Year Zero (17 page)

Blood, however, will have more blood. In addition to accusing Sukarno of treachery, the Dutch saw him as a front man for the communists. Exactly twenty years after the Battle of Surabaya, officers in the Indonesian Army ousted Sukarno in a military coup, supposedly to prevent the communists from taking over Indonesia. This marked the beginning of a nationwide purge of communists. Muslim vigilantes, armed youths, army battalions, Javanese mystics, and ordinary civilians all took part in the killing of half a million people, many of whom were Chinese. The leader of the coup, and the future president of Indonesia, was a Major General Suharto. Trained by the Japanese military, and thoroughly indoctrinated against Western imperialism, Suharto had fought against the Dutch in 1945. His presidency would last for thirty-two years. During that time, as a staunch opponent of communism, he enjoyed the warm and unwavering support of all Western powers, including, of course, the Netherlands.

•   •   •

THE FRENCH WERE AS FEARFUL
as the Dutch of losing their colonial possessions in 1945, and, if anything, felt more humiliated, not just because of their defeat in 1940, but also because of their history of official collaboration. French Indochina continued to be administered by a Vichy-oriented colonial government during what was, in fact, a Japanese occupation. The Japanese used the colony as a military base, while the French carried on drinking their apéritifs at Saigon's Cercle Sportif and generally minding their own business. But this sweet life came to an end in March 1945. Once France was liberated, French collaboration with Japan could no longer be taken for granted, so French troops and officials were swiftly imprisoned in Saigon and Hanoi.

When defeat was almost certain in the first week of August, the Japanese transferred political authority to the royal government of Vietnam, while the communist Vietminh (League for the Independence of
Vietnam) took control of the north. A few weeks later, with Chinese troops pouring across the northern border and the arrival of British troops imminent in the south, both the emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai, and the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh made it quite clear that whatever happened, the resumption of French rule was unacceptable. Statues of French colonial dignitaries were already being pulled down in Hanoi. On September 2, more than three hundred thousand Vietnamese gathered on Ba Dinh Square, near the former French governor-general's palace, to hear Ho Chi Minh declare national independence. Bands played communist marches, including harsh words about “drinking French blood.” Vietminh soldiers, armed with pistols, guarded the speaker's platform, festooned with red flags. A royal umbrella was held over “Uncle” Ho's head, as he softly spoke into the microphone: “Countrymen, can you hear me?” The crowd hollered back that they could.

A U.S. intelligence officer who witnessed this event reported to his superiors in the southern Chinese city of Kunming: “From what I have seen these people mean business and I am afraid the French will have to deal with them. For that matter we all will have to deal with them.”
⁶⁵
He couldn't have known quite how prophetic his words would turn out to be.

If the French, many of whom remained in their prisons, still guarded by Japanese soldiers, were spooked by these events, French colonizers in Algeria were panic-stricken. Both Algeria and Indochina were experiencing serious famines in early 1945, the result of droughts as well as the diversion of food supplies for military purposes. In Indochina more than one million people died of hunger. In Algeria, hunger was fueling a popular rage that was seen by frightened Frenchmen as the beginning of a violent revolution.

In fact, despite some agitation among Algerian communists and radical nationalists, most Algerians simply wanted equal rights. But every time a Muslim stone was thrown at a French settler, the French thought that the “Arab revolt” was at hand. The new colonial administration in 1945 was led by French leftists, many of whom had actively resisted the Germans. Many of the settlers had been pro-Vichy, and were fiercely
anti-Semitic. (Often the only ones who had defended the rights of Jews under French rule were Algerian Muslims.) Yet the Muslims who called for Algerian independence or equal rights were quickly branded as “Nazis.” This was like calling Indonesian and Vietnamese demands for national independence part of a Japanese fascist plot. It made it easier for leftist colonial authorities, as well as former Vichyistes, to crack down on them.

Violence had been mounting steadily in Algeria, especially in the famine-stricken areas around the town of Sétif in the northeast. Settlers clashed with nomads, arrogant police officers were chased out of villages, right-wing European youths taunted Muslims in Algiers with cries of “
Vive Pétain!
” or even “
Vive Hitler!
”, and French policemen shot into a crowd of Muslims who wished to take part in a May 1 demonstration.

Sétif, the center of Muslim agitation and Algerian nationalism, was a logical place for serious violence to explode. On May 8 the French, despite their former allegiances, decided to celebrate the Allied victory over Germany with full patriotic pomp. Early that same morning, Muslims, mostly rural people, men as well as women and children, gathered in front of the main mosque. Some men carried traditional daggers under their jellabas. Some had pistols. Leaders of the AML (Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté, or Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty), the Muslim organization for equal rights, assured the authorities that this was not a political demonstration. There would be no nationalist banners.

By eight o'clock the crowd had grown to about three thousand and began to march along the Avenue Georges Clemenceau to lay a wreath at the war memorial. Despite promises to the contrary by the AML, banners were unfurled by some nationalists, reading: “We want the same rights as you.” When policemen at a roadblock saw a banner that said “Long live Algerian Independence,” they tore it from the hands of a poor Algerian, who was killed on the spot. Whereupon French civilians, as though they had waited for this moment, started firing submachine guns into the crowd from their balconies and the windows of the Café de France. Between twenty and forty people were killed. Terrified by the shooting,
Muslims rushed into the side streets, using their pistols and daggers to attack Europeans. The French communist leader Albert Denier was so badly cut that his hands had to be amputated.

A French teacher recalled having a drink at a café opposite her school, when “a flood of screaming natives appeared from all sides, with daggers in their hands. They were running towards the Arab market. Atrocities had been committed. I saw about fifteen of them beat an old friend of the Arabs, Mr Vaillant, with clubs . . . It's terrible when you think about it. The odd thing is that most of the victims were Arabophiles.”
⁶⁶

News of the killings swiftly reached the villages. Vengeance was sporadic, but brutal: “We were armed with knives and rifles. It was my father who killed the baker because he was French. We broke down the doors, burning down the houses with the oil and petrol that we found.”
⁶⁷
French settlers fled to local police stations. Some who were caught were mutilated with knives, had their breasts slashed or their genitals stuffed into their mouths. About one hundred Europeans were killed in three days.

Instead of urging calm, the socialist governor-general Yves Chataigneau called for ten thousand troops: Moroccans, West Africans, and Foreign Legion units. This would not just be an exercise to restore order. A lesson had to be taught. The killings of French citizens had to be avenged.

French settlers formed militia units and started assaulting the local population. One of the toughest infantry regiments, manned by Algerian soldiers, was shipped back from Germany where they had fought hard to defeat Hitler. In their native country, they were sent into the hinterlands to hunt fellow Algerians. By the end of June the countryside was petrified into an awful silence. Villages and towns had been bombed for weeks from the air and shelled from cruisers; thousands had been arrested, often tortured, and executed. The exact number of Algerian dead is not known. Some say up to thirty thousand. With murder came deliberate humiliation. A nineteenth-century practice of making natives submit ceremonially to their conquerors was revived. Thousands of famished peasants, who could no longer stand the bombings, were made to kneel before the
French flag and beg for forgiveness. Others were pushed to the ground and made to shout: “We are Jews. We are dogs. Long live France!”

To some Frenchmen it may have looked as though normality had finally returned to Algeria. But the more sophisticated ones, including General de Gaulle, knew perfectly well that mass-murdering native populations was an embarrassing blot on
La France éternelle
, which, in official mythology, had so bravely resisted the Nazi menace. So what happened in Sétif and surrounding areas was smothered in official silence for many years.

The French in Saigon, however, read Sétif as a warning of what could happen to them if aspirations for Vietnamese independence were not quickly stifled. In August things did not look good for the French. Many were still in Japanese prisons. The Vietminh were given, or simply took, more and more Japanese arms. Some Japanese military officers were joining the Vietminh, either out of conviction (“Asia for the Asians”) or because they needed a place to hide from prosecution for serious war crimes. French imperial designs were not popular with the Americans, even though the Chinese, still under Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, had no objections to French rule in Indochina. The only ones who were entirely on the side of the French, not so curiously, were the British.

Mob violence often begins with a rumor. So it was on September 20 in Hanoi, when people spoke of a French plot, assisted by Vietnamese members of the French colonial security police, to regain control. Caches of arms were supposed to have been found. There was talk of poison gas. French soldiers had been released from prison by the Japanese, and even rearmed. To foil these dark French designs, thousand of Vietnamese, armed with knives, spears, and machetes, ransacked French homes and molested any French people found in the streets. Japanese soldiers mostly just stood by.

The waiters in the best hotel in Hanoi, the Metropole, attacked the guests in their rooms and barricaded them in the dining room. A Frenchman who managed to escape asked the Japanese to relieve the French prisoners and restore order.

Françoise Martin was a young French woman who had arrived in Hanoi “not to make money in this country, but, on the contrary, filled with humanitarian idealism.” She felt nothing but “respect for the Sino-annamite culture.” Yet her sentiments about the Vietnamese who demonstrated in the streets for independence were probably typical of most French colonials: “It is possible that there were
real
patriots among them . . . But so far as this mob of criminals and imbeciles bustling about town with their flags is concerned, the sight of half a dozen guns would send them scurrying back to their rat holes. Unfortunately, we don't have half a dozen guns, nor would we have them soon.”
⁶⁸

In August, there had been more rumors about stockpiles of arms found in a French villa. Demonstrators denounced French imperialism. But apart from some murders in the countryside, Vietnamese violence against the French did not amount to much. The French were terrified nonetheless, all the more because they were still so helpless, despite brave words from France, where General de Gaulle spoke of developing Indochina as “one of the principal goals of [France's] activity in her reborn power and rediscovered grandeur.”
⁶⁹

“Everyone is armed to the teeth,” recalled Françoise Martin about the situation in Hanoi, “Americans, Chinese, Annamites; only the French have nothing to defend themselves with except sticks and empty bottles . . .”
⁷⁰
Her analysis of the Vietnamese fight for independence was as typical of her place and time as her views of the “imbecilic” demonstrators. It was all a plot: “Officially, Japanese had laid down their arms, but continued to wage war in a different manner, impeding any revival of Europeans in Indonesia and Malaya; everywhere their methods were the same: a perfidious plan, admirably prepared, carefully carried out . . . An admirable and new example of Asian duplicity, which never fails to fool the White man.”
⁷¹

When violence finally broke loose, however, it wasn't in Hanoi, but in Saigon. The first sign of serious trouble was remarkably similar to events in Algeria. On September 2 hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, or “Annamites” as they were called in the Western press, many from the
countryside, gathered in Saigon to hear Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence on the radio from Hanoi. Earlier that morning, armed Vietnamese youths had staged a demonstration at the gate of a military camp where French soldiers were still interned. The French replied to Vietnamese taunts by shouting insults back and singing the “Marseillaise.” Because of a technical problem, the crowds never heard Ho Chi Minh's speech on the radio. Suspicions of French sabotage made the crowds even angrier. Just as the marchers reached the cathedral, shots were fired. The crowd panicked, and mobs, suspecting the French of the shooting, attacked every French person in sight. Chinese and European shops were looted, priests were killed, women had their teeth kicked in.

The French blamed Vietnamese provocateurs for the shots that caused the mayhem. A little over two weeks later, they convinced the British general Douglas Gracey that it was time to kick out the Vietnamese from police stations and public offices and rearm the French. And the British, in a spirit of colonial solidarity, complied. On September 23 it looked as if order had been restored to Saigon: the French were in charge once more. The humiliation and helplessness felt over weeks, months, perhaps even years, turned French celebrations of their triumph into a rampage: now it was the turn of Vietnamese to be lynched by mobs of Frenchmen. A British officer reported that there “were wild shootings and Annamites were openly dragged through the streets to be locked up in prisons.”
⁷²