A Savage War of Peace Page 2
The wounds of the war still lie deep, and it was not until April 1975 that the tricolour could fly again in Algiers, with the first state visit of a French President. Yet an expression I heard many times in Algeria was “the page is turned.” On the one hand, this is a sentiment of the most admirable magnanimity; indeed, how many other peoples could—within two or three years of the close of an eight-year war that cost the lives of almost one in ten of the population—make a film, La Battaglia di Algeri, where a colonel of the dreaded French paras appears almost as its hero? On the other hand, it in no way helps the historian in his work. The most elementary precisions become obscure, or difficult to verify; for example, birthdates of leading revolutionary figures often differ radically, according to the source, and for the key FLN “Meeting of the Twenty-two” in the summer of 1954 no less than six different dates have been provided from the memories of those present.
Perhaps the best of much advice I received in the preparation of this book came from another of Algeria’s top ambassadors abroad. “Be absolutely honest,” he said, “and admit it if you have only seen part of the picture.” For the very real difficulties outlined above, I cannot claim to have seen anything like the “whole picture”; but it may be open to doubt whether anyone—French, Algerian or outsider—could do so at this moment. Possibly now no one ever will.
In the course of research I made two trips to Algeria and Tunisia, where I received the maximum co-operation from the authorities. I was received with warmth and openness by President Bourguiba of Tunisia; but a similar interview kindly sponsored by my publisher, Mr Harold Macmillan, with President Boumedienne was, alas, vitiated by its coinciding with the “Ramadan War” of 1973. I made many trips to France where, as previously noted, I was almost overwhelmed by a surfeit of information and helpfulness. My researches took me on vertiginous leaps across the over-hanging roofs of the Casbah, and to third countries for shadowy appointments with anonymous “Jackal” killers still “on the run”; though, as far as personal hazard is concerned, nothing was more alarming than a drive across Paris in Jacques Soustelle’s Mini, the former Governor-General reminiscing at 80 k.p.h. with both hands!
There remains the insidious problem of Arabic transliteration. When chided by his publishers for spelling inconsistencies in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in that “Jedha the she-camel was Jedhah on slip 40,” T.E. Lawrence riposted dismissively: “She was a splendid beast.” Later on there was this exchange: “Slip 78. Sherif Abd el Mayin of slip 68 becomes el Main, el Mayein, el Muein, el Mayim and el Muyein.” T.E.L.: “Good egg. I call this really ingenious.” If so distinguished an Arabist as Lawrence should admit defeat over the endless variation in the spelling of proper names in Arabic, I hope I may be allowed some indulgence. Otherwise, on the advice of Dr Albert Hourani, I have tried to adopt the European transliteration of the appropriate “colonising” power; i.e. French for Algerian and Maghreb names, and English for the occasional Egyptian or Palestinian reference.
Of the many in France, Algeria and elsewhere who helped me, a number specifically requested not to be mentioned in this book or to have information attributed directly to themselves. Regretfully, I must comply with their wishes, but thank them sincerely in my heart. For the rest, I am particularly indebted to the following who have been kind enough to give me their time and assistance:
President Habib Bourguiba; MM. les Présidents Georges Bidault, Michel Debré, Pierre Mendès-France, Antoine Pinay and the late Guy Mollet; Dr Mahieddine Aminore, Mme Lorette Ankaoua, the late General André Beaufre, S.E. M. Mohammed Bedjaoui, Mr Edward Behr, S.E. M. Abdelmalek Benhabyles, M. Ben Youssef Ben Khedda, General Maurice Challe, M. Abdelkader Chanderli, Professor Pierre Chaulet, Colonel François Coulet, the late Mr Christopher Ewart-Biggs, M. Christian Fouchet, Colonel Jean Gardes, General James Gavin, Mr Omar Haliq, Dr Albert Hourani, S.E. M. Louis Joxe, Professor Mostefa Lacheraf, Senator Robert Lacoste, M. Mohamed Lebjaoui, General Jacques Massu, M. François Mitterrand, Dr Jean-Claude Pérez, Dr Pierre Roche, General Raoul Salan, Captain Pierre Sergent, Comte Alain de Sérigny, M. Jacques Soustelle, Maître Paul Teitgen, Mme Germaine Tillion, M. Bernard Tricot, M. Gérard Viratelle, Mr Sam White, Mr Robin Wu.
I am also grateful to the French Embassy in London, the British Embassy in Algiers, and especially to H.E. M. Lakhdar Brahimi, Algerian Ambassador in London, for his constant help and kindness; to Lady Liddell-Hart for access to her late husband’s remarkable collection of personal archives; to Reggane Films, M. Jean Fontugne and Historia magazine; to the irreplaceable London Library, the Royal United Service Institution, the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine at Nanterre and the library of the French Senate at the Luxembourg (surely the world’s most sumptuous surroundings in which to research) and its librarian, M. Jean Bécarud.
For their unfailing hospitality in Paris, as well as performing endless commissions, my warm thanks are due (once again) to Mr and Mrs Walter Goetz and to Mr Michael Edwards; for help in my travels to, and inside, Algeria and Tunisia, I am indebted to the Algerian and Tunisian governments, the Algerian National Travel Agency, Tunis Air, the Tunisian National Tourist Office, the Evening Standard and the Observer.
As frequently in the past, an occasional haven of enlightened peace was offered me by St Antony’s College, Oxford—and additionally, this time, the benefits of their affiliated Middle East Centre.
In France I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my old friends Gérard Minvielle, the Socialist Senator from Les Landes, and his charming wife, Jany, who between them opened many doors to me that might otherwise have been closed—and, in addition, those of the Senate Library. I am also warmly appreciative of the patient friendliness of M. Yves Courrière who, in his four volumes on the Algerian War, carried out invaluable pioneer work in personal interviews and who responded to my endless enquiries with a goodwill not always to be found between fellow authors. More sadly, I am beholden to Sir Anthony Nutting, Bt, for graciously withdrawing from an identical project where his wide knowledge of the Arab world might have stood him in better stead than mine.
For the toilsome work of processing the manuscript I am first of all indebted to Mrs Angus Nicol for the typing and many items of research (alas, probably for the last time); to my wife for her reading and assaults on the extraneous gallicism; to Mr Alan Williams of the Viking Press, New York, for his long-range help and good sense, but especially to Mr Richard Garnett for his exacting editorial work and boundless patience. (Needless to say, all faults and errors that remain are mine alone.)
Finally, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my publisher, the Rt Hon. Harold Macmillan for his counsel and constant encouragement to write about a part of the world that—since 1942—has held his imagination; and to Alan Maclean and Caroline Hobhouse for the actual idea which has committed their willing slave to more than three years’ hard labour, without remission.
Preface to the 1996 edition
SOME fifty miles westward along the coast from Algiers lie the ancient Roman ruins of Tipasa. There are few more idyllic spots in the entire Mediterranean, and it provoked from that great French humanist, Albert Camus, one of his most eloquent and nostalgic essays. Writing in those tranquil pre-war days of colonial Algeria, Camus—in some ways the typical pied noir—described euphorically how he had experienced there “the happy lassitude of a wedding day with the world.” Lapped by a peacock-coloured sea, Tipasa remains an absinthe-perfumed paradise of expressionist colours. “Happy is he among the living who has seen such things,” exulted Camus.
Five years after he wrote these words, when Algeria was occupied by the Allies in the Second World War, General Charles de Gaulle and Harold Macmillan, then Churchill’s plenipotentiary in Algiers, spent an historic afternoon together amid the joys of Camus’s Tipasa. Macmillan had bathed naked, but de Gaulle—always ram-rod correct and conscious of his dignity—sat bolt upright on a rock, in full uniform under the Algerian summer sun, while ceaselessly they thrashed out the futu
re of the post-war world. Little could de Gaulle have realised then just how closely his own future was going to be linked to the fate of Algeria.
When I first discovered Tipasa while researching A Savage War of Peace in 1973, it moved me almost as strongly as it did Camus. Revisiting it twelve years later, I was still able to find the small memorial to Camus that bears the now worn quotation from his works, in French: “Glory consists of the ability to love without measure.” Camus loved his native Algeria, algérie française, without measure, and in a way the aging obelisk stands as a memorial to all the heartbreak, savagery and bitterness that now lies fading with extraordinary rapidity. Since Camus, Macmillan and de Gaulle, the glory that colonial France once created in Algeria has largely passed into limbo, and the gently peaceful beauty of Tipasa casts a deceptive cloak over a much more ferocious past. For it was on a sunny beach close to Tipasa that French women and children, as well as men, were machine-gunned as they bathed by freedom-fighters of the Algerian FLN. At Zeralda, just a few miles to the east, Algerian suspects died in a French torture camp; and it was from barracks in this same Zeralda that rebel units of the élite French paras launched a nearly successful coup against President de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in April 1961.
Four decades have gone by since the FLN declared war on the French in Algeria on that historic All Saints’ Day of 1954. It is a long time in modern memory, and one tends to forget the passions stirred by this appallingly savage contest, not only in France, but the impact it also caused throughout the world. Yet it remains on the statute books as a prototype of the modern war of national liberation. It was as appropriate as it was imaginative that President Chadli Bendjedid’s government should, in November 1984, mark the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the beginning of the Algerian War of National Liberation with the first ever international conference of historians studying that war. That it should have been held at all, given the pain of memories only so recently in the past, was a remarkable—and courageous—feat on the part of the Algerians. But, in the openness of discussion and the factual revelations that emerged, the conference was also a considerable success in itself, and showed a significant break with the reticences and the repressiveness of the immediate post-war Algeria of Houari Boumedienne.
Alas, the terrible events of the 1990s—up to 50,000 killings in a new civil war every bit as horrendous as the War of Liberation—attest that the angry echoes of Algeria 1954–62 have still not yet died away.
In my preface to the first edition of A Savage War, I drew attention to some of the difficulties encountered when trying to study the Algerian side of events in 1973. Eleven years later an invitation to participate in the Algiers’ historical conference provided me with a unique opportunity to meet some of the participants of the war who had been inaccessible to me in 1973. As Michael Holroyd once remarked, one of the privileges of writing contemporary biography—or, for that matter, contemporary history—
is that you meet, usually on friendly terms, people you have always wanted to meet …
Certainly this was true for me in Algiers in 1984. It was immensely exciting to meet for the first time men about whom I had written, but—because of circumstances—never previously been able to see.
This new edition was stimulated by that Algiers Conference; on the other hand, it also contains some factual corrections and amendments noted down over the years (for which I am deeply indebted to the help given by very many correspondents), and some new assessments and updating. I remain, however, painfully aware that the last words on the Algerian War are far from being written. In France the sack-loads of archives removed from the Gouvernement-Général in the last days of the war lie, sealed from the public gaze, in the repositories of the University of Aix-en-Provence; in Algiers, the official archives were only just beginning to be assembled in a splendid new centre in 1984. Yet, meanwhile, memories are fading and eye-witnesses dying, their recollections unrecorded. It is with that in mind that I hope this revised edition may offer at least a part view of a key episode in our times, which—like the inscription on the Camus memorial—is rapidly being eroded away by the passage of time.
Sadly, at the time of writing, overlaying all that bitter past in Algeria has come a new civil war to rend its fabric once more, overflowing yet again to plague and perplex Metropolitan France.
Preface to the 2006 edition
OVER half a century has now passed since that All Saints’ Day in the Aurès Mountains, historic for Algeria, dreadful for France, when two young French schoolteachers on their honeymoon, the Monnerots, were hauled off their bus and shot down. That is a long time in modern memory. Yet this story of how a handful of Algerian guerrillas, primitively armed, but masterfully deploying the weapon of terror, outwitted and out-fought over eight years the best armies that France could provide, remains on the statute books as a prototype of the modern war of national liberation. In South Africa the ANC studied it carefully, prior to the release and apotheosis of Nelson Mandela; in their unleashing of intifada against Israel, Palestinian leaders have looked ardently towards it. So has al-Qaeda. Since the events of September 11, 2001, particularly, the West has needed to take a new, hard look at Algeria’s “Savage War of Peace,” and all that has flowed from it.
Four decades of independence provided little of peace, or prosperity, for the Algerians. At many times the peace has been no less savage than the war, with the ghosts of it coming back to haunt both Algeria and France. Under the gaunt and unyielding figure of Boumedienne, for a while Algeria carried an influence above its weight in world affairs—to the embarrassment of the West. The Arab-Israeli War of 1973, with its accompanying surge in oil prices, was partly orchestrated in Algiers. When Boumedienne died in 1978, the seemingly more benign Chadli Benjedid brought hopes of a more liberal Algeria. But these faded as the country wrestled with mountainous economic problems, amid murmurs of corruption estimated to have cost the impoverished country the equivalent of the entire national debt. During its brief period of liberalism in the 1980s many who had not dared speak during the Boumedienne years now appeared from the woodwork. Then, in 1984, I was able to meet many important participants who had been unapproachable in the 1970s, such as the son of Si Salah and some of the (still young) women who had risked their lives to plant bombs in French targets. I was also able to meet Ben Bella and Ait Ahmed, two of the six leaders “hijacked” by French intelligence in 1956, in exile in Switzerland. These were exciting encounters for an historian, and helped provide fresh substance to what I had written in the previous decade.
Fundamentalism and Civil War
By the 1990s, however, the harsh voice of Islamic fundamentalism was heard across the land. Those young, progressive-minded war heroines whom I met in 1984, with their bright hopes of the future, were forced back once more behind the veil, or, like Maître Marie-Claude Radziewsky, the courageous Polish-French woman lawyer who had represented them during the war, to emigrate abroad. The state continued to be run by the men who still controlled the guns, the FLN Party. In the early 1990s, revolt broke out, led by the fundamentalist and aggressively dynamic FIS (Front Islamique du Salut—“Islamic Salvation Front”). Significantly pronounced fils, the FIS also proclaimed itself the fils, or sons of the heroic and high-principled FLN of the war years. Abassi Madani, the President of the FIS, who was one of the original volunteers from I November 1954, explicitly claimed that the FLN revolution had been “confiscated” by Marxist and secular forces following independence). Many of its leaders were the kind of young Algerian who joined the struggle against the French occupiers in the 1950s. Their grievances were similar—unemployment and overpopulation, and no say in the administration of the country. The FIS took advantage of the upsurge in hostility and disillusion with the regime, which had first been expressed in riots in October 1988. After the creation of a new multiparty system in 1989 the FIS successfully posed as the only viable alternative to the regime capable of ejecting the corrupt and despised existing system. In 199
2 elections were cancelled, and the FIS disenfranchised. Elements of it took to the hills and the streets in much the same way as the FLN had in 1954.
Starting with the killing of local policemen and regional administrators—just as in 1954, but displaying less coordination—an appalling civil war ensued, with the Algiers government proving as incapable of crushing the revolt as the French Army had been in 1954–62. The FIS was in turn thrust aside by a far more extreme band of revolutionaries, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), prepared to wage war with total ruthlessness. Its origins and leaders were surrounded in mystery—but its aims appeared to be projected towards a complete and anarchic destruction of the existing order. On a note that was to become pointedly ominous on September 11, 2001, some of its killers were known as the “Afghans,” highly trained volunteers who had served their apprenticeship in that country. The economy was targeted, and so at one point were foreigners, businessmen and journalists, promiscuously massacred with the clear intent of driving out foreign capital. Whole villages—including women and children—would be slaughtered by unknown guerrillas, for unknown motives.