A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (24 page)

20 August was a day of the kind of stifling Algerian summer heat when passions readily boil over. The killing started in Constantine, perched high above its great gorge and where, in happier days, Pierre Louÿs had completed his
Chansons de Bilitis
. Almost the first victim was Ferhat Abbas’s nephew, Allouah Abbas, a municipal councillor for Constantine, an U.D.M.A. supporter and a moderate like his uncle. His execution had been ordained by Ben Tobbal for his criticism of F.L.N. excesses, and was systematically carried out. For the rest, the mob took over, goaded on by armed F.L.N. regulars. In the port of Philippeville, with its thoroughly European, Côte d’Azur atmosphere, which Pierre Leulliette remembers from leave as a “happy, sweet-smelling town”, Muslims of both sexes swarmed into the streets in a state of frenzied, fanatical euphoria. Grenades were thrown indiscriminately into cafés, passing European motorists dragged from their vehicles and slashed to death with knives or even razors. Altogether some twenty-six localities came under sudden attack.

The peak of horror was reached at Ain-Abid, twenty-four miles east of Constantine, and at El-Halia, a small pyrite mining centre close to Philippeville. El-Halia housed 130 Europeans and some 2,000 Muslims who for years had coexisted amicably enough together. Some were on friendly terms with each others’ families, while in the mine labour relations had been exceptionally good, with a rare degree of equality between the two races. It appears that the whole Muslim community had been aware of what was brewing at least twenty-four hours previously, and a number of families left the village. On the morning of the 20th some fifty Muslim workers absented themselves from the mine — but not an inkling of this was passed on to any of the Europeans. Shortly before noon, when it was known that the
pied noir
women would be preparing lunch and their men would have returned home from the midday heat of the mine, four groups of fifteen to twenty men attacked the village, taking it completely by surprise. They were led by mineworkers who knew each house and its occupants. Telegraph lines were cut, the emergency radio transmitter was found to be “out of order”, and the village constable who was equipped with warning rockets had “disappeared”. The attackers went from house to house, mercilessly slaughtering all the occupants regardless of sex or age, and egged on by Muslim women with their eerie
you-you
chanting. According to Jacques Soustelle, in some of the attacked towns the
muezzins
even broadcast from their minarets exhortations to slit the throats of women and nurses in the cause of “the holy war”.

It was not until two o’clock that a forest guard managed by a miracle to dodge ambushes and bring the news to Philippeville on foot; and still another hour and a half elapsed before a para detachment could reach the village. An appalling sight greeted them. In houses literally awash with blood, European mothers were found with their throats slit and their bellies slashed open by bill-hooks. Children had suffered the same fate, and infants in arms had had their brains dashed out against the wall. Four families had been wiped out down to the last member; only six who had barricaded themselves in a house in the centre of the village and had held out with sporting rifles and revolvers had escaped unscathed. Men returning home from the mine had been ambushed in their cars and hacked to pieces. Altogether thirty-seven Europeans had died, including ten children under fifteen, and another thirteen had been left for dead.

Among other butchery, at Ain-Abid an entire
pied noir
family called Mello perished atrociously: a seventy-three-year-old grandmother and eleven-year-old daughter, the father killed in his bed, with his arms and legs hacked off. The mother had been disembowelled, her five-day-old baby slashed to death and replaced in her opened womb. There were similar scenes of such revolting savagery in attacks elsewhere that day, and what heightened the horror (particularly at El-Halia) was the carefully premeditated planning which clearly lay behind them, with the wanton participation of so many deemed “friendly” Muslims or fellow-workers. The details sicken the stomach, but they need to be recounted for no other reason than to explain the potent and profound effect that the “Philippeville massacre” was to have on the
pieds noirs
, on Jacques Soustelle, and indeed on the whole subsequent history of the Algerian war.

The reaction of the French army units in the area was immediate. A friend in Ducournau’s crack 18th Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes described the scene in Philippeville to Pierre Leulliette. They had been asleep in barracks after night operations when the killing began. Out in the streets they found

bodies literally strewed the town. The Arab children, wild with enthusiasm—to them it was a great holiday—rushed about yelling among the grown-ups. They finished off the dying. In one alley we found two of them kicking in an old woman’s head. Yes, kicking it in! We had to kill them on the spot: they were crazed….

Catching up with a group of “rebels”, mingled with civilians,

We opened fire into the thick of them, at random. Then as we moved on and found more bodies, our company commanders finally gave us the order to shoot down every Arab we met. You should have seen the result…. For two hours all we heard was automatic rifles spitting fire into the crowd. Apart from a dozen
fellagha
stragglers, weapons in hand, whom we shot down, there were at least a hundred and fifty
boukaks
[another derogatory term for Muslims]….

At midday, fresh orders: take prisoners. That complicated everything. It was easy when it was merely a matter of killing….

At six o’clock next morning, all the l.m.g.s and machine-guns were lined up in front of the crowd of prisoners, who immediately began to yell. But we opened fire; ten minutes later, it was practically over. There were so many of them that they had to be buried with bulldozers.

Now you see why there are so few people left in the town. The few European survivors are still so paralysed with fright that they stay at home, and those natives who are still alive do the same. Personally I can’t wait to go on leave….

It seems unlikely that this was just one isolated incident; French newsreels at the time showed one sequence of a young para shooting down an unarmed Algerian in a road, then casually reloading his rifle as the man lay, still agonising and clutching at his belly. Meanwhile, by way of explanation for the “liquidating” of the Muslim prisoners, Leulliette’s Chasseur added meaningfully: “the Europeans who had survived the massacre would never have forgiven us…. They’d have come and finished them off themselves.” And, indeed, in many instances they did. In what seems like a mistaken over-reaction, the administration allowed European settlers to arm themselves in self-defence—which had been expressly vetoed by Soustelle a few months earlier. The result was that in Philippeville, claims Edward Behr,
pieds noirs
formed “vigilante committees, summarily executed Muslims and buried them surreptitiously while armed civilians held over-inquisitive correspondents at bay”.

As always, there is a discrepancy in the casualty figures. Soustelle states that 123 were killed by the F.L.N.-led mob on 20 August, of whom seventy-one were Europeans; while 1,273 of the “insurgents” died, two-thirds during the actual attacks. He admits, however, that “our reprisals were severe”, and it will always be open to suspicion that a great many more innocent Muslims were killed in the backlash than was ever admitted; the F.L.N., giving names and addresses, claim as high as 12,000.

The conversion of Soustelle

Immediately on hearing the news, Soustelle flew to the scene of the massacre. Nothing was concealed from his gaze; the mutilated men, the disembowelled mothers, and in Constantine hospital he visited women and children survivors “groaning in fever and in nightmare, their fingers severed, their throats half-slit”. At the burial of the victims in Philippeville, grief and rage took over, with distraught relatives trampling on the flowers sent by the administration. “The bright gaiety of the August sun,” says Soustelle of that day, “looking down with indifference on all the horrors, made them even more cruel.” He returned to Algiers utterly nauseated, deeply affected and with despair in his heart. Though he has been at pains to deny it ever since, it does seem that Philippeville marked the turning-point in the conversion of Soustelle. Certainly, from this date on determination to crush the rebellion began to assume priority over any hopes of liberal compromise, while those close to him—like Mendès-France—detected an unmistakable hardening of line. And for the Algerians of both races it was a terrible Rubicon over which there was to be no return. “It was not only the sacked houses or the poor mutilated corpses that the
fellagha
left in their passage,” says Soustelle “it was confidence, hope, peace. A sombre harvest of hatred sprouted in the bloodshed. Terror dominated minds. Far from being brought together by the ordeal, human beings were going to divide themselves and tear themselves to pieces.”

Horrible as it was, there is no doubt that—on the principle set out by Carlos Marighela—for the F.L.N. this new Sétif was to prove a net gain. Though some Muslims may have recoiled in disgust, by October recruitment in the North Constantine area had risen to an estimated 1,400 “regulars”—almost the highest of any of the Wilayas—and from then on it was to remain throughout the war one of the most highly contaminated areas on the army “smallpox chart”. As Soustelle himself admitted, in the war of subversion the Philippeville massacre was a victory; for, between the two communities, “there had been well and truly dug an abyss through which flowed a river of blood”. What had hitherto been, in many respects, a “phoney war”—or
drôle de révolution
as some French called it—now became a full-blooded war to the end. August 1955 was the beginning of what Mitterrand termed the real
cercle infernale
in Algeria.

Returning in September, Soustelle recorded:

One could not imagine anything more lugubrious than the atmosphere prevailing at Philippeville. It was a season of storms, and sombre clouds filled the sky. The streets were almost deserted, with the exception of armed patrols. The Europeans saw terrorists in every Muslim, the Muslims feared reprisals by the Europeans….

The stormy skies were symptomatic of the troubles pressing in on Soustelle from almost every side as 1955 drew to a close. The first, and perhaps most disappointing, blow came on 26 September when sixty-one Muslim second college deputies signed a statement repudiating “integration”. Denouncing “blind repression” and “collective responsibility” as a cause of their dissatisfaction, they declared the concept of integration to be “now out-dated”, adding: “The overwhelming majority of the population now supports the Algerian national idea.” The impact of Philippeville and its ensuing backlash was clear here, and moderate Muslim leaders had been left in no doubt that the assassination of Ferhat Abbas’s nephew had been intended as a warning for them. Next, Jacques Chevallier, in what seemed like a real stab-in-the-back to Soustelle, published a stinging criticism of his policy in
Le Monde
of 5 October, withdrawing his support from integration as now being “practically inapplicable”. In pain and anger Soustelle responded to the “Motion of the Sixty-one” by simply suspending the session of the Algerian Assembly. This in turn had its echo in the Palais Bourbon. For three days the National Assembly debated Algeria in mid-October; Premier Faure gave what looked like only a lukewarm support of integration, and there was increasing talk of a new solution—“federalism”. The government scraped by with 305 to 274 votes, but the only result of the prolonged debate was indecision. Another shock came from New York where, under pressure from Third World representatives and by a majority of only one in the General Assembly, the Algerian problem was tabled for the first time on the United Nations Assembly order of the day. The French delegation promptly withdrew, but it was, says Soustelle, “worth more than a convoy of arms” to the F.L.N. In the military sphere, forces at Soustelle’s disposal had now been inflated to the large total of 160,000, and towards the end of the year he claims the situation was beginning to look much brighter. A successful raid on the desert head-quarters of Bachir Chihani had produced a windfall of documents, giving the Deuxième Bureau its first clear view of the overall structure of the F.L.N. On the other hand, this had been offset by the disturbing news of the first significant desertions from Tirailleur units returned from Indo-China.

But, in Soustelle’s view, it was from Paris that the coldest wind blew. On 21 October, while inspecting army units near Constantine with Bourgès-Maunoury, the latter confided that he had to return to Paris that same night as Edgar Faure, under pressure of events in Algeria, wanted to discuss bringing the date of the forthcoming general election six months earlier. Soustelle was aghast. Flying to Paris, he pleaded with Faure that to hold elections and risk a change of government at this moment would have “lethal” consequences in Algeria. Faure was adamant, and the dissolution of the Assembly was decreed for 2 December. Time was fast running out for Soustelle.

Camus and the “civil truce”

The “Motion of the Sixty-one” and the defection of Chevallier signified that the “men of good will” of both races had got sadly thinner and thinner on the ground, as their liberal ideas became more and more diffuse and divergent. But towards the end of Soustelle’s term, however, a phenomenon occurred that kindled a brief flicker of hope; though, seen in retrospect, it was to be one of the last of its kind. The initiative had come from that great son of
pied noir
Algeria, and true liberal humanitarian Albert Camus. Born in 1913 of working-class
petits blancs
(his father was killed on the Marne the following year), Camus had made his name by the inspiring leaders he wrote in
Combat
, the underground newspaper he had helped found in Nazi-occupied France. After 1945 he had emerged as the intellectual conscience of the post-war generation of left-of-centre Frenchmen, had established his reputation as a major novelist, and had written a number of articles eloquently drawing attention to the plight of the indigenous Algerians. Through 1955 he had watched in anguish the escalation of atrocity and “collective responsibility” reprisal. “Everybody leans on the crime of the other to justify himself.” After Philippeville he wrote to an “Algerian militant” that he was “ready to despair”, adding his fear that unless there were restraints imposed by both sides “tomorrow Algeria will be a land of ruins and dead which no power in the world will be capable of resurrecting in this century”. The horrors of August decided Camus to launch a “holy war” of liberals himself, and on 16 December he proclaimed in
L’Express
—amid a forceful attack on Soustelle’s failure to effect “genuine reforms”—the opening of a campaign for a “civil truce”. His aim was to start by placing a limitation on the murderous character of the war through a “truce” that would outlaw all attacks on civilian non-combatants.