Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (99 page)

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 association 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
Algérie française
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 overthrow 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 l’Armée Secrète)
, 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 illustrates 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.
¹²⁷

Nor did the corruption stop at the o
AS
. 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.’
¹²⁹

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 l’Algérie
, 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 murdered. The French commander, General Ailleret, retaliated by destroying the last redoubt of
Algérie française
, 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 hospitals, 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.
¹³²

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.

FIFTEEN
Caliban’s Kingdoms

In March 1959 Evelyn Waugh, visiting East Africa, wrote to his wife: ‘I spent one day with the Masai …. They had a lovely time during the Mau Mau rising. They were enlisted and told to bring in all the Kikuyus’ arms. Back they proudly came with baskets of severed limbs.’
¹
Waugh had provided a gruesomely imaginative foretaste of independent Africa in his pre-war novels
Black Mischief
and
Scoop.
Now the anarchist in him joyfully scented fiction come true: the confusion of aims and tongues, the disintegration of ephemeral order, the return to chaos.

We have seen in Chapter Four that it is impossible to make any truthful generalization about colonialism. The same is true of the decolonizing process. The most that can accurately be said is: it occurred. All the rest is propaganda;
ex post facto
rationalization. Colonialism has been presented as a conspiracy of capitalist states; decolonization as a further conspiracy when it became economically more prudent to switch to ‘neo-colonialism’. But if there was a conspiracy, why did the conspirators never meet or exchange plans and ideas? The truth is colonialism was born in intense rivalry and died in it. The colonial powers did not conspire against the natives. They conspired against each other. Each colonial power hated all the rest, despised their methods, rejoiced in their misfortunes and happily aggravated them when convenient. They would not co-operate even when imperative self-interest demanded. In August 1941, on the eve of the Japanese onslaught, it was found that, though Britain and the Netherlands had been wartime allies for fourteen months, nothing whatever had been done to co-ordinate the defence plans of their South-East Asian empires.
²
During the entire process of decolonization, 1945–75, the colonial powers never once met together to decide how they were going to do it, nor do there seem to have been even informal efforts at co-ordination. The historian who looks for evidence of such contacts finds nothing but a hole.

One reason there was no alignment of policy for decolonization was that neither of the two biggest colonial powers, Britain and France, actually possessed one. Both made logical noises. In reality all was expediency. When de Gaulle set up his Free French standard in 1940, France’s Arab and Indo-Chinese territories stuck to Vichy; only black Africa rallied to him. As a result, at the January 1944 Brazzaville Conference, he opened for them the road to freedom. But the colonial officials who attended it made a different interpretation: ‘The formation of independent governments in the colonies, however far off, cannot be contemplated,’ they reported. ‘We visualize empire in the Roman, not the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term.’
³
De Gaulle’s post-war government abolished forced labour and the hated penal code for natives; but a rising in Madagascar in 1947 was put down with astonishing ferocity, 80,000 natives dying.
⁴
As late as 1957, François Mitterrand declared: ‘Without Africa, France will have no history in the twenty-first century.’ Until the
débâcle
in Algeria, French policy was a maze of contradictions: old-style paternalism in the jungle and the bush, with
colon
firebrands and highly educated black nationalists sitting cheek by jowl in the Paris Assembly. Sometimes an ‘African’ deputy moved from a ‘white’ to a ‘black’ constituency, as did the Colonial Under-Secretary, Dr Aujoulat, in 1951, changing his politics in the process and campaigning under the slogan ‘His face may be white but his heart is as black as a black man’s.’
⁵

When de Gaulle returned to power in May 1958 and surveyed the shattered Fourth Republic and the mess in Algeria, he abruptly decided to turn French black Africans loose. In the 28 September referendum, they were given the choice of voting ‘Yes’ (interdependence) or ‘No’ (separation). All but Guinea and Madagascar voted ‘Yes’; but it was independence by another name. De Gaulle wanted to keep some kind of union together. On 12 December 1959, at a meeting of French African heads of state at St Louis, he told them: ‘As the Pilgrims of Emmaus said to the traveller: “Abide with us: for it is towards evening, and the day is far spent.”’
⁶
But they chose ‘association’, meaning aid and military backing, rather than ‘community’. Some of these African leaders, such as Houphouët-Boigny (Ivory Coast), Philibert Tsiranana (Malagasy), Léopold Senghor (Senegal), Hamani Diori (Niger), Ahmadou Ahidjo (Cameroon), Leon M’Ba (Gabon), François Tombalbaye (Chad), and Mokhtar Ould Daddah (Mauritania), formed a personal relationship with the mesmeric general: they ‘became my intimates’ as he put it.
⁷
But this was transitory; all went their separate ways. All these territories, the Ivory Coast excepted, were very poor. Some were more ‘fit’ for independence than others; some not at all. But it is impossible to
discern any principles behind the process by which they secured it, other than France’s decision to have done with them.