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Psychological Warfare and the Dahra Peasants

Chapter 17 examines how Opération Pilote was implemented through a case study of the military sub-secteur of Ténès. A first problem in implementing Pilote arose from the fact that there were major disagreements within the army about the project. Some commanders resisted the new methods of the psychological warfare 5th bureaux, disliked the creation of a ‘parallel’ hierarchy of political commissars, while major tensions emerged between the civil authorities, the prefect Chevrier, and the generals. A close study of Pilote in the Dahra mountains shows that the aim of ‘pacification’ of each douar by cleansing the ALN and installing harkis autodefense, schools, medical teams, and a proto-municipal government was only successful in two highly mediatized locations, the Breira mine and Bou Maad. Far more typical was the situation in the Djebel Bissa where, following large-scale sweep operations and mass arrests, the army was unable to secure the terrain, and moved on rapidly before consolidating new communal organizations. The army command, frustrated at the slowness of Servier’s ‘hearts and minds’ approach, rapidly reverted to traditional methods of colonial warfare, the creation of zones interdites, bombing of civil populations, starvation, and the forced mass evacuation of peasants into army camps. A generalized ‘Massu model’ of cutting the vital ALN dependency on urban-rural supply networks was also tried in Ténès but failed.