The Homing Pigeons of Algiers

...The fact is that the Fourth and Fifth Republic's more or less "phoney" wars of colonial, "disengagement," whether in Indochina, Madagascar, Algeria or elsewhere, have never been backed by the population of metropolitan France and have concerned mainly a peculiar elite of professional soldiers, colonialists, or rightist agitators...

...In the Spring of 1954, I happened to spend an Easter vacation in Algeria...

...In the Army the sponge was liberally used to wipe out the memory of loyalty to the Vichy Government...

...An appended editorial note added that she had founded in October 1955 the agency for which they all worked together, recruiting its personnel not only among French educational experts but among native Algerians too, whether Moslems, Christians or Jews...

...and we know also of ratonnades, real pogroms carried out by French paratroopers even in the Algerian sections of such industrial centers of metropolitan France as Metz...

...Some journalists and politicians were arrested, a few even tried and executed, often after shockingly long delays or in equally shocking haste...

...When the FLN in recent months began to acquire gradually the kind of official recognition that might enable it to demand retribution for crimes committed against its supporters, many members of the French Armed forces and of the special security units must have felt that they were out on a limb, committed to a way of life that might soon cease to enjoy any kind of legality or official encouragement...

...After all, Algiers is just about as close to Paris as Chicago is to New York, and its new oil, natural gas and mining resources no further from the Paris Bourse than those of Oklahoma or Texas from Wall Street...

...But I fought my case, won it close on two years later and was able to return to my Paris home late in 1959...

...One wonders indeed how much of the money collected by supposed OAS agents has actually reached the OAS treasury...

...Again and again, in recent decades, thinkers have attributed the vagaries of French political behavior to a "crisis of the regime...

...Whole sections of the population, as now the extremist European elements in Algiers and Oran, refuse to comply with the imperatives of democratic authority if these fail to be in harmony with their own special interests...

...For a while, the Third Republic had managed to keep them busy with colonial conquests in Indochina and Morocco, after 1918 in Syria and Lebanon too...

...The willingness of French officers and security agents to cooperate at all times with extremist elements of the Right was moreover encouraged by the security policies adopted by the NATO powers in the Cold War...

...Actually, we face in France a crisis of citizenship too...

...We know of whole Algerian villages that have been wiped out by the Army in ratissage operations, men, women and children, because they had supplied food to FLN forces...

...The cease-fire agreement, like the Liberation in 1944, officially closes an inglorious period in French history...

...But in France, as in several other modern nations, authority has gradually discredited itself in the eyes of many citizens as a result of some very strange phenomena of its own sociology...

...This peculiarity [explains le Monde] aroused the suspicions of the various security agencies, whether civilian or military...

...In the police and especially in all French security agencies, most of those who might have been tried for their complicity in crimes committed under the Nazi occupation had either been double agents at the time, working also for Allied strategic services, or had been supplied with forged documents to prove that they had been active in the Resistance...

...On the Boulevards and elsewhere, the mood of the public was about as indifferent as it had been some years ago when Mendes-France had announced the end of the equally disastrous war in Indochina...

...For all these reasons, I continued to be watched until 1958, when I was suddenly expelled from France by an order signed, oddly enough, when I happened not to be in France at all...

...Yet Premier Michel Debr6, on June 25, 1959, had stated, in a speech to the Senate: "I insist on declaring to the Assembly that this book consists of a wholesale fabrication...

...even in prisoner-of-war camps, German SS-men were offered an escape from the Allied war crimes teams through enlistment in the Foreign Legion for immediate service in the Far East...

...A couple of years ago, while reviewing in Commentary the published memoirs of Hoess, Commandant in Ausschwitz, I drew attention to some of these phenomena: governments are tending more and more to recruit potential criminals as ideal material for special jobs in their armed forces and security agencies...

...The second task to be undertaken concerns mainly the French Government...

...In the Cold War, many activist members of former fascist groups willingly served such purposes while waging their own guerrilla warfare against the French Communist party and later against the FLN...

...Former Minister Jacques Souswile, once a friend of Minister Andre Malraux, may find himself soon in much the same position as, in 1944, such writers as Drieu La Rochelle or Robert Brasillach who, after flirting with Nazism, woke up one day from their Nietzschean dreams of power to see themselves condemned to death as traitors...

...One week end, on the recommendation of Albert Camus, I visited the novelist Mouloud Feraoun in Fort National, an administrative center in the mountains of his native Kabylia, where he was President of the school for boys, in fact a French civil servant...

...Again and again, as OAS strong-arm men, thugs, conspirators and bandits are now being arrested, we are casually informed that they happen to be deserters from paratroop regiments, from the Foreign Legion or from other highly compromised elements of the Armed Forces or the Civil Service...

...The files of French security agencies thus became veritable encyclopaedias of malicious gossip concerning all individuals who might at all be suspected, however unjustly, of sympathizing with these tabu causes...

...Finally, at a gathering of younger poets who were planning the publication of a little magazine, the Algerian poet Kateb Yacine, subsequently an FLN supporter, was known to have spent an evening in my home...

...Yet it would be wrong to attribute all the insubordination and sedition displayed by French extremists in the last stages of the Algerian War to such domestic phenomena, whether political, social or economic...

...Yet I had been assured by French security agents, in 1959, that he was a known FLN sympathizer and that my mere friendship with him sufficed to make me suspect too...

...For a long time to come, we may thus expect sporadic acts of violence, even after the OAS strongholds in Oran and Algiers capitulate...

...But they generally prove to be great "security risks" too...

...On my return to Algiers, I was constantly shadowed, later on my return to Paris too...

...Such potential criminals prove indeed to be remarkably docile when trained to perform unpleasant tasks that would revolt more normal citizens...

...It has even been reported on several occasions that the Algerian War was being used as a testing-ground for new NATO weapons and guerrilla tactics...

...Any Moslem who could be suspected of being at all critical of French policies, however wavering or short-lived, would sooner or later be denounced as an FLN agent...

...General de Gaulle and his wartime supporters who came briefly to power in France after the Liberation might have found it difficult, if left to themselves, to agree to the apparently saintly policies of leniency that were applied to most former collaborationists...

...I was questioned mainly about my contacts with Algerian intellectuals whose names, in most cases, were unknown to me...

...but similar denunciations of indiscriminately anti-Communist conspiracy or of rabidly anti-Arab activity interested nobody, though these lunatic-fringe activities might actually threaten public order...

...Obviously, these men had once been specially recruited and trained for this kind of job...

...Firstly, the job of reconstruction, after eight years of warfare and hundreds of years of under-development, will prove to be far greater than anything that France alone can undertake...

...In official speeches of ministers and throughout the French press, Feraoun was posthumously proclaimed to have always been a man of peace and a loyal friend of France...

...It would not be absurd to believe that the OAS, which is led by General Salan with the help of a large staff of deserters from the armed forces and from security agencies, has done little else, in its more criminal actions of recent months, but continue to implement those extremist policies that had been practiced earlier by the army in Algeria and even in the police stations and prisons of metropolitan France...

...Unlike other such wars, the Algerian War, however, was also a matter of life and death for a million North African Frenchmen who are anxious to preserve their privileges as a local Herrenrasse...

...But if France has shocked us again and again, since 1954, by its frequent recourse to Gestapo methods of torturing and SS practices of genocide, this is certainly because the French police and the French Army, after 1944, had never been properly purged of those fascist elements which had previously collaborated with the Nazis in occupied France or now studiously copied Nazi methods of retaliation, repression and "questioning...

...Many former collaborationist officers were transferred to duties in Indochina or occupied Germany, if purges threatened them in France...

...The French Army's professional status-seekers had thus found, ever since the Algerian rebels first went into action in November 1954, considerable support in this margin of jingoists and other enemies of all democratic regimes which somehow seem to lack the dash and swagger that once characterized Empire-building...

...During the first trial, one young Moslem, Said Ayadi, vanished in the Army premises where he was held and has never been seen again...

...Men trained to torture and mur der Moslems are now fighting General de Gaulle's government in a guerrilla war that goes on after the cease-fire in the barricaded streets of Algiers and Oran, cities from which, in March, it had for several weeks been impossible to escape to metropolitan France without an exit permit granted by some clandestine OAS agency...

...Will the French authorities have the courage and integrity to face all these consequences of their own folly...

...In every democracy, a certain amount of governmental schizophrenia is to be expected as normal: a judiciary which would never be called upon to defend the rights of the individual against the aberrations of the legislative or the encroachments of the executive would lose its most glorious function...

...Nor is this an isolated example of contradictory attitudes or, as optimists might believe, of an "evolution" of the government's stand on the whole Algerian issue...

...Nor are these suppositions at all colored by personal bitterness...

...From all this, it can indeed be seen that French authorities were quite schizophrenic in their attitudes toward this official agency, their left hand never really wanting to know, until it was too late, what their right was up to...

...Successive French governments of the postwar period had eagerly encouraged French interests to invest heavily in all sorts of plans to develop the backward Algerian economy...

...The lunatic fringe, mirabile dictu, even includes a certain number of families of the haute juiverie of Algiers who have long been personal friends and supporters of Jacques Soustelle, former Government Commissioner in Algeria, former Cabinet Minister, former Nouvelle Revue Fran caise author, former putschist and, in recent months, a conspirator who lives in hiding in Italy or "somewhere in France...

...Some of these men were even working in Allied War Crimes teams, where their duties consisted mainly in locating and suppressing, in the Allied Documents Centre in Berlin, everything that, in the seized Nazi archives, might possibly compromise their colleagues or superiors...

...Whatever purges occurred in Algeria or France after the Liberation thus lacked the conviction or the legality of organized denazification...

...It now remains to be seen whether General de Gaulle, in the next twelve months, will have the courage and the vision to purge the ranks of his armed forces, his civil service and his own supporters, of all these unworthy representatives of authority...

...When the rebellion began in Algeria late in 1954, all sorts of members of the Moslem elite who had no connection at all with the FLN had thus been listed for a long while as suspects and were henceforth treated, by the Army and the security agencies, as if they were active supporters or agents of the FLN...

...They have friends, relatives and supporters in metropolitan France too, where a good quarter of a million other embittered Frenchmen have sought refuge in the past ten years as they drifted back from Indochina, Tunisia and Morocco when the white man no longer reigned supreme...

...A first arrest occurred in 1956...

...Many of these particularly compromised agents were likewise transferred, after 1944, to Occupied Germany, North Africa or other colonial areas where serious man-power shortages were hampering administration and none of the former victims or foes would be likely to recognize them...

...The victorious Allies of 1944 and, later, our international leaders in the Cold War must bear a heavy share of blame for the atrocities perpetrated in France or Algeria in the past eight years...

...Finally, as an example of the kind of special vested interest that was at stake, the proud Foreign Legion, with its French officers and its motley crowd of Germans, many of them former SS men, and other foreigners who no longer have any home, had in Algeria its last possible base, since the French law that originally established it provides that it should never be permanently stationed in metropolitan France...

...The OAS is the bad conscience of France...

...On March 22nd, le Monde announced briefly that the officially ordered seizure of all copies of Lac Gangrene, a book reporting details of alleged cases of torturing, had been lifted, which suggests that the contested material of the book had meanwhile been proven to be true...

...It would therefore be wrong to state sweepingly that there had never been in France any enthusiasm at all for the Algerian War...

...It is purely and simply a mendacious fabrication and has been compiled by two authors who are paid by the Communist party...

...But those who recruited them seem to have ignored the known psychological fact that the kind of anti-social instability which guarantees a man the aptitudes required for successful adaptation to the life of a more or less legalized thug may also make him feel just as few qualms about turning against the authorities that recruited and trained him...

...The Premier has not found it necessary to withdraw these curious statements which, in most civilized countries, would now justify an action for slander before the courts...

...The average Frenchman had learned his bitter lesson of liberal anti-colonialism under the German occupation of his own country: if the Algerian Moslems or any other colonial people now wants its freedom under a government of its own, let them have it...

...Are we returning, as in 1944, to "business as usual," while a majority of those who committed crimes against humanity in North Africa are pushed temporarily into the background, but remain ready to emerge again as double-agents, torturers, murderers, thugs or rebels in France's next political crisis...

...True, the French had never been par titularly squeamish about the methods used by the military and the police in conquered North Africa: already in the reign of Napoleon III, there had been nasty rumors of practices that would now be called genocidal...

...Too many of France's leading enterprises, with plenty of funds available for political agitation and seditious activities, were now threatened with the loss of their North African investments and subsidiaries...

...some, especially after 1954, reached positions of real power and influence in their fields...

...But we now seem to lack vast expanses of tropical forest or desert in which to expend a nation's surplus energies, and conspiring against the Republic had thus become, in France, one of the main peace-time occupations of certain elements in the French Army that recruits so many of its officers from families that bear or claim titles from the monarchy or the Napoleonic regime...

...it took me months to check their identities and many of them proved to be known only to have had brief contacts with Camus or Feraoun, none whatsoever with me...

...On December 19, 1959, an Algiers court sentenced two monitors and two casual employees of the agency to sentences of three months or eight months of imprisonment...

...These enemies had indeed been active in every crisis of the Republic since France's defeat in 1871 in the Franco-Prussian War, but paradoxically responsible for France's defeat in 1940 too...

...For a while, of course, such transferred officers or agents no longer enjoyed the benefit of routine promotions...

...In March 1962, Feraoun was murdered in Algiers by the OAS, together with five other Moslem or Christian colleagues who worked with him in a government-sponsored agency which campaigns against illiteracy and disease in the more backward parts of Algeria...

...In May and June 1959, about twenty people attached to the agency were again arrested, six of them imprisoned...

...But its very legality, has already been impugned in the Assemblee Nationale, where extremist deputies such as Biaggi have ranted against the government and its supporters and demanded that they be summarily executed as traitors...

...When the cease-fire after eight years of war in Algeria was at last announced on March 17th, no sirens screamed in Paris, no anxious mothers fell down on their knees to pray in the streets, no crowds foregathered to burst into Te Deums...

...From a couple of wire-tapped calls I had received at home from Antonina Valentin, who was then writing a biography of Picasso and consulted me about American works published on her subject, I was also known to the DST as a foreign resident of Paris who was a potential source of information about such outstanding Communists as the great Spanish painter...

...Before the French National Assembly, Minister Joxe stated, however, on March 21st, that this did not protect individuals whose criminal actions were unworthy of France...

...French official estimates list, for eight years of war, less than two hundred thousand casualties in the ranks of the FLN armed forces and among the Moslem victims of its various terrorist activities in Algeria and France...

...they pursued with their vexations this agency of the Ministry of Education, which was fighting illiteracy but refrained from participating in any campaign to condition the Moslem population politically...

...In desperation, they then joined the OAS which, in any case, seems to be even less squeamish about the moral character of its strong-arm men than the French Army and security forces: in recent months, it has thus been almost impossible for the ordinary police in metropolitan France to distinguish very clearly between routine underworld crimes and the kidnappings, blackmail ventures and armed robberies that are part of the fund-raising campaigns of the OAS...

...In every nation, there exists at all times a fringe of "Texans" ready to fight any war, no matter how difficult it may be to justify it to the world-at-large...

...of its present government, which was originally brought to power by a putsch in which those who later established the OAS had cooperated...

...My phone wires were tapped intermittently, I was subjected to all sorts of other investigatory procedures and, in 1955, was suddenly summoned to the headquarters of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) in the Rue des Saussaies and grilled there for a whole day...

...The Algerian War, in particular, offered great opportunities of promotion to all officers and security agents who had the reputation of being tough, no matter how this reputation had been gained...

...In July 1957, in the heat of the battle of Algiers, sixteen members of the agency's personnel were tried before an Algiers court-martial: two were condemned but paroled, one young Moslem was condemned to imprisonment for one year, thirteen were acquitted...

...But pressures from abroad had been brought to bear on the Free French authorities which had never enjoyed, in exile, the full confidence of Washington and Whitehall, where curiously ambiguous contacts had been maintained to the very last with both Petain and Laval...

...I would not like it to be said here that this infamous book, drafted by two infamous authors, represents in any detail even the shadow of truth...

...Spectacular financial and technical aid will be required from international sources too, as Genevieve Tabouis reported two days before the cease-fire, on her return from Geneva, where United Nations' experts were already estimating that aid to the Congo, in the past year, will prove to have been child's play compared with the aid required by Algeria...

...In France a curious mystique of the Army, inherited from every conceivable military adventure since those of Louis XIV or Napoleon, and responsible, among other absurdities of French history, for the affaire Dreyfus, has long kept this lunatic fringe more numerous or virulent than in most other European nations...

...Can they at long last be expected to purge their own armed forces and civil service...

...Besides, great vested interests in agriculture, mining and industry were at stake, to say nothing of banking, insurance, commerce and real estate...

...We know also of many individuals who have disappeared after having been arrested and questioned, of many proven murders that have occurred in premises of the Army or the police, of a great number of corpses of hideously manhandled Algerians that have been fished out of the Seine, where they had been thrown to drown, by the Paris police, when they were no longer in a condition to save themselves by swimming...

...In fact, all through March 18th too, business went on more or less as usual, the announcement of Grace Kelly's return to the screen made the headlines too, and only in the courtyard of the Sorbonne did a relatively small and very orderly crowd of students meet briefly to hoist side by side the flags of the Fifth Republic and of the FLN...

...The cease-fire agreement includes a clause that guarantees a political amnesty and, on both sides, forbids reprisals for the political beliefs or activities of individuals during the war years...

...The French Army and security forces thus escaped being systematically purged of those fascist or collaborationist elements which had been previously ready to fight the Allies or directly responsible in France for the implementation of Nazi policies...

...Had the French Communist party suddenly gone underground and started a campaign of bombings, an immediate wave of arrests would probably have made short shrift of all those responsible...

...In le Monde of March 18th, Germaine Teillon published a moving article on her own associations with Feraoun and his murdered colleagues...

...All this required funds that, especially in a nation of accountants like France, must have been drawn from some earmarked budgetary reserves, approved at some level of the administrative hierarchy...

...In postwar Europe, we can observe the survival of certain patterns of behavior that once characterized the Resistance under the German occupation...

...The new Algerian Government can now be expected to demand that many of these individuals, as well as many OAS criminals who are continuing to murder Moslems at random in Oran and Algiers, be put on trial...

...French police and intelligence agencies have moreover a deeply rooted tradition of relying to a great extent on the cooperation of outsiders, underworld characters or foreign agents whom they can blackmail into serving their purposes, whether as informers or mere thugs...

...The FLN, on the other hand, is known to have collected scathing evidence of outrages committed by individual members of the French Army and security forces: torturings, murders, rape, etc...

...But the regime has changed several times and the pattern of these vagaries, whatever their constitutional context, remains very much the same...

...Two urgent tasks must be assumed immediately in Algeria...

...As time went by, however, many managed to escape identification so well that they could again be promoted...

...Their forces were indeed composed mainly of OAS sympathizers or of men who had honestly been barking up the wrong tree for so long that they now had no idea where they should strike...

...Two members of the French cabinet were rushed from Paris to attend the funeral in Algiers, on the eve of the announcement of the cease-fire agreement...

...But it also happens that this elite in the Army, the police, and the administration draws reserves from a fairly large class of supporters...

...In a vicious circle, an increasingly ungovernable nation finds itself governed by increasingly unconstitutional or violent methods, with authority often represented by increasingly dubious or criminal elements...

...Surely, Feraoun's murderers were men who, sharing this opinion of him, might now be suspected of belonging to some wild-cat group that had at one time cooperated with those Algiers representatives of the DST who had once listed me too as a suspect, or even of consisting to some extent of deserters from the DST who might have now joined the OAS...

...Will the trial of General Salan, if it ever occurs with him actually standing in the dock, be any less lenient than that of Marshall Petain after the Liberation...

...The whole Algerian War had presented, from its very inception, strange characteristics of violence, brutality and illegality, especially in its treatment of prisoners and its torturing of political suspects...

...We now know, for instance, of many proven cases of torture which involved the use of expensive equipment in carefully prepared hideouts...

...a campaign of intimidation was started then among them, in the course of which a boy, kidnapped by men wearing paratrooper uniforms, also disappeared...

...When, however, the OAS went into action in metropolitan France just about a year ago, French security agencies proved for a long while to be completely incompetent...

...Circles concerned with national education were so shocked by all this that a complaint was filed by a number of civil servants...

...Or are we now destined to experience another moving scene of French national reconciliation, with the schizophrenic nation's divided political mind again achieving, for a while, a semblance of peace and equilibrium, like a patient who has just been subjected to shock-treatment but who may any day become violent again...

...of its whole rag, tag and bobtail of former Poujadists, jingoists and various near-fascist or former collaborationist elements of one kind or another...

...At the grass-roots level, an important section of the European population of Algeria, mainly in Oran and Algiers, has long been planning a kind of Custer's Last Stand of its own, armed to the teeth with weapons, ammunition and supplies stolen, without much difficulty, from official stores...

...He must achieve this in so spectacular a manner that the French population at large will accept these purges and readapt itself to normal standards of democratic authority...

...FLN forces, on the other hand, have estimated total Moslem casualties, including civilians killed in French Army reprisals carried out on individual villages and victims of starvation, at well over a million...

...Be that as it may, in France and elsewhere, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) and other security agencies have concerned themselves for some years almost exclusively with the task of spying on the activities of liberals or leftists who might more or less reasonably be suspected of harboring sympathies for Communist causes...