The regroupements Camps and the Collapse of Pilote 1

Army commanders in the Chelif, as elsewhere, frustrated by the problems of a hearts and mind approach and the difficulty of winning the support of dispersed populations, fell back on the standard ‘big division’ methods of sweep and search operations, destruction of farmhouses, mass internment, and forced displacement into military camps. By 1960 some 291 camps had been established in the Chelif region, holding a population of a quarter of a million, over 70 per cent of the peasantry. The army also declared zones interdites in which civilians were subject to artillery fire and bombing. Bourdieu and Sayad famously recounted the radical destruction of a traditional peasant order, but peasant communities still exerted, through the djemâa, a degree of collective unity and resistance. For example, through ritual submission to the French (aman) some douars in coming over ‘to the French side’, created protective zones for ALN fighters. Internal to the camps joint families and fractions were able to retain their forms of organization, a basis for self-regulation and resistance.

The Arzew Camp

The chapter examines the success of the forms of psychological warfare deployed during Opération Pilote. A key element of Servier’s plan was to recruit peasants to undertake a crash training programme in the COIN centre at Arzew, so that they could be secretly reinserted in the douars to act as future political leaders. The first cohort proved to be of mediocre ability, and their placement in the douars, known to the FLN, proved to be perilous. The army turned to other techniques of mass brainwashing of the rural population, who were either subjected to propaganda teams or, at Warnier in the Chelif, placed in ‘re-education’ camps. Anthropology, promoted by Servier, was marginalized since army officers could not be rapidly trained in the necessary language and ethnology skills, and instead the army relied on behaviourist theories of conditioned reflexes and mechanical forms of mass indoctrination by repetition of slogans. The prefect, and some officers, were deeply scathing of the impacts of such brainwashing techniques. By August 1957 Opération Pilote was wound down but, despite its major failure, was promoted by top commanders as a great success, and was rapidly expanded across Algeria. The claims made for the experiment were supported by dubious forms of psychological mapping that claimed to plot the success of ‘pacification’.

Psychological Warfare and the Dahra Peasants

Chapter 17 examines how Opération Pilote was implemented through a case study of the military sub-secteur of Ténès. A first problem in implementing Pilote arose from the fact that there were major disagreements within the army about the project. Some commanders resisted the new methods of the psychological warfare 5th bureaux, disliked the creation of a ‘parallel’ hierarchy of political commissars, while major tensions emerged between the civil authorities, the prefect Chevrier, and the generals. A close study of Pilote in the Dahra mountains shows that the aim of ‘pacification’ of each douar by cleansing the ALN and installing harkis autodefense, schools, medical teams, and a proto-municipal government was only successful in two highly mediatized locations, the Breira mine and Bou Maad. Far more typical was the situation in the Djebel Bissa where, following large-scale sweep operations and mass arrests, the army was unable to secure the terrain, and moved on rapidly before consolidating new communal organizations. The army command, frustrated at the slowness of Servier’s ‘hearts and minds’ approach, rapidly reverted to traditional methods of colonial warfare, the creation of zones interdites, bombing of civil populations, starvation, and the forced mass evacuation of peasants into army camps. A generalized ‘Massu model’ of cutting the vital ALN dependency on urban-rural supply networks was also tried in Ténès but failed.

From Earthquake to ‘Red Maquis’, September 1954 to June 1956

The chapter examines how the Communist Party, following the decision of June 1955 to organize the paramilitary Combattants de la libération (CDL), established a short-lived guerrilla, the so-called ‘Red Maquis’, in the Chelif region. The clandestine structure had begun to take root as a consequence of the massive earthquake of September 1954, centred on Orleansville, that exposed the long-term failure of the colonial state to develop the rural economy. The communists rapidly created the Fédération des sinistrés that established a network of peasant cells that soon became the base of the Red Maquis. While the communists were successful in creating a guerrilla base centred on Medjadja, the main group inserted by Laban and Maillot in the Beni Boudouane was rapidly located and destroyed by the army, assisted by the bachaga Boualam. The catastrophic failure of the Red Maquis highlighted the failure of the Algiers-based central committee to prepare the ground for a guerrilla movement. However, several key participants escaped the military encirclement and were soon absorbed into the FLN on the dissolution of the CDL in July 1956.

The Communist Party and Peasant Mobilization, c.1932–48

The Algerian Communist Party (PCA) played a particularly important role in the anti-colonial movement in the Chelif region, a prominence that explains why it was chosen as the primary base for the ‘Red Maquis’ guerrilla force in 1956. Chapter 7 looks at the way in which the PCA, dominated by the French Communist Party, initially opposed nationalism and followed the orthodox Marxist doctrine that the peasantry could not constitute a revolutionary class, a vanguard role that could only be assumed by an industrial or urban proletariat. In the Chelif region the veteran communist and trade union leader Mohamed Marouf reflected this position and focused propaganda work on the farm labourers of the plain while neglecting the mountain peasants that were seen as a form of seasonal, blackleg labour. However, from 1932 onwards a minority movement began to emerge in the PCA that was favourable to a peasant-based strategy, and in 1944 this led to the creation of the Syndicat des petits cultivateurs (SPC). The peasant-based movement that developed in the Aurès, Tlemçen, and Chelif mountains during the late 1940s and prepared the ground for a later guerrilla movement.

Introduction

A key aspect of the colonial state was a geo-political dualism of space in which settlers occupied the rich agricultural plain and urban centres while Algerian peasants inhabited the communes mixtes, the forests and mountains of the interior. After the First World War the caids, the traditional élites that governed the peasants through indirect rule and patron-client relations, entered a crisis of legitimacy and were challenged by communist and nationalist movements. Marxists and historians have tended to perceive the peasants as lacking in political consciousness, incapable of organized resistance, but a new social history, by restoring agency to the lowest strata of the colonized, demonstrates that they assumed a key role in the long-term move towards insurrection. Contrary to the conventional interpretation of rural revolution as a movement initiated by a vanguard party of urban militants, the nationalists adapted to, and built upon, the traditional social and political structures of the peasant community, including the village assemblies. The colonial state largely failed in its attempts to cut the root cause of rebellion through economic modernization of the peasant economy. After 1956 the French launched Opération Pilote, a massive counterinsurgent experiment that deployed anthropology and psychological warfare, but signally failed to contain an insurrection that was embedded within the family, kin, and associational structures of rural society.

The Genesis of Opération Pilote

In January 1957 the military and colonial government accepted a master plan drawn up by the anthropologist Jean Servier to undertake Opération Pilote in the Chelif region, the biggest counterinsurgency (COIN) experiment of the Algerian War. The arrival of Salan and Indochina specialists in command accelerated the adoption of the doctrine of revolutionary warfare, that victory over the FLN could not be achieved by conventional ‘big’ force operations, but only through winning over the indigenous population. The catastrophic failure of counterinsurgency in Kabylia in late 1956 diverted attention to the Chelif where a dispersed population was seen as advantageous to COIN operations. Servier’s plan was linked to the revival of Lucien Paye’s communal reform of 1945 to 1948, seen as the key reform to retain Algérie française. By late 1956 the colonial government and military had rapidly lost control of the Dahra and Ouarsenis mountains, a collapse signalled by the evacuation of isolated colons, and the aim was to ‘reconquer’ the interior through driving the ALN and its OPA structures from each douar, and replacing it by ‘djemâa amie’ that could form the core of future rural municipalities in which peasants could take on board their own local government and auto-defense. Unable to guarantee open elections Opération Pilote aimed to secretly train future douar leaders in the psychological warfare centre at Arzew.

Creating the FLN Counter-state

This chapter examines how the rural population responded to the presence of FLN forces in their midst. Internal FLN documents captured by the French in September 1957 for kasma 4311, a grouping of four douars in the eastern Chelif, reveal the sophisticated counter-state that was created at the local level. The aim of the ALN in the mountains was, as far as possible, to isolate the population from the colonial administration and to prevent informing, but to do so the guerrillas needed to offer a degree of rebel governance. The detailed kasma reports and accounts reveal how the ALN assumed key state functions, including food supply, civil registration, taxation, education, health care, social welfare, and justice. Through a progressive redistributive taxation policy, funds were transferred from the more wealthy in the towns to the famished peasantry. Peasant support for the FLN was not only moral or ideological, but was also grounded in the significant material rewards of wages, pensions, and family allowances. A key problem facing the ALN was the inability to protect the population from military repression and violence, but to a degree the guerrillas found a solution by reorganizing into small, mobile groups that were less dependent on the rural population.

Organization of the Early ALN Guerrilla, 1954–7

The chapter examines the processes by which the earliest nationalist guerrilla forces of the ALN (Armée de libération nationale) began to make contact with peasant society in the Chelif and to organize support among the local population. The process was made particularly difficult because of a virtual civil war between the Messalist forces of the MNA, and the newly created FLN, each competing to create a peasant base. The initial small, and poorly equipped forces of the FLN often faced hostility from the inhabitants, but through collective, night-time propaganda meetings they began to create a new autonomous assembly, the nizam. Instead of assassinating or driving away the caids, as has often been claimed, the FLN recruited where possible the existing fraction headmen and field guards. During the propaganda drive led by political commissars the FLN was careful to shape its rhetoric and message to the culture and beliefs of a conservative peasantry.

The Zitoufi Maquis

Gendarmes minutes of the interrogation of twenty-four peasants in the douar Taouira, east of Ténès, enables a close micro-level reconstruction of a little-known communist maquis. The influential djemâa president, Mohamed Zitoufi, patriarchal head of a large, joint family, had dominated life in the douar for nearly forty years, and as president of the peasant trade union, the Syndicat des petits cultivateurs, was a figure of national status. Orders for the implantation of a guerrilla force during 1956 were received, along with logistic supplies, from Dr Masseboeuf of Ténès, and the Kabyle militant and market trader, Rabah Benhamou. Behamou prepared secret cache locations in the caves, and during night-time operations led a group that forced farmers to hand over their shotguns, money, and other supplies, and assassinated informers or collaborators, including the brother of the bachaga Boualam. The gendarmes interrogations reveal how the peasants reacted to the implantation of the guerrilla, some of them hostile, and Mohamed Zitoufi had difficulty in imposing unity on a douar that was internally divided. Eventually the Zitoufi family was arrested, and the remnants of the maquis under Benhamou was absorbed into the FLN.