Jungle of Snakes

by James R. Arnold

  On September 16, 1959, in anticipation of the opening of the UN General Assembly, de Gaulle appeared on television to address the nation. In a twenty-minute speech he directly mentioned the possibility of Algerian “self-determination” to be decided by referendum. It was the first time a French leader had publicly suggested this possibility. It marked a watershed. Every French proposal before this time was now irrelevant. There was no longer any chance of retaining Algeria within metropolitan France. Although de Gaulle himself did not yet perceive it, everything that followed was no more than issues of procedure and method.

  This was a strategic victory for the insurgency and the leadership knew it. The FLN minister of defense, Belkacem Krim, the only living member of the original nine revolutionary leaders who had plotted the rebellion, broadcast to his hard-pressed fighters the news that “your struggle has obliged the enemy to talk of self-determination, thus renouncing the oft-repeated myth of Algérie française. His retreat is the fruit of your efforts.”5 Henceforth, all the FLN had to do was survive until France yielded to its demands. To ensure its survival, the FLN abandoned conventional military operations and substituted hit-and-run raids and acts of terrorism. These acts had the psychological and political purpose of showing the world that the FLN remained an unconquered force.

  On the international stage, FLN cadres operating outside of Algeria garnered the reward for years of diplomatic labor. Their propaganda machine continually publicized accounts of French brutality. They contrasted international support for self-determination with the French repression of this right in Algeria. FLN propaganda undermined France’s claim to represent Western civilization and France’s historic revolutionary roots based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man. By skilled and relentless manipulation of the international media, FLN propagandists convinced the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as liberal factions in Great Britain and particularly the United States, to condemn French conduct. They used the United Nations as a stage to tarnish France and sow discord between France and her allies.

  De Gaulle’s last attempt to find compromise featured a policy of “association” by which an autonomous Algeria would remain loosely linked with France. He hoped to find a way to allow the pieds-noirs to remain and for Muslims loyal to France to assimilate peacefully into a new Algeria. This policy failed on all fronts. Muslim demonstrations in Algiers showed that anything short of total independence was unacceptable. In keeping with the emerging international consensus, on December 19, 1960, the UN General Assembly rejected de Gaulle’s policy and instead recognized Algeria’s right to independence. The French army grew demoralized. Addressing mourners at the funeral of ten paratroopers killed in Algeria, an army chaplain spoke for many when he said, “You have fallen at a time when, if we are to believe the speeches, we no longer know why we are dying.”6 Officers who had worked to protect Algerians from FLN reprisals, particularly the SAS officers who had developed close relationships with villagers in their areas, felt dishonored that de Gaulle would betray people who had trusted France. The extreme loyalists of French Algeria formed the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a secretive terror group dedicated to retaining pied-noir control of Algeria. A revolt of French generals in Algeria, including General Challe, against de Gaulle’s government, the so-called Generals’ Putsch of April 1961, demonstrated a powerful French military faction’s attitude toward compromise. With his own rule in jeopardy, de Gaulle concluded that he had no alternative but to enter negotiations with the FLN in May 1961.

  This decision violated repeated French pledges never to negotiate with the terrorists. The FLN leadership correctly perceived that France needed a negotiated settlement more than the insurgents did. They stonewalled on every issue discussed at the conference table and within one year France had capitulated on every major point it had once asserted represented a vital national interest. On July 3, 1962, France officially recognized Algerian independence.

  The Algerian settlement ended a sixteen-year French military effort to retain its colonies in Indochina and North Africa. The terms of the settlement guaranteed the safety and property of French colonists for three years. Unpersuaded, at least three quarters of the pieds-noirs, some 750,000 people, left the country they called home, the place where they and their families had been born and raised, to flee to France. The summer of 1962 witnessed terrible scenes as a desperate, uprooted Europe an population pushed and shoved to secure a berth on a plane or boat bound for Marseilles. In a haunting echo of the FLN slogan “The suitcase or the coffin,” they had to leave all property behind except for their allotment of two suitcases each. Another 50,000 moved to Spain, while 10,000 Sephardic Jews emigrated to Israel. In total, their exodus was the most massive population relocation to Eu rope since World War II.

  Tragically left behind were those Algerians who had supported the French. They included career soldiers, militiamen, elite members of the “hunt commandos,” police, and government bureaucrats. At first SAS officers had arranged transportation to France for the men who were certain to face death if they remained in Algeria, namely the most devoted members of their units. But the French government halted this effort and forbade all “illegal” emigration from Algeria. By this act of surpassing dishonor, the French government thereby condemned several hundred thousand Algerian men and their families to reprisals at the ungentle hands of the FLN. As the weeks passed, horrific stories leaked from Algeria of former French loyalists dying by the hundreds while being compelled to clear the minefields of the Morice Line; of veterans forced to dig their own graves, swallow their French medals, and then face execution; of burnings, castrations, and the elimination of entire families, including young children. How many were killed is unknown, with estimates ranging from 30,000 to 150,000.

  Why the French Lost

  The war in Algeria lasted almost eight years. Two million French soldiers had crossed the Mediterranean to fight in Algeria. The official French tabulation of casualties reported 12,000 French combat deaths with another 6,000 killed by “accidents.” The Algerian militia including the harki hunter units suffered 2,500 killed. The number of combat wounded totaled 25,000, with the astonishing figure of 28,700 enduring “accidental woundings.”7

  Over the duration of the war, the French estimated that 141,000 Muslim male combatants had been killed by security forces and another 78,000 Muslim civilians had been killed by terrorist action, 12,000 of whom were killed in internal political purges. On the other hand, in 1962 the FLN estimated that 300,000 Algerians had died from war-related causes. Later, the Algerian government raised this estimate to one million. No one ever counted the number of civilians “accidentally” killed during French search-and-destroy operations, losses from malnutrition and disease among the 1.8 million Muslims who either were regrouped by the French or became refugees, or the number of reprisal killings conducted by the FLN after the French departed. While the French totals surely are an undercount and the Algerian government’s count may be exaggerated, the true number is unknowable. Taken as a whole, the war probably caused about a half million deaths, most of which were Algerian.

  Coming in the wake of the national humiliation against the Germans in 1940 and against the Viet Minh in Indochina, the Algerian debacle was too much to acknowledge, so France tried to ignore it. Until 1999, France formally refused to call it a war, leaving others to label it the “War with No Name.” Some of the long-suppressed secrets from the conflict emerged in the late 1990s. The start of the new century witnessed dramatic confrontations in the French press among senior French veterans, culminating in the 2001 publication of General Paul Aussaresses’ memoirs. Aussaresses candidly admitted torture and summary executions and claimed that the French national leadership covertly authorized this conduct. His shocking assertions, in conjunction with other revelations, provide overwhelming documentation of the routine practice of torture and murder by French military and security forces during the Algerian War.

  THE MILITARY INEPTITUDE of Algerian g
uerrillas surprised French veterans of Indochina. They remarked, “Thank God we are not dealing with Vi-ets here!”8 By virtually all military measures the armed wing of the Front de Libération Nationale failed. Likewise, inside Algeria the political wing did not enjoy much success. Unlike nationalist movements elsewhere, it failed to organize effective labor strikes or stimulate a widespread popular uprising. The year 1958 witnessed the armed wing at its peak strength. Yet when the FLN called for a Muslim boycott of the September 1958 referendum on de Gaulle’s assumption of power, large numbers of Muslims voted in defiance of FLN pleas and threats. Nonetheless, in spite of military and political failure inside Algeria the FLN decisively achieved victory.

  That victory came even though the French military waged a comprehensive counterinsurgency featuring all the classic ingredients, including fortified barriers to isolate the insurgents and eliminate outside support, light-infantry/hunter-killer tactics, extensive recruitment of local militia, and population “regrouping.” The military effort created several opportunities for a political compromise leading to peace, but the requisite political resolution was lacking. About the time French military leaders believed themselves on the verge of victory, the corrosive impact of torture on French and Algerian public opinion became manifest. political support for the war collapsed, resulting in a French withdrawal from Algeria.

  The French counterinsurgency had the presumed benefit of featuring veterans with very recent experience in counterinsurgency warfare. For all their talk about understanding revolutionary war, French political and military leaders were unable to devise a consistent political-military counterinsurgency strategy. Broadly speaking, leaders divided into two camps, one promoting “soft” war and one insisting on “hard” war. The schism between the two camps was wide and affected almost everything. A representative of the “soft” war camp, David Galula, believed that it was vitally important for the military and the police to conduct arrests and detentions with great care in an effort to avoid alienating the civilian population. In contrast, embittered Indochina veterans such as Roger Trinquier and Paul Aussaresses thought that France had failed in that war because it had been too gentle and the way to end the insurgency was through a brutal policy that relied on torture and summary execution.

  French counterterrorism as performed by Aussaresses and like-minded officers shows how readily security forces confronting terrorists become brutal. Aussaresses justified his conduct in pragmatic terms. Terrorist bombs were killing innocent people. The judicial system was incapable of addressing the situation. If a terrorist entered the legal system there would be a long delay before his trial and the chances were good that he would be freed and thus given the opportunity to launch new attacks. Aussaresses concluded that “summary executions were therefore an inseparable part of the tasks associated with keeping law and order.”9 Aussaresses and his ilk were not sadists. Rather they believed that they were performing the nation’s necessary dirty work and took comfort in the familiar dodge that they were simply following orders. Indeed, it is almost certain that French military and political leadership all the way up to the top tacitly authorized torture and summary executions.

  Having accepted the logical necessity for extralegal conduct, the next step inevitably extended the boundaries where such conduct was appropriate. In Aussaresses’ mind there was no moral difference between the terrorist who placed the bomb and the members of his support network. The chemist who made the explosive, the bomb maker, the driver, and the lookout were equally guilty. Indeed, if Aussaresses had had his way he would have carried his counterterror operations back to France to kill the “suitcase men,” the couriers and tax collectors who gathered funds among Algerian immigrants in France and carried the money to Algeria to support the insurgency.

  Aussaresses was not the only one who held this opinion. Without regard to national borders, French assassination teams targeted arms merchants who supplied the insurgency. Inside France, the police killed an unknown number of insurgents and their supporters.

  Algeria was a notable example of the perils of fixating on the military defeat of an armed insurgency. By most conventional measures, the French defeated the insurgents’ military arm. However, the political and subversive struggle continued and the insurgents ultimately won out. In the words of historian Alistair Horne, “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 to 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.”10

  Given that the French objective was to retain colonial control over Algeria—the domination of 1 million settlers of European origin over 9 million natives—in the absence of radical political change the French in Algeria were doomed to fail. Even the most enlightened practitioners of pacification could offer nothing more than social and economic reforms within the existing political framework. What the masses wanted was self-rule.

  Then and thereafter, the Algerian war attracted interest among British and American officers who contemplated how to confront the spread worldwide of Communism. French veterans of the conflict gave lectures attended by NATO officers and wrote articles in American and Europe an military journals. American interest increased as the United States found itself becoming increasingly involved in Vietnam. However, that interest focused on counterinsurgency techniques—for example, the use of helicopters against guerrillas—rather than on the political implications of fighting a nationalist movement. When they looked at Algeria, American strategists were more interested in how to acquire the most efficient operational payoff than in performing a painstaking analysis of the underlying nature of the insurgency. Because of this typically American focus, American planners failed to derive vital conclusions regarding the political underpinnings of revolutionary warfare.

  In France, the consequences of the war in Algeria continue to play out. The terms of the war-ending Evian peace agreement gave Algerian immigrant workers coming to France certain preferential treatment. Thereafter they lived as marginalized citizens in urban slums beyond the sight of most French people. Periodically there have been outbreaks of civil unrest, but until 2005 France successfully managed to ignore most of the grievances of its Muslim population. The riots that began on the evening of October 27, 2005, in Clichy-sous-Bois, a working-class commune located in the eastern suburbs of Paris, have been another demonstration that the historic tension between France and its former Algerian citizens is not yet resolved.

  PART THREE

  The Malayan Emergency

  ELEVEN

  Crisis in Malaya

  The answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people.

  —General Gerard Templer, 19521

  The Empire’s Setting Sun

  MALAYA IS A PENINSULA STRETCHING 450 miles southeast from a border with Thailand to the island of Singapore. A spine of jungle-covered mountains extends along the middle of the peninsula. At the time of the Malayan Emergency, four fifths of the land was jungle, with the balance consisting of rice paddies, rubber plantations, villages, and towns.

  The British began establishing trading posts and naval bases on the Straits of Malacca in 1786. During the 1820s the British imported Chinese immigrants to work the rubber plantations and tin mines. Mining camps at Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, and Taiping grew to become the country’s three main urban centers. The presence of a large Chinese population caused ethnic strife. Economics played a role, since the Chinese acted as middlemen between producers and Malayan consumers and thereby dominated retail and commercial life in Malaya. Differences in religion—the Malays were Muslims, the Chinese were not—exacerbated tensions. Although accepting of British hegemony, the Chinese considered themselves superior to the Malays and refused to be ruled by them. Consequently, the Ch
inese retained their own way of life and did not mix with the Malayan people.

  In 1946, the British completed the unification of a country that heretofore had been a loose collection of sultanates. The new Federation of Malaya numbered 5.3 million people divided among three major ethnic groups: 49 percent Malay, 38 percent Chinese, and 11 percent Indian. By 1948, the year the Emergency began, about 12,000 Europeans, almost all of whom were British, lived in Malaya. British civil servants filled the upper echelon of government. British citizens managed the country’s rich tin mines and rubber plantations. Although the sun had already begun to set elsewhere in the British Empire, Europeans living in Malaya continued to enjoy a life of colonial ease. At their places of employment they managed a biddable, low-cost labor force. Outside of work innumerable servants dealt with life’s chores while their masters rotated from posh polo and tennis clubs to mountain resorts where they sought refuge from Malaya’s hot, humid climate. Life was good, it had long been like this, and they saw no reason it should change.

  The Communist Party

  The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) formed in 1930. With some 15,000 members and 10,000 active sympathizers, almost all of whom were Chinese, the party was not particularly effective. It hosted a regional meeting in its foundation year, a meeting most notable for the attendance of a young Viet namese Communist named Ho Chi Minh, and for the comprehensive surveillance by the British Special Branch of the Singapore Police Force. Subsequent mass arrests decimated the MCP.