A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 Read Online Free PDF Page A

what, in effect, led to the collapse of the French government and the advent of de Gaulle in 1958. In their turn, the Iraq insurgents have been able to use Syria—and now, much more dangerously, Iran—to similar advantage.
    THREE: The vile hand of torture; of abuse, and counter-abuse. In the Algerian War what led—probably more than any other single factor—to the ultimate defeat of France was the realisation, in France and the world at large, that methods of interrogation were being used that had been condemned under the Nazi Occupation. At the dawn of the new century, the ugly ghosts of torture returned to plague France. In 2001, an eighty-three-year-old former general, Paul Aussaresses, published a book in which he unashamedly, indeed proudly, admitted to having tortured—in a good cause, he claimed. After a trial which gripped France, the aging general got away with a fine of one hundred thousand francs, on a uniquely worded charge “in the name of respect for the victims.”
    Because of the slowness of communications in the 1950s and 1960s, it took a year or more for the message of abuses perpetrated in Algeria to sink in. Now, with the Internet and al-Jazeera, one set of photos from Abu Ghraib is enough to inflame hatred across the Islamic world against the West, providing excuse for all the beheadings and atrocities carried out by al-Qaeda. From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the “Battle of Algiers,” history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, that torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society, I draw readers once again to the testimony of Prefect Teitgen of Algiers ( see ) which —three decades on—I still find deeply moving. Teitgen had been informed by the Algiers police that they had intelligence of a bomb which could have caused appalling casualties. Could they put a suspect to “the question”? Himself a deportee in World War II, Teitgen told me he refused:
     
…I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because if you once get into the torture business, you’re lost…. All our so-called civilisation is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear …. When you see the throats of your copains slit, then the varnish disappears.
     
    How applicable this still is to the dilemmas facing the West in the war on terror!
    In passing, one should also note France’s painful discovery that, fifty years on, many former “torturers” in the armed services were having to resort to psychiatric “counselling.” The inflicters of torture as well as their victims remain grievously impaired.
    In 2005, at the suggestion of his staff, I sent a copy of A Savage War to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, underscoring the evils of torture—and, not least, the propaganda value even the least substantiated rumours of it can arouse. I received a flea in the ear—courteous, but a flea nevertheless—for my trouble.
    After all the hopes generated for a free, happy and prosperous Algeria at Evian in 1962, within years of the departure of the French Army she was tearing herself apart in the most senseless and bloody civil war (between fellow Muslims) of recent times.
    Does much more need to be said about the relevance of Algeria’s Savage War to contemporary Iraq? History continues to take its toll.
    We historians, perhaps fortunately, are not permitted to see the future. Certainly when I started writing A Savage War back in 1973, I had not the least thought that it might find a new relevance, or modernity, in the twenty-first century. At the time it seemed a very tragic story sufficient within its own bounds. Now, for all the lessons it may contain—not just for the conflict in Iraq, but for wider issues in the world at large, and those as yet unforeseen which may still lie