Everything you need to know about multiculturalism can be found in this 1966 war film, such as:
* Multiculturalism is never stable for long.
* Multiculturalism means an increasingly splintered society.
* Extremists tend to win out in racial wars.
* Radical Jews are potent enemies of the ruling regime.
* Everybody wants to rule the world.
* Life is a competition between groups for power and resources.
* Morality doesn’t determine who rules and how much power they can project.
* Good intentions count for little in resolving racial and religious conflict.
Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times:
In North Africa it was no better, in some ways worse. Algeria was
in theory run like metropolitan France but in fact it had separate
electoral colleges for French and Arabs. This wrecked Clemenceau’s
post-war reforms in 1919 and indeed all subsequent ones. The
French settlers sent deputies to the parliament in Paris and this gave
them a leverage unknown in the British Empire. In 1936 the colon
deputies killed a Popular Front bill which would have given full
citizenship to 20,000 Muslims. Marshal Lyautey, the great French
Governor-General of Morocco, described the colons as ‘every bit as
bad as the Boches, imbued with the same belief in inferior races
whose destiny is to be exploited’. 40 In Morocco he did his best to
keep them out. But this was difficult. In Morocco a French farmer
could enjoy the same living standards as one in the American
Mid-West. All Europeans there had real incomes a third above that
of France, and eight times higher than the Muslims. Moreover,
Lyautey’s benevolent despotism, which was designed to protect the
Muslims from French corruption, in fact exposed them to native
corruption at its worst. He ruled through caids who bought their
tax-inspectorates and judgeships, getting into debt thereby and being
obliged to squeeze their subjects to pay the interest. The system
degenerated swiftly after Lyautey’s death in 1934. The greatest of the
caids, the notorious El Glawi, Pasha of Marrakesh, ran a
mountain-and-desert empire of rackets and monopolies, including
control of Marrakesh’s 27,000 prostitutes who catered for the needs
of the entire Western Sahara. 41 On the front that mattered most,
education, little progress was made. There were far too many French
officials: 15,000 of them, three times as many as the Indian
administration, all anxious to perpetuate and if possible hereditarize
their jobs. In 1940, accordingly, there were still only 3 per cent of
Moroccans who went to school, and even in 1958 only 1,500
received a secondary education. In 1952 there were only twenty-five
Moroccan doctors, fourteen of them from the Jewish community.
It was not that the French had colour prejudice. Paris always
welcomed evolues. In 1919 the old-established ‘Four Communes’ of
West Africa sent to the Chambre a black deputy, Blaise Diagne. Two
years later Rene Maran’s Batouala, giving the black man’s view of
colonialism, won the Prix Goncourt. But the book was banned in all
France’s African territories. Clever blacks learned to write superb
French; but once they got to Paris they tended to stay there. In the
1930s, Leopold Senghor, later President of Senegal, felt so at home in
right-wing Catholic circles he became a monarchist. 42 There seemed
no future for him in Africa. By 1936 only 2,000 blacks had French
citizenship. Apart from war veterans and government clerks, the
great majority of black Africans were under the indigenat — summary
justice, collective fines, above all forced labour. Houphouet-Boigny,
later President of the Ivory Coast, described the work-gangs as
‘skeletons covered with sores’. The Governor of French Equatorial
Africa, Antonelli, admitted that the building of the Congo-Ocean
railway in 1926 would ‘require 10,000 deaths’; in fact more died
during its construction. 43 Black Africans voted with their feet,
running into nearby British colonies to escape the round-ups.
Some Frenchmen with long experience of colonial affairs saw
portents. Lyautey warned in 1920: The time has come to make a
radical change of course in native policy and Muslim participation in
public affairs.’ 44 Sarraut himself argued that the European ‘civil war’ of 1914—18 had weakened the position of the whites. ‘In the minds
of other races,’ he wrote in 1931, ‘the war has dealt a terrible blow to the standing of a civilization which Europeans claimed with pride to
be superior, yet in whose name Europeans spent more than four
years savagely killing each other.’ With Japan in mind he added: ‘It
has long been a commonplace to contrast European greatness with
Asian decadence. The contrast now seems to be reversed.’ 45 Yet
nothing effective was done to broaden the base of French rule. When
Leon Blum’s Popular Front government introduced its reform plan to
give 25,000 Algerians citizenship, the leader of the Algerian
moderates, Ferhat Abbas, exulted ‘La France, c’est moiV Maurice
Viollette, a liberal Governor-General of Algeria and later, as a
Deputy, one of the sponsors of the reform, warned the Chambre:
‘When the Muslims protest, you are indignant. When they approve,
you are suspicious. When they keep quiet, you are fearful. Messieurs,
these men have no political nation. They do not even demand their
religious nation. All they ask is to be admitted into yours. If. you
refuse this, beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.’
But the reform was killed…
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 dwind-
ling. 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 Euro-
peans 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 Liberie 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 Liberation 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 para-
chuted into Tunisia as an Abwehr 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’m 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.
The fln strategy was, in fact, to place the mass of the Muslims in a
sandwich of terror. On one side, the fln killers replaced the
moderates. On the other, fln atrocities were designed to provoke
the French into savage reprisals, and so drive the Muslim population
into the extremist camp, fln doctrine was spelt out with cold-
blooded precision by the Brazilian terrorist Carlos Marighela:
It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police …. The government can only intensify its repression, thus making the lives of its citizens harder than ever . . . police terror will become the order of the day …. The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in the physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the
country will [then have] become a military situation.
Of course this odious variety of Leninism, if pursued ruthlessly
enough, has a certain irresistible force. The French government in
1954 was composed, on the whole, of liberal and civilized men,
under the Radical-Socialist Pierre Mendes-France. They shared the
illusion – or the vision – that Algeria could become a genuine
multi-racial society, on the principles of liberty, equality and fratern-
ity. Mendes-France, who had happily freed Indo-China and Tunisia,
told the Assembly: ‘The Algerian departements are part of the French
Republic . . . they are irrevocably French . . . there can be no
conceivable secession.’ On Algeria, said his Interior Minister,
Franqois Mitterrand, ‘the only possible negotiation is war’. 111 Both
men believed that, if France’s own principles were now at last fully
and generously turned into an Algerian reality, the problem would be
solved. They sent out as Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, a
brilliant ethnologist and former resistance-fighter, to create this
reality. What they did not realize was that the fln’s object was
precisely to transform French generosity into savagery.
Soustelle saw the fln as fascists. He thought he could defeat them
by giving the Arabs genuine democracy and social justice. He created
400 detachments of Kepis bleus (sas) in remote areas to protect
loyalists. He brought in dedicated liberals like Germaine Tillion and
Vincent Monteil to set up networks of centres sociaux and maintain
contacts with Muslim leaders of opinion. 112 He sought desperately
to bring Muslims into every level of government. His instructions to
the police and army forbade terror and brutality in any form and
especially collective reprisals. 113 It is unlikely that Soustelle’s policy
of genuine integration could have succeeded anyway, once the
French themselves realized what it involved: France did not want to
become a half-Arab, half-Muslim nation, any more than most Arabs
wanted to become a French one. But in any case the fln systemati-
cally murdered the instruments of Soustelle’s liberal policy, French
and Arab. They strove hardest to kill those French administrations
who loved the Arabs; and usually succeeded. One such victim was
Maurice Dupuy, described by Soustelle as a ‘secular saint’. At his
funeral Soustelle was in tears as he pinned the Legion d’honneur on
the eldest of Dupuy’s eight orphaned children, and it was then he
first used the word ‘revenge’. 114
In the summer of 1955 the fln went a stage further and adopted a
policy of genocide: to kill all French without distinction of age or
sex. On 20 August the first massacres began. As always, they
embraced many Arabs, such as Allouah Abbas, nephew of the
moderate nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas, who had criticized fln
atrocities. But the main object was to provoke French army reprisals.
At Ain-Abid near Constantine, for instance, thirty-seven Europeans,
including ten under fifteen, were literally chopped to pieces. Men had
their arms and legs cut off; children their brains dashed out; women
were disemboweled – one pied-noir mother had her womb opened,
her five-day-old baby slashed to death, and then replaced in her
womb. This ‘Philippeville massacre’ succeeded in its object: French
paratroopers in the area were given orders to shoot all Arabs and (by
Soustelle’s account) killed 1,273 ‘insurgents’, which fln propaganda
magnified to 12,000. It was the 1945 massacre over again. As
Soustelle put it, ‘there had been well and truly dug an abyss through
which flowed a river of blood’. French and Muslim liberals like
Albert Camus and Ferhat Abbas, appearing on platforms together to
appeal for reason, were howled down by all sides.
From this point the Soustelle experiment collapsed. The war
became a competition in terror. The focus switched to the Algiers
Casbah, where every square kilometre housed 100,000 Algerians. It
began with the execution of a crippled murderer, Ferradj, who had
killed a seven-year-old girl and seven other civilians. The fln
commander, Ramdane Abane, ordered one hundred French civilians
to be murdered for every execution of an fln member. On 21-24
June 1956, his chief killer, Saadi Yacef, who controlled a network of
bomb-factories and 1,400 ‘operators’, carried out forty-nine murders. The violence grew steadily through the second half of 1956 – parallel with the build up to the Suez adventure. The French Mayor
of Algiers was murdered, and a bomb carefully exploded in the
middle of the funeral ceremony: Yacef secretly ordered all his
operators out of the area in advance, to make certain that in the
subsequent wild reprisals only innocent Muslims were killed. 116
The Suez debacle was important because it finally convinced the
army that civilian governments could not win the war. Robert
Lacoste, Soustelle’s socialist successor, conceded the point. On 7
January 1957 he gave General Jacques Massu and his 4,600 men
absolute freedom of action to clean the fln out of Algiers. For the
first time all restraints on the army, including the banning of torture,
were lifted. Torture had been abolished in France on 8 October
1789. Article 303 of the Penal Code imposed the death penalty for
anyone practising it. In March 1955 a secret report written by a
senior civil servant recommended the use of supervised torture as the
only alternative to prevent much more brutal unauthorized torture.
Soustelle had flatly rejected it. Now Massu authorized it, as he later
admitted: Tn answer to the question: “was there really torture?” I
can only reply in the affirmative, although it was never either
institutionalized or codified.’ 117 The argument was that successful
interrogation saved lives, chiefly of Arabs; that Arabs who gave
information would be tortured to death, without restraint, by the
fln, and it was vital for the French to make themselves feared more.
It was the Arab belief that Massu operated without restraints, as
much as the torture itself, which caused prisoners to talk. But
non-Muslims were tortured too. One, a Communist Jew called Henri
Alleg, wrote a best-selling book which caused an outburst of moral
fury throughout France in 1958. 118 Massu claimed that interroga-
tions by his men left no permanent damage. On seeing Alleg, looking
whole and well, on the steps of the Palais de Justice in 1970, he
exclaimed:
Do the torments which he suffered count for much alongside the cutting off of the nose or of the lips, when it was not the penis, which had become the ritual present of the fellaghas to their recalcitrant ‘brothers’? Everyone knows that these bodily appendages do not grow again!
But the notion that it was possible to supervise limited torture
effectively during a war for survival is absurd. In fact, the liberal
Secretary-General of the Algiers Prefecture, Paul Teitgen, testified
that about 3,000 prisoners ‘disappeared’ during the Algiers battle. At
all events Massu won it. It was the only time the French fought the
fln with its own weapons. Algiers was cleansed of terrorism.
Moderate Arabs dared to raise their voices again. But the victory was
thrown away by a new policy of regroupement of over a million poor
fellahs, a piece of crude social engineering calculated to play into fln
hands. Besides, the Massu experiment set up intolerable strains
within the French system. On the one hand, by freeing army units
from political control and stressing the personalities of commanders,
it encouraged private armies: colonels increasingly regarded them-
selves as proprietors of their regiments, as under the monarchy, and
began to manipulate their generals into disobedience. In the moral
confusion, officers began to see their primary obligation as towards
their own men rather than the state. 120
At the same time, news leaking out of what the army had done in
Algiers began to turn French liberal and centre opinion against the
war. From 1957 onwards, many Frenchmen came to regard Algerian
independence, however distasteful, as preferable to the total corrup-
tion of the French public conscience. Thus the demand for the
restoration of political control of the war – including negotiations
with the fln — intensified just as the French army was, as it believed,
winning by asserting its independence. This irreconcilable conflict
produced the explosion of May 1958 which returned General de
Gaulle to power and created the Fifth Republic.
De Gaulle was not a colonialist. He thought the age of colonies
was over. His body seemed in the past but his mind was in the future.
He claimed that at Brazzaville in 1944, when marshalling black
Africa behind the Resistance, he had sought ‘to transform the old
dependent relationships into preferential links of political, economic
and cultural co-operation’. 121 He saw the half-hearted continuation
of French colonialism as the direct result of the weakness of the
Fourth Republic’s constitution, which he despised, and the ‘regime of
the parties’, incapable of ‘the unequivocal decisions decolonization
called for’. ‘How could it’, he asked, ‘have surmounted and if
necessary broken all the opposition, based on sentiment, habit or
self-interest, which such an enterprise was bound to provoke?’ The
result was vacillation and inconsistency, first in Indo-China, then in
Tunisia and Morocco, finally and above all in Algeria. Naturally, he
said, the army ‘felt a growing resentment against a political system
which was the embodiment of irresolution’.
The coup was detonated, probably deliberately, by the fln
decision on 9 May 1958 to ‘execute’ three French soldiers for
‘torture, rape and murder’. Four days later, white students stormed
the government headquarters in Algiers. Massu asked Lacoste, who
had fled to France, whether he had permission to fire on the white
mob. He was not given it. That night, at a Brecht play attacking
generals, a left-wing audience applauded deliriously. 123 But not one
was actually prepared to fight for the Fourth Republic. In Algiers, the
generals took over, and called for de Gaulle’s return. Some 30,000
Muslims went to the government forum to demonstrate their appro-
val. They sang the ‘Marseillaise’ and the army song, ‘Chant des
Africains’: a spontaneous demonstration in favour of French civiliza-
tion and against the barbarism of the fln. Massu said: ‘Let them
know that France will never abandon them.’ 124 When the generals
called for de Gaulle they were lying, for they saw him merely as a
battering-ram, to smash the Republic and take power themselves. De
Gaulle thought Algeria was untenable and would destroy the French
army. Indeed, he feared even worse might happen. On 24 May a
detachment from Algeria landed in Corsica. The local authorities
fraternized. Police sent from Marseilles allowed themselves to be
disarmed. De Gaulle took over to avert an invasion of France itself,
which would probably have succeeded or, alternatively, produced
civil war. He saw ominous parallels with the beginning of the
Spanish catastrophe in 1936. It would, he thought, finally destroy
France as a great civilizing power. If Paris was worth a mass, France
herself was worth a few lies.
So, having taken power, he went to Algiers to deceive. On 4 June
he told the howling colon mob in Algiers: ‘Je vous ai compris’ ‘I
tossed them the words,’ he wrote, ‘seemingly spontaneous but in
reality carefully calculated, which I hoped would fire their enthusi-
asm without committing me further than I was willing to go.’ 125 He
had said the previous year, privately: ‘Of course independence will
come but they are too stupid there to know it.’ ‘Long live French
Algeria!’ he chanted publicly in June 1958; privately: ‘VAfrique est
foutue et VAlgerie avecV He called French Algeria ‘a ruinous
Utopia’. Publicly he continued to reassure the colons and the army.
‘Independence? In twenty-five years’ (October 1958). ‘The French
army will never quit this country and I will never deal with those
people from Cairo and Tunis’ (March 1959). ‘There will be no Dien
Bien Phu in Algeria. The insurrection will not throw us out of this
country.’ ‘How can you listen to the liars and conspirators who tell
you that in granting free choice to the Algerians, France and de
Gaulle want to abandon you, to pull out of Algeria and hand it over
to the rebellion?’ (January 1960). ‘Independence … a folly, a
monstrosity’ (March I960).
Meanwhile, he got an ever-tighter grip on the state. On 28
September 1958 the French adopted the constitution of the Fifth
Republic, concentrating power in the president. On 21 December he
was elected President. The same referendum which created the new
constitution gave all French overseas territories the right of associa-
tion or departure. The notion of consent thus became universal. One
by one, de Gaulle broke or removed the men who had hoisted him to
office. In February 1960 he demanded and received ‘special powers’.
Four months later he opened secret talks with the fln leaders. In
January 1961 he held a referendum offering Algeria freedom in
association with France, and got an overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote. It was
the end of Algerie franqaise and it brought its extremist supporters
out into the open, bombs in hand.
If the army leadership had insisted on taking power in May 1958,
it could have done so, with or without de Gaulle. By April 1961,
when it finally grasped de Gaulle’s deception and sought to over-
throw him, the chance had been missed. French opinion had moved
on. The conscripts had transistor radios; they could hear the news
from Paris; they refused to follow their officers. The revolt collapsed;
its leaders surrendered or were hunted down and gaoled. That left the
way open for a complete scuttle. Captured fln leaders were released
from prisons to join the talks just as the rebel French generals were
beginning their sentences.
White terrorism, the oas (Organization de VArmee Secrete), took
longer to deal with. It operated at full blast for over a year, using
bombs, machine-guns and bazookas, killing over 12,000 civilians
(mainly Muslims) and about 500 police and security men. It illus-
trates the fearful power of political violence to corrupt. Indeed, in
many ways it was the mirror-image of the fln. On 23 February
1962, its leader General Salan, who had had a distinguished career as
an honourable soldier, issued orders for a generalized offensive …. The systematic opening of fire against crs and gendarmerie units. “Molotov cocktails” will be thrown against their armoured vehicles . . . night and day …. [The objective is] to destroy the best Muslim elements in the liberal professions so as to oblige the Muslim
population to have recourse to ourselves … to paralyse the powers that be and make it impossible for them to exercise authority. Brutal actions will be generalized over the whole territory … at works of art and all that represents the exercise of authority in a manner to lead towards the maximum of general insecurity and the total paralysis of the country.
Nor did the corruption stop at the oas. For in order to beat them
and to protect de Gaulle himself (twice nearly murdered), the state
built up its own official terror units, which murdered and tortured
prisoners with impunity, and on a wide scale. 128 In this case, neither
liberal France nor the international community raised a whisper of
protest, oas terrorism finally killed the idea of a white settlement. At
the end of 1961 de Gaulle’s closest adviser, Bernard Tricot, reported
back from Algiers: ‘The Europeans . . . are so hardened in opposition
to everything that is being prepared, and their relations with the
majority of the Muslims are so bad, that . . . the essential thing now
is to organize their return.’
The end came in March 1962, in an orgy of slaughter and
intolerance. The Muslim mob, scenting victory, had already sacked
the Great Synagogue in the heart of the Casbah, gutting it, ripping
the Torah scrolls, killing the Jewish officials and chalking on the
walls ‘Death to the Jews’ and other Nazi slogans. On 15 March the
oas raided Germaine Tillion’s social centre, where handicapped
children were trained, took out six men and shot them to death,
beginning with the legs. One of them was Mouloud Feraoun, friend
of Camus, who had termed him ‘last of the moderates’. He had
written: ‘There is French in me, there is Kabyle in me. But I have a
horror of those who kill …. Vive la France, such as I have always
loved! Vive VAlgerie, such as I hope for! Shame on the criminals!’ 130
The cease-fire with the fln, 19 March 1962, brought a further burst
of oas killing: eighteen gendarmes and seven soldiers were mur-
dered. The French commander, General Ailleret, retaliated by
destroying the last redoubt of Algerie franqaise, the pied noir
working-class quarter of Bab-el-Oued, with its 60,000 inhabitants.
He attacked it with rocket-firing dive-bombers, tanks firing at
point-blank range and 20,000 infantry. It was the suppression of the
1870 Commune all over again; but this episode does not figure in the
Marxist textbooks. 131 That was effectively the end of Algeria as a
multiracial community. The exodus to France began. Many hospi-
tals, schools, laboratories, oil terminals and other evidence of French
culture and enterprise — including the library of the University of
Algiers — were deliberately destroyed. About 1,380,000 people
(including some Muslims) left in all. By 1963, of a large and historic
Mediterranean community, only about 30,000 remained.
The Evian Agreements, under which France agreed to get out,
contained many clauses designed to save France’s face. They were
meaningless. It was a straight surrender. Not even paper protection,
however, was given to 250,000 Muslim officials, many of a very
humble kind, who had continued to serve France faithfully to the
end. De Gaulle was too busy saving France by extricating it from
the horror, to give them a thought. When a Muslim deputy, ten of
whose family had already been murdered by the fln, told de Gaulle
that, with self-determination, ‘we shall suffer’, he replied coldly: ‘Eh,
bien – vous souffrirez.’ They did. Only 15,000 had the money and
means to get out. The rest were shot without trial, used as human
mine-detectors to clear the minefields along the Tunisian border,
tortured, made to dig their own tombs and swallow their military
decorations before being killed; some were burned alive, castrated,
dragged behind trucks, fed to the dogs; there were cases where entire
families including tiny children were murdered together. The French
army units that remained, their former comrades-in-arms, stood by,
horrified and powerless, for under the Agreements they had no right
to interfere. French soldiers were actually employed to disarm the
Muslim harkis, telling them they would be issued with more modern
weapons, although in fact they were about to be slaughtered. It was a
crime of betrayal comparable to the British handing over Russian
pows to Stalin’s wrath; worse, indeed. Estimates of the number put
to death vary from 30,000 to 150,000. 133
Who knows? A great darkness descended over many aspects of the
new Algeria, a darkness which has never been lifted since. The lies
continued to the end. ‘France and Algeria’, said de Gaulle on 18
March 1962, would ‘march together like brothers on the road to
civilization’. 134 The truth is, the new nation owed its existence to the
exercise of cruelty without restraint and on the largest possible scale.
Its regime, composed mainly of successful gangsters, quickly ousted
those of its members who had been brought up in the Western
tradition; all were dead or in exile by the mid-1960s.
Exactly twenty years after the independence agreement was
reached, one of the chief signatories and Algeria’s first President, Ben Bella himself, summed up the country’s first two decades of independent existence. The net result, he said, had been ‘totally negative’.
The country was ‘a ruin’. Its agriculture had been ‘assassinated’. ‘We
have nothing. No industry — only scrap iron.’ Everything in Algeria
was ‘corrupt from top to bottom’. 135 No doubt Ben Bella’s bitterness
was increased by the fact that he had spent most of the intervening
years imprisoned by his revolutionary comrades. But the substance
of his judgement was true enough. And unfortunately the new
Algeria had not kept its crimes to itself. It became and for many years
remained the chief resort of international terrorists of all kinds. A
great moral corruption had been planted in Africa. It set a pattern of
public crime and disorder which was to be imitated throughout the
vast and tragic continent which was now made master of its own
affairs.
