Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [78]
Yacef was a twenty-nine-year-old baker, who in a short period of time assembled fourteen hundred fighters, while constructing an elaborate network of bomb manufactories, arms dumps and hiding places in the courtyard houses of the Casbah, home to eighty thousand Muslims. One of his most implacable fighters was the former pimp Ali La Pointe, the hero of Pontecorvo’s film, in which Yacef played himself. A classic in the revolutionary-insurgency genre, the film is required viewing for soldiers deployed in Iraq, for whom the message of how to win a battle while losing a war is pertinent. In the summer of 1956, almost fifty Europeans were shot dead by the FLN in a series of random killings in the European quarters of the city. Probably in response to this, settler extremists (perhaps including members of the local police) detonated a bomb in the Casbah’s Rue de Thebes, allegedly to destroy an FLN bomb factory; it demolished four houses, killing seventy Muslim men, women and children.
In September 1956, Yacef despatched three young middle-class women, including two law students, into the European quarter of Algiers. One of them subsequently married Jacques Verges, the half-Vietnamese lawyer who defended the Lyons Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, although the couple have since divorced. Yacef reminded them of the atrocity in the Rue de Thebes - whose effect was heightened, according to twenty-two-year-old Zohra Drif, by the knowledge that carefree and indifferent Europeans were at the beach or swimming in the city below when Arab children were being picked out of the rubble. Dressed as if going to the beach, and with their hair dyed to pass as Europeans, the girls flirted their way past French military checkpoints. One terrorist went to the Milk-Bar where families liked to go after a day at the beach; another, accompanied by her mother, to a cafe patronised by students dancing the mambo; and a third to the Air France terminus. The bombs were slipped under tables and the women left. When they exploded, a total of three people were killed and fifty injured, many by shards of flying glass. When the doctor who was hiding Ramdane Abane protested, the FLN chief replied: ‘I see hardly any difference between the girl who places a bomb in the Milk-Bar and the French aviator who bombards a mechta or who drops napalm in a zone interdite’.37 To worsen relations between Europeans and Muslims further, Ali La Pointe was instructed to assassinate the seventy-four-year-old president of the Federation of Algerian Mayors, Amédée Froger, a veteran of the Great War and a popular pied noir leader.
The governor-general of Algeria handed overall responsibility for public order to the newly arrived commander in chief, general Raoul Salan, and his subordinate Massu. Massu was an extremely distinguished soldier; his chief of staff Yves Godard was a former maquisard and veteran of the war in Indo-China.
These men used brutal force to break an FLN-inspired general strike intended to impress the United Nations as it opened in New York, dragooning strikers back to work or ripping off the grilles of closed shop fronts. By these actions the French authorities were prohibiting the right to strike, having already corrupted Algeria’s limited democracy. Yacef responded by despatching more young female bombers, who killed five people and wounded sixty in a brasserie, a bar and a cafe. A fortnight later, bombers struck at two popular stadiums, killing ten and injuring forty-five people. Godard used diagrams, called organograms, based on information from informers and tortured suspects, to give firm organisational outlines to a shadowy opponent camouflaged by the civilian population of the Casbah. Each house was daubed with a number and Nazi-style block wardens were appointed to monitor the comings and goings of the inhabitants. Hooded informers stood ready to identify FLN suspects at the choke points through which Arabs entered and left the Casbah.