A Savage War of Peace
Alistair Horne
604 pages including index
published in 1977
Remember how the White House a few years ago, in one of their periodic attempts at convincing the rest of the world George Bush is not a complete moron, released a list of books supposedly read by him in the past year? One of the books on the list was this, A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne's history of the Algerian struggle for independence from France. What's more, the same book was also reported to be widely read in the US army occupying Iraq and Afghanistan as part of an attempt to understand the enterprise they were engaging in. This isn't necessarily a recommendation of course; another much read book in the US army is that piece of pseudoscientific racism, The Arab Mind. A sort of mixed bag of recommendations then: this is clearly an important book in that it seems to have shaped the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but does this make this a good book?
Fortunately, it does. Had Bush read this book in 2002 before the War on Iraq, and had he been able to actually understand what he read, he may have actually decided against the invasion. Everything that happened in Iraq is described here, every mistake and failed strategy the Americans would use, written down twentyfive years before the war even started. No wonder various army generals studied it so avidly. Colonial wars follow certain patterns it seems and what happened in Algeria in 1954-62 can be used as a guide to Iraq forty years later.
France invaded and conquered Algeria back in 1830. Unlike other French possesions in Africa it didn't turn into a colony, but became a part of France proper, with a substantial number of French settling there. For the original inhabitants of the country this was of course a distinction without a difference, as they didn't become French citizens. After a bloody subjugetion tensions remained low for more than a century -- though they were never completely absent. The indigenous population of Algeria remained second class citizens, governed through the usual colonial mismash of co-opted native rulers and the colonial bureaucracy. There were attempts to reform the system, both through native initiative, growing in force as Algeria's population became more educated and aware of their situation and through the well meaning attempts by French sympathisers to better the plight of the native population. Little came of these attempts though, largely due to the intransigent resistance of the Algeria born French population, the socalled pied noirs. By 1954 the moderate Algerians pressing for reform had achieved little but the suspicion of the pied noirs, whose resistance to even the most harmless reform attempts in turn radicalised part of the Algerian movement.
By 1954 the more radical element of the Algerian independence/equality movement had joined together in the Comité Révolutionaire d'Unité et d'Action, which would later evolve into the FLN, Front de Libération Nationale. The CRUA/FLN no longer wanted to negotiate with the French, but drive them out by force. On November 1, 1954 (All Saints Day) they therefore launched their first offensive. From there on, events followed a course that is quite familiar to anybody who has followed the American Occupation of Iraq. While the French managed to win most every battle and had largely defeated the FLN by the end of the war, the Algerians won the political battle, converting the population to their side, gaining public recognition abroad and finally making the war so costly for France it had to give up. There were lessons there for the Americans, had they choosen to see it.
The first lesson that Horne shows in great detail in A Savage War of Peace is that eternal conomdrum of guerrilla warfare, that a broadbased resistance movement against a foreign occupier cannot win military, but doesn't need to. At the start of the war, the FLN did try to win through conventional military battles, starting their All Saints offensive targeting French gendarmes and military, but not civilians. It ended in failure, but its psychological effect was great. Even the most celebrated episode in the war, the Battle of Algiers and the national strike that accompanied it ended in defeat to the FLN, with many of its leaders and cadre killed or arrested. But again, it had a psychological effect far in excess to the gains the FLN made. The FLN's offensives led to increased French repression, massive sweeps of native neighbourhoods and villages and mass arrests, each arrestee becoming a immediate convert to the nationalist cause. Meanwhile in France itself as well as abroad these episodes focused attention on Algeria, a recognition that all was not well and later, that this war was unwinnable.
The second lesson is unpleasant: for the FLN, terror worked. A terrorist attack against a pied noir discotheque for example increased French repression and drove the pied noirs and native population further apart, making compromise less likely. At the same time the FLN also waged a brutal war against the more moderate or independent political groups in Algeria, massacring their political opponents. This left no acceptable alternative political group for the French to negotiate with that might've accepted something less than complete independence. As we're seeing right now in Palestine, when there are such alternatives, an occupier can use that to keep the population divided and weak. The FLN managed to make itself the sole representative of the Algerians and made complete independence the only acceptable outcome of the war. France had to either crush the movement completely, or eventually give in.
In stark contrast, French repression and especially the use of torture did not help them, but instead corrupted its army and drove public opinion in France and the world against it. World War II after all was less than two decades in the past and here we have the French army using the same methods as the Gestapo? Who could support that? One of the methods of torture used in Algeria incidently was the use of waterboarding, described graphically in one contemporary book, The Question by Henri Alleq, a French born communist journalist. The bookw as banned in france but made an impact in the UK and America when it was published there in 1958.
The final lesson is that once the war had started in earnest, the compromises and reforms that had been so stubbornly resisted by the pied noirs were no longer enough to end the war. By the time the pied noirs had finally been convinced of the need for reform, it was too late. From the start the FLN had one goal in mind and no matter what happened they stuck to it, even if things went badly. In contrast, the French, even de Gaulle, thought for far too long in terms of first defeating the FLN and then giving the Algerians a free choice of independence or becoming a regular part of France. In the end the French were in a bad negotiation position and therefore had to given in to the FLN. One result of this was that the vast majority of pied noirs was forced to leave the country for good; their position was no longer tenable after independence.
It's interesting to compare the French experience in Algeria with what was happening in Kenya in roughly the same period, where the British managed to succesfully contain the Kikuyu independence movement; even though Kenya did gain its independence, the British did largely keep their priviledges there. The main difference between Algeria and Kenya seems to be that the British managed to divide the native population, isolating the Kikuyu from the other Kenyan peoples, and then coming down hard on the Kikuyu. In Algeria on the other hand the FLN managed to keep all the different ethnicities on board, even if more Algerians fought for the French than for them.
A Savage War of Peace is a fascinating book that should be read by anybody interested in what's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine. It is sometimes tough going, but well worth perservering. Though I still can't see Bush having done it...