A Savage War of Peace Read online

  The techniques of murder equally had echoes from the grisly égorgements, the throat-slittings, from days of the Savage War, the “Kablyie Smile” as French servicemen dubbed it with unpleasant humour, frequently accompanied by castration. Beheading victims became common, their heads stuck on road signs as a kind of gruesome sport. Algerians themselves spoke of the “blind war,” but in its prolonged, random senselessness it came almost more to resemble Europe’s Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. Power now came to reside essentially in the hands of the military, and its role in the coming civil war remains a murky if not repugnant one. There were even ugly rumours that somehow the Army itself was involved in some of the uglier massacres. Reports seeped out via eyewitnesses and defectors suggesting that the security services and the regime, or at least elements within them, had a hand in some of the extreme violence initially attributed to Islamists. The main motivation for this was never quite clear, but there appeared to be a desire to demonise the Islamists and win over the bulk of the population—which seemed to be bewildered as to exactly who was killing whom.

  All the time the economy suffered, leading to ever worse unemployment—one-third of the labour force, in a population well over three times that of 1954, produced by one of the world’s highest birthrates, and concentrated (in Algiers) in some of the world’s worst slums. All more incentives for bringing recruits to the revolt. By the end of 2001 at a rough estimate 100,000 Algerians had died—and 120 foreigners—with a cost to the economy running into billions of dollars. With strong US support, the Bouteflika regime has to some extent been successful in suppressing the Islamicist revolt, winning over the pious middle classes, and providing the Pentagon with a staunch ally in the war on terror—but at a questionable price in human rights.

  In 1962, a popular slogan heard among exhausted Algerians was “Seba’a snin, barakat!” (“Seven years, that’s enough!”) Yet, five decades after independence, a savage war still continued in Algeria. It was a country exhausted by seven years of senseless violence, of not knowing who were the “good guys” and who the “bad.” As much as any other factor, it was this exhaustion that helped bring the civil war to an end.

  Though the parallels may be only partially exact, dark comparisons also offer themselves between the two former French colonies both “liberated” in the 1950s and 1960s: Vietnam, infinitely more devastated than Algeria over twenty years of war, and lacking its natural wealth of oil and gas, but now rapidly emerging as the new Taiwan of Southeast Asia; Algeria wracked by internecine fundamentalism, and economically impoverished. Students of contemporary Islam and its incompetence in the world of material progress might wish to draw their own conclusions.

  Shadows in France, Too

  As for France, if at every hand in Algeria one could detect the roots, and pattern, of the war of 1954–62, so too in a similar fashion did the civil war between Algerians of the 1990s soon overflow across the Mediterranean. In 1995 and 1996 feuding between rival clans of the GIA brought terrorism to the Paris Metro, killing and wounding over eighty persons. Supposedly aimed at dissuading the French from backing the repression of the Algiers government, in what could have been a hideous preview of 9/11, an Air France plane hijacked, pointedly, on Christmas Eve, 1994, was evidently programmed to be flown suicidally into the Eiffel Tower. The problem of immigration became an ever hotter issue for any French government to handle, as carnage in Algeria—on top of overpopulation—persuaded increasing numbers of Algerians to seek refuge, and employment, in France. In the winter of 2005–6, outbursts of rage in the overcrowded banlieues, with their substandard housing, gave the lie to the Gaullist notion that, with the end of the war in 1962, France could wash its hands of the “Algerian Problem.” Now there are over five million of Algerian extraction living in France. On top of this there is the residual bitterness and strife between the “new” immigrants and the Harkis, the Algerians loyal to the French Army who took root in France in 1962 and have assiduously resisted integration. The Algerian War has effectively crossed the Mediterranean to France, bringing with it raw sensitivities that almost rival the legacy of collaboration in World War II. France has still not come to terms with it. Just a tip of the iceberg of Algerian émigré sensitivities in France could be detected in the extraordinary head-butting episode (as of writing still cloaked in mystery) of the Algerian-French football champion Zinedine Zidane, which may have caused France to lose the 2006 World Cup. In lieu of the decisive post-colonial divorce that was envisaged in 1962, a messy relationship continues with each country deeply, and unpredictably, involved in each other’s histories. All of this is grist to the mill of Le Pen—and to al-Qaeda.

  After 9/11 and Parallels with Iraq

  Following September 2001, whether in Paris or London, intelligence evolving about the terror networks of al-Qaeda indicated numerous links with Algeria. In turn there were roots of jihad laid back in the Savage War —though it was not of itself a conflict rooted in Islam. It was, in effect, first and foremost, an anti-colonial war of national liberation. One cannot stress this fact too often. Nevertheless, in many ways the horrors suffered in Algeria’s own civil war do read like a paradigm, a microcosm of present-day Islam’s frustrated inadequacy to meet the challenges of the modern world, the anger generated thereby finding itself directed into lashing out against the rich, successful West.

  Generally, the old saw about history never repeating itself holds true. Nevertheless, its bad elements may well do so if national leaders pay no attention to its lessons. A few years back the Israeli press reported that Ariel Sharon’s favourite bedside reading was the Hebrew translation of A Savage War of Peace. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Amos Elon commented that “[Sharon] must have tragically misunderstood it. That book could not tell him what to do, but it could have told him what not to do.” The lessons surely apply today. At the time of writing, one feels that Bush’s Washington (and Blair’s London) also went blindly into Iraq —and into collision with the Islamic world—without the kind of necessary preparation, where study of Algeria in 1954–62 might have helped. At the very least its lessons might have imposed caution before getting involved in Iraq in the first place. There are at least three areas where the echoes are particularly painful, if not deafening.

  ONE: In the early days of the Algerian War, once the FLN realised it was not strong enough to take on the powerful French Army, it concentrated its attacks on the native police loyal to France. Result: a deadly loss of morale among the police, with defections to the FLN, and the French Army defensively reduced to protecting the police, instead of concentrating on active “search-and-destroy” missions. The “insurgents” in Iraq have learned from this strategy with deadly effect.

  TWO: The benefit of porous frontiers. In 1954–62, the winning French Army was paralysed by its inability to pursue its FLN enemy across into its friendly bases in neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco. This is what, in effect, led to the collapse of the French government and the advent of de Gaulle in 1958. In their turn, the Iraq insurgents have been able to use Syria—and now, much more dangerously, Iran—to similar advantage.

  THREE: The vile hand of torture; of abuse, and counter-abuse. In the Algerian War what led—probably more than any other single factor—to the ultimate defeat of France was the realisation, in France and the world at large, that methods of interrogation were being used that had been condemned under the Nazi Occupation. At the dawn of the new century, the ugly ghosts of torture returned to plague France. In 2001, an eighty-three-year-old former general, Paul Aussaresses, published a book in which he unashamedly, indeed proudly, admitted to having tortured—in a good cause, he claimed. After a trial which gripped France, the aging general got away with a fine of one hundred thousand francs, on a uniquely worded charge “in the name of respect for the victims.”

  Because of the slowness of communications in the 1950s and 1960s, it took a year or more for the message of abuses perpetrated in Algeria to sink in. Now, with the Int
ernet and al-Jazeera, one set of photos from Abu Ghraib is enough to inflame hatred across the Islamic world against the West, providing excuse for all the beheadings and atrocities carried out by al-Qaeda. From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the “Battle of Algiers,” history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, that torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society, I draw readers once again to the testimony of Prefect Teitgen of Algiers (see) which —three decades on—I still find deeply moving. Teitgen had been informed by the Algiers police that they had intelligence of a bomb which could have caused appalling casualties. Could they put a suspect to “the question”? Himself a deportee in World War II, Teitgen told me he refused:

  …I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because if you once get into the torture business, you’re lost…. All our so-called civilisation is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear…. When you see the throats of your copains slit, then the varnish disappears.

  How applicable this still is to the dilemmas facing the West in the war on terror!

  In passing, one should also note France’s painful discovery that, fifty years on, many former “torturers” in the armed services were having to resort to psychiatric “counselling.” The inflicters of torture as well as their victims remain grievously impaired.

  In 2005, at the suggestion of his staff, I sent a copy of A Savage War to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, underscoring the evils of torture—and, not least, the propaganda value even the least substantiated rumours of it can arouse. I received a flea in the ear—courteous, but a flea nevertheless—for my trouble.

  After all the hopes generated for a free, happy and prosperous Algeria at Evian in 1962, within years of the departure of the French Army she was tearing herself apart in the most senseless and bloody civil war (between fellow Muslims) of recent times.

  Does much more need to be said about the relevance of Algeria’s Savage War to contemporary Iraq? History continues to take its toll.

  We historians, perhaps fortunately, are not permitted to see the future. Certainly when I started writing A Savage War back in 1973, I had not the least thought that it might find a new relevance, or modernity, in the twenty-first century. At the time it seemed a very tragic story sufficient within its own bounds. Now, for all the lessons it may contain—not just for the conflict in Iraq, but for wider issues in the world at large, and those as yet unforeseen which may still lie ahead—it affords me great satisfaction humbly to offer this book up once again.

  The preface to the first edition of A Savage War of Peace included an accounting of kind friends, associates and agencies to whom I expressed warm appreciation. As many have since passed on, as have twenty-nine years, I hope my grateful thanks of yesteryear may remain on the record and that I may gratefully add three new names to the list: those of Dr. Eugene Rogan and Michael Willis Ph.D., of the Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Edwin Frank, of New York Review Books, for their most helpful editorial inputs. One particular debt, I feel, needs to be reiterated, however. The very genesis of writing A Savage War was proposed to me by my then publisher, and former Prime Minister, the late Harold Macmillan. To him Algeria—with its lasting impact on de Gaulle—had held his imagination ever since World War II, and, though already in his eighties, he was to give me invaluable counsel and constant encouragement, actually reading the manuscript himself three times.

  [1] There is a certain parallel with the French campaign of 1940. Lasting a matter of weeks instead of seven and a half years, it granted few war diarists (especially on the French side) any opportunity to keep up their diaries or even scribble a letter home; as I discovered when researching To Lose a Battle.

  PART ONE

  Prelude: 1830–1954

  Qu’importe si cent mille coups de fusil partent en Afrique! L’Europe ne les entend pas.

  Louis-Philippe, 1835

  CHAPTER ONE

  “A Town of no Great Interest”

  As long as you keep Algiers, you will be constantly at war with Africa; sometimes this war will seem to end; but these people will not hate you any the less; it will be a half-extinguished fire that will smoulder under the ash and which, at the first opportunity, will burst into a vast conflagration.

  Baron Lacuée, 1831

  Sétif, 1945

  The market town of Sétif sits haphazardly on a high and treeless plain some eighty miles west of Constantine. Even in early summer a thin, mean wind whirls up the dust along its rectilinear streets of typical French colonial design. Passing rapidly through it in March 1943, Churchill’s Minister Resident in North Africa, Harold Macmillan, noted with the eye of a classical scholar that, in comparison with the nearby ruins of Trajan’s Djemila, Sétif was “a town of no great interest”.

  On the morning of 8 May 1945, the inhabitants of this largely Muslim town were preparing for a mass march. It was V.E. Day; for Europe, the first day of peace following the Nazi capitulation the previous night.

  All across the mother country, metropolitan France, there would be fervent celebrations to mark the end of the nightmare five years of defeat, occupation and the destructive course of liberation by her own allies. But compared with the frenzied joy of Armistice Day 1918, France’s jubilation was somewhat muted by the sober backdrop. The scattering of antique cars that crepitated along the grands boulevards of Paris, propelled by cylinders of floppy bags of coal gas, perched on the roof like great duvets, symbolised the state of France herself. Plundered by the occupiers, bombed by the liberators, deprived of fuel and every raw material and fed by a crippled railway system, industry faced a grim struggle for rehabilitation. The épiceries were empty — and already there were grave menaces of industrial unrest. French society was riven; the hunting down of those who had collaborated (or were said to have collaborated) went on apace; politicians were already rending one another, as in the bad old days of the Third Republic, while an aggressive Stalinist Communist Party seemed poised for takeover. Such was the scene that confronted a generation of prematurely fatigued Frenchmen: those who had fought all the way from Lake Chad with Leclerc, or had more recently come limping home from deportation and the prisoner-of-war camps of Hitler’s Reich. The prevailing note was perhaps struck by one returning veteran when he remarked to an American journalist: “That great world insomnia which is war has come to an end, once again.” Like a weary insomniac, France too greeted the relieving dawn chiefly longing for one thing only — repose.

  If it was liberation that a haggard France was fêting that May day, that too was the magic word mobilising the Muslim community of Sétif. The difference was that the one was celebrating its return; the other, marching in quest of something it considered to be still denied it. Over the past weeks, hints of what might be to come had percolated through Algeria. There had been a mounting series of minor incidents against colons, as the European settlers were called; cars, and even children leaving school, had been stoned; fatmas, or domestic servants, told their employers that they had been warned no longer to work for them. On walls graffiti appeared overnight exhorting: “Muslims awaken!” “It’s the Muslim flag that will float over North Africa!” Or, with more direct menace: “Français, you will be massacred by the Muslims!”

  The hot-blooded colons riposted with aggressive scorn, laced with such epithets as sale race, which tripped all too readily off the tongue. Passions between the two communities had risen. Then, in mid-April, information had been received by the French authorities that a general insurrection was brewing, to be accompanied by widespread sabotage. The conspirators appeared to be a nationalist movement called the Parti du Peuple Algérien, or P.P.A., so as a precautionary measure its leader, Messali Hadj, was packed off into exile to the desert, thence to Brazzaville.

  In contrast to the heavily colon-do
minated enclaves round Oran and Algiers, Sétif was predominantly Muslim and had a long history of radical nationalism. But apart from this ground-swell of political discontent, there were more immediate economic motives for trouble. Algeria had suffered harshly from two years of crop failures, on top of severe hardships imposed by wartime shortages. Emergency rations normally stocked against the eventuality of famine had been depleted by the Vichy French for the benefit of Festung Europa; the black market had thrived, but was beyond the means of most Algerian peasants. Revisiting his native land that year, Albert Camus was horrified to find Kabyle children fighting with dogs for the contents of a rubbish bin. Although relatively rich compared with Kabylia, the countryside round Sétif had received no rain since January — and resentments had been fanned by the prosperous harvest reaped by the foreign-owned Compagnie Genevoise, which held nearly 15,000 hectares of the best farmlands.

  If there was indeed to have been a concerted demonstration in favour of Algerian independence (although the evidence for this remains still inconclusive), there could hardly have been chosen a better day than V.E. Day; nor a better place in which to ignite the spark than Sétif. All Europe — and especially France — was rejoicing at deliverance from an occupying power; the United Nations Charter was about to be signed at San Francisco amid pious declarations of self-determination for subject peoples; while in Cairo birth had been given to the Arab League, a day of importance in the cause of Muslim independence everywhere. The French army was still largely preoccupied in Europe, and in Sétif itself there were no more than twenty gendarmes to maintain order.

  There could be no question of M. Butterlin, the sub-prefect of Sétif, halting the 8 May parades. After all, were they not nominally celebrating the triumph of the mother country and her allies, and specifically processing to lay a wreath on the monument aux morts in memory of the Algerian troops fallen in the recent conflict? And, in any case, how could his twenty gendarmes physically contain 8,000 Muslims pouring in from the outskirts of Sétif? At least, he decided, he would impose a strict ban against the march assuming any political character; above all, no seditious banners. But as soon as the procession had formed up outside the mosque, Butterlin received a telephone call from his chief of police, Commissaire Valère, that the demonstrators had, nevertheless, deployed banners bearing such provocative slogans as: “Vive Messali!” “Free Messali!” “For the Liberation of the People, Long Live Free and Independent Algeria!” They were also flourishing, for the first time, the green-and-white flag that had once been the standard of that legendary hero of resistance against the French, Abd-el-Kader, and was later to become that of the F.L.N. liberation movement. He at once ordered Valère to intervene and seize the banners. Valère warned that that might mean a fight (une bagarre). “All right,” replied Butterlin, “then there’ll be a fight.”