Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (97 page)

The episode was a striking victory for the Bandung generation. Nehru, administering moral rebukes all round, was in his element. Nasser emerged with enhanced prestige because in all the excitement it was scarcely noticed that the Israelis had inflicted a shattering defeat, in less than a week, on his large, Soviet-armed forces. Any Egyptian discomfort was attributed to the Anglo-French forces. Thus what might have been a fatal blow to Nasser’s prestige actually enhanced it, for ‘collusion’ gave solid substance to the Arab mythology that Israel was merely an imperialist proxy. Suez confirmed the Bandung view of the world, mythology made flesh.

Suez is often said to have dealt the final blow to Britain’s status as a great world power. That is not true. The status had been lost in 1947. Suez simply made it plain for all the world to see. The underlying cause was a failure of will, not of strength, and the Suez fiasco merely reflected that failure, of which Eden was a pathetic sacrificial victim. Macmillan, who succeeded him, drew the moral that in a world of superpowers, a medium-sized power survives by virtue of good public relations rather than battleships. The real loser in the long term was the United States. Eisenhower appeared to act decisively, and he got his way fast enough. Britain came to heel. He preserved his reputation as a man of peace. But in the process he helped to prepare a mighty scourge for America’s own back, in the shape of the tendentious concept of ‘world opinion’ first articulated at Bandung and now, by Eisenhower’s own act, transferred to the
UN.

Until the early 1950s, the Americans had controlled the
UN.
Their first mistake was to involve it in Korea, especially through the forum of the General Assembly, a pseudo-representative body which spoke only for governments, a growing proportion of which were undemocratic. Korea broke Trygve Lie, the Norwegian Secretary-General, who was loyal to the principles of the old Western alliance. He resigned when the Russians boycotted him and got the Left to stir up his own Secretariat against him. At this point the Western democracies should have dropped the
UN
and concentrated instead on expanding
NATO
into a world-wide security system of free nations.

Instead, after much bad temper, the powers appointed a senior Swedish diplomat called Dag Hammarskjöld. A worse choice could not be imagined. He came from a highly successful family of public servants
in a nation uneasily aware that it had grown immensely prosperous by staying out of two world wars. He was guilt personified and he was determined that the West should expiate it. Severe, well-read, humourless, unmarried (though not homosexual: in Hammarskjöld’s life’, wrote his official biographer, ‘sex played little or no part’
¹⁰²
), he exuded a secular religiosity. It was characteristic of him and of the advanced Fifties good taste he faithfully reflected, that he transformed the old
UN
Meditation Room, a plain and unpretentious chamber, into a dark and dramatic cavern, with striking perspective and lighting and, in its centre, a vast rectangular block of iron-ore illuminated by a single shaft of light. What did it symbolize? Relative morality perhaps. It was Hammarskjöld’s manifest intention to cut the umbilical cord which linked the
UN
to the old wartime Western alliance, and to align the organization with what he regarded as the new emergent force of righteousness in the world: the ‘uncommitted’ nations. In short he too was a member of the Bandung generation, despite – or rather because of – his pallid face. When Eisenhower turned on Eden at Suez, broke him, and handed the whole problem to the
UN
, he gave Hammarskjöld exactly the opportunity he had been waiting for.

The Secretary-General set to work to oust the Anglo—French force and the Israelis and replace them with a multi-nation
UN
‘peacekeeping’ contingent. He saw a role for himself as a world statesman, driven by the engine of non-alignment. Hence, though affecting impartiality, he threw his weight entirely behind the Afro-Asian camp. That meant treating Israel not as a small and vulnerable nation but as an outpost of imperialism. There was on record a 1951
UN
resolution, passed before his time, calling on Egypt to allow Israeli vessels through the Canal. At no point did Hammarskjöld make any attempt to get the resolution implemented. Nor would he allow that Arab denial of freedom of navigation to Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba was a threat to peace – though in fact it was this denial, tightened by the three-power Arab military pact of 25 October 1956, which was the immediate cause of the Israeli attack. He repeatedly declined to condemn Nasser’s seizure of the canal, and other arbitrary acts. So far as he was concerned, the Israeli attack and the Anglo—French intervention were wholly unprovoked acts of aggression. He said he was ‘shocked and outraged’ by such behaviour. On 31 October he took the unprecedented step of publicly rebuking the British and French governments. The Soviet invasion of Hungary, which took place under cover of the Suez crisis, he treated as a tiresome distraction. His friendliness to the Egyptians throughout, and his cold hostility to Britain, France and Israel, made it plain where his emotional sympathies lay. He set his heart on the public
humiliation of the three powers and he got it. In deploying the
UN
emergency force, to move into the vacuum created by the three-power withdrawal, he insisted that its presence was by grace and favour of Egypt: as he put it, ‘the very basis and starting point has been the recognition by the General Assembly of the full and unlimited sovereign rights of Egypt’.
¹⁰³
It had therefore to be withdrawn at Egypt’s simple request, a right exercised by Egypt in 1967 as soon as it believed itself strong enough to destroy Israel. Hammarskjöld thus bequeathed another Middle Eastern war to his successors. More important still, however, was his demonstration of the way in which the
UN
could be used to marshal and express hatred of the West. In 1956 it was the turn of Britain and France. Soon it would be America’s own.

America was also the loser by the impact of Suez on France. If Suez simply pushed Britain slightly faster down its chosen slope, in France it helped to bring to a head the national crisis created by the agony of French Algeria. Algeria was the greatest and in many ways the archetype of all the anti-colonial wars. In the nineteenth century the Europeans won colonial wars because the indigenous peoples had lost the will to resist. In the twentieth century the roles were reversed, and it was Europe which lost the will to hang onto its gains. But behind this relativity of wills there are demographic facts. A colony is lost once the level of settlement is exceeded by the growth-rate of the indigenous peoples. Nineteenth-century colonialism reflected the huge upsurge in European numbers. Twentieth-century decolonization reflected European demographic stability and the violent expansion of native populations.

Algeria was a classic case of this reversal. It was not so much a French colony as a Mediterranean settlement. In the 1830s there were only 1.5 million Arabs there, and their numbers were dwindling. The Mediterranean people moved from the northern shores to the southern ones, into what appeared to be a vacuum: to them the great inland sea was a unity, and they had as much right to its shores as anyone provided they justified their existence by wealth-creation. And they did: they expanded 2,000 square miles of cultivated land in 1830 to 27,000 by 1954.
¹⁰⁴
These
pieds noirs
were only 20 per cent French in origin (including Corsicans and Alsacians). They were predominantly Spanish in the west, Italian (and Maltese) in the east. But rising prosperity attracted others: Kabyles, Chaouias, Mzabite, Mauritanians, Turks and pure Arabs, from the mountains, the west, the south, the east. And French medical services virtually eliminated malaria, typhus and typhoid and effected a prodigious change in the non-European infant mortality rates. By 1906 the Muslim population had jumped to 4.5 million; by 1954 to 9 million. By the
mid-1970s it had more than doubled again. If the French population had risen at the same rate, it would have been over 300 million by 1950. The French policy of ‘assimilation’, therefore, was nonsense, since by the year 2000 Algerian Muslims would have constituted more than half the French population, and Algeria would have ‘assimilated’ France rather than the reverse.
¹⁰⁵

By the 1950s there were not enough
pieds noirs
for long-term survival as a dominant class or even an enclave. Only a third of Algiers’ 900,000 inhabitants were Europeans. Only in Oran were they in a majority. Even in and most heavily settled part, the Mitidja, the farms were worked by Muslim labour. In 1914 200,000 Europeans had lived off the land; by 1954 only 93,000. By the 1950s most
pieds noirs
had ordinary, poorly paid city jobs Arabs could do just as well. The social structure was an archaeological layer-cake of race prejudice: ‘the Frenchman despises the Spaniard, who despises the Italian, who despises the Maltese, who despises the Jew; all in turn despise the Arab.’
¹⁰⁶
There was no pretence at equality of opportunity: in 1945 1,400 primary schools catered for 200,000 European children, 699 for 1,250,000 Muslims. Textbooks began: ‘Our ancestors, the Gauls….’

More serious, however, was the fraudulence of the electoral system. Either the reforms passed by the French parliament were not applied at all, or the votes were cooked by the local authorities themselves. It was this which cut the ground beneath the many well-educated Muslim moderates who genuinely wanted a fusion of French and Muslim culture. As one of the noblest of them, Ahmed Boumendjel, put it: ‘The French Republic has cheated. She has made fools of us.’ He told the Assembly: ‘Why should we feel ourselves bound by the principles of French moral values … when France herself refuses to be subject to them?’
¹⁰⁷
The elections of 1948 were faked; so were those of 1951. In such circumstances, the moderates had no effective role to play. The men of violence moved forward.

There was a foretaste in May 1945, when the Arabs massacred 103 Europeans. The French reprisals were on a savage scale. Dive-bombers blew forty villages to pieces; a cruiser bombarded others. The Algerian Communist Party journal
Liberté
called for the rebels to be ‘swiftly and pitilessly punished, the instigators put in front of the firing-squad’. According to the French official report, 1,020 to 1,300 Arabs were killed; the Arabs claimed 45,000. Many demobilized Arab soldiers returned to find their families dead, their homes demolished. It was these former
NCOS
who formed the leadership of the future Front de Libération Nationale (
FLN).
AS
the most conspicuous of them, Ahmed Ben Bella, put it: ‘The horrors of the Constantine area in May 1945 persuaded me of the only path:
Algeria for the Algerians.’ The French commander, General Duval, told the
pieds noirs: ‘I
have given you peace for ten years.’

That proved to be entirely accurate. On 1 November 1954, the embittered
NCOS
were ready: Ben Bella, by now an experienced urban terrorist, linked forces with Belkacem Krim, to launch a national rising. It is important to grasp that the object, from start to finish, was not to defeat the French Army. That would have been impossible. The aim was to destroy the concept of assimilation and mutli-racialism by eliminating the moderates on both sides. The first Frenchman to be murdered was a liberal, Arabophile schoolteacher, Guy Monnerot. The first Arab casualty was a pro-French local governor, Hadj Sakok. Most
FLN
operations were directed against the loyal Muslim element: employees of the state were murdered, their tongues cut off, their eyes gouged out, then a note, ‘
FLN
‘, pinned to the mutilated bodies.
¹⁰⁸
This was the strategy pioneered by the Mufti in Palestine. Indeed many of the rebel leaders had served him. The ablest, Mohamedi Said, commander of ‘Wilaya 3’ in the Kabyle mountains, had joined the Mufti’s ‘Muslim ss legion’, had parachuted into Tunisia as an
Abwebr
agent, and declared: ‘I believed that Hitler would destroy French tyranny and free the world.’ He still wore his old ss helmet from time to time. His disciples included some of the worst killers of the twentieth century, such as Ait Hamouda, known as Amirouche, and Ramdane Abane, who had sliced off breasts and testicles in the 1945 massacres, read Marx and
Mein Kampf in
jail, and whose dictum was: ‘One corpse in a suit is always worth more than twenty in uniform.’ These men, who had absorbed everything most evil the twentieth century had to offer, imposed their will on the villages by sheer terror; they never used any other method. Krim told a Yugoslav paper that the initiation method for a recruit was to force him to murder a designated ‘traitor’,
mouchard
(police spy or informer), French gendarme or colonialist: ‘An assassination marks the end of the apprenticeship of each candidate.’ A pro
-FLN
American reporter was told: ‘When we’ve shot [the Muslim victim] his head will be cut off and we’ll clip a tag on his ear to show he was a traitor. Then we’ll leave the head on the main road.’ Ben Bella’s written orders included: ‘Liquidate all personalities who want to play the role of
interlocuteur valable.”
‘Kill any person attempting to deflect the militants and inculcate in them a
bourguibien
spirit.’ Another: ‘Kill the
caids
…. Take their children and kill them. Kill all those who pay taxes and those who collect them. Burn the houses of Muslim
NCOS
away on active service.’ The
FLN
had their own internal
reglements des comptes
, too: the man who issued the last order, Bachir Chihani, was accused (like Roehm) of pederasty and sadistic sex-murders, and chopped to pieces along with eight of his
lovers. But it was the Muslim men of peace the
FLN
killers really hated. In the first two-and-a-half years of war, they murdered only 1,035 Europeans but 6,352 Arabs (authenticated cases; the real figure was nearer 20,000).
¹⁰⁹
By this point the moderates could only survive by becoming killers themselves or going into exile.