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Geoffrey Boccas The Secret Army
Geoffrey Boccas The Secret Army
While black majority rule came relatively quickly to Kenya, there would be
longer waits for those in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and South Africa.
If with the passage of time, a tendency exists to view the war in Algeria as
a ‘last stand’ of a white minority settler population against a non-white
majority, it is a misreading of a vastly more complex state of affairs.
For one, the Pied Noirs, translated in English to mean ‘Black Foots’, were
unlike the largely British descended Rhodesians or the historically
autonomous Afrikaner community in South Africa. Many were of non-
French stock being of Spanish, Italian and Maltese heritage, and while
ahead of the Jewish and Moslem Algerians in the racial pecking order of
colonial society, were considered according to author Geoffrey Bocca to be
“Second Class Frenchmen.”
Also, the territory of Algeria was not a far away dominion which had
traditions of self-rule, but was in fact ruled directly from France and indeed
was considered a part of Metropolitan France. The prevailing attitude was
that the Mediterranean sea separating France from Algeria was no different
from the Seine dividing Paris; a mere geographic detail in other words.
‘The Secret Army’, a book by Geoffrey Bocca, was published in 1968 only a
few years after the end of a short but particularly vicious underground war
which followed on from events that divided France. The Secret Army was in
fact the Organisation de l’Armee Secrete (O.A.S.), which consisted of
renegade personnel of the French army as well as civilians dedicated to
keeping Algeria French.
Just how this state of affairs came about, one involving the waging of a
clandestine war against the French state marked by acts of terrorism and
the assassination of some officials as well as the attempts made on the life
of the head of state, Charles de Gaulle, bears some recounting.
Agitation from military commanders in Algeria led to the fall of the French
Fourth Republic in 1958, and the return to centre stage of Charles de
Gaulle whose initial pledge to keep Algeria French was later reversed in
favour of negotiations with the F.L.N. and a decision to grant Algeria
independence.
It was thus with the sting of the ‘betrayal’ by de Gaulle that elements
within the military based in Algeria decided in April of 1961 to stage a
putsch, Putsch des Generaux. Led by Generals Salan, Zeller, Jouhaud and
Challe, the coup initially suggested that France was poised for civil war. It
fizzled out after a few days and out of its ashes, a group of officers and
civilian cohorts banded together to form the O.A.S. Their slogan
was L’Algeria est Francaise et le restera: Algeria is French and will remain
so.
Although it is clear that officers from the French military rebelled against
the constituted order, in the process throwing away career, pension rights,
private interests and reputation, the reasons for voluntarily becoming
outlaws in a proscribed body are not easily explained. Reasons for joining
the OAS, as Bocca explained were “sometimes contradictory”.
For General Paul Gardy, the end of Algeria meant the end of the foreign
legionnaires.”What else mattered?” he responded to Admiral Querville, a
naval commander who was key in snuffing out the coup of April 1961
which Gardy had joined.
The OAS were claimed to be fascists, but three of the four generals in the
putsch, including the organisation’s nominal leader, Salan, were to the left
of the political spectrum. It was claimed to be racist, but included among
its ranks were Muslims, and Algerian Jews were among its most fanatical
adherents.
They were fighting a lost cause by the time it was created. And for a time,
they fought, if not for an already elusive victory and the overthrow of the
French republic, for a power vacuum which might have been achieved with
the physical elimination of General de Gaulle.
For a time though, particularly in Algiers and Oran, the O.A.S. reigned.
They could pledge to strike at any time and place of their choosing and
back it up. For instance, in ‘Operation Rock n’ Roll they detonated 120
bombs in Algiers while independence talks were going on. When de Gaulle
sent in a specially created secret squad of security agents to purge the
dissidents, the O.A.S. virtually wiped them out.
The Barbouzes, the Bearded Ones, were a kind of French Black and Tans
but did not stand a chance due to O.A.S. infiltration of the civil society of
Algeria. Also, thanks to the “sympathetic passivity” of the mainstream
French army, which de Gaulle shrewdly did not instruct to initiate a mass
crackdown because of doubts about its loyalty, the OAS survived and even
thrived.
Bocca gets to the essence of the personalities, for he knew many of the
participants personally and weaves a compelling tale of history and politics,
of context and sub-texts.
But there was no way forward after the Evian accord was given a ninety
per cent approval in the referendum held in April 1962. Bocca, a writer par
excellence in describing the post-Evian brake down in law and order in
Algiers writes eloquently about the degeneration by referring to ”the
scatterlings of every holocaust, who crawl out like roaches through the
gaping holes of a collapsed civilization to rob the dead, ransack the dead,
and dress in stolen finery.”