Algiers had become a very violent place. In response to Yacef’s terror campaign, settler counter-terrorist squads blew up an FLN bomb factory in the Rue de Thèbes, killing seventy innocent people living in adjacent houses. Left in sole charge when other FLN leaders fled, the twenty-nine-year-old Yacef decided to retaliate in kind. He moved frequently, his office being an imitation-leather briefcase, filled with fake IDs, FLN documents and 500,000 francs. His base was in the kasbah, a maze of houses built around courtyards that stretched back from dark and narrow alleyways, with wearying flights of steps and sudden corners. Many of the alleyways led to dead ends, where intruders could be trapped and killed. The windows in the courtyards had grilles designed so that women could see out without being seen themselves. The Algiers police called it ‘the aquarium’.
Among Yacef’s 1,400 fighters were a number of attractive young Muslim women who could pass as Europeans, sometimes using peroxide to lighten their hair. On 30 September 1956, two pairs of these young women bluffed and flirted their way past incurious Zouave sentries guarding the exits from the kasbah, to deposit duffel bags containing bombs in a milk bar opposite Salan’s headquarters and at a café popular among European students. The bombs killed three people and injured fifty. A third bomb failed to detonate in the Air France terminal.
Yacef’s chief hit man was a former pimp called Ali Ammar, alias Ali la Pointe, who had discovered he was a political victim while in jail. He had the Legion motto Marche ou crève tattooed on his chest and Tais toi (shut up) on his left hand. In December, Ali la Pointe shot dead Mayor Amédée Froger, the most senior and most militant elected official in Algeria. Shortly before Froger’s funeral cortège reached the cemetery an FLN bomb exploded among the tombs, which led to a furious colon mob spreading out to lynch Arabs. Governor-General Lacoste summoned Salan, who turned the response over to Massu’s 10th Parachute Division and his right-hand man Colonel Yves Godard, who had close working connections with the French intelligence services and no qualms about using torture to extract information. The first battle of Algiers was on.16
Godard divided Algiers into quadrilaterals, and then used numbers painted on houses to order the chaos of the kasbah. He appointed individual ‘block’ leaders, with a duty to report on the inhabitants, and took hooded informants on surprise visits to identify FLN activists. Armed with police files on nationalist suspects, and intelligence on their precise whereabouts, Bigeard’s 3rd Paras combed this human rabbit warren, dragging out their targets. The nationalists responded with a general strike, which Massu broke by using trucks and chains to drag away the steel shutters used to close stores and kiosks and by intimidating transport and office employees into returning to work. In other words, the French were starting to make war on the entire population. Yacef launched a further wave of female bombers, who brought carnage to more cafés and restaurants, killing five and wounding sixty. Bombs left among the packed stands at a racecourse killed ten spectators and injured forty-five. Patient police work enabled Bigeard to locate the guerrillas’ main bomb factory, where his Paras found eighty-seven fully operational bombs and a rich haul of bomb-making paraphernalia. Meanwhile, Godard’s torturers were compiling detailed ‘organigrammes’ of the FLN’s organizational structure within the kasbah, with each fact written on to a large chart.
Although Catholic Church leaders, including Archbishop ‘Mohammed’ Duval of Algiers, opposed torture, the 10th Division chaplain Father Delarue justified it, on the grounds that it prevented ‘the massacre of innocents’. The methods went beyond what the French call the passage à tabac, or a disorientating roughing up, by way of preliminaries. What Bigeard dubbed ‘muscular interrogation’ involved the wet and dry ‘submarines’, suffocation by water or plastic bag (which were to gain renewed notoriety when employed by the Argentine military in the 1970s), and the ‘talking machines’, hand-cranked telephone generators attached to sensitive parts of the body. Female suspects were raped, sometimes with inanimate objects. Torture took on its own humdrum routines, with the torturers breaking to eat or smoke. Loud music was used to drown the screaming, except in situations where screams were useful to terrorize those awaiting interrogation.
Other stratagems included writing the names of FLN members who had not been captured on the doors of empty cells, to deceive those arrested into revealing details about them. When victims died under torture, they were either buried in remote spots or dropped out at sea by helicopter. This was also the fate of many live prisoners, who were dubbed ‘crevettes Bigeard’ (shrimps à la Bigeard) by barrack-room wits. Major Paul Aussaresses ran a combined torture and murder operation in the Villa des Tourelles, where other victims of army torture were taken for elimination. Most of them were driven to a variety of locations, where they were supposedly shot in combat or while trying to escape. In the case of FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi, who had organized the 1957 general strike, Aussaresses personally hanged him and then claimed it was suicide in a prison cell. Aussaresses reported his nocturnal activities to Massu, who grunted acknowledgement.17
Even though a handful of French officials such as Paul Teitgen, the senior civil servant responsible for police, resigned in protest because he had been tortured (in Dachau) during the war, in many situations victims make excellent victimizers, their psychology twisted by their own appalling experiences. Some of the torturers had also been tortured by the Germans, or had acquired a taste for it in the wartime resistance, when they tortured and executed captured Nazis or members of the collaborating Milice. Nor were the FLN wilting violets when it came to torturing those suspected of collaboration with the French. It was a nightmare spiral into moral nihilism on the part of a country whose civilizing mission obviously included the 1789 Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. In practice, when in 1955 Mitterrand authorized an investigation into allegations of ill-treatment of prisoners, the report avoided the term ‘torture’ in favour of ‘procedures’, which medical experts in turn helpfully sub-divided into the harmless and the ‘abusive’. This issue has haunted many other subsequent governments fighting irregular opponents who did not enjoy the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which France had ratified in 1951.18
In recognizing the right of colonial peoples to national independence, in December 1960, the UN General Assembly was mute regarding coercion, torture and violence by national liberation movements. For there were no international constraints on guerrillas, who, being mobile, did not take many prisoners. In Algiers Yacef intensified terrorist violence. In June 1957 a powerful bomb placed under the stage at the seaside casino killed nine, including band leader Lucky Starway, and injured eighty-five, many of them girls with their feet or legs blown off. Rescuers were sickened to find scattered shoes still containing dainty feet. Sinister men in dark glasses directed mobs of outraged pieds noirs in their retaliatory rampages through Arab districts, as the army and police looked on.
Information from detainees and informants eventually led Godard to Yacef’s lair, in two adjacent houses. After threatening to blow up the houses, Godard secured Yacef’s surrender. Although never tortured, Yacef volunteered the whereabouts of his most loyal lieutenant. Ali la Pointe and a twelve-year-old admirer refused to surrender and died along with seventeen innocent neighbours when plastic explosives placed by the Paras detonated a large cache of FLN explosives in their hide-out. With this the battle of Algiers was considered won by the Paras, who relaxed into the admiring arms of their sun-kissed sweethearts. The FLN called it their Dien Bien Phu.
During the battle the ALN mounted diversionary attacks in the countryside and at Agounennda the strategy backfired when Bigeard’s regiment killed ninety-six guerrillas for the loss of only eight Paras. A key priority became to staunch the flow of arms and men from ALN bases in Morocco and Tunisia, which was achieved with electrified fences. Infiltration from the Tunisian border was halted by the Morice Line, backed by the Challe Line, which stretched 220 miles from Bône to Bir el
-Ater, with the most vulnerable section fortified to a depth of twelve miles, including floodlights, mines and two wire fences capable of delivering a 5,000-volt shock, backed by 40,000 conscript troops. The Pedron Line divided the country, running for ninety miles from Sidi Aissa. In 1958, of 1,200 guerrilla fighters who tried to cross from Tunisia into Algeria, only two made it. Three million villagers were compulsorily moved into 1,840 auto-défense villages by 1960, in an attempt to drain the sea in which the guerrillas swam. Some 8,000 nationalist suspects were held in ten internment camps, which attracted international criticism despite being deemed humane by the International Red Cross.19
Meanwhile as factional fighting between external and internal leaders or within the wilayas divided the nationalist camp, the French institutionalized the more advanced thinking about counter-insurgency warfare. French conscript officers attended twelve-day courses at the Centre d’Instruction de Pacification et de Contre-Guérilla established at Arzew near Oran in March 1956. Notable practitioners, including David Galula and Roger Trinquier who had led commandos behind Viet Minh lines, were discussed in military journals or in books on theory and practice. Efforts were made to explain the purpose of the war to incoming conscripts, who were far less enthusiastic than the regulars. The means included a weekly magazine called Le Bled. The aim was for the conscripts to internalize the hearts-and-minds approach of the more intelligent French counter-insurgency experts, an approach undermined by emphasis placed by the regulars on body counts. The half-million men stationed in Algeria in 1957 were divided among three corps situated in Algiers, Constantine and Oran, with the elite troops acting as a mobile reserve. In addition to 40,000 Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian tirailleurs and Spahis, there were 60,000 Algerian Muslim irregular harkis, who included disillusioned former insurgents.20
From the government’s point of view, the most worrying development was within the elite units. They saw themselves as a cut above the inexperienced and under-motivated conscripts who arrived from metropolitan France like lambs to the slaughter. Disdainful of the settler elite, the colonial and Legion troops sympathized with the rough-and-ready working-class colons, especially as many of their sons volunteered to do their military service in the elite units. In 1958 these men fell into the gulf dividing them from a metropolitan French society identified with slimy politicians and traitorous intellectuals when their contempt led them to mutiny.
Winning the Wider War
Although the FLN had lost the urban battle, being excluded from Algiers for the next three years, the epic and vicious nature of the fighting had attracted the world’s notice, while the moral costs of torture were starting to be paid in metropolitan France and in France’s standing in the wider world after the Paras turned their attention on French FLN sympathizers. As usual the liberal press ignored nationalist barbarity.
The FLN were aided and abetted by human rights lawyers who waged what is nowadays called ‘lawfare’ to distinguish those for whom self-promotion is more important than their individual client. One such was Jacques Vergès, the son of a French doctor and diplomat and a Vietnamese woman, who grew up on the island of Réunion. A Communist sympathizer, Vergès was so hopeless at defending FLN suspects that he became known as ‘Maître Guillotine’. But he was a master at attracting publicity by waging ‘a strategy of disruption’ in courtrooms. He eventually married one of his clients, the FLN bomber Djamila Bouhired, and would go on to defend the Lyons Gestapo killer Klaus Barbie, the international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal), Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz and the former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan.21
Regardless of the motives of persons like Vergès, French conduct of the war undermined claims that it was being fought on behalf of Western liberal values, even though the FLN actively rejected those values. In 1955 the FLN had been recognized as the authentic voice of Algeria by the non-aligned states meeting at Bandung in Indonesia. Despite French efforts to treat the war in Algeria as a purely domestic affair, the nationalists’ adroit and cosmopolitan diplomats won over American opinion, especially after left-wing French intellectuals made it both fashionable and respectable to criticize France, notably on university campuses. It was the FLN and not the French who tantalized American big business with the prospect of Saharan oil.
The nuanced and informed voice of the novelist Albert Camus, who defended the humanity of the settler population, became a cry in the wilderness, the ambiguities too subtle for most of the liberal media. For the Algerian colons became the targets of the universal left’s Manichaean demonology that divides peoples according to its own definition of history. The colons were on the wrong side of ‘progress’, a category subsequently extended to Ulster Unionists, Afrikaners and Israelis. In reality, as Camus knew, and anybody capable of independent thought knows, they are just one of two peoples competing for the same piece of territory, which in most cases had never been a nation at all before they arrived.
The Eisenhower administration had several concerns about Algeria. Foster Dulles’s chief consideration was that support for France in Algeria would undermine US efforts to exploit its own anti-colonial past in boosting anti-Communism sentiment in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The constant subtraction of French forces from Europe weakened NATO, which in turn appointed fewer French officers to senior positions, thereby alienating the army and the French public from an alliance in which France counted for less and less. Nor did Dulles believe French claims that the nationalists were part of the global Communist threat he otherwise fervently believed in. Ike, drawing on his wartime experience in the region, wanted to cultivate moderate Arab leaders like Sultan (later King) Mohammed V of Morocco and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia. He also rightly suspected the anti-American potential of French Socialist plans for a Eurafrica bloc running from France via Algeria to Francophone sub-Saharan Africa.22
The nationalists had absorbed individual members of the Algerian Communist Party without being contaminated by its doctrines. While its leaders took any aid they could get from Moscow, they had no illusions that the Soviets had their eye on the main chance represented by detaching France from NATO, and they regarded Tito’s Yugoslavia as a better external partner.23 It was odd that while France claimed to be fighting for Western civilization, it refused to hear the views of any Western power on its presence in Algeria, let alone those of Morocco and Tunisia which tried to broker peace. Dulles realized that French policy was liable to create conditions in which Communism might gain a wider purchase throughout North Africa, undermining a solid block of anti-Soviet Arab states. Moreover, France’s unconditional support for Israel was complicating America’s more subtle policies in the Middle East; ironically this was a claim Europeans would use against the US itself fifty or sixty years later.
US confidence in the French was not improved by the chronic instability of the Fourth Republic, nor by veiled threats that, if the US failed to support it to the hilt, France might opt for neutralism between the US and Soviets. That pipedream was encouraged by Moscow, with Molotov telling the French that Algeria was a purely internal problem about which the Soviets refrained from expressing a view.24 Threats of future neutralism led to US impatience with France’s residual pretensions to being a great power. The skyjacking of Ben Bella destroyed US efforts to build an anti-Communist alliance in North Africa, involving Morocco, Tunisia and, revealingly, an independent Algeria. The October 1956 Suez Crisis came as a shock to a French public that was much more united behind the invasion than the British public was because of Cairo’s support for the Algerian insurgents. Next came the body blow of the FLN being allowed to open an office in Washington DC as well as at the UN in New York. The French were not wrong in imagining that US policy-makers were sceptical about France, as indeed they had been since FDR did his best to exclude France from any significant post-war role. Anti-Americanism swept France, with US tourists refused fuel at petrol stations and taxi drivers declining their fares.
On 1 July 1957 the young Senator John F. Kennedy gave a widely publicized speech in which he called for peace and independence for Algeria, urging Ike to abandon his limp support for France. The administration refused to follow French urgings to frustrate the ensuing Senate resolution, for Kennedy had merely said what Dulles wanted to do. A week later the French responded in similar fashion when the government of Félix Gaillard refused to obstruct a National Assembly resolution calling for France to recognize Mao’s China. At the same time, it is worth emphasizing, the US continued to supply the French with weapons – including helicopters – and loans to help it during one of many balance of payments crises.
An incident on the Algerian–Tunisian border on 8 February 1958 was the next turning point in the deterioration of Franco–US relations. Since the autumn of 1957 the Tunisians had abandoned a frontier strip twenty-five miles long to the ALN, which opened a training base at the village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, a short distance from the Algerian border. Two and a half thousand nationalist fighters were soon camped there in a disused mine near the village. This raised the perennial problem of whether the host state was colluding with the enemy or was too weak and ineffectual to control him. On 11 January 1958 a group of 300 Algerian fighters ambushed a French patrol, killing fourteen, wounding two and taking four captives. On 8 February the French air force, using US-supplied B-26 bombers assigned for NATO use, flattened Sakiet. Among the hundred people killed were many guerrillas, but the casualties included women and children, and two International Red Cross trucks were destroyed as well.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 40