Review of "A Savage War of Peace" by Alistair Horne

While I was an undergraduate student at Eastern Michigan University, I had to write a paper for a class in post-World War II European history. I had initially chosen to write about the French president Charles de Gaulle. Then I found about the French war in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. After I found out about the FLN, the Battle of Algiers, and the OAS, any biography of Charles de Gaulle was out the window.

The war in Algeria started with a series of bombings by the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, in French) that began 1 November 1954. Though civilians were killed, the targets were French soldiers, important members of the French community, and Arabs suspected of being collaborators. The French authorities responded by rounding up the usual suspects. But that wasn’t all: the French also engaged in collective reprisals, wiping out villages in the bled, holding suspected terrorists incommunicado, and subjecting them to tortures that seemed out of the Gestapo handbook for police interrogations.

If former members of the Free French had learnt anything from the time they spent in SS dungeons undergoing torture during World War II, it was how to employ the same methods of interrogation against Algerian nationalists fighting for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. La gégène, an electric generator hooked up to body parts like testicles and vaginal labia soon became a favourite instrument for extracting information like name, rank and serial number.

Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962” is an historical account of the war in Algeria. Many students of military history know about how the minuscule Viet Minh forced the mighty French Foreign Legion to surrender at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954, resulting in the loss of French Indochina. Six months later, France faced a new assault on it empire in North Africa. These were shots heard round the Third World. Though the French were easily able to overwhelm the FLN on the field of battle, they lost the peace with the Treaty of Evian on 18 March 1962, giving in on every point. You’d have thought that Paris and Marseille had just been nuked.

Guerrilla warefare is sort of like nuclear war; the last man standing wins the war. If you survive long enough to pass your AK-47 down to your oldest son, the struggle continues indefinitely, until either your side overwhelms the enemy in battle (hardly likely, if you are outnumbered 15 to 1), or the enemy gets bored and decides to go home. As long as the war continues, you hold all the cards.

Naturally, law enforcement officials have a great stake in wiping out guerrilla insurgencies. Any city’s worst nightmare is gangs running the streets, shooting people right and left. You can’t run a city when people are afraid to go the store for a pack of cigarettes for fear of getting shot. The main argument for the legalization of drugs has always been that legalized marijuana would put the gangs out of business.

Alistair Horne divides “A Savage War of Peace” into three parts: “Prelude 1830-1954”; “The War 1954-1958”; and “The Hardest of All Victories 1958-1962.”

Horne starts his prelude with the terrorist attack on the village of Sétif in the Aurès Mountains of northern Algeria in 1945, just as the Germans were surrendering to the victorious Allies at the end of World War II. After the village constable was overwhelmed and a number of pieds noirs were killed―men, women and children― the French came in with guns a-blazing. Every Algerian Arab leader who had ever talked about independence out loud was rounded up while their followers hid out in caves. But General Duval, commander of the gendarmes who made the attackers head for hills, warned: “I can guarantee you ten years of peace of peace. But after that…”

Sétif had the same effect on Algerians that the Boston Massacre had on Americans before the Revolutionary War; it radicalized them. People who thought that they could play by French rules and talk to them found themselves faced with a choice: us or them. Most of the “moderates” sided with the radicals, in part because it was dangerous to be seen talking to the enemy. The FLN killed housands of Algerian Arabs as suspected collaborators between 1954 and 1962.

One of these moderates was Ferhat Abbas, who had fought with the Free French during World War II. He even had the honour of having Charles de Gaulle, commander of the Free French, pin the Medaille d’honneur on his chest during the war. However, Abbas threw his medals away, rejected the offer of a commission in the French Army, and joined the rebels. He paid a high price, spending years of his life in prison. He was eventually Algeria’s first President, but he died in exile in Switzerland after he was overthrown.

Let’s be blunt about it: the FLN was a terrorist group, pure and simple, setting off bombs and assassinating their enemies. Saadi Yacef, who starred as himself in “The Battle of Algiers,” developed the modus operandi of wearing women’s clothes, the abaya, that black table cloth that Arab women wear, and shooting his victims. You might think of the movie “The Battle of Algiers” as cinéma vérité, but this writer looks at it more as the attempt of a retired terrorist to rehabilitate his image.

To be fair, however, the FLN terrorist was a kinder, gentler terrorist, compared to the likes of Osama bin Ladin today. The goal of the FLN was not to inspire terror― the goal of the “real” terrorist― but to drive the French from Algeria. Initially, their orders were not to kill innocent men, women and children, but only to strike at “hard” targets.

However, the FLN weren’t above using civilians as cover. In any major operation, operatives were kept off the street, except those directly involved, so that all the “usual suspects” rounded up were people who had nothing to do with it. You could call it an attempt at recruitment. A lot of people who signed up with the FLN had been tortured by French gendarmes first.

The main event of the war itself was the Battle of Algiers in 1958. Like the Thet Offensive of 1968 in Vietnam, it was a strategic blunder for the FLN. Most of those who took part in the battle were either killed or arrested, including Saadi Yacef, who was arrested rather than killed. He was sentenced to death at least four times, but never executed. When parachutists of the French Foreign Legion under Gen. Jacques Massu saved the day, it seemed to the French inhabitants of Algiers, the pieds noirs, that Algeria would remain forever French. This was another dark moment for the FLN.

So what happened? It seems that the French in Algeria, the pieds noirs, were victims of their own excesses. The French had hoped for a “third force,” a group of moderates in Algeria who could steer the conflict to a middle ground where all parties involved could negotiate. The pieds noirs made any “third force” impossible as they raped, murdered and tortured suspected terrorists, in retaliation for what was done to them. When they adopted the tactics of the FLN, they were lost; they only succeeded in alienating the very people that the French government hoped to win over.

Let’s face it, folks: terrorism works while counter-terrorism doesn’t. By blowing up “soft targets” like hotels and making the enemy overreact, you can easily make yourself look like the victim when the enemy starts murdering civilians and subjects you to cruel and unusual punishment. If you can get the authorities to suspend habeas corpus and throw people in jail right and left for even “looking like a terrorist,” you have won half the battle.

We all have some idea why people become terrorists; it could be because of a moment of religious conversion, or because you believe in a cause. Why would anybody become a police interrogator― just to get a pension and buy a home on the Gulf of Mexico? When somebody becomes an activist, you think he or she might be a little crazy. When a friend tells you that he wants to become a cop, you hope that somebody around you doesn’t light up a joint.

That’s why counter-terrorism never works. While the terrorist may or may not have a touch of sadism, with the counter-terrorist, there seems to be no doubt. Few people want torturers at their parties. You wouldn’t want a torturer as best man at your wedding.

The last phase of the war occurred after Charles de Gaulle was asked to form a government as Premier of France in 1958. By this time, the French in Algeria were rising up against the colonial adminstration in Algeria. Parachutists in the French Army had even landed on the island of Corsica, with the object of overthrowing the government. When the last premier of the Fourth Republic, Pierre Pflimlin, doubted that he had the Army on his side, he offered to resign and let De Gaulle form a government.

De Gaulle got a new constitution and almost imperial powers as President of the Fifth Republic. Never a fan of party politics, De Gaulle soon saw most of the old parties of the Fourth Republic fall by the wayside.

If there was any “third force” in Algeria, it was the pieds noirs, only they were no moderating influence. Their conditions were very clear: l’Algérie française, or French rule in Algeria. Preferably forever.

The mistake that both the French government and the FLN made, it seems, was in underestimating the attachment that the pieds noirs felt towards Algeria rather than France. Some of the French families had been in Algeria since the 1830; many French Algerians had never been to France. To many of the French in Algeria, France was a different country. Most of them had little attachment to France.

The “third force” that French colonial admistrators had banked on turned out to be a nationalism on the part of the French settlers that worked not only against the Arab nationalists but also against the Mother Country. There might have been French people in Algeria willing to declare independence in order to maintain their way of life, if necessary; but thoughts of a white minority declaring independence so that it might rule a non-white majority were a little premature. It wasn’t until 1964 that the whites in Rhodesia declared independence to maintain their white supremacist government in Africa.

The last phase of the war in Algeria was the war against terrorism. All the excesses by the French gendarmes in Algeria, the parachutists under Jacques Massu, and pied noir mobs are well-documented in Horne’s book. However, the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète or OAS) adds a whole new chapter to the history on the war against terrorism.

The OAS was a group of army officers fanatically dedicated to overthrowing the French government in order to preserve French rule in Algeria. It’s leader was Gen. Raoul Salan, known as “The Mandarin” because of his immersion in Asian culture while serving in Indochina. Salan had served under De Gaulle as a member of the Free French. In the beginning, the OAS limited its actions to acts of sabotage and assassinations in Algeria. Once it became clear that President de Gaulle was seriously negotiating with the FLN, however, they turned their sights on France.

By the summer of 1961, the explosion of plastiquages, or “plastic explosives,” became a daily occurance in France. At first, the French public was bewildered. What were the OAS thinking, and what had the French done to deserve this? Then, after a blomb intended for De Gaulle’s Minister of Information, André Malraux, exploded and permanently blinded a four-year-old girl, the public demanded that France cut Algeria loose and destroy the OAS.

By the spring of 1962, the OAS was broken and its leaders were arrested, including Salan. Under the agreement between De Gaulle and FLN, Algeria won it’s indepenence. The FLN got everything that it wanted at the bargaining table, including the rights to recently discovered oil in the Sahara Desert. Initially, the FLN offered the pieds noirs a choice between French and Algerian citizenship and allowed them to stay, but nearly all of them fled to France once the ink on the treaty was dry. Because of their support for the OAS, they had burnt their bridges. Before they left Algeria, they went on an orgy of destruction, burning and tearing apart anything that wasn’t nailed down. Burning their bridges.

The role of Charles de Gaulle in all this is very complex. At what point did he realize that the only way out of the violence in Algeria was for France to leave? He clearly wasn’t ready to show his hand when he flew to Algiers in 1958 and affirmed to the crowd, “Je vous ai compris!” I understood you. He may have understood them, but they clearly didn’t understand them. The pieds noirs in Algeria and the Army had supported De Gaulle because they thought that he was as committed to l’Algérie française as they were, but they were wrong.

The secret of De Gaulle’s appeal among the French was that he loved France at a time when France seemed justified in hating itself after the shame of surrender and the collaborationist regime in Vichy. Committed to France’s “grandeur,” however, he realized that France’s destiny didn’t include Algeria. De Gaulle was willing to invest in a future that included nuclear weapons while foregoing France’s colonies. He lost Algeria, but most of the people thought that he saved France from endless colonial wars.

The FLN has also been profoundly misunderstood. While they saw themselves as committed to Islam but willing to tolerate the peoples of the dhimma, or non-Muslims, the West saw them as agents of Moscow. Khrushchev understood the FLN better than the West; his support for them was never more than lukewarm because he understood that the FLN was only trying to use the Russians like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt had tried to use them. The main supporters of the FLN was always Algeria’s neighbours, Morocco and Tunisia. Once the French granted independence to those countries, the FLN used their territory as bases of operations against the French.

As I said before, the FLN moudjahad was a kinder, gentler terrorist in comparison to the moudjahadine with Al-Qaida. They rarely, if ever, strapped bombs to themselves, or left imrovised explosive devices that could be detonated by children. Their targets were military: off-duty French officers in officers’ clubs, or suspected collaborators (as well as the usual bridges and railways). At least that’s the FLN mythos.

However, once you resort to terrorism, you are compromised, even if your tactics lead to victory. If you resort to terror in the name of Islam, people who think that they are better Muslims than you might resort to the same tactics. In the 1990s, the FLN government in Algeria found itself embroiled in a civil war against the Islamist Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut or FIS). This civil war is a major reason why Algerians have shown little inclination to take to the streets during the “Arab Spring.”

If any lessons are to be learnt from Horne’s books, it’s that terrorism works while counter-terrorism does not. Also, there’s no “third force,” unless another radical group appears, like the OAS. Let's face it: few people want to be on the wrong end of a terrorist bomb. The French found out the hard way― after a useless eight-year war― that people never forget an injustice. Even after more than 100 years of French rule, the Algerians clearly never accepted it. However, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander: Algerians under the FLN became victims of the same tactics that they used against the French with the civil war in the 1990s.

If anything is to be learnt from history, it’s that people don’t learn from history.