Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Gen. Massu's strategy was not to go after the FLN bombers but to identify and disable anyone who was even remotely associated with the FLN. It was not a selective sweep. The smallest interrogation unit in Algiers possessed 100,000 files. Out of the casbah's total population of 80,000 citizens, Massu arrested 30 to 40 percent of all males.
Torture forced "loyal" Algerians to cooperate, but after the battle, they either ended their loyalty to France or were assassinated. Torture forced a politics of extremes, destroying the middle that had cooperated with the French. In the end, there was no alternative to the FLN. As Paul Teitgin, the police prefect of Algiers, remarked, "Massu won the Battle of Algiers, but that meant losing the war."
The judicial system also collapsed under the weight of torture. Judges and prefects found themselves unable to deny warrants to armed men who tortured and killed for a living. Police records show that Teitgin issued 800 detention orders (arrêtes d'assignation) for eight months before the battle, 700 for the first three months of the battle and then 4,000 a month for the remaining months. By the end of the battle, he had issued orders to detain 24,000, most of whom (80 percent of the men and 66 percent of the women) were routinely tortured.
And "what to do with these poor devils after their 'use'?" asked a French soldier. Many torturers preferred to kill them, though, one soldier conceded, genocide was difficult. "There isn't enough place in the prisons and one can't kill everyone ..., so one releases them and they're going to tell others, and from mouth to mouth, the whole world knows." Then, he observed, their relatives and friends "join the resistance." By the end of the battle, about 13,000 Algerians (and some Frenchmen) were in detention camps and 3,000 "disappeared."
Doctors, whose task it was to monitor torture, were themselves corrupted by the torture. "Our problem is," remarked a doctor attached to a French torture unit, "should we heal this man who will again be tortured or let him die?" As oversight failed, the French military government arrested more people for flimsier reasons.
Use of torture also compromised the military. Lt. Col. Roger Trinquier, the famous French counterinsurgency expert, believed that torturers could act according to professional norms -- applying only the pain necessary to get information and then stopping. But the stories of rank-and-file torturers confirm previous studies of the dynamics of torture. "I realized," remarked a French soldier, "that torture could become a drug. I understood then that it was useless to claim to establish limits and forbidden practices, i.e. yes to the electrotorture but without abusing it, any further no. In this domain also, it was all or nothing."
Torture drifted headlong into sadism, continuing long after valuable information could be retrieved. For example, soldiers arrested a locksmith and tortured him for three days. In his pocket, the locksmith had bomb blueprints with the address of an FLN bomb factory in Algiers. The locksmith bought time, the bombers relocated and the raid by the French three days later fell on open air. Had the soldiers been able to read Arabic, they would have found the bomb factory days earlier. But they were too busy torturing. As one would predict, engaging in torture prevented the use of ordinary -- and more effective -- policing skills. (Incidentally, the French could not believe that the most wanted man in the casbah had spent months only 200 yards from the headquarters of the army commandant.)
The French military also fragmented under the competition associated with torture. Parallel systems of administration emerged, and infighting occurred between the various intelligence agencies. Officers lost control of their charges, or the charges refused to follow higher command. And in the end, the soldiers blamed the generals for exposing them to torture, noting its pernicious effects on their lives, their families and their friends -- a sense of betrayal that has not diminished with the years.
Yves Godard, Massu's chief lieutenant, had insisted there was no need to torture. He suggested having the informant network identify operatives and then subject them to a simple draconian choice: Talk or die. This would have produced the same result as torture without damage to the army.
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