A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  From Boumedienne to Bendjedid

  When Chadli Bendjedid succeeded Boumedienne, from the beginning of 1979 onwards subtle changes slowly took place, almost surreptitiously. Photographs of the two men seemed symbolic; the gaunt, austere and unsmiling features of the wartime leader contrasted with the comfortable bourgeois face that you might almost expect to meet in an English golf club, perhaps a retired colonel. Algeria tended to slip from the world headlines. Under Bendjedid, Algeria ceased adopting extreme postures in the outside world (and particularly in Middle East politics) in favour of concentrating on domestic matters. The grandiose (and sometimes disastrous) industrial projects launched under Boumedienne gave way to consumer goods. In 1984, Algiers itself throbbed with vast and apparently insoluble traffic jams, that Western index of prosperity. The young were well clothed, and there were no signs of the terrible malnutrition rampant south of the Sahara. But, in a nation with bursting population explosion where the average age was 19, economic problems remained menacing. High price structures made it difficult to sell Algerian natural gas on glutted world markets; as in so many emerging countries, a rich agriculture had been nearly ruined by early collectivisation and was only gradually being rectified by opening to private enterprise. But, whether Algeria continues along the road of moderation charted by Bendjedid — so it seemed at the time — or regresses to a Boumedienne-style of authoritarianism, must to an important extent depend on its success in mastering its economic problems.

  Algeria’s new mood of benevolent moderation was exposed to the world when — to mark the 1984 celebrations — Bendjedid granted some fifty post-humous amnesties. The men thus rehabilitated included not only leaders who had been liquidated during the war, but also fallen angels who had revolted against either Ben Bella or Boumedienne during the post-war years. Among the wartime leaders forgiven were Si Salah, and the two tracked down and murdered abroad: Krim and Khider. Explicitly absent were the harkis who had served France. So, too, was Ramdane Abane; for obvious reasons, so long as any of those implicated in his death remained alive, the legend of the hero “killed in action” had to be allowed to persist. But, in Chadli Bendjedid’s Algeria of 1984, veterans were much less inhibited in discussing what really happened to men like Abane and Si Salah, in a manner that would have been inconceivable under the shadow of Boumedienne ten years previously.

  Algiers itself seemed a much more open society, more smiling and less dour, as the war years receded further in human memory. With many young Algerians trained in France or the U.S., the country looked increasingly northward and westward and away from the East. The successful role of Algerian diplomacy over the Teheran hostages in 1980 brought her into closer proximity with the United States — which she welcomed. In the saga of the hijacked airliner in 1985, Algeria was reckoned by Washington to have acted as honourably as circumstances permitted. Though Algeria continued to back Polisario against America’s ally, King Hassan of Morocco, their support was limited by balanced fears that the fall of Hassan might lead to a Khomeini-style revolution and Islamic fundamentalist anarchy on Algeria’s western flank. Only to a lesser degree was Algeria concerned about the succession to the ageing Bourguiba on her Tunisian flank.

  “Don’t look on us as an Arab people,” remarked Bendjedid’s Foreign Minister, Taleb Ibrahim, to a foreign diplomat; “We are Mediterranean people in an Arab context.” It revealed just how complex is the Algerian identity. Yet, even though Algeria is an Arab nation, the legacy of the past is such that no amount of calculated “arabisation” will erase completely the 130 years of links with France. As of 1978, a large proportion of Algerians still remained francophone; to many it was still a lingua franca, often used with pride as a sign of education. As the correspondent of The Times wrote after President Giscard’s simple but moving welcome by Boumedienne in 1975, the first time the Marseillaise had been played at an official Algerian ceremony in thirteen years: “France and Algeria are like an old couple who have been married many years, had a tremendous bust up, divorce, and then decide to make up. Emotion will never be altogether absent from their relationship; it will never be completely straightforward.”

  The fading ghosts

  From that mortified relationship of the past the ghosts, though fading, have lingered most pervasively in Algeria. As I wandered around the bled in 1973, for the first time, I recorded for the last pages of my account how the tokens of destruction of those seven terrible years had not even then been effaced.

  Along the main roads, like rows of neatly felled trees, the power pylons lie where they were blasted by the F.L.N., and frequently you have to bounce your way across rocky fords where destroyed bridges have not yet been replaced. High up on Kabylia’s Col de Tametz cows saunter in and out of the gutted remains of what was once a luxury hotel for Algeria’s wealthier colons. Everywhere there are the empty shells of farmhouses, barns and homesteads, sometimes whole villages. Memories have blurred as to who was responsible for each separate tragedy: was it an isolated pied noir farm destroyed by the fellagha, or a Muslim douar razed by the French army in reprisals? On their broken walls, superimposed upon each other like the strata of archaeological diggings, the rival war slogans remain clearly legible:

  ALGÉRIE FRANCAISE!

  DE GAULLE — VOTEZ OUI

  O.A.S. — SALAN

  And finally, more emphatic than all the rest:

  F.L.N.

  Every few kilometres along the railway that runs through the savage Aurès mountains, the cradle of the revolt in 1954, stand the gaunt skeletons of French watch-towers. But their purpose seems hardly less remote than the marvellously preserved arches and columns of the nearby Roman garrison of Timgad. Here — in the same breath — Chaouia women try to sell you a Roman oil lamp, a Second Empire cock (minus its works), or a fifty-year-old French flat-iron. All seem to belong to an equally vanished past. In the French villages of the Mitidja the parish churches are boarded up and gently dying. Overlooking Oran stands a vast votive sanctuary, built in thanksgiving after a past plague, surmounted by a Virgin with hands outstretched as if imploring for the compassion that Algérie française so tragically lacked. In its deserted cloisters visitors may find a half-starved cur eating a dead pigeon, the chapel altars defaced by Arabic graffiti. Above Algiers, Notre Dame d’Afrique has an air of even greater abandonment. The shutters of the small boutique which once sold candles and religious bric-à-brac are rusted firmly shut, the eucalyptus trees dying unwatered. In comparison, the Catholic Cathedral in Algiers seems to have had a happier fate, by reverting once more to being a mosque, busy and alive. Along the lovely beaches around Algiers, what were once the weekend villas of the pieds noirs stand abandoned, stucco flaking, curtainless windows staring blankly out across the Mediterranean. Half a generation ago they would have comprised a cheerful, thriving and typically French bourgeois resort such as one might find in Brittany or Arcachon; now, though a few prosperous Algerians are refurbishing the deserted homes, the remainder seem haunted by resentful ghosts. These seaside hamlets are deader and colder places than ancient Roman Tipasa, whose glowing ruins nearby seem somehow younger than the similar relics of French bricks and mortar scattered all over contemporary Algeria, testifying glumly to the perishability of Western civilisation.

  At Sidi-Bel-Abbès, a town plonked down in the middle of dusty nowhere that was once the home of the Foreign Legion, it is hard to find any trace of Beau Geste. In answer to discreet enquiries, while Parlez-moi d’amour oozes nostalgically from the radio, a local restaurateur affects never to have heard of La Légion: “Yes, there was a campe de triage [vetting centre] up here, and a torture camp (you know what torture is, m’sieur?) over there. There were foreigners there, of course, who did the torturing — lots of Germans. But, as for a Foreign Legion, j’en sais rien.” At Zéralda the barracks from which the 1st R.E.P. marched out forever in 1961, singing Piaf’s Je ne regrette rien, have been bulldozed to make way for a vast new tourist complex. At Sidi Ferruch, the beach where the Fren
ch landed in 1830, an even more ambitious complex and marina have been built. “We thought this was the most appropriate kind of monument,” Algerian officials explain; “so the French can land here again — but this time with their travellers’ cheques!”

  At Toudja in Kabylia, the wartime devastation of which so shocked Jules Roy, new fig trees have been planted and a new clinic built next to the former French barracks, part of which is now used as a school. A mountain stream rushes through the village; it is a green and peaceful demi-paradise. But the lack of men in their thirties and forties is conspicuous. A youth with a flute will proudly take you round the village, pointing out the lovely “Arbres de France” (acacias, “one of the good things left behind by France!”), but he cannot recall exactly where the fighting took place, or just what it was about. The Algerian attitude towards history seems, to Europeans, a curious one. “The page is turned,” they tell you. Even in the Algiers Casbah there is not a single plaque or inscription to remind one of the house where Ali la Pointe was blown up, where Yacef hid, or where some of the more legendary of the F.L.N. freedom-fighters fought so tenaciously against Massu’s paras.

  In Algiers, too, most of the streets were renamed soon after independence. (It was said, apocryphally, that, in the early days of xenophobia, Constantine’s Boulevard Anatole France had been rechristened Anatole Algérie.) Rue des Colons, with some poetic justice, is now Rue des Libérés; Place du Gouvernement, Place des Martyrs. The Forum, scene of the wild moments of crowd hysteria when the para colonels tumbled the Fourth Republic, is now the Esplanade de l’Afrique. The elegant Rue d’Isly bears the name of Ben M’hidi, the F.L.N. leader who died mysteriously in French hands during the Battle of Algiers. The prancing equestrian statue to the rebel chief, Abd-el-Kader, has replaced that of his vanquisher, Marshal Bugeaud. In the same square the office of General Salan — once the target of the “ultra” bazooka — is now F.L.N. party headquarters. The “Otomatic”, haunt of the pied noir “ultras” which was bombed during the Battle of Algiers, has become the “Cercle des Étudiants”, now catering to an almost all-male Muslim clientèle. The “Casino” night-club, so brutally bombed during Yacef’s second offensive in the Battle of Algiers, has become a dour club for Algerian officers. With the going of the méditerranéen-et-demi pieds noirs, certainly Algiers has lost its erstwhile gaiety. The sun beams down on Algiers — but the inhabitants do not smile back. It is a surly city, harrowed by the stresses of over-population and under-employment; with the architecture of Cannes, but the atmosphere of Aberdeen. During the day the cafés are thronged with all-male, typically Arab society. At night the city, responsive to President Boumedienne’s own personal brand of puritanism, closes down like wartime Toronto on a Sunday. The once exclusively pied noir areas of Algeria have become so totally Arab in atmosphere that one wonders how the French dreams of “integration” or “association”, or the liberal hopes of a Camus for a multi-racial society of the 1950s, could ever have come true. Despite the Timgad-like bricks and stones left by the pieds noirs, were they ever really here at all?

  “Everything fades,” says Camus, quoting a cemetery ex-volto, “save memory.” But the nostalgia can be overdone. Today’s Algerian is a thoroughly pragmatic individual. Near Skikda (ex-Philippeville) there is a paradigm of the Algeria of the present and future. The Plage Jeanne d’Arc once housed a rest and rehabilitation centre for Bigeard’s paras returning from operations in the bled. Now bulldozers constructing an immense new oil refinery have crunched through the road to the beach settlement, leaving it isolated from the outside world. Shutters hanging crazily askew, the bistros and “discos” and “dancings”, where once Massu’s centurions chatted up the local girls, are sliding aimlessly into the sea, leaving a spaghetti-like tangle of reinforcing rods protruding from the ephemeral prefabs. By some miracle, here and there geraniums still flower out of untended window-boxes. But perhaps even by now Plage Jeanne d’Arc has disappeared forever beneath the pounding surf — more immemorably than either Roman Timgad or Tipasa.

  Certainly by the thirtieth anniversary of the war in 1984 the Plage Jeanne d’Arc had gone without a trace, and a few more relics of the présence françcaise had expired with it. On the way to Camus’s ravishing Tipasa then I noted how the typically France bandstands that once dominated the main square of small provincial towns were no longer there. In the heart of Algiers itself (a much less dour, perhaps more self-assured city, than I remembered it from 1973), on the Plateau des Glières which had provided the focus for the events of 1958, the hideous Monument aux Morts still stood. But — instead of removing it in its entirety — the Algerians had simply rendered over with cement its excessive bas-reliefs to colonial feats of arms. Meanwhile, superbly sited above the city and visible from every part of it, stands the vast new monument to Algieria’s war dead. Representing three vast palm fronds ingeniously cantilevered against each other and over three hundred feet high, designed by Polish architects and constructed with Canadian knowhow — it is in itself almost a symbol of post-1962 Algeria’s balancing act between East and West. Beneath, a museum contains a vivid record of suffering and resistance under the 130 years of French rule. At its heart one descends into a crypt in polished black granite; in the centre is a simple patch of desert sand embracing a rock from the Aurès mountains where that savage war began on November 1st, 1954. It is an imposing and solemn place — about a thousand light years removed from that memorial on its sea-girt promontory at Tipasa, where a carefree Albert Camus once rejoiced in that other Algeria.

  Tragically, it was very soon evident that the bright hopes of 1984 were — once again — to be dashed. Under worsening economic conditions, Fundamentalism led by the F.I.S. [Islamic Salvation Front], came to acquire a growing ascendancy throughout the country. Alarmed at their power, the F.L.N.-based regime under Liamine Zeroual in 1992 cancelled the second round of the National Elections. From then on escalated a new civil war, which by the time of the next elections three years later, had killed perhaps as many as 50,000 people — over twice as many as all the French fatalities, civilian as well as military, during the eight years of the War of National Liberation. The targets of the slaughter, as well as the techniques, seemed rooted in those horrendous years of conflict. One of the first, eminent victims of terrorism that June was the President himself, Mohamed Boudiaf. Almost sole survivor of the greatly respected “neuf historiques”, he had been brought back at seventy-three to head a government of reconciliation. As an echo of the 1950s, two weeks alone of January 1994 saw 116 Algerian policemen assassinated, in a deliberate attempt to sow the kind of fear that had gripped the populace during the struggle against the French. Magistrates, evoluées women who refused to wear the veil (and to whom the Revolution had brought such high hopes of emancipation), novelists, journalists and intellectuals all appeared high on the Fundamentalist hit-list.

  Also targeted, in a determined effort by the F.I.S. to ruin the country’s economy by scaring off badly needed external investment, were foreign journalists and technicians. Distinguished political leaders, like Ait Ahmed, were driven — once more — into exile, for fear of their lives. The Government met terror with counter-terror. There leaked out accounts of torture, executions without trial, and “disappearances” that recalled the worst moments of the French Occupation. As in the ’60s, during the reign of the O.A.S., terrorist bombings now struck at Metropolitan France again.

  In 1995, two rays of hope appeared. Oil exploration in Algeria made the world’s biggest oil discoveries for the past year. But would these now be put to the salvation of the country’s desperate economic problems, and to countering the demands of overpopulation — that fertile field on which Fundamentalism breeds so readily — or would they be, once again, profligately wasted, as under Boumedienne?

  Then, in November of 1995, Zeroual held the long-promised national elections. Closely watched by international observers, they seemed properly conducted and, despite threats of “days of blood”, resulted in a 61 per
cent landslide vote for the Government. It was heralded as a triumph for moderation and hopes rose high for the beginning of a new era of reconciliation for the strife-weary Algerians.

  Yet, within days — and only eight hours after Zeroual took the oath of office — the most senior Algerian general to be killed so far was felled by terrorists in a smart suburb of Algiers.

  How much longer, Algerians ask themselves, is hope to go on being deferred, as the clock moves closer to the fiftieth anniversary since the War of Liberation began on that historic day of 1 November 1954?