Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [77]
Even more slippery was Massu’s claim to Aussaresses that the army would have to adopt ‘implacable’ measures - the euphemism for torture - to forestall some morally insane act by the pieds noirs - in other words a variant on the claim that torture was the lesser of two evils. Specifically Massu indicated that the colon ultras were plotting to park several petrol tankers on an incline at the top of the Casbah, the old Turkish quarter of Algiers. Petrol would be streamed down the sloping alleys and streets which, when ignited, would incinerate ‘70,000’ Muslim residents. Here Massu’s memory may have been playing tricks for he was back-projecting to the start of the conflict a plot that the OAS undertook in the final days of French Algeria. If Massu had any religious qualms about what he ordered, these were presumably allayed by the army chaplain who explained:
Faced with a choice between two evils, either to cause temporary suffering to a bandit taken in the act who in any case may deserve to die, or to leave large numbers of innocent people to be massacred by this criminal’s gang, when it could be destroyed as a result of his information, there can be no hesitation in choosing the lesser of the two evils, in an effective but not sadistic interrogation.34
Torture led smoothly to the murder of suspects, like the lawyer Ali Boumendjel, who, arrested for organising terrorist killings, was thrown off a sixth-floor walkway connecting police buildings. The justification for murder was that there were so many FLN suspects awaiting trial that the courts were clogged to the point of immobility while liberal lawyers were ever ready to get the accused off. Rather than risk acquittal, it was better to throw a man off a high building, a clear illustration of how torture tends to be a slippery slope. Much, much later, Massu - who with his wife adopted two Algerian children - would concede that torture had been militarily superfluous.35
Massu had arrived in Algiers with his 4,600 paratroops, just as the more extreme colons in the capital were hurling tomatoes at the new socialist premier Guy Mollet at a wreath-laying ceremony, forcing him to rescind the appointment of a seventy-nine-year-old former general as governor-general to replace the popular Soustelle. Instead Algeria got Robert Lacoste, another hero of the wartime resistance. In addition to being defeated by an angry urban mob, Mollet decided to increase the military presence to half a million men by calling up reservists and extending the service of conscripts. This resulted almost immediately not only in the FLN ambushing a platoon of inexperienced soldiers at Palestro, but in the grim discovery that the FLN had taken prisoners, some of whom were later found disembowelled with their genitals cut off, and with stones stuffed in their body cavities. Although Massu’s paratroops wiped out most of the band responsible, governor-general Lacoste ordered the execution of two FLN prisoners and a massive armed raid on the Casbah that resulted in the detention of five thousand people. The battle of the Casbah was on.
Fatefully, the FLN simultaneously took the decision to focus its terrorist efforts on the capital, for as Ramdane Abane argued: ‘one corpse in a jacket is always worth more than twenty in uniform’. He instructed the head of the FLN in Algiers, Saadi Yacef, to ‘kill any European between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four. But no women, no children, no old people.’ The objective of this urban terror campaign was to get the maximum international visibility for the FLN: ‘Is it preferable for our cause to kill ten enemies in an oued [a dry