A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (50 page)

Little did he foresee that it would be under his regime that the Sahara would be lost. But not everybody in France reckoned, even at that early stage, that the Algerian oil was worth fighting the war for. In a booklet,
L’Algérie et la République
, published in the summer of 1958, Raymond Aron, the distinguished writer and contributor to the conservative
Le Figaro
, pointed out that the annual cost of the war “is more or less equal to ten times the profits which would be derived from twenty million tons of crude petroleum,” and that “those who insist or suggest that Algerian autonomy would entail the loss of the petroleum for France are either ignorant or liars….” He predicted: “The best way for France to lose the Sahara oil is to want to keep it for herself.”

Certainly, if it opened bright new prospects for France, at the same time the Saharan oil also opened yet another new dimension for the “internationalising of the Algerian problem”. Henceforth it would focus with sharpest clarity the covetous eyes of the all-powerful Anglo-American oil interests on Algeria. Not always without reason, France would be nagged by suspicions that shady deals were being done with the F.L.N. behind her back, with a view to ensuring that her rivals got in on the ground floor in an independent Algeria. Edward Behr, who was a correspondent in France at the time, recalls how “for a brief spell officer-cadets in French military schools were systematically taught a course in ‘American imperialism’, and it was stated as an incontrovertible fact that the United States had designs on the newly discovered Saharan oil deposits”. In addition to the “Anglo-Saxon” villains in this shadowy oil war, there was also Italy’s maverick oil operator, the unpredictable Enrico Mattei, who was openly to supply the F.L.N. with money and arms in return for future “considerations”. When Mattei’s private plane crashed mysteriously in October 1962, there were strong rumours that, apart from such over-exposed candidates as the C.I.A., French operatives either from the O.A.S.—or even the official secret service, S.D.E.C.E.—might be responsible for his death.

Strained relations with the “Anglo-Saxons”

In the autumn of 1957 the French Press began to find relief from their own governmental worries by knocking hard such American discomfitures as the racial disorders in Little Rock, and the humiliation in space through Russia’s launching of the first sputnik. It was predominantly Algeria that gave France this low threshold of irritability in the first instance—with oil always latent in the background, but there were other factors. If Prime Minister Macmillan could growl at French “tiresomeness”, they also had cause to feel that—
vice versa
—France’s principal allies were being extremely tiresome to her interests.

Specifically, during the brief regime of Félix Gaillard there was an angry flare-up over American and British arms sales to Tunisia. In the wake of Suez both countries had become anxious to repair fences with the Arab world, were increasingly concerned at the incipient flood of Soviet-bloc arms into the Middle East. The United States in particular was showing sensitivity to Arab charges that equipment (notably helicopters) she had supplied France for N.A.T.O. purposes was being massively used to crush the F.L.N. Thus it was decided, by way of a counterbalance, to sell a limited quantity of small arms to the infant Tunisian army, rather than risk Bourguiba turning to the Russian market—as Nasser had done with the Aswan dam. Already there had been angry charges in the French army about British duplicity following the capture of Lee-Enfield rifles in the hands of the F.L.N., although these had in fact been obtained (at last) through the Egyptians out of the vast quantities of material left behind at Suez, and news of the Tunisian deal immediately provoked a violent storm in France.
Le Figaro
rated it “an odious blow by our allies”, while the right-wing
Aurore
at once detected that
l’explication pétrolière
was only too evident; strong riot squad detachments were sent to protect the American and British embassies, and floods of letters poured in to them from parents expressing anger and shock that the Tunisian arms would inevitably end up killing their sons in Algeria. Premier Gaillard declared bitterly that, “If the Atlantic Pact should fall to dust one day, we will know the artisans of its failure”; in his memoirs Harold Macmillan admits, retrospectively, “I think we made a serious error, at a critical moment when France was already nervous and uncertain…. At the time I did not fully realise the true situation in France.” And early in 1958 he was warning the obdurate Dulles “that if the over-sensitive French were upset they might well use the excuse to wreck the prospects of the European Free Trade Area”. The warnings of both premiers proved all too true.

Britain and America sensitised to the war

Disheartening to France as it was encouraging to the F.L.N. in their campaign for “internationalisation” was the growing awareness of the war in both the United States and Britain. Inevitably this brought hostility to France’s role in it. As in France, the Battle of Algiers had done much to publicise the war, and the French anti-torture campaign had had its echo in Anglo-Saxon liberal opinion. In London, in February 1958, Labour delegations demonstrated three days in a row in front of the French Embassy to denounce the conduct of Djamila Bouhired’s trial and demand reprieve of her death sentence. The
Observer
was ticked off privately by the French government for its critical articles by Nora Beloff and John Gale. On 1 April “Algeria Day” received unprecedented support from top Socialists. Mrs Barbara Castle explained pedantically that terrorism was the result of repression, not its cause; and Anthony Wedgwood Benn declared that the French must permit negotiations to bring an end to the war, with the right of self-determination for Algeria.

Across the ocean George Meany, the powerful boss of the American Federation of Labour, had protested to Mollet about the arrest of Algerian trade union leaders in 1956 and, it was reported, asked that Lacoste be disavowed in the name of socialism. More and more enterprising American correspondents were finding their way into the F.L.N. camp, and writing articles sympathetic to the Algerian cause, and in January 1958 two issues of the prestigious
Saturday Evening Post
were confiscated by the French police on this score. Herb Greer, an American journalist who made two clandestine visits to the F.L.N., had already had films taken by him televised across America. As well as telling harrowing tales of French brutality, he revealed to the American public disquieting instances of Algerian mistrust. One
djoundi
in the field is quoted as saying: “I don’t trust America and I don’t know any Arab who does…. You want to be friends with France and so you give them guns and helicopters to fight against us. But you’re also afraid we might win, so just in case you express sympathy, unofficially of course….” Repeatedly Greer encountered suspicion that the Americans were after Algerian oil. Similar plaints were later recorded by Richard and Joan Brace: “on the one hand the United States helps us through the U.N. with wheat and food, and on the other furnishes her ally, France, with the finest military hardware—helicopters, napalm, everything, to kill us off. Which way do the Americans want us, dead or alive?” The essential paradox imposed an unpalatable burden upon the conscience of America which, in those days of naive idealism as yet untarnished by Cuba or Vietnam, still sought to be beloved of all peoples in the world.

Yazid and Chanderli in New York

Through 1957 and 1958, official American policy gradually began to change under the unofficial pressures upon it. Another American correspondent, Michael Clark of the
New York Times
(who supported
Algérie française
), recalls how the “courteous briefing” handed out to itinerant journalists by American diplomats now usually took the line that their function was “to ease the French out as painlessly as possible”. At home, policy had been much influenced by the vigorous campaign of the F.L.N. at the United Nations. Here the F.L.N. were fortunate in the exceptionally good choice they had made by sending in 1956 their two best-fitted talents to New York: Abdelkader Chanderli and M’hamed Yazid. Of middle-class origins, Chanderli had fought in the French campaign of 1940; escaped to Britain; joined de Gaulle; landed in Algiers in 1942; fought through Italy and ended the war in Stuttgart. From then until 1948 he had reported on Palestine for a French newspaper, and the opening of the revolution in 1954 had found him working for U.N.E.S.C.O. in Montevideo. Returning to Cairo, where he worked on Ben Bella’s external delegation, he and Yazid had been sent to New York after the hijacking of Ait Ahmed, the representative-designate, in 1956, and he was to stay there for the next nine years. Yazid had been educated at university in Paris, where he became Secretary-General of the Association of Muslim Students in France. He had joined the P.P.A. at the time of Sétif in 1945, but after violent disagreement with Messali had immediately switched to the F.L.N. in November 1954, and had made his name at the Bandung Conference of April 1955 where the F.L.N. first achieved international recognition. Like Chanderli, a master at public relations, Yazid in September 1958 was to become first Minister of Information of the newly-formed Provisional Government (G.P.R.A.).

Both were extensively-travelled cosmopolitans, popular and at home in salons across the world; good talkers (Yazid often to excess) with perfect command of English, a light-handed sense of humour and easy-going manners. Both had married attractive foreign wives; Chanderli first to a Frenchwoman, then to a beautiful Italian in New York; Yazid to an American, Olive, who helped open many doors to the Algerians in the United States. Both seemed the very antithesis of the hard-eyed revolutionaries and rude men of the maquis bickering among themselves in Tunis. Chanderli exuded a mixture of humanitarian intellectualism and personal well-being, reminding one of a Roy Jenkins (to whom, indeed, he bore some passing physical resemblance), and he achieved early success on the American scene by cultivating liberal “egg-heads” like J. K. Galbraith of Harvard. And through them he became friendly with an up-and-coming young Democrat Senator, John F. Kennedy.

Operating with a tiny staff out of thoroughly bourgeois quarters on East 56th Street, Chanderli and Yazid tirelessly stomped the university campuses, toiled away at the media, lobbied opinion-makers and politicians. “I used the U.S. public relations technique to my own advantage,” Chanderli claimed to the author: “I always tried to tell the truth, at least more truth than the French, and let the French get caught out in their own lies.” Sagely he instructed his own staff: “The United States is the land of truth, so give it the truth. But that of others, of the French who are disgusted by the war, and we’ll add no commentary.” Thus the Algerians in New York accorded the maximum publicity to the anti-torture outcries in France, to the protests of General Bollardière, Professor Capitant and Maître Teitgen. The response was encouragingly favourable. Yazid played hard on America’s hypersensitivity in the “cold war” to the growing Russian competition in the Arab world, and when asked in a 1957 television interview, “Is it true that the F.L.N. is Communist and that the Eastern Bloc is furnishing it with a lot of arms?” he replied: “We are far from being Communist, but when one is at war one needs arms. We prefer Western arms, and if I were to find someone who could procure us any, I can’t see any reason for refusing them.” Immediately a flow of offers from Western arms dealers poured in. By comparison, French public relations seemed maladroit, constrained and defensive. Repeatedly Yazid won points when Soustelle was instructed to decline his challenge to a public debate about Algeria on American television. Jacques Soustelle complained that, when sent to New York by Mollet in 1956, he had found in the French delegation offices a cupboard stuffed with unused material and photographs on F.L.N. atrocities in Algeria, sent by Lacoste for propaganda purposes at the United Nations. “But these were never used by us, for fear of offending the niceties of diplomacy. So how could you win the diplomatic war when you were fighting with your hands tied like this?”

Outrages of terrorism by the F.L.N. such as Mélouza and the Algiers bombings would indeed produce a momentary revulsion in the United States, but the eventual reaction would, perversely, somehow end up as one of irritation against France as being responsible for the war in which such horrors could take place; a psychological process not dissimilar to that in the 1970s where the spate of Palestinian hijacking and terrorism against innocent targets did nothing to make the world less hostile towards Israel. One of the F.L.N. lobbyists at the United Nations is quoted by Edward Behr as saying: “You must realise that every time a bomb explodes in Algiers we are taken more seriously here.”

Support from Senator John F. Kennedy

The F.L.N. had registered its first success at the United Nations in September 1955 by getting the Algerian issue tabled, thereby administering a first rude shock to the French. In Soustelle’s view, this had been “worth more than a convoy of arms” to the rebellion. Seen purely in overt terms of United Nations votes collected, however, 1957 was a disappointment for the F.L.N. despite the intense activities of their representatives there. French diplomacy had fought a hard struggle to maintain that Algeria was an “internal affair” for France, and therefore the United Nations was not competent to deal with it. Were she to be overruled, Foreign Minister Pineau warned Dulles in January, France would have no option but to walk out. Torn between increasing pressure to mollify the Arab world and back Algerian independence, and an anxiety not to hit a tottering ally too hard, the United States agreed to block a tough Afro-Asian resolution to bring the issue of independence directly into the General Assembly. At the February session, to which the F.L.N.’s abortive general strike launching the Battle of Algiers had been geared, the powerful Political Committee, by a narrow vote of 34 to 33 with 10 abstentions, threw out the Afro-Asian resolution, and it was defeated once again in December 1957. Instead, a watered-down text was introduced into the Assembly, piously expressing: “the hope that, in a spirit of co-operation, a peaceful, democratic and just solution will be found by appropriate means, in conformity with the United Nations’ charter”.