deputy; thus Jouhaud too escaped the firing-squad. But, as a junior officer unsupported by the galaxy that had come forth to testify for Salan, Lieutenant Roger Degueldre was to bear the full brunt of the law. On 28 June, at the sinister Château de Vincennes, where Napoleon had the Duc d’Enghien executed, the leader of the Delta killer commandos was sentenced to death. His mistress (who bore him a son shortly before the trial) and a team of O.A.S. faithfuls attempted to “spring” Degueldre from the Santé; when this failed they examined no less than fifteen alternative schemes for assassinating de Gaulle in vengeance. Nevertheless, little more than a week after his sentencing, Degueldre was marched before a firing-squad inside the Fort d’Ivry. Wearing his para’s uniform, he sang the Marseillaise and declared himself proud to have kept his oath not to abandon Algeria to the F.L.N. It appears that the execution was appallingly botched, lasting an interminable quarter of an hour, with the squad firing wide and no less than five coups de grâce having to be administered before the agonised victim was finally despatched.
France “free to look at France”
With Algeria lost and its leaders removed, the O.A.S. and its affiliates still writhed on in France like a headless snake under the nominal leadership of Georges Bidault, Colonel Argoud and Captain Sergent. The plastiques continued to explode aimlessly in France, and over a dozen further attempts were made to assassinate de Gaulle. The most spectacular, and failing by a mere hair’s-breadth, took place at Petit-Clamart in August 1962, the month after the lowering of the flag in Algiers, when the car carrying the President and Madame de Gaulle was shot up by a band led by Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry. Outraged by the threat to his wife, de Gaulle saw to it that Bastien-Thiry followed the fate of Degueldre, the first senior French officer to pass before the firing squad in many years. An all-out, ruthless campaign followed to smash the O.A.S.[2] once and for all. From Bavaria, where he and Bidault were in refuge, Colonel Argoud had entered into correspondence with the distinguished British military historian, Captain Liddell-Hart, desiring to explain to him why, “for the past three years, I have led the fight of my life against the imposture of a man, supported, alas, by the cowardice of a whole people”. Liddell-Hart had replied that he found it “difficult to understand the course pursued and methods practised by such sincere and thoughtful people as yourself”, but that he was interested to learn more. At the beginning of February 1963 a final letter arrived from Argoud, announcing his intention to visit Liddell-Hart in London in a few weeks’ time. Argoud never arrived; instead he was found, trussed like a turkey, in a van outside the Paris Prefecture of Police, where the staff had been tipped off to come and collect him. It appears that a new outfit of barbouzes had been despatched from France to “snatch” Bidault, but had got hold of Argoud instead in the centre of Munich during the Rosenmontag festivities. The kidnapping, not unlike Napoleon’s spiriting away from Baden of the Due d’Enghien, provoked the worst breach in Franco-German relations of the post-war era. Nevertheless, it fulfilled de Gaulle’s aim; in April Bidault fled to Brazil, via Lisbon; the O.A.S./C.N.R. broke up; the last plastique exploded in Paris in July 1963.
“In the year of grace 1962,” wrote de Gaulle in his memoirs, “France’s revival was in full flower. She had been threatened by civil war; bankruptcy had stared her in the face; the world had forgotten her voice. Now she was out of danger.” Though it was not true of his own life, as the O.A.S. assassins still lurked and skulked, France herself was indeed “out of danger” with the ending of the Algerian war. Life began to resume its course with customary celerity. The Brittany farmers were embarked upon an “artichoke war”; Academicians began to fret about the incursions of franglais; in the Assembly, what de Gaulle dubbed the “snarlers and grousers” were already raising their voices in anticipation of the end of the Fifth Republic and an electoral replacement of de Gaulle. He had served his purpose. But otherwise the title of the new Vadim—Bardot film, Le Repos du Guerrier, seemed to set the tone. Already in 1962 France’s gross national product was rising by 6.8 per cent in the year. Shed of the load of Algeria, her economy was to begin to show a miraculous blossoming from planting done in the latter years of the Fourth Republic and four years of Gaullism. France was, as de Gaulle had promised in 1960, beginning “to marry her time”. De Gaulle began to travel ever more widely, to remind the outside world of the sound of France’s “voice”. It was a sound not always harmonious to the ears of her friends as she broke completely with N.A.T.O., embarked upon her own go-it-alone force de frappe, and closed the door on Britain’s entry to the E.E.C.
As one distinguished American correspondent, C. L. Sulzberger, remarked, Salan had “become a symbol of the defeated past”. Once he and his comrades had been disposed of, the French army could finally put behind it the harrowing memories of so many tragic defeats, from 1940 onwards. It could purge itself of all the “bad dreams” of brutality and torture and self-division inflicted by the Algerian war, and — though the process would take a painfully long time — look toward the future, equipped with all the atomic panoply of modern warfare to distract it from the past. On 15 June 1964 the last French troops pulled out of Algeria, but already the technical modernisation dreamed of by de Gaulle was well under way.
In every aspect France was now, in the words of Dorothy Pickles, “free to look at France”.
A different ending?
Could it all have been otherwise? Could the Algerian war have ended any differently? The historian can record for the benefit of the leaders what went wrong, but — in his feckless and unhelpful way — he is not necessarily there to tell them how they could have got it right; nor is it the purpose of this book to enter into a lengthy dissection and critique of French and Algerian errors. Various points of no return in the war perhaps deserve to be recapitulated, and certain general observations made. To begin at the beginning, in November 1954 France was caught at a major disadvantage because, in contrast to Britain over India, no French politician, not even Mendès-France or Mitterrand, let alone the Communists, could contemplate any kind of French withdrawal from Algeria. Mollet the Socialist echoed Mendès-France the Radical: “France without Algeria would be no longer France.” Throughout those critical first years, when a compromise peace might have been conceivable, France was hobbled by the ball-and-chain of Algeria forming an integral part of French territory. From then on she was hobbled by what the army wanted, or would not permit. As Yves Courrière remarks at the beginning of his remarkable four-volume study of the Algerian war,
Nobody ever wanted to look the problem in the face. The metropolis was only interested in Algeria when European blood flowed. No one wanted to believe in the conflict. No one wanted to consider the conflict as a war. No one wanted to consider the Muslims as men. When they did, it was much too late.
When, in the early days, the priority was to institute the reforms claimed by moderate Muslims — and so badly needed — it was almost invariably a case of “too little, too late”.
In the second place, France was constantly and repeatedly hampered in her Algerian policy by the intervention (generally immoderate) of the hyper-articulate pied noir lobby. The pieds noirs were never strictly honest, even to themselves, as to what they really wanted. Despite all the brouhaha, it was not Algérie française; what the majority wanted was a pied noir Algeria, ranging between South Africa at its best and its worst, but under the umbrella of French protection. At various times in this book the author may seem to have been unduly censorious of the passionate and blinkered community that the pieds noirs, taken as a whole, represented. But it is essential to remember in the end that for every opulent grand colon, for every reactionary opponent of all reform, for every noisy “ultra”, for every violent counter
-terrorist (and, later, Delta killer), there were perhaps a dozen hard-working and impoverished simple fishermen, small farmers, carpenters and gardes-champêtres, only relatively better off than their Muslim neighbours, and with but one desire: to be allowed to continue to live, and make a living, on the soil where they and their fathers had been born. The grands colons could (and did) afford to get out, write off their stake in Algeria, and start up somewhere else before the debacle of 1962. But not the petits blancs. Thus (not unlike the artisan class Rhodesians who backed Ian Smith), fear at losing all drove them progressively into hard-line reaction — finally, in desperation, into the arms of the O.A.S., which, in tragic paradox, was to make it impossible for any of them to remain at all in the native land. The other tragedy of the pieds noirs was that they were never able to produce a leader of stature — let alone anyone who could have treated in a statesmanlike manner both with the French government and the Muslim “moderates” while carrying his own community with him. Thus, by default, they were to become represented — and indeed symbolised — by the bistrotier, Jo Ortiz.
From the French army’s point of view, their tragedy was that at various points they could see with agonising clarity (and not without reason) that they were winning the war militarily. But (not unlike the American commanders in Vietnam) it was not given them to perceive that, at the same time, their chances of winning the war politically and on the wider world stage were growing ever slimmer. The army felt (again, not without reason) that it had been lied to, betrayed and abandoned by the man it brought to power; but the case may be put that, had their vision perhaps been less focused upon the immediate front, the deception could have been avoided — or at least avoided earlier — before the catastrophe of April 1961. As it was, until the army had been bent to his will — or broken, as tragically happened in April 1961 — de Gaulle could not risk proceeding with an acceptable policy of “self-determination”.
A Savage War of Peace Page 80