The Battle of Diar - el - Kef By ROBERT KEE ABOVE the main
European poor-white quarter no, of Algiers three heights dominate, in a semi- circle, a valley which on this morning was filled with steel-helmeted troops and gardes mobiles with machine guns and armoured cars. About 80,000 Arabs live on these heights in a number of vast new apartment blocks and one relatively small shanty town. The roads winding down from the heights were blocked on this morning —November 1, 1961—by strongly guarded barbed-wire entanglements. In normal times it would take from five to ten minutes at least to get down from these heights on foot into the European quarters, but on this day it would have been impossible to pass the entanglements and machine guns which barred the road. The FLN bad in any case given instructions that demon- strations were to be peaceful and confined to the Moslem quarters, an aim particularly easy to realise in the huge self-contained areas of the apartment blocks of Diar-el-Kef, and in the re- volting shanty town beside the cemetery of El Kettar.
From first light the troops and gardes mobiles watched the heights through binoculars. To an outsider it seemed impossible that against such a display of force the Arabs who lived up there could dare to demonstrate at all. It was therefore very exciting and frightening when at about a quarter past eight the first wailing 'you-you- you-you-you-you' cry of the Arab women was heard coming from the height of Diar-el-Kef. Looking up, one saw a smallish band of demon- strators, many of whom were women and child- ren, marching up and down in front of the building with the green and white flag of the FLN at their head. Whether' or not they would eventually have tried to come down the winding road towards the barriers there was no time to tell. For while they were still parading there a steel-helmeted French patrol began to cut its way across the side of the hill towards the dem- onstrators. The next thing I heard was a terrible fusillade. It lasted for almost exactly a minute, but while it went on it seemed as if it would never stop.
What had happened was this : the patrol had already reached the road on top of the height when a shot rang out and the lieutenant fell wounded in the leg. (Examination of the bullet mark on the tarmac afterwards, beside a pool of the lieutenant's blood, showed that this shot had come either from the roof or one of the top flats of the building.) The rest of the patrol dived over the edge of the road and fired in- discriminately at the face of the building. It was understandable in the circumstances that they did not stop to care that demonstrators were between them and the building or that the bal- conies of the building itself were crammed with people.
After the minute of concentrated fire there was a short appalling silence broken by the cry of an Arab woman screaming 'Assassins !' Then sounds lost their special significance again and life, almost obscenely, began to return to normal. When the ambulance had taken away the lieutenant the troops got up from their cover quite leisurely as if the whole thing had been some sort of exercise. No one seemed to take into account now the possibility of another shot from the building. More troops came up. More ambulances. Slowly, one by one, and again as if this were an ordinary routine thing to do, the Arabs began to bring out their wounded through the crowds, very much as if it were just an individual family affair, like going to market. A little girl of about eight with a wound in her thigh lay there quite still until a French orderly gave her an injection, when she let out a thin continuous wail that seemed to come from some great distance in- side her. A boy of about fifteen was rolled over so that the wound in his back could be dressed. A distraught Arab woman with blood and orange dye streaming intermingled down her face talked and gesticulated as if it were per- haps not her at all who was the wounded person she was concerned about but a child she couldn't find. I counted at least twenty wounded altogether and there were said to be two dead. But Arabs are traditionally secretive about their dead.
I recognised the colonel of Zouaves who only the day before had so courteously arranged for me to be escorted filming round the Casbah, proud of the tranquillity that reigned there. Now he seemed genuinely distressed by what had happened and this distress was all the more telling for being only just discernible beneath his still impeccable military correctness. 'Yester- day,' he said, 'these soldiers were out in the bled fighting the FLN. They're used to firing back with everything they've got when they're shot at. Please, you must remember that.'
This had been unnecessary killing and wound- ing but it was not done with conscious callous- ness—as it was to be done later on the hillside opposite. Here, at Diar-el-Kef, one could feel sorry for the French on the spot as one feels sorry for any person whose perfectly human action has led to inhuman results. In a strange way they even seemed identified in the dulled aftermath of the incident with the Arabs who had suffered in it. Arguments even broke out between French soldiers and Arabs which at any other time would have been settled at once with a blow of a truncheon. All of which makes the battle of Diar-el-Kef—in many ways so typical of the Algerian tragedy—so untypical too.
Two questions remain: first, who fired the shot from the building and why? Arabs said that it was a stray bullet from a soldier on the roof, but this seems wildly improbable and the colonel of Zouaves said there were no soldiers on that roof. It is improbable too that it was an official FLN agitator, since the FLN orders were categorically to demonstrate peacefully that day and in the main they were obeyed. So that it can only have been a fanatic of one sort or another. Either someone who had witnessed scenes such as those that took place that day so often before that he had become hysterical when the troops approached. Or else someone so wickedly fanatical that his shot was aimed to produce the exact result it did produce. For cer- tainly if by any chance there had been any Moslems in that building who were not in favour of an independent Algeria at the beginning of the day there were none left by 8.35 a.m.
The second question is: why were the French so determined that all FLN demonstrations for the independent Algeria which the French Government is in principle prepared to concede should be broken up, whether peaceful or not, whether marching on other parts of the town or not, and should be broken up by heavily armed men, long accustomed to thinking of a civilian Arab life as worth very much less than a French one? Admittedly the French can now do nothing to save Algeria for France. So perhaps they feel there is no point in showing political sagacity at last when 'at last' is also too late. But at least they might have some consideration for the futures of poor-white Frenchmen like those who are going to have to go on living in the quarter below Diar-el-Kef when the French army and the gardes mobiles have gone.
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