Arabs (68 page)

 

The leadership of the FLN was divided between six internal commanders, who organized resistance within five insurrectionary provinces, or
wilayas
, and three external leaders based in Cairo. With the outbreak of the nationalist uprising in November 1954, the French used their extensive intelligence network to clamp down on the internal leadership. During the first six months of operations, the French had killed the commander of Wilaya II and arrested the leaders of Wilayas I and IV. With the internal leadership in disarray, the initiative passed to the external leadership.

Of the three external leaders of the FLN—Ahmed Ben Bella, Hocine Ait Ahmed, and Mohamed Khider—Ben Bella gained the most prominence (he would later become the first president of independent Algeria). Born in a village in western Algeria in 1918, Ben Bella was in every sense a child of French Algeria. French was his first language, he volunteered for the French army in 1936, and he even played for a French soccer team in the late 1930s. His conversion to nationalist politics was provoked by French repression of the 1945 Sétif uprising. He was arrested by the French in 1951 but escaped from prison in Algeria and made his way to Tunisia and Cairo, where he established an FLN office. Following the outbreak of the war, Ben Bella moved between Arab capitals raising funds and political support for Algeria’s bid for independence from France.

The French succeeded in decapitating the leadership of the FLN in October 1956. Following reliable intelligence, the French air force intercepted a Moroccan DC-3 carrying Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed, and Khider, as well as the supreme commander of the internal leadership, Mohamed Boudiaf, and forced the plane to land in the western Algerian city of Oran. The FLN leaders were arrested and dispatched to prison in France, where they served out the remaining years of the Algerian War.

The French public celebrated the arrests of the FLN leadership as if this development marked the end of the Algerian War. Mouloud Feraoun, a celebrated author and member of Algeria’s Berber community, reflected bitterly that the capture of the leaders of the movement would do nothing to restore peace between Algerians and the French. “They present the seizure [of the FLN leaders] as a great victory, prelude to the final victory,” he wrote in his diary. “What final victory? Snuffing the revolt, the death of the rebellion, the renaissance of Franco-Algerian friendship, of confidence, of peace?”
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Written in a tone of bitter irony, Feraoun recognized that whatever the French might hope, the arrest of Ben Bella and his colleagues was the prelude to more, not less, violence.

By the time of Ben Bella’s arrest, the violence had already moved from the countryside to the cities. On a Sunday evening in September 1956, the relative peace of the capital, Algiers, was shattered by three bombs set off in the European quarters of the city. It was the start of a violent campaign known as the Battle of Algiers. The FLN took the war to the capital in a calculated bid to provoke a French reaction that would bolster support for the National Liberation Front inside Algeria and generate international condemnation that would isolate France. Through the autumn of 1956 and the winter of 1957, the FLN organized a number of murderous terror attacks. The French retaliated with mass arrests and extensive torture to expose the FLN’s network in Algiers. The Battle of Algiers did attract widespread international attention, and France did face condemnation. But the Algerians paid a terrible price for these gains.

Mouloud Faraoun observed the violence in Algiers with horror and condemned both the French and the FLN for the murder of innocents. “The attacks in the cities are multiplying,” he wrote in his diary in October 1956, “stupid, atrocious. Innocents are torn to shreds. But which innocents? Who is innocent? The dozens of peaceful Europeans drinking in a bar? The dozens of Arabs who littered the road near a mangled bus? Terrorism, counter-terrorism,” he reflected with ironic bitterness, “desperate cries, atrocious screams of pain, agony. Nothing more. Peace.”
⁴

 

The FLN mobilized all segments of the society in the Battle of Algiers. Women in particular played a central role, carrying bombs, running guns, serving as couriers between leaders in hiding, and providing a safe refuge for activists wanted by the French. The role of Djamila Bouhired and other women in the movement was captured with a gritty realism in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film,
The Battle of Algiers
.

Fatiha Bouhired and her twenty-two-year-old niece Djamila played central roles in the Battle of Algiers. Fatiha Bouhired’s husband was one of the first men in her quarter of the Casbah, or old city of Algiers, to join the independence movement. He was arrested by the French early in 1957 and killed while trying to escape. Her
husband’s death redoubled Bouhired’s commitment to the liberation struggle, and she allowed the FLN to operate a clandestine bomb factory in her attic. Her niece Djamila served as one of the bomb carriers and delivered correspondence between FLN activists hiding in the Casbah. Both women showed remarkable presence of mind under pressure. Once, Fatiha and Djamila were alerted that soldiers were about to search their house. They made coffee, put classical music on the gramophone, and got dressed up. When the soldiers arrived they were greeted like welcome guests by attractive women with fresh coffee.

“I would be most curious to know what lies behind those beautiful eyes,” the captain of the patrol murmured suggestively to Djamila Bouhired.

“Behind my eyes,” she replied, rolling her head flirtatiously, “is my hair.”
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The officers searched the house no further.

The police would soon discover another side of Djamila Bouhired. On April 9, 1957, Djamila was shot in the shoulder while fleeing a French patrol in the Casbah. She was found carrying correspondence addressed to Saadi Yacef and Ali la Pointe, high-level FLN leaders who were at that time the two most wanted men in Algiers. She was taken to a hospital to be treated for the bullet wound, then transferred directly from the operating table to the interrogation chamber.

Over the next seventeen days she was subjected to horrific torture, clinically described in her deposition to the kangaroo court that ultimately condemned her to death. She never cracked. Her only comment in court was that “those who tortured me had no right to inflict such humiliation on a human being, physically upon my person, and morally upon themselves.”
⁶
Her death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Fatiha Bouhired continued to serve the FLN after her niece was arrested. She bought a house in the Casbah to provide a new refuge for Saadi Yacef and Ali la Pointe. They could trust no one else. “They were at home in my home, not hiding among other people,” Bouhired explained. The Casbah was riven with mistrust as the French infiltrated the FLN through collaborators and intelligence obtained by torturing detainees. “I was afraid of those who had sold out,” Fatiha Bouhired confided to an interviewer, “and preferred to do everything myself: I did the shopping, I was their intermediary, I helped them move about. I did everything, but that way I felt more at ease.”

The French were relentless in their pursuit of the surviving FLN leadership in Algiers. In July 1957, Yacef’s sister was arrested. Under torture, she revealed Fatiha Bouhired’s role in the movement and her connections to Saadi Yacef and a female bomber named Hassiba. The French authorities immediately arrested Bouhired. “They took me away and tortured me all night,” Fatiha Bouhired recalled. “Where is Yacef? Where is Yacef?” they demanded. Fatiha disclaimed any knowledge of Saadi
Yacef and said Hassiba only came to her house to give her financial assistance on behalf of the FLN for the loss of her husband. She stuck to her story through repeated torture and ultimately persuaded the French, who agreed to place agents in her house to catch Hassiba when she next called on Fatiha.

Even with French agents in Fatiha Bouhired’s house, Ali la Pointe and Saadi Yacef remained in place. This led to the ironic situation of the French providing security to the FLN’s covert command center, with Ali la Pointe safely in the attic and French soldiers on the ground floor. Fatiha would prepare couscous, the Algerian traditional dish, for the French agents downstairs, always allowing Saadi Yacef to spit in the food before serving it to her unwelcome guests. “This time take them their couscous, and next time we’ll send them a well-seasoned bomb,” growled Yacef.
⁷

Fatiha chafed in her new role as make-believe informant to the French, but her play-acting came to a sudden end when the French discovered Yacef’s hiding place and arrested him along with Fatiha in September 1957. She spent months in prison—refusing afterward to discuss her tortures—before being placed under house arrest.

With all of the senior leadership of the FLN in the capital dead or imprisoned, the Battle of Algiers came to an end in autumn 1957. But the larger Algerian War raged on.

 

Buoyed by its hard-fought success in defeating the insurgency in Algiers, the French army renewed its effort to break the National Liberation Front in the countryside. In late 1956 the French initiated a policy of forcing Algerian peasants from their homes and farms into internment camps. The forced resettlement of rural Algerians gained pace after the Battle of Algiers. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were rounded up and forced to live under French surveillance in camps with no access to their farmlands or work. Rather than suffer these French measures, many rural workers fled to the cities, where they congregated in slums. Others sought refuge in Tunisia or Morocco. By war’s end in 1962, some three million rural Algerians had been displaced from their homes, many never to return.

The French further isolated the FLN by closing the frontiers between Algeria and its neighbors with electrified fences and mine fields, thus preventing the migration of arms, fighters, and supplies from Morocco and Tunisia.

In military terms, the French had contained and defeated the insurgency in Algeria by 1958. However, the FLN opened new fronts in its war of independence, bringing its cause to the attention of the international community. With support from Egypt and other countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, they succeeded in getting the Algerian question on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly in 1957. The following year, the FLN declared a provisional government in exile based in its Cairo office, with veteran nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas as president.
And in December 1958 the provisional government of Algeria was invited to send a delegation to the People’s Republic of China. Algerian nationalists were gaining international attention and support that served to isolate France politically even as it seemed to have won the war militarily.

France itself was increasingly divided over the Algeria question by 1958. French taxpayers were beginning to feel the enormous cost of war. The French force in Algeria, only 60,000 men in 1954, had expanded ninefold to over 500,000 by 1956.
⁸
This massive occupation force could only be sustained through conscription and extended national service—always unpopular measures. The young conscripts found themselves caught up in a war of unspeakable horror. Many returned home appalled by what they had witnessed and traumatized by what they had done: violations of human rights, forced resettlement, house demolitions, but worst of all, the systematic use of torture against men and women.
⁹
French public opinion was shocked by reports of French soldiers resorting to methods associated with the brutal Nazi repression of the French Resistance in the Second World War. Leading French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre grew increasingly outspoken against the war at home, while France suffered isolation in the international arena for the violence of an imperial war during an age of decolonization.

The army and the settler community in Algeria were alarmed by the wavering French support for the Algerian colony. In May 1958 a group of French settlers rose in rebellion against the anemic government of French Premier Pierre Pflimlin, whom they suspected of seeking accommodation with the FLN enemy. Their slogan was “the Army to Power!” On May 13 the settlers overran the governor-general’s offices in Algiers to declare effective self-rule under a revolutionary “committee of public safety” with General Jacques Massu, commander of the elite paratrooper units, as its president.

The French military in Algeria was in full sympathy with the settlers’ movement. General Raoul Salan, commander in chief of French forces in Algeria, had dispatched a long telegram to his superiors in Paris on May 9. Salan conveyed his officers’ concerns that “diplomatic processes” might lead to “the abandonment of Algeria.” He continued: “The army in Algeria is troubled by the recognition of its responsibility towards the men who are fighting and risking a useless sacrifice if the representatives of the nation are not determined to maintain
Algérie française
.”
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Salan warned that only determined government action to preserve French Algeria would prevent a military putsch—not just in Algeria, but in metropolitan France as well. The crisis in Algeria risked toppling the French republic itself.

The settler insurrection sent shock waves through Algiers. Mouloud Feraoun captured the fear and uncertainty in his diary on May 14: “Atmosphere of revolution. People barricaded in their homes. Demonstrators march up and down the major
arteries of the city, shops closed. The radio speaks of a Committee of Public Health that has taken all in hand and occupies the Governor General’s office and controls broadcasts.” The Muslims of Algiers recognized that this was a fight between the French that did not involve them. Feraoun questioned the Fourth Republic’s ability to withstand the pressure. “At base, the Algeria War will prove a very hard blow for France, perhaps a mortal blow to the Republic. After which, no doubt, this blow will bring the remedy to Algeria and Algerians.”
¹¹