Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Edward Behr's fine 1961 work on old French North Africa:

The Algerian Problem.





"INTRODUCTION

"One summer's day in 1957, a rebel band of some 250 men broke through the Algerian frontier defenses from Tunisia and lay up on the hills adjoining the old Roman town of Tébessa.

"They were spotted and surrounded.

"After an unsuccessful attempt to break through a strong paratrooper and Foreign Legion cordon, they fought it out to the death: one French lieutenant described how, in the final assault -- in which eight paratroopers, including an officer, were killed -- some of the rebels rose from their hiding places and, their ammunition gone, smashed their rifles against the rocky hillside.

"Only eight rebels survived.

"[These] prisoners were sat on stools in open army trucks and the grisly procession wound its way through the Roman ruins and the narrow streets of Tébessa, to the disgust of the few French and foreign journalists present.

"The Moslems of Tébessa reacted in a way which must have infuriated the [French] Psychological Warfare expert: they behaved as though the hideous procession before them was a figment of the imagination.

"They neither looked at it nor deliberately away from it.

"Sipping mint tea at café tables, haggling over small purchases in squalid shops, they carried on as though nothing unusual were happening.

"The ignored French troops escorting the prisoners felt, and looked, foolish.

"The instinctive reaction of the inhabitants of Tébessa goes far to explain why Algeria, conquered and colonized successively by the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the Turks and the French, has constantly eluded its conquerors ... "

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