Algiers
For over a year France’s elite shock troops and revolutionary terrorists were locked in a bitter battle in the slums of the Algerian capital ALGIERS JUNE 1956 - SEPTEMBER 1957
Uncover France’s colonial crackdown
As the Cold War’s chill hung over Europe, former colonies across Asia and Africa stirred from decades – and sometimes centuries – of foreign misrule. On too many occasions nationalist fervour led to unbelievable violence. The British Empire’s relatively peaceful release of India, for example, didn’t spare millions of innocents from the human toll wrought by Partition. Southeast Asia fared no better, as fresh conflicts erupted in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and Vietnam.
Yet in North Africa a war unlike any other was prosecuted with extreme cruelty. France had dominated Algeria for 133 years, subjugating it in a spasm of imperialism from 1830 to 1845. Instead of turning it into a protectorate like neighbouring Tunisia or Morocco, Algeria was made a French province.
Enabling Algerie Française to exist and endure meant grafting a façade of French tastes and habits onto North Africa. This was most noticeable in Algiers, with its tree-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes and imposing apartment blocks. Unscathed by World War II and populated by Europeans, the capital’s interior also offered refuge for the Arab migrants from the countryside displaced by pied-noir, or ‘black foot’, settlers who built their farms and vineyards over the land. This made conditions in the metropolitan slum of the Casbah intolerable. With its ramshackle brick houses piled on each other and crowded along winding alleys and back streets, the Casbah symbolised the iniquities of Algiers.
So when the revolutionaries of the Front de Libération National, or FLN, and its armed wing the ALN rose up in October 1954 it marked a reckoning between a native populace
long oppressed by the colonial yoke and an entrenched local elite, known as ‘colons’, ready to defend its privileges. Between them was an institution, the French armed forces, which wanted to prove itself after the recent debacles in World War II and Indochina.
It was in the Casbah of Algiers where France’s elite troops pitted themselves against determined urban ‘fellaghas’ – the derogatory term for guerrillas. It should be emphasised the FLN were nationalists, rather than Islamists. The 1950s marked a rare epoch in modern Arab history where the mesmerising ideal of Pan-arabism captured hearts and minds from Baghdad to Rabat. The FLN aspired to a modern and independent Algerian state. But the organisation’s willingness to use violence meant a complete separation from the original Etoile Nord Africane movement that had lobbied for Algerian independence since the 1920s.
The French never tolerated the idea of giving up Algerie Française. Anti-colonial demonstrations in the town of Setif in 1945 were put down with force, leaving 10,000 dead. Survivors of the massacre founded the FLN to wage war in freedom’s name, even if it meant brutalising anyone who opposed them, whether they were Europeans, Arabs or Berbers.
The campaign that became the Battle of Algiers marked a tactical shift for the FLN. Bloodied by an overwhelming French response in ‘the bled’ – the deserts and countryside – the FLN created a new sub-organisation to terrorise the cities and tie down their nemesis. The responsibility fell on two leaders, Saadi Yacef and Larbi ben M’hidi, who were tasked with orchestrating a series of attacks that would unravel public order.
Another motivation for terrorising Algiers was avenging the gruesome work done by the Ultras, a colloquial term for local French nationalists who organised themselves to fight the FLN. While regular French forces and their ‘harkis’, or Arab auxiliaries, were more than a match for the FLN on the field, the Ultras used indiscriminate terror tactics to match the atrocities the FLN committed against the piednoirs community. This reached a tipping point in early 1956 when a bomb allegedly planted by the Ultras killed 75 people in the Casbah. The carnage gave the FLN a battle cry to rally the masses – retribution.
Life and death
The reprisal campaign began in June 1956 when lone assassins targeted members of the gendarmerie. This usually involved a pedestrian with a concealed weapon (either a handgun or a knife) approaching their target to kill him at close range before fleeing. The tempo of the war increased on 30 September 1956 after terror attacks on two locations: an establishment called Milk Bar and the restaurant La Cafeteria, carried out by an all-female cell dressed as Europeans. The explosions left two dead and 30 injured. Another homemade time bomb was left in the offices of Air France, but it failed to detonate.
This was a novel strategy conceived by Yacef. Since authorities could question any Casbah residents they deemed suspicious, it made sense for women who knew how to pass for colons and speak French to work as his couriers and bombers. These terrorist ‘heroines’, like Zohra Drif Bitat and Djamila Bouhired, helped plan and execute operations throughout Algiers, which totalled 600 incidents of arson, bombings and murder by late 1956.
For the colons the situation was unbearable. For the people of the Casbah it was just desserts. Fearing chaos and panic, Governor Robert Lacoste gave the military carte blanche to root out the city’s terrorists. This marked the French army’s transition from conventional fighting to a peculiar form of suppression that tarnished its image for decades to come.
The responsibility to preserve and protect Algiers fell on General Jacques Massu, who commanded the elite regiments of the Tenth Parachute Division, together with local gendarmes, army regulars and the Ultras. At least 12,000 men in total, led by France’s toughest officers, had a single mission: to find where the enemy was hiding and destroy them.
Until 1956 the French relied on an overwhelming presence in the wilayats, or provinces, of the Algerian coast. Each wilayat was divided into quadrillages where infantry columns, often assisted by helicopters and light armour, searched for FLN encampments. Elaborate fortifications such as electrified fences along the borders with Morocco and Tunisia, known as the Pedron and Morice Lines, were in place for blocking the transit of FLN guerrillas to and from their bases. In Algiers, three undermanned airborne regiments of the Tenth Parachute Division, together with a Special Action unit, were cobbled together for dismantling the FLN network in the Casbah.
Unknown to the French, Yacef and ben M’hidi belonged to a shadowy network called the Comite de coordination d’execution, or the CCE, that was responsible for all the recent mayhem. The CCE’S other leaders were FLN stalwarts Abane Ramdane and Benyoucef Benkhedda. This quartet controlled invisible sectors of Algiers, with agents and cells bound together by safe houses, informants and cryptic notes in letter boxes. But it was Yacef, who held the nominal rank of ‘colonel’, who directed the myriad activities from within the Casbah.
The inner workings of the CCE’S terror campaign remain a mystery to this day. But one French counter-intelligence officer in Algiers, Colonel Roger Trinquier, later wrote about his experiences in his book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. In it, between long chapters on the science of defeating terrorism, he described how the CCE functioned. According to Trinquier, the FLN would handpick local assassins and entice them with FLN
“SURVIVORS OF THE MASSACRE FOUNDED THE FLN TO WAGE WAR IN FREEDOM’S NAME, EVEN IF IT MEANT BRUTALISING ANYONE WHO OPPOSED THEM, WHETHER THEY WERE EUROPEANS, ARABS OR BERBERS”
membership. “One evening, at a fixed time and an appointed place,” wrote Trinquier, sharing the perspective of an anonymous operative, “an individual unknown to me was to give me a loaded weapon with the mission to kill the first person I came across. I was then to flee, dropping the weapon into a trashcan that the unknown person had pointed out to me,” the operative had told Trinquier. “I did what was required of me. Three days later I joined the ALN.” The ALN was the armed wing of the FLN.
Trinquier also shed light on how the terrorists established their mobile bases in a crowded slum. “When one or several members of the Council [the FLN leadership] wanted to install themselves in a house in the Casbah, they first sent a team of masons to construct a hiding place there,” Trinquier wrote. “The masons immediately gathered together the people and told them, in substance, ‘You are soon to receive important personages. You will be responsible for their security with your lives.’”
Trinquier claimed this process sometimes involved executing Casbah residents of dubious loyalty, but it’s worth pointing out there’s little proof to back the colonel’s claim.
What allowed the CCE to operate on the scale it did was a remarkable top-down operation that thrived in absolute secrecy. Again, it’s Colonel Trinquier’s own account that explains how it worked. The essential unit was a three-person cell, and each cell formed part of a company that ran a district. This was a ‘political’ organisation. For combat, each district had a 35-strong group of fighters again divided among three-person cells. Orders were relayed anonymously. The leaders of each group delivered these to a deputy, who then shared the mission details to the cells. When it came to assembling the crude bombs used for terrorising public spaces, Yacef established a system that delegated each task, from assembly to deployment, among separate cells.
Colonel Trinquier believed there were never more than 1,400 full-time operatives working under the CCE. Of course, their sympathisers and conspirators numbered greater, but the fact that they came close to seizing Algiers at a time when more than 415,000 French conscript soldiers were deployed in the country proved their effectiveness.
The innovators
Officers like Colonel Trinquier formed a collection of ruthless leaders who used their intellect and cunning to reclaim the Casbah. Foremost among them were two uncompromising officers who stopped at nothing to defeat the CCE: General Paul Aussaresses and Colonel Marcel Bigeard.
General Aussaresses was commander of the mysterious Action Group, a unit whose mission was breaking the will of suspected terrorists.
On the streets of Algiers were the paratrooper companies and their daring leader, Colonel Marcel Bigeard, who led the Third Colonial Parachutists. The unit was an acclaimed one, having fought with distinction in Indochina. Bigeard himself was a veteran of the Free French Forces in World War II and a former captive of the Vietminh after Dien Bien Phu. He was even the victim of an assassination attempt, having been shot twice in the chest by FLN gunmen in 1956. The experience left him undaunted, and he remained a centurion of Imperial France.
Determined to check the momentum of the CCE’S terror campaign, in the opening months of 1957 both General Aussaresses and Colonel Bigeard would successfully dismantle the CCE’S operations and restore security throughout Algiers. How they did it was exceptionally clever.
Colonel Bigeard’s paras, considered the crème de la crème of the French army, locked down the entire Casbah and sealed off its streets with barbed wire and checkpoints. Elsewhere in Algiers, the local gendarmes, together with turncoat FLN fighters, established other checkpoints to restrict the mobility of terrorists. Census data, police records and personal ID cards were invaluable for largescale surveillance over the city.
Then came the reign of terror. On most days trucks of paratroops totting their MAT49 submachine guns would storm a house or close down a street. The Casbah’s alleys and passageways were patrolled day and night.
By all accounts General Aussaresses’s Action Group was already subjecting detainees to harsh interrogations – from electrocuting their genitals to sleep deprivation. French soldiers, with requisite French terror, became a permanent feature of the Casbah.
The turning point in the struggle for Algiers was a massive strike organised by the CCE to shut down the city. The French had gotten wind of the plan involving trade unions, labourers and small-time business owners, who planned to skip work and protest for a week. The revolt was supposed to begin on 28 January 1957. The clock was ticking.
There was no time left for cat and mouse. General Massu, General Aussaresses and Colonel Bigeard immediately launched a plan to beat the strike before it started. On the day itself paras and gendarmes forced shopkeepers to resume business. The workers in the factories and docks were compelled to remain in place under guard. Those who did join the throngs in the demonstration were arrested.
The crackdown was so swift it caught the CCE off guard. All of a sudden its entire campaign was under threat. General Aussaresses had much to show for his efforts: arresting demonstrators allowed him to piece together the FLN’S order of battle in the Casbah. Within days 23 gunmen and 51 cell leaders were arrested. A further 174 ‘tax collectors’ were rounded up. Some 200 felleghas were killed in ensuing street battles. Almost overnight, it seemed, the entire structure of the FLN’S CCE collapsed. Indeed it had, and by March the routine violence of the previous months had mostly subsided.
Soon the terrorist leadership was itself splintered. Colonel Trinquier, the counterintelligence strategist, used his network of informants to spring a trap on Larbi ben M’hidi, who was brought to General Aussaresses for questioning. A terrible fate awaited the local patriot. After a routine beating, he was taken to the southern outskirts of Algiers and hanged in a farmhouse. The local press were then told he killed himself while in custody.
With their organisation in tatters, the CCE tried its best to prolong the fight by carrying out even more outrageous missions in the months of June and July. This culminated in the destruction of the Casino de Corniche, a popular watering hole for colons, that left 11 dead and 89 hurt. It was an operation planned by Yacef himself – a powerful reprisal for the CCE’S losses.
The CCE, in disarray from infiltrators and the collapse of its cells, was finally destroyed the following month. Yacef was arrested in the Casbah in a nondescript abode not far from the French commandant’s headquarters on 24 September. His trusted lieutenant Ali la Pointe was killed in October.
Yacef was put on trial and sentenced to death before Charles de Gaulle, who assumed power in 1958, ordered his imprisonment in France. After being set free a handful of years later, he published his memoirs on the ‘Battle of Algiers’ – a title he found ironic – and found a filmmaker, Gillo Pontecorvo, to adopt it for the big screen. The resulting movie was acclaimed upon its release but banned in France for many years because of its portrayal of French atrocities.
Yet it was Yacef and Pontecorvo’s enduring war film, with its stark imagery and nonprofessional cast, that etched wartime Algiers into the public imagination. The FLN may have lost on the tactical level, but it was their spirit that wrote the history of the struggle after. In the final tally, it turned out more than 3,000 civilians – whether or not they collaborated with the FLN – went missing between 1956 and 1957, apparent casualties of French heavyhandedness during the conflict.
Besides this, the fearless commanders in the battle had made their reputations. Aussaresses in particular went on to enjoy a long career after the war. Almost untouched by the treason committed by his peers in their attempts to kill de Gaulle in the early 1960s, Aussaresses transitioned from a practitioner to a mentor, lecturing American Green Berets on the fine art of counterinsurgency.
Whether French methods in Algiers were justified to prevent terrorism is almost moot given how much more violence, committed by guerrillas and pied-noirs, occurred during the rest of the Algerian War that spanned nine years. Pontecorvo’s adaptation of Yacef’s work showed both sides undertaking monstrous deeds and justifying these. Indeed, before his capture in 1957, Saadi Yacef told the French ethnologist Germain Tillion, “Innocent blood cries out for vengeance!”
The bitter end
The Battle of Algiers was a testament to French resolve in a time of crisis. Yet as soon as it was over, the success of crushing the FLN in the cities dissipated.
It wasn’t until the turn of the century, however, when Aussaresses had aged to a softspoken old man who covered his bad eye with a patch, that the painful memories from the war were rekindled. In a tell-all book published more than 40 years after the events he took part in, Aussaresses chronicled the torture he inflicted on prisoners for the sake of vital intelligence.
Despite confessing what amounted to crimes against humanity, justice wasn’t forthcoming for a war hero and a pensioner. The worst of it was a minor court case that fined him a petty sum. Aussaresses died in 2013 at the ripe age of 95. “I consider I did my difficult duty of a soldier implicated in a difficult mission,” was his final say on his reputation. He was unrepentant until the end.
The darkest aspects of the Algerian War didn’t hit home for the French public until
“IN 1992 ALGERIA WAS ENGULFED BY ANOTHER CIVIL WAR AFTER THE MILITARY NULLIFIED ELECTIONS WON BY HARDLINE ISLAMISTS. THE RESULTING BLOODSHED LEFT AN ESTIMATED 200,000 KILLED”
one FLN veteran, Louisette Ighilahriz, was interviewed by Le Monde in 2000. According to Ighilahriz, after being captured by the French in 1958 she was brought to a camp and raped multiple times, often left naked and bleeding in solitary confinement. If it weren’t for the kindness of a mysterious French doctor, she said, her captivity would’ve been worse.
The French press knew about the military’s widespread torture and detention of enemy combatants in the Algerian War. But when they tried holding the army accountable, the official line was pointing at the FLN – the rebels mutilated their victims and massacred citizens, wasn’t it only fair to be as harsh?
Loyal soldiers like Aussaresses embraced this view and remained firm in the personal belief that such methods, permitted by the government, helped to save innocent lives. But for commanders like General Massu, reconciling their actions with their honour proved impossible.
Although the FLN lost Algiers, the French did not gain an upper hand where it counted most, and the battle failed to bring a lasting victory. While French commanders gloated over the success of their border defences and the wholesale destruction wrought on entire FLN units, the war’s cost and political ramifications jeopardised France’s standing in the world.
It didn’t help that a political rift between Paris and Algiers almost caused a civil war. In 1958 thousands of angry colons stormed the government house in Algiers, accompanied by sympathetic officers, with the revered General Raoul Salan at their head. The assembly demanded an end to France’s government, the Fourth Republic, and the return of Charles de Gaulle to power.
Both conditions were fulfilled in a matter of days, yet within four years the very same agitators who believed in de Gaulle’s leadership plotted his death. The same tactics used by the Casbah terrorists were appropriated by the shadowy Organisation l’armée secrete, or OAS, an unholy alliance of Ultras and French officers, for a bombing and arson campaign across mainland France and Algeria in 1961.
When independence for Algeria was settled, marking France’s final and complete departure from North Africa and the Arab world, thousands of colons fled its cities and towns, taking whatever money and possessions they could. As a final blow to the Algerian nationalists, the Ultras and the OAS sabotaged farms and factories before they were abandoned, leaving grim surprises for the new state.
Military losses for the French between 1954 and 1962 reached 17,456 killed and some 65,000 wounded. The Muslim harkis suffered 30,000 dead, adding to anywhere between 150,000 and 1 million Algerian fatalities.
What befell the loyal harkis at war’s end was equally tragic. Once disarmed by the French, they were left at the mercy of the FLN. This triggered another exodus as Arab and Berber veterans, fearing gruesome deaths at the hands of their former enemies, desperately tried to reach France.
Algeria gained its independence on 5 July 1962 but slid into military dictatorship in 1965. In 1992 Algeria was engulfed by another civil war after the military nullified elections won by hardline Islamists. The resulting bloodshed left an estimated 200,000 killed.
As in America’s own crucible in Vietnam, the task of using a conventional army to defeat a local population was a fool’s errand. Whatever counterinsurgency is supposed to mean, it almost always doesn’t work as intended. This is the timeless lesson of Algiers, where a group of pitiless soldiers turned a slum into a charnel house and thought they had found a new science for organised violence. Their success was a mirage. Ultimately they still lost the war.