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Neil Macmaster 1 Inside the FLN NEIL MACMASTER 2 Inside the FLN: the Paris massacre and the French Intelligence Service Neil MacMaster March 2013. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The author welcomes any e-mail comment: <[email protected]> Cover photograph: Mohamed Zouaoui. 3 Contents Introduction 4 1 “Operation Flore” and the arrest of Mohamed Zouaoui 10 2 The Zouaoui network: the role of the Contrôleurs 21 3 The European Support Network, Renault, and FLN Propaganda 33 4 The Problem of Violence and the Federation U-Turn 43 5 Assassination of police officers and the Federation crisis 54 6 At the grass-roots: Mohammed Ghafir and Amala 12 (13th Arrondissement) 66 7 Planning the demonstrations of 17-20 October 84 8 Abderrahmane Farès and the financial network 98 9 After the massacre: the impact of the crisis on the FLN 108 Conclusion 123 Jean-Luc Einaudi and the Sacralisation of Mohammedi Saddek: An Essay 127 Appendix 1 Who was Mohammedi Saddek? 132 Appendix 2 La guerre des chiffres: how many Algerians died? 140 Short bibliography of publications, 2006-2013 145 Note on the author 147 4 INTRODUCTION By 2006, when I and Jim House published Paris 1961. Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, a number of books, by Jean-Luc Einaudi, Jean-Paul Brunet, Alain Dewerpe, Linda Amiri, Rémy Valat, and others, meant that the main features of the Paris massacre and the demonstration of 17 October were quite well understood.1 Political controversy has continued to rage, mainly in relation to the contested issue of the numbers of Algerians that were killed, but in general the bulk of the publications that have appeared since Paris 1961 have had to do with the cultural, artistic and memorial aspects of the events, rather than with further research into primary archival sources.2 This shift from the further excavation of archives, to differing interpretations of cultural and political meanings, was exemplified by the debates surrounding Michael Haneke’s film Caché,3 and the commemoration of the 50th anniversary in October 2011. The commemoration was marked by an enormous range of memorial, artistic and political activity: the organisation of demonstrations in Paris and its suburbs, as well as in numerous provincial towns from Caen to Bordeaux; conferences in Lyons, Nanterre and elsewhere, including one in the Paris National Assembly; documentary and film productions, most notably Yasmina Adi’s Ici on noie les Algériens; photographic exhibitions; four new theatre productions; several books, including a bande dessiné by Daeninckx and Mako, Octobre Noir; musical-café shows; the ceremonial renaming of streets and squares, the unveiling of plaques (Pont de Bezons, Pont de Neuilly).......4 At the heart of this mobilisation was a campaign to bring pressure on the French state to officially recognise the massacre through a ‘proposition de loi’ tabled in the Senate on 12 October 2006. Jim House closely analysed in Paris 1961 the extraordinary complexity and emotional intensity of the political, trade union, nationalist, inter-generational and sectarian memory battles that raged openly, or seethed under the surface, throughout the period from 1961 to 2006 over the very existence and significance of the Paris massacre. Since 2006 the debates and political skirmishing has intensified, both in France and Algeria, and the campaign for official recognition of the massacre by the French state has been challenged by an array of right-wing and reactionary forces, from UMP conservatives and retired generals, to neo-fascists and die-hard ex-colonialists that defend the enlightened ‘civilizing mission’ of France in its oversea empire and its undemocratic and violent domination over ‘subject races’. On 17 October 2012 President François Hollande provided the first official recognition of the fact of the massacre in a brief statement: ‘The Republic recognises lucidly these facts. Fifty-one years after the tragedy, I pay tribute to the memories of the victims’. This declaration was met with a cachophany of protest from Marine Le Pen and others on the far-right. 1 For a full bibiography see Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961. Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 341-359, French edition, Paris 1961. Les Algériens, la terreur d’Etat et la mémoire (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 483-509. I have updated this in a short bibliography of works that have appeared since 2006, see below page 145. 2 The major exception here is Emmanuel Blanchard’s book, based on his 2008 thesis, La Police Parisienne et les Algériens (1944-1962) (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011). Linda Amiri’s doctoral thesis on the FLN in France, based on many years of archival research, also promises to bring new elements to our understanding of October 17 and its context. 3 There is a considerable, and growing, literature on Haneke and the 17 October: see, for example, Nancy E. Virtue, ‘Memory, Trauma, and the French-Algerian War: Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005)’, Modern and Contemporary France, 19:3 (2011), 281-96; Jonathan Thomas, ‘Michael Haneke’s New(s) Images’, Art Journal, 67:3 (Fall 2008), 80-85; Susannah Radstone, ‘Caché: Or what the past hides’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 24:1 (2010), 17-29. 4 On some of this cultural activism see the homepage of the ‘Collectif “17 Octobre 61”’, www.17octobre61.org; also the bibliography and references in Marcel and Paulette Péju, Le 17 Octobre des Algériens. Suivi de La Triple Occulation d’Un Massacre par Gilles Manceron, (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), 187-195. 5 Had a point been reached by 2007 in which debate was no longer about gleaning further evidence on the 17 October, but offering different cultural and political readings of the established ‘facts’? Was little more to be discovered from the archives in which research was no longer worth the effort because it promised diminishing returns? Such a claim would be absurd, since no historical investigation can ever claim to be definitive and each generation of historians will bring to the body of evidence quite new and different interpretations. In 2006, however, after several years research on the massacre, I decided to move on, not because the topic was exhausted, but because I had a number of others projects that were waiting. However, the peculiar interpretations that Jean-Luc Einaudi continued to develop in his book, Scènes de la guerre d’Algérie en France (2009), and elsewhere, led me in early 2012 to re-examination the DST archives.5 To mark the 50th anniversary commemoration in October 2011, which drew enormous media attention in France and Algeria, Jean-Luc Einaudi, the doyen of memory activists, and Mohammed Ghafir, who was FLN leader of Amala or Superzone 12, located on the Left Bank of the Seine, joined forces in the autumn of 1961 to publicise the claim that Mohammedi Saddek was the head of the entire FLN network on French soil and had organised the demonstration of 17 October. The rather strange campaign, assisted by members of the Saddek family, to construct a mythical status for Mohammedi Saddek was intended to counter the research of myself and Jim House that had shown that the top-level co-ordinator in France was Mohamed Zouaoui.6 This inspired me to re-examine much of the archival materials that I had collected a decade earlier and the issues surrounding the Paris massacre. My initial, but subsidiary interest was in an anthropological examination of how and why Einaudi and Ghafir went about the construction or defense of such a myth through the sacralisation of Saddek, especially by religious commemorative rituals in his village of origin in Kabylie. This case-study serves to throw light on wider processes of memory activism and the ‘ideologisation’ of history and why it is that the charged emotional investments that result from the confusion or mixing of commemoration ritual and historical interpretation and fact can make for poor history. I have placed this case-study at the end, since it can be read on its own standing apart from the main drive of the study, as a separate essay under the title, Jean-Luc Einaudi and the Sacralisation of Mohammedi Saddek. I have also examined the question of the biography and role of Saddek in the FLN, who appears nowhere in the DST and police archives, in a separate Appendix 1 (page 132). The more substantial reason for writing this study arose from a re-examination of my research notes from the Archives of the Paris Prefecture of Police (APP) which reminded me how extraordinarily rich and important these documents were for an understanding of the Paris massacre. This was especially true of the extensive reports of the counter-intelligence agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), its arrest of numerous top FLN cadres in early November 1961, and the seizure of hundreds of key FLN documents. In our previous publications we had referred to the DST files, but editorial restrictions on word-length meant that full justice could not be done to this important and extensive body of source material. Since the publication of our 2004 article it would appear that no historians have followed our lead by further investigating what constitutes the richest and most significant, but still largely unused, archival source on the Paris massacre and its context. My aim in this study is to fill this gap.7 The DST archive is important to an understanding of the Paris massacre for a number of reasons. On 22 September 1961 DST agents, who were tailing an FLN cadre Medjoub Benzerfa, were led to 5 Jean-Luc Einaudi, Scènes de la guerre d’Algérie en France.
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