A Timeline of Human Rights
(Under Construction)
November 11954
Algerian War of Independence
Filed under: Colonialism, Torture
FLN launched coordinated guerilla attacks on this date, sparking a struggle that lasted until 1962 and included violent atrocities on both sides.
In the months after the November 1 attack, FLN atrocities included torture and murder of Muslim officials. And, with the murder of 123 colonists at Philippeville in August, 1955, continued into attacks on civilians in general.
French forces responded to Philippeville by summarily executing 1,273—by their own count; the FLN supplied names and addresses of the killed to suggest the actual number was nearly 10 times that.
The Battle of Algiers began September 30, 1956, with three bombings in downtown Algeria. Thus, a largely rural conflict morphed into urban warfare, and reached new levels of atrocity.
The FLN assassinated French pied noir and bombed public places. The colonists responded with mob violence against the Muslim population. Governor General Robert LaCoste reacted by handing Algeria over to military control under General Jacques Massu. Four paratroop regiments in Algiers arrested thousands and sent them to interrogation centers where they were tortured.
Paul Teitgen, head of the police force in Algiers and formerly a hero of the French resistance against the Nazis, resigned in protest. He wrote that, in the interrogation centers, he “recognized the deep marks of cruelties and tortures that I personally suffered 14 years ago in the Gestapo cellars.” Teitgen estimated that 3,000 Algerians were “disappeared” in Algiers interrogation centers.
Despite growing international concern over France’s inhumane tactics, the paratroops won the battle of Algiers. They destroyed bomb factories, arms caches, and fighting units, and the number of FLN attacks fell from 112 in January 1957 to 29 in March of that year. The group’s leadership fled to Tunisia, and the French began to feel the entire war had been won.
The French Fourth Republic was meanwhile collapsing, with the unrest in Algeria as a primary cause, and the National Assembly appointed Charles de Gaulle prime minister, with powers to rule by decree, in order to save France. On a trip to Algeria on June 4, 1958, he famously told the pied noirs, “I have understood you” (“Je vous ai compris.”)
In fact, however, what de Gaulle would come to understand was that war was unsustainable. And following a short lived colonists’ coup in January 1960, a ceasefire was negotiated to begin March 19, 1962.