Jungle of Snakes Page 10
FLN leaders selected the Aurès massif, a mountain chain extending across eastern Algeria, as the most promising region to launch their campaign. The rugged Aurès mountains, with their razorback ridges separated by deep ravines and scattered pine, live oak, and cedar forests, were a traditional refuge for men fleeing invaders or the law. Even by Algerian standards the Aurès was a poverty-stricken region where subsistence farmers lived in mud-daubed villages. Banditry was nearly as common as sheep herding. Three times in the past hundred years the Aurès had revolted against the French. The FLN calculated that such people would happily support a fourth revolt. Moreover, a native revolutionary of the region, Belkacem Krim, already had an organized and armed guerrilla band hidden in the heartland of the Aurès mountains. Better still, in 1954 in all the massif only seven gendarmes were present to represent French law.
Couriers carried instructions across Algeria: “Arm, train and prepare.” In the crowded Muslim quarter of Algiers, the infamous Casbah, a dedicated terrorist named Zoubir Bouadjadj set up a network of bomb-making factories. Elsewhere, insurgents smuggled firearms past police outposts, everything from World War I–era bolt action rifles to weapons carelessly lost by American GIs during the 1942 invasion of North Africa. Most fighters had to be content with unreliable hunting guns better suited for shooting a feral goat than a French regular.
The effort to create a revolutionary infrastructure without solid preparation did not work. Recruitment for the djounoud, the “soldiers of faith,” failed to attract many candidates; most people chose to wait and see what happened before choosing sides. The FLN leadership cared not. Inspired by news of French failure in Indochina, they wanted to strike while opportunity beckoned. D-Day for the simultaneous outbreak of rebellion would be one minute after midnight on November 1, 1954, the day France, and most especially the staunchly Catholic pieds-noirs, celebrated as All Saints’ Day.
The Counterinsurgency Begins
During World War II, diverse French political parties had forged bonds of mutual self-interest in order to oppose the Germans. After the war those bonds became unstable as shaky coalition governments collapsed one after another. Military men disdainfully spoke of striving politicians while French citizens took solace in the fact that a strong and competent bureaucracy administered the country regardless of the political circus at the top. However, short-lived Oalitions could not muster a coherent national response if trouble arose in the colonies. The postwar rise of nationalism in Africa brought that trouble barely six months after Dien Bien Phu’s surrender.
The number of Algerian rebels who participated in the All Saints’ Day revolt probably did not exceed 700. They conducted seventy simultaneous attacks at scattered places throughout Algeria, killing seven people and wounding four. This was hardly a devastating blow. It made a minimal first impression in France, where few suspected that a war had begun. Indeed, the rebels lacked firearms, their homemade explosive devices were unreliable, and there were simply too few insurgents ready to start fighting. The poverty of resources was such that although the FLN leaders had ambitiously divided Algeria into six military-political districts, or wilayas, for almost a year following the All Saints’ Day revolt three of the district chiefs had neither followers nor weapons.
In Algeria, when the Europeans recovered from their initial shock and assessed the situation, they quickly perceived the rebels’ weaknesses. Among the pieds-noirs a deep sense of outrage replaced initial fears. The FLN campaign slogan calling on the Europeans to leave or risk death, “The suitcase or the coffin,” amazed them. For generations they had made this country their home and it was inconceivable that anyone should challenge their right to call themselves Algerians.
In France itself, the All Saints’ Day revolt presented a major political challenge. There were two alternatives to war: rapid and fair integration of Algeria into metropolitan France and disengagement. Neither choice was politically acceptable. Ethnic, religious, cultural, and racial divisions between French and Algerians made equitable integration a nonstarter. Disengagement was psychologically difficult. French leaders, the army, and the people still reeled from the humiliating events of 1940, when a German blitzkrieg overran the fatherland. Postwar loss of the colonial empire threatened to reduce France to second-rate status. The gallant but futile defense of Dien Bien Phu was still very much in everyone’s mind. France’s Algerian lobby and the army were powerful political influences and neither body could countenance losing another valuable and prestige-conferring colony. The politicians bent with the prevailing wind.
French determination to hold Algeria arose from the interplay of multiple factors, the most salient of which were the presence of close to a million settlers, the legal fiction that Algeria was an integral part of France, wounded pride, and last but not least the discovery of oil in the Sahara desert in Algeria’s far south.
For these reasons the mandate to retain Algeria as part of metropolitan France extended across political parties. The French premier representing the Radical Party, Pierre Mendès-France, told the National Assembly in November 1954 that Algeria was part of France and that it was inconceivable that it should be otherwise. He emphasized that a “blow struck at the French of Algeria, be they Moslem or European, is a blow struck at the whole nation.” Applause from delegates of all stripes greeted his words as he emotionally intoned there could be no compromise when it came to “defending the internal peace of the nation and the integrity of the Republic.”3 Mendès-France pledged to send massive military reinforcements to restore order. His minister of the interior, François Mitterrand, a member of the left wing, added that “the only possible negotiation is war.”4 Later, Mendès-France’s successor, the Socialist premier Guy Mollet, said, “France without Algeria would be no longer France.”5
This viewpoint and its undergirding logic dictated how France responded to the crisis. For the duration of the conflict the French government treated the insurgents as citizens engaged in outlaw behavior. They were subject to the law in the same way a citizen of Paris or Marseilles was subject to the law. The government sent the military to Algeria to restore and maintain order in the same way it dispatched riot police to a city on the mainland. This legal distinction that described Algeria as part of metropolitan France carried significant implications. In the arena of foreign affairs, no international law prevented a government from suppressing an internal rebellion. No foreign power could legitimately support the rebels or intervene on their behalf. In the arena of French military conduct, counterinsurgency efforts were nominally subject to French law. This would be observed in the breach, with the government itself permitting and encouraging extralegal measures with a wink and a nod.
The French Military
From a military standpoint, the outbreak of terror in Algeria came at a bad time. The army’s most experienced guerrilla fighters were still in slow transit from Indochina. Troubles in neighboring Morocco and Tunisia, both of which were also asserting their right to self-rule, tied down another 140,000 men. Commitment to NATO occupied additional divisions. Few trained reserves remained. In Algeria itself, there were about 49,000 security forces of all types among whom a mere 3,500 were combat effective soldiers. The available air transport was indicative of the military’s poor state of combat readiness: eight leftover World War II–era Junkers transport planes, a type already obsolete ten years earlier, and one helicopter. Given that the insurgents’ tactic of choice was terror, the role of the police would be crucial. Yet the total number of police in Algeria barely exceeded the size of the Parisian police force. The logical answer to the manpower shortage was to recall French reserves, but such strong medicine was politically unpalatable.
Instead, French authorities brazenly dismissed the initial wave of terrorist acts as “ordinary banditry.” This failure to appreciate the true challenge enabled the rebels to pass through the revolution’s precarious first stage. Henceforth, its spread became inevitable. By the time French authorities recognized the rebe
llion for what it was, there was no easy recourse. Firm, even bold political and military action was the only possible strategy for victory. Instead, the succession of weak French governments tried hastily devised reforms to undercut the insurgents. These economic and social reforms only hardened the insurgents’ resolve and encouraged the FLN to limit the alternatives they presented to the French colonists to two: “the suitcase or the coffin.”
IN ALGERIA THE initial official response to the outbreak of violence was the predictable overreaction of an embarrassed administration. First came heavy-handed, indiscriminate arrests of suspects, thereby converting neutrals to the cause of the insurgency. Next came French government resistance to reform, a stance widely acclaimed by hard-liners in France and the pieds-noirs. And then, too late, came official proposals for meaningful reform.
During the winter of 1954–55, the French army conducted several clumsy operations featuring conventional, large-scale pincer operations designed to trap and eliminate the guerrillas. The insurgents were seldom to be found. Somehow their intelligence network—the Arab “bush telegraph,” using beacon fires lit from peak to peak—outpaced both the French mechanized columns and their foot-slogging brethren. It was soon apparent that in the battle for intelligence the insurgents held a big edge. Worse, the large scale sweeps proved counterproductive. One French analyst caustically observed, “To send in tank units, to destroy villages, to bombard certain zones, this is no longer the fine comb [ratissage]; it is using a sledgehammer to kill fleas. And what is much more serious, it is to encourage the young—and sometimes the less young—to go into the maquis.”6 Indeed, an FLN leader confirmed that this style of French operations was “our best recruiting agent.”7 After one typical French military operation caused the death of an innocent Muslim woman, an FLN leader remarked, “Voilà, we’ve won another battle. They hate the French a little more now. The stupid bastards are winning the war for us.”8
At this time French leaders still failed to understand thoroughly the po-liti cal dimensions of the struggle. FLN appeals to nationalism were useful insurgent tools in the competition for popular support inside Algeria. More effective was the endless repetition of a potent propaganda message delivered to Algerian Muslims who sat on the fence: “The French swore they would never leave Indochina; they left. Now they pledge to never abandon Algeria.” In 1956, after France announced the in dependence of neighboring Morocco and Tunisia, revolutionary propagandists had two examples much closer to home of France reneging on its solemn vows.
Jacques Soustelle, soon to be appointed governor-general to Algeria, described the essential question asked by all French sympathizers: “ ‘Are you leaving or staying?’ There is no officer, who assuming command of his post in a village . . . has not been asked this question by the local notables. What it meant was: ‘If the village raises the French flag, if this or that family head agrees to become mayor, if we send our sons and daughters to school, if we hand out weapons of self-defense, if we refuse to supply the fellaghas roaming around the djebel with barley, sheep and money, will you, the army, be here to defend us from reprisals?’”9
If armed French regulars possessed too much firepower for the insurgents to risk an attack and European civilians were not yet on the target list, French sympathizers among the Muslim population remained vulnerable. A village policeman found with his throat slit—a particularly humiliating death normally reserved for slaughtering sheep and goats—and an FLN placard pinned to his corpse, an Algerian vineyard manager employed by a French owner found tortured and killed, and an outspoken pro-French village elder subjected to slow death within a few hundred yards of a French army base, all conveyed the terrorist message to cease collaborating with the French.
Targeted terrorism also sought to drive a wedge between the Muslim and the French population by compelling rural Muslims to burn schools and destroy public properties in order to bring French repression. The FLN also worked to raise Muslim political consciousness by rigid enforcement of Islamic rites. One notable tactic was to enforce a ban on public tobacco consumption. A few public chastisements where a smoker’s nose was cut off went a long way toward enforcing a national tobacco boycott. The Front also organized local political cadres whose main job was to collect taxes to support the insurgency. Having initially made the strategic error of impatience, the FLN focused on building revolutionary infrastructure by mobilizing the population through persuasion and terror.
SEVEN
Terror Without Limits
The Philippeville Massacre
THE STRATEGY PROMOTED BY FRENCH president Mendès-France called for simultaneous reform and military pressure. When the insurrection began there were 2,000 employees in the general government of Algeria. Eight were Muslims. To help redress this imbalance a new school of administration gave Muslim Algerians access to public sector management positions. Nationwide, only 15 percent of Muslim children attended school. Proposed educational measures addressed this issue. The average European’s salary was twenty-eight times that of the Muslim. Economic measures sought to reduce the gap between Algerian and European salaries. In sum, comprehensive economic and social reforms would give Algeria more equal standing within France’s political structure. The problem with this approach was obvious: it threatened the pieds-noirs, who wanted to preserve the status quo, but failed to satisfy the FLN, which wanted nothing less than full in dependence. Lack of progress in Algeria and fierce opposition from the Algerian lobby brought down the Mendès-France government in February 1955. The Algerian lobby in France and many pieds-noirs celebrated the government’s collapse. In their view, now could begin the proper employment of force. FLN leaders likewise welcomed Mendès-France’s ouster. They regarded his promise of liberal reform as a dire political threat to their goal of total in dependence.
One of Mendès-France’s last acts before his ouster was to appoint a new governor-general for Algeria, Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle was a remarkable man who by age forty-three had already enjoyed an outstanding career as academic, political thinker, administrator, and World War II partisan. In February 1955 Soustelle toured Algeria and quickly saw that the situation was much worse than metropolitan France realized. The French military had understood the paramount importance of recruiting and employing large numbers of Muslims. In turn, the guerrillas made examples of these “loyal” Muslims, subjecting them to torture, mutilation, and death. Soustelle realized that FLN terror had driven the Muslim majority into fearful neutrality. “The Administration and the Army,” Soustelle wrote, “had seen information dry up . . . Fear closed mouths and hardened faces.”1
Soustelle represented the school of thought that poverty breeds revolution. His response, the so-called Soustelle Plan, and its subsequent variants sought to combat the insurrection through social and economic reforms. This school of analysis had superficial validity. The impoverished peasants of the Aurès mountains had little to lose by joining the insurrection. However, the urban poor were equally destitute yet did not initially participate in the insurrection. A grand strategy based on the wrong diagnosis could not succeed. Expensive social and economic reforms designed to conquer poverty were of limited value when the conflict was really about politics. The FLN did not fight to banish poverty; they fought to banish French rule.
The arrival of substantial French reinforcements in Algeria frustrated the insurgents’ hopes for a quick victory. French military pressure drove many guerrilla bands into hiding, where the hard winter of 1954–55 seriously depleted their ranks. In March 1955 Soustelle asked the government for the right to adapt legislation to war time conditions. At month’s end the National Assembly, while refusing to use the word war, voted for a state of emergency that strengthened the powers of the army. But these powers applied only to a limited zone of the Aurès. The National Assembly also authorized the first population regroupments in order to move “contaminated” populations to “settlement camps.”2
During this time the insurgents continued to have tro
uble obtaining arms and ammunition—probably only half of the guerrillas who had participated in the All Saints’ Day attacks were armed—so they could not openly challenge French security forces. FLN leaders realized that there would be no war-winning Algerian version of Dien Bien Phu. Henceforth, insurgent strategy relied upon fighting a low-level war of attrition that pitted their scarce armed manpower and ammunition against French national will.
Yet they had to be seen to remain active in order to prevent the Muslim population from rallying to the French cause and to encourage foreign support. So the FLN lifted restrictions on attacks against European civilians and embarked on a terror campaign without limits. Civilians became targets for indiscriminate bombings and shootings. The goal was to provoke repressive French military responses in order to alienate both the Algerian and the French people. A hand grenade tossed into a crowded cafe or a homemade bomb detonated on a school bus carrying French children could be expected to bring furious reprisals against the local Muslim population. The new policy came into sharp focus on August 20, 1955, in and around the harbor city of Philippeville.