Abstract
This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. It focuses on civil conflict in two French colonial territories, Vietnam and Algeria, during and immediately after 1945. It investigates the civil war dynamics of local, often intra-ethnic contests among anticolonial oppositionists. Concentrating on the early, formative years of insurgent violence, we aim to demonstrate that elements of civil war pre-existed the supposed outbreak of decolonisation conflicts – 1946 in Vietnam and 1954 in Algeria. Our approach combines narrative assessments of the early phases of these conflicts with analysis of their civil war dynamics. As we seek to demonstrate, cycles of internecine killing, massacre and counter-massacre, normalized summary killing, maltreatment of detainees, and loss of distinction between civilians, seditionists, and ‘traitors’. Our argument is that decolonisation violence in both Vietnam and Algeria may be usefully rethought in civil war terms.
Civil wars are conventionally defined as conflicts between an incumbent government and one or more opposition movements using violence to overthrow the regime. Superficially, if one accepts that colonial empires were sovereign entities – as their imperial rulers claimed –, then all violent decolonisation struggles could be described as variants of imperial civil war. In practice, forms and degrees of colonial governance and sovereignty varied and thereby make this notion moot. Decolonisation conflicts were, to some degree, battles for nationhood, different ways of distributing power, or what some now describe as ‘uncolonizing’. 1 More meaningful, then, is to explore the civil war dynamics of local, often intra-ethnic contests among oppositionists, between those trying to supplant incumbent colonial authorities as well as those fighting for more particular interests. That is our proposition. It makes for a fruitful comparison between anticolonial forces in Vietnam and Algeria, each a territory that would violently ‘uncolonise’ from the French colonial empire. In Vietnam, a revolutionary republic under committed Marxist-Leninist leaders who declared their nation's independence in September 1945 waged war not only against colonial France, which was eager to restore its imperial governance interrupted during World War II, but against all local opponents of its claims to power. Among the latter were myriad pro-independence groups, including non-communist nationalists and factions. In Algeria, a guerrilla insurgency, which was organized initially around a nationalist party and then, from 1954 onwards, as a revolutionary national movement, never established an alternate regime within Algerian territory before the final overthrow of colonial France. The internal insurgency nonetheless claimed nationwide authority, using violence to destroy rival claimants. Fighting civil war against other oppositionists was integral to the national liberation front's assertion, not just of supremacy, but of sole legitimacy as the voice of Algerian nationhood. Our focus, then, will be on the violence of anticolonial actors against their local rivals rather than on the repression they faced from colonial security forces.
Most intra-state conflicts and regional conflagrations since 1945 have originated in insurgencies, whether against incumbent imperial authorities or rival local claimants to politico-economic power and cultural primacy. Typical within such conflicts was a civil war dynamic, which must affect our understanding not just of the nature of these conflicts, but of their chronology as well. Concentrating on the early, formative years of insurgent violence in two colonised territories, we aim to demonstrate that elements of civil war pre-existed the supposed outbreak of decolonisation conflicts – December 1946 in Vietnam and November 1954 in Algeria. Relevant here is the fact that these and other decolonisation conflicts were rarely acknowledged as ‘wars’ in international law. A familiar point, this observation is sometimes dismissed as mundane – of course imperial counter-insurgents would deny that they were ‘at war’ within spaces over which they claimed sovereignty and against people over whom they asserted dominion. However, the issue remains important. One reason is that colonialists refused to recognize that international legal protections for combatants and civilians might apply to anticolonial insurgents and subject populations, preferring the euphemistic language of civil emergencies. 2 In their absence, the scope for collective punishment, retributive killing and other rights abuses was commensurately large. Another reason is that decolonisation conflicts, in which insurgents sought the disintegration of an imperial polity being defended by their counter-insurgent opponents, might be usefully recast as civil wars of empire. Historians have worked hard to expose security force misdeeds, from murder and summary punishment to torture and sexual violence, revealing the social processes and colonialist dynamics behind them. By contrast, while the prevalence of intra-insurgent violence has long been recognized, attempts to typologise it derive principally from comparative politics scholarship.
This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. Fundamentally, it analyses the logics and forms of violence deployed by pro-independence actors in the early decolonisation era in Asia and Africa, respectively. Our focus on the two French imperial territories, which fought their way to independence through wars over the two decades from 1945, leads us to suggest that the conflicts in each country were both revolutionary and civil. Our approach combines narrative assessments of the origins and early phases of these conflicts with analyses of the civil war dynamics operating within emblematic decolonisation conflicts. Greater attention to insurgent practices also blurs the distinction between enhanced conditions for anticolonial insurgency during major inter-state wars and the outbreak of such insurgencies in the aftermath of these global conflicts. The broader conclusion that is implied by the above points is that notions of ‘empires at peace’ or ‘peacetime colonialism’ are oxymoronic. Legally and experientially, for the majority of people living under colonialism after 1945, as before it, the coercion and constraint that shaped their daily lives points to an intermediate condition: rather than the experiencing of war or peace, people were imminently affected by the proximity or actuality of violence.
Nor was late-colonial rebellion wholly reducible to an effort to end empire by organized violence. Often, the actions of insurgents and counter-insurgents are better understood as a bargaining process in which violence actors sought to maximize their influence in negotiating local distributions of power as well as the future complexion of colonial or post-colonial government. 3 Temporary alliances and local deals cut across binary, national divides between imperial security forces and paramilitary insurgents. In Vietnam and Algeria, rebels’ defiance of an insurgent leadership ‘line’, as well as offers of money to fighters willing to surrender or change sides, were sufficiently commonplace to be integrated into security force strategy. 4 Something else bears emphasis here. An implication of the viewpoint that violence was somehow omnipresent in colonialism, albeit in myriad forms ranging from warfare and active inter-personal harm to intimidation and perceived threats, is that imperial rule required violence management. 5 In many cases, the job of colonial security forces was not so much to outright ‘defeat’ anticolonial opposition as to restrict violent dissent to levels that enabled day-to-day administrative and economic activity to continue.
The successive Vietnamese and Algerian revolutions were as much the product of internal dynamics as they were of external influence. In Vietnam, the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was largely responsible for the onset of systemic Vietnamese-on-Vietnamese violence. It began targeting other Vietnamese for elimination during World War II, intensified its efforts to that end after Japan's 9 March 1945 takeover in Hanoi, and waged a virtual war against domestic ‘traitors’ and other enemies in the immediate aftermath of Ho Chi Minh's declaration of national independence and the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) on 2 September 1945. In Algeria, the militants who organized the more diffuse insurgency of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), announced themselves through the violence of insurrection in November 1954 and cemented their allegiance through an earlier paramilitary vanguard, the Organisation Spéciale (OS). 6
The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, it explores the reasons that prompted the ICP and FLN to target compatriots for elimination. Why did each kill their countrymen while their territories remained under foreign occupation? Secondly, it considers the nature of the violence inflicted upon victims of the ICP and FLN. What forms did that violence take? Who were its targets? Who were their executioners? The Indochina and Algerian wars were quintessential anticolonial revolutions but neither the Vietnamese nor the Algerians were united in opposition to France; they were deeply fractured from the start. As a segment of the local population vigorously resisted the French, another actively supported them, while still more desperately sought to avoid taking sides.
Origins and early phases of the Franco-Vietnam war
Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in February 1941 after three decades in self-imposed exile. At once he and a handful of trusted comrades set about rebuilding the ICP, created with Ho's help in 1930 but recently decimated by Franco-Japanese repression. As they did so, they also initiated a merciless campaign of intimidation, terror and assassination against Vietnamese ‘traitors’ (Viet gian), namely, men and women who collaborated with France and/or Japan and otherwise acted or thought ‘subversively’. 7 Ho was in the Soviet Union during Stalin's Great Purge, which impressed upon him the importance of combatting both foreign and domestic enemies, actual and potential. Ranking members of the Party acceded to Ho's campaign. Most had spent lengthy stints in colonial jail, where they habitually used violence against other Vietnamese, particularly inmates recruited by the French as overseers or affiliated with rival political organizations. Execution-style killings were ‘routine’ prison events. 8
Traitors, as Vietnamese communists defined them, included indigenous members of the colonial bureaucracy and the colonial security forces, plus intellectuals and artists, who legitimated through their attitudes and actions the domination of Vietnam by foreigners. ‘Without isolating the traitors, there cannot exist a strong national salvation movement,’ the final resolution of a meeting of ICP cadres explained. The ‘basic principle’ of the struggle against traitors was ‘to make people themselves recognize from their own experience’ that traitors ‘are selling out the country.’ To neutralize them, Party loyalists had to ‘infiltrate traitors’ organizations’ and ‘dissuade people who follow them’ by ‘exposing [traitors’] wicked schemes,’ ‘treasonous actions,’ and ‘deceptive agendas.’ 9 Ho and the ICP leadership relied on a patriotic front, the Viet Minh (abbreviated from Viet Nam Doc lap Dong minh, or League for the Independence of Vietnam), to advance their political objectives. The Viet Minh rallied fighters, partisans and other disparate elements from all segments of Vietnamese society sharing a common disdain for France and those who supported its colonialism. 10
Through the remainder of World War II, the ICP discredited, intimidated, abducted and assassinated ‘traitors’ as it sustained its ‘patriotic struggle’ against Franco-Japanese ‘fascists.’ Communists were not the only Vietnamese political actors to condone such violence, but they were the most ruthless and least discriminating. 11 ‘Every day our troops fight to eliminate Vietnamese traitors,’ ICP authorities bragged. 12 In certain areas at particular times, neutralizing traitors even took precedence over resisting foreign occupiers. 13
In March 1945, strategic reverses in the Pacific War prompted Tokyo to remove the pro-Vichy French colonial administration, previously co-opted to administer Indochina. At once, Japanese forces detained French civilian leaders and military personnel. In ending this marriage of convenience, the Japanese authorities partly aimed to curry favour with the Vietnamese. They sanctioned the creation of the Empire of Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai as an ostensibly sovereign state. In acting as they did, the Japanese advanced a core ICP objective: ending French rule in Vietnam. At a stroke, in a relatively bloodless coup, Tokyo achieved what the Party had pursued since its inception.
The so-called March coup dramatically improved communist prospects for seizing national power. Once Japan was defeated, the only remaining obstacle to an ICP power grab would be other local pro-independence groups, namely non/anti-communist political parties and other organizations, including religious sects. ICP leaders promptly denounced the Empire of Vietnam as a ‘puppet government’ (chinh phu bu nhin) filled with ‘traitors’ voluntarily serving the ‘pro-Japanese movement.’ 14 The Party's coercive campaign against those traitors was brutal. In light of recent developments, the ICP broadened its definition of ‘traitors’ to include not just ‘active collaborators’ in the employ of the imperialists, but also ‘patriotic collaborators,’ that is, those who rallied to the Empire of Vietnam because they believed in its potential as a representative government. After March 1945, ICP/Viet Minh death squads targeted the customary elite (mandarins), traditionally supportive of the colonial order, as well as low-level officials in the Empire of Vietnam government. Essentially, Ho and his comrades threatened and sanctioned violence against anyone adhering to alternative visions of an independent state. 15 They couched their actions and denunciations in nationalist language, claiming rivals were duplicitous servants of popular interest answering to foreign patrons. In this vision, at once ideological and instrumental, any Vietnamese blocking the realization of communist ambitions was a turncoat. The French and then the Japanese had created new cleavages and exploited old ones among Vietnamese; after the March 1945 coup, local communists cemented them through coercive measures.
Origins and early phases of the Algerian conflict
A similar escalation in internecine political violence occurred in Algeria, but in the immediate aftermath of World War II. A fledgling republican democracy in post-war France briefly seemed willing to lend substance to Algeria's theoretical integration with France through economic modernization and offers of citizenship. However, the outcome disappointed all sides. 16 Parliamentary representatives from black Africa and the French Caribbean won legislative victories in 1945–46 regarding forced labour, democratic representation and welfare entitlements, but an Algerian-enabling law approved in 1947 was vacuous. 17
Algeria was, by then, a colony in political lockdown following an insurrection two years earlier. The territory's rulers meticulously recalibrated the Sétif uprising, a May 1945 rebellion in eastern Algeria's Constantine region, as a vicious local revolt – an isolated explosion of racial hatred – rather than the start of a populist nationalist insurgency among Algeria's Muslim majority. 18 As European settlers gathered to celebrate VE-Day on 8 May 1945, security forces shot down demonstrators in Sétif protesting against the ban on the territory's principal nationalist movement, the Algerian People's Party (PPA). 19 The PPA orchestrated the original protests, but it did not control the collective violence that followed. One hundred and eight settlers died in and around the towns of Sétif, Guèlma and Philippeville (now Skikda) between 8 and 11 May. These killings were the prelude to a security clampdown in which somewhere between 7,000 and 45,000 Algerians died in the period of May to August 1945. The Sétif uprising, the meanings of its violence, and those of the retributive colonial onslaught that it triggered have been extensively debated. 20 The relevant point here is that the colonial occupier refused to acknowledge the conflict, and indigenous political violence more generally, as a form of inter-ethnic civil war that would ultimately destroy both colonial power and pluralist opposition. 21
Misrepresenting the motives behind the violence of the original outbreaks made it easier to justify security force and settler vigilante repression as a curative process, the first step towards healing a psychotic body politic. The administrative reports and intelligence assessments of collective violence expressed this mentality. Settlers were killed with knives and rocks, the only weapons available to the Algerians involved. Yet, this form of lethal group violence was pathologized as atavistic, pre-modern and frenzied. 22 Time and again, the events of early May 1945 were constructed, not as a politically-inspired rebellion, but as a collective psychiatric ‘disorder’ – community psychosis. 23 Security force repression was therefore the necessary shock treatment, a didactic performance to restore social order and mental stability to Algeria's indigènes. 24 French security forces conspicuously enacted retribution to achieve three purposes: to deter, to instil fear and to avenge. Ascribing community guilt through collective punishment was essential to the punitive process. 25 Functionally, this terrorization of the majority population worked for a while. Algeria saw no recurrence of popular rebellion from below before November 1954.
The changing nature of internecine and anti-European political violence in Algeria, which occurred in the decade separating the events of 1945 from the August 1955 massacres in Constantine, is less well-known. These last acts of violence marked the decisive escalation of the Algerian War from localized rebellion to national revolution. 26 Again, there were pronounced civil war dimensions to inter-Algerian violence before and after August 1955.
Judicial proceedings consequent to the Sétif uprising continued for years afterwards, intensifying local resentment at colonial courts’ racial bias. Among those imprisoned, Algerian postal workers and administration clerks, essential public sector employees, stood some chance of release. However, most detainees were kept in limbo. Closures of local branches of Algeria's Muslim Scouts Federation (FMSA) were progressively lifted, first in the eastern towns of Khenchela, Bône, Bougie and Djidjelli, then in 15 more. Conversely, only one of the 19 Koranic schools (medersas) that had been shut down in Constantine was allowed to re-open. 27 Meanwhile, thousands of Algerian males languished in jail despite mounting calls in Algeria and France for an amnesty to reverse the collective punishments imposed in the summer of 1945. 28
Mass Algerian violence on a scale similar to that in Vietnam was improbable at the time. After Sétif, the Muslims of Constantine département were ordered to surrender any privately held firearms. This ban remained in force more than two years later, despite more than 800 requests for the return of licensed shotguns whose use in ‘hunting for the pot’ offered the principal source of protein to rural families. 29 Rigged elections to the Algerian Assembly in April 1948 triggered violent demonstrations, such as in Aumale, where riot police fired at protestors, even though the demonstrators in question were unarmed, throwing stones, not bombs. 30 Those still imprisoned since 1945 used hunger strikes as a form of resistance, demanding recognition as political prisoners. 31 These protests escalated into a concerted national campaign beginning in March 1949. Hunger strikes continued intermittently for 18 months until the autumn of 1950. 32 In Algiers, Tizi Ouzou and other prisons, a radical hard core crystalized. 33 From it, political organizers emerged.
Former prisoners figured among those, principally from Constantine département, who witnessed the retributive security force and vigilante repression subsequent to the Sétif uprising. 34 Convinced that Algeria could only be liberated through revolutionary violence, they regrouped into a proto-insurgent group, the Organisation Spéciale (OS). 35 The OS was the paramilitary vanguard of two Algerian oppositionist parties, the outlawed PPA and its legal surrogate, the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD). Although nominally distinct, the PPA-MTLD shared common origins in Messali Hadj's integral nationalism. Following Messali's return from exile, the MTLD contested Algerian legislative and municipal elections in 1946–47. It was during this interlude of legal nationalist campaigning that the OS was formally established at the MTLD party congress in mid-February 1947. 36 The obvious tension between peaceful political engagement and covert paramilitarism was, as yet, unresolved. 37 That was set to change. Although chronically short of weapons and money, the primordial role of OS militants in organizing insurrectionary violence was assured as the PPA-MTLD (hereafter PPA) struggled to circumvent renewed bans on its organizational activities. In that sense, the OS was part of a bigger shift as nationalist opposition went underground. 38 Targeted violence against fellow Algerians was integral to this transition. With firearms taken out of circulation after Sétif, the OS took delivery of the weapons that the PPA retained: caches of small arms, including rifles, Sten guns and grenades, purloined during World War II. Meanwhile, PPA activists took charge of building up larger armouries in major urban and provincial centres. 39 The murder on 22 June 1947 of a garde champêtre, effectively a colonial estate guard, at Palestro (now Lakhdaria) southeast of Algiers was the first in a string of PPA-OS killings. Ali Ben Slimane Bahloul, the caïd, or headman, in nearby Béni-Arif was murdered two months later, allegedly for informing police about local PPA attacks. Accosted in a café on the evening of 13 August by two of the men he denounced, brothers Saïd and Yahia Bey, the caïd died from gunshot wounds. The brothers also acted in response to a neighbour's reports about the caïd's actions. Bahloul's relatives burned down this informant's house on the evening of the caïd's funeral. 40 The two brothers were effectively the PPA's first death squad and were convicted of multiple capital crimes by the Tizi Ouzou assizes. 41 Yahia Bey was murdered in a retaliatory attack on 21 November 1949. His brother, Saïd, was killed four months later, shot by police acting ‘in self-defence’. 42
This pattern of targeted assassination of ‘traitors’ and revenge killings by relatives continued with the murder of Ramdane Ferhat, the leading notable of Aït-Aïssi village on 23 November 1948. 43 However, it was the murder of Lounés Zouileh, the prosecution witness in proceedings then underway against Mohamed Benlounes, who was the PPA chief in Bordj-Ménaiel, a pivotal district in the Berber heartland of Kabylia, that laid bare the civil war dimension of the PPA-OS assassination campaign. Kabylia's defiant political culture of resistance to central authority melded with PPA-OS self-characterization as outlaw representatives of the oppressed. 44 The combination worked. From summer 1948, sub-prefectures received numerous complaints from caïds and government workers in Kabylia and elsewhere about intolerable insecurity as PPA-OS networks extended. 45 Heightened policing, stiffer sentences and longer prison terms were demanded. 46
By April 1948, an OS network was entrenched throughout the Algiers department. Other groups consolidated in Oranie and Constantine reporting to OS leader Hocine Aït Ahmed. He may have been coordinating the OS but Aït Ahmed's gaze was always more global than military. In December 1948, one of the FLN's original nine leaders who would become its principal spokesperson in the USA and elsewhere, pressed the MTLD's central committee to seek friends, sympathy and influence overseas. Defining OS-type paramilitarism as the necessary prelude to ‘people's war’, he viewed their activities as inherently transnational – part of a universal struggle against injustice that transcended international politics. 47
In Oranie, Ahmed Ben-Bella, organized the OS in western Algeria. There, as elsewhere, local cells were composed of a head and three subordinates – a system termed ‘Quatre-quatre’ that reported to a ‘general staff’, which provided training, equipment and instructions. Further east, in the Constantinois, by the beginning of 1949, three local OS units led by future FLN luminaries Didouche Mourad, Larbi Ben M’hidi and Rabah Bitat, reported to Mohammed Boudiaf, OS chief in Constantine department. 48 Nationalist politicians also figured prominently in the OS leadership and planned to divert funds from the PPA-MTLD to support OS activities. That said, arguments between nationalist dignitaries over Berber separatism in Kabylia triggered a restructuring of the OS executive in 1949. 49 By that point, the paramilitary group was desperate for the money necessary to concretize its plans, whether securing arms deliveries from Libya or funding individual covert operations. Financial need, combined with the desire to strike at an institutional symbol of French colonialism, explained the decision of an OS commando team to raid the Oran Post Office on 5 April 1949, a robbery that secured almost 3.2 million francs. 50
French security services did not immediately connect the Oran Post Office attack to the OS, but, from February 1948, urban police commanders warned the colonial government that areas of the Algerian capital, including the casbah and the working-class district of Belcourt, were in thrall to ‘services de sécurité PPA,’ an elliptical reference to the OS. An earlier police raid on MTLD headquarters in the Algiers district of Michelet also confirmed the nationalist movement's plans to organize spearhead units ready to coordinate an insurrection when the leadership ordered a ‘general offensive’. 51 To that end, small groups of nationalist activists enforced observation of PPA central committee edicts, including boycotts of Jewish shops and bans on visiting European cafés. The PPA also strengthened its grip on the FMSA. Still the largest youth group in the colony, the FMSA helped recruit Algerian teenagers to the PPA through nationalist propaganda and pre-military training. FMSA ‘night marches’ were conducted paramilitary style, with uniforms and wooden weapons. Older PPA cadres reportedly trained in Algiers and elsewhere with real firearms. 52
Mohamed Belkacem Khider, a PPA deputy and senior OS organizer, assured supporters in April 1948 that the young paramilitaries were disciplined, willing to die for the nationalist cause, and ready to use violence to advance it. 53 By June 1948, Algerian prefectures reported the first resignations of colonial auxiliaries serving as forest guards and village officials placed on PPA ‘death lists’ for alleged collaboration with the colonial authorities. 54
The OS was eventually broken down after heavy police infiltration. 55 Intelligence provided to the police in March 1950 by Abdelkadir Khiari, an OS activist in Tebessa, eastern Algeria, became the prelude to a nationwide clampdown on the paramilitaries. Again, Algerians used information, whether withheld or supplied, as a weapon. However, home searches, document seizures and detainee ‘confessions’ elicited details of OS cells throughout the country. As in summer 1945, so in spring 1950, hundreds of arrests were made before mass trials in 1951 and 1952. 56 Again, hunger strikes, assaults on prison staff, and tighter political organization among OS detainees followed. 57 Jail terms of between one and four years punctuated by coordinated prisoner protests were the norm. 58 Indeed, shared experiences of incarceration linked the police crack-down against the OS between 1950–52 with the consolidation of the FLN's inner core of regional (wilaya) commanders in 1954–55. 59 Public support for OS militants, even after most were jailed, meanwhile confirmed this paramilitary vanguard's success in building public identification with insurgency. Demonstrations at criminal courts, such as in Oran where 47 OS detainees were convicted of sedition on 6 March 1951, were thus highly symbolic. 60 Despite the movement's break-up, an activist core endured, among them OS leader Ahmed Ben Bella, Ait Amirouche, the OS organizer in Relizane Province, and PPA parliamentarian Mohamed Khider. 61
Civil war dynamics of the Franco-Vietnam conflict
In Vietnam, the Viet Minh, too, extended its popular reach, offering social support while enforcing public compliance. After famine hit Tonkin and northern Annam in 1944–45, mounting tensions amongst the Vietnamese fomented insecurity that was conducive to the civilianisation of violence and paramilitarization of the independence movement. Food shortages bred lawlessness as armed gangs, including some controlled by the ICP/Viet Minh, started raiding government granaries. Japanese and Empire of Vietnam authorities tried but failed to maintain order. In August 1945, famine still plagued areas of Tonkin. In July and August 1945, torrential rains caused the Red River to surge, bringing ‘exceptional flooding’ that devastated several regions, including densely populated zones between Haiphong and Hanoi. Losses in rice production exceeded a third of the anticipated total output. 62
The prevailing instability exacerbated political, class, racial and regional tensions. Conscious of their vulnerability, Vietnamese joined and otherwise supported organizations promising to help and protect them. The ICP was a main beneficiary. Its raids on government granaries were popular, and attendant efforts to redistribute food earned it political legitimacy. 63 Other factions capitalized on circumstances to rally supporters by promising protection and food. They included rival political parties such as the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD) and Greater Vietnam Party (Dai Viet), plus politicized religious sects based in southern Vietnam, the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai. Each sect organized paramilitary forces to defend supporters and facilitate the administration of the territories they occupied. Thanks primarily to their militias, each operated as a mini-state.
Following news of Japan's mid-August surrender to the Allies, Viet Minh and affiliated forces acting on ICP orders occupied government installations across the country. On 2 September, just as Tokyo signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender formally ending the Pacific War, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam's independence and the founding of the DRVN. In their exuberance, loyalists unleashed public retributive violence against French residents and their indigenous auxiliaries. 64 ICP leaders failed to restrain them partly because of the fragmentation within the independence movement and the physical isolation of the Party's leadership elite in the country's far north. 65 The immediate post-independence period was so bloody and contested that it even witnessed ‘an explosion of score-settling’ between ‘real’ Viet Minh and those they considered ‘fake’ Viet Minh. 66 Thus, as World War II ended, the scale of fratricidal violence in Vietnam increased.
Although Ho claimed to speak for the nation, his declaration of independence was not endorsed by all pro-independence factions in Vietnam. The country's largest political party at the time, the VNQDD, condemned the ICP's appropriation of its nationalist mantle. It saw the declaration for what it was: a power play intended to enhance the ICP's domestic and international legitimacy at the expense of more popular and less sanguinary rivals. The VNQDD and other non-communist organizations reacted quickly, their opposition facilitated by the arrival of Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) and British forces commissioned to supervise the disarmament and repatriation of Japanese forces above and below the 16th parallel, respectively. This interlude of transitional foreign occupation created a safer space for anti-communists to assert themselves and ‘violently attack’ those presumed to be DRVN partisans. 67 The VNQDD denounced those partisans and the known communists among them specifically as stooges of Moscow, more focused on serving foreign interests and terrorizing their own compatriots than preparing to fight the French once they returned. Internecine violence escalated across Vietnam. 68
Just like the May 1945 rebellion in Algeria's Constantine region, the communist-led August Revolution that culminated in the declaration of Vietnamese independence was more than a local revolt: it marked the onset of an inter-ethnic, multi-layered civil war that both complicated and assisted France's campaign to recolonise Vietnam and the rest of Indochina after World War II. 69 Although various factions were involved, as just noted, the civil war and the Vietnamese-on-Vietnamese violence intrinsic to it were primarily driven by the ICP and groups affiliated with it. Indeed, once Ho announced his new regime, a ‘campaign of hate and slander’ commenced to delegitimize organizations and populations identified as a ‘grave danger’ to its ideological plans. 70 Violence became an instrument of ‘organizational policy’ that was authorized from above and ‘purposefully adopted in pursuit of group objectives’ to consolidate the new regime's power. 71
Ho Chi Minh effectively emulated Lenin's decisions immediately after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution: terror was key allowing communist leaders to ‘entrench themselves definitively.’ 72 The DRVN's campaign of ‘Red Terror’ resulted in renewed attacks against rivals and non-compliant groups. 73 Where conditions permitted, a secret Party instruction noted, ‘using force to protect people's property and lives should go hand-in-hand with the killing of Vietnamese traitors and [war] profiteers.’ ICP operatives had to be particularly vigilant toward ‘enemies’ belonging to the VNDQQ, Dai Viet, Hoa Hao, and Cao Dai, as well as Catholics. 74 ICP-sanctioned ‘terrorism’ sought not only to neutralize these domestic enemies; it also aimed to permanently ‘detach’ from France all ‘sympathetic populations.’ 75 French intelligence estimated that alongside security forces and propaganda calling for ‘murderous violence’ against enemies, terrorism was one of three means employed by Ho's regime to consolidate its authority and ensure compliance with its policies. 76 The regime's police force (tu ve) was ‘perfectly efficient in its repression and its terrorism.’ 77 ‘Forceful police action’ against other Vietnamese widened existing political divides. 78 The DRVN government set up ‘people's tribunals’ to judge those arrested by its police force for ‘having supported imperialism, speculated [against], or sabotaged the nation building effort.’ It also created military tribunals to mete out justice against those who joined movements resisting the ICP or who decided to fight alongside, sell goods to, and gather information for the French. The tribunals and the semblance of justice they promised did little to curtail extrajudicial killings by DRVN security forces; traitors and other regime enemies were still executed summarily ‘under appalling conditions’ and without due process. 79 Adapting the formulations of political scientist Laia Balcells, the DRVN killed because it lacked widespread popular support; its violence against others was ‘motivated by the need to obtain consent from and control over civilians.’ 80
Predictably, the actions of Ho's regime spurred retaliatory action against DRVN loyalists by the groups they victimized. As previously noted, non-communist and anti-communist nationalists generally opposed violence against other Vietnamese. By their reasoning, inflicting harm upon compatriots was senseless as it alienated people and created sympathy for France. Prompted by circumstances, however, they resorted to violence against other Vietnamese more frequently after 2 September 1945, targeting communists and those who helped them. Theirs was a reactive form of violence, indicating that communist-sanctioned killings of other Vietnamese did not consolidate DRVN power but in fact amplified existing political, religious, ethnic, and socio-economic cleavages.
Targets of DRVN violence included ethnic minority groups that had never been keen to embrace ethnic Vietnamese (kinh) masters. Historically, minorities in Vietnam were variously marginalized, oppressed, and dehumanized by ethnic Vietnamese. Several actively supported or otherwise collaborated with the French. Among them were the Tai, Meo (Hmong), Tho, and Nung ethnicities, with the latter considered ‘traditional enemies’ of the Vietnamese. 81 These groups effectively co-opted the coloniser as protector. 82 Some village and district leaders, refusing to recognize DRVN authority, threatened secession; others eagerly awaited France's return. 83 In Son Tay Province, a French report noted, local minorities mounted a ‘bloody resistance’ against the new government. 84 Their rejection of oversight by communist-dominated ‘people's committees’ frustrated regime officials, who set out to punish them and ‘terrorize’ their leaders. 85 This ‘categorical violence’ assessed guilt collectively and targeted entire groups defined by their ethnicity. 86 Pro-DRVN contingents were especially ruthless toward Tai populations. Tai leaders and notables were taken hostage and sent to Hanoi or executed on-the-spot by firing squad (fusillés). Their homes were burned. 87 The violence unleashed upon minorities also reflected embedded hostility among ethnic Vietnamese; it was as much a settling of old scores as an effort to affirm the central government's authority. Just as in Algeria, it was in remote towns and villages that violence against civilian officials was most pronounced.
DRVN loyalists also murdered politically unaffiliated individuals, including Vietnamese administrators who continued their work for French-sponsored institutions such as the Institut Pasteur.
88
They hunted down leaders of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao once it became clear their respective paramilitary forces would not rally to the DRVN. On at least one occasion
The worst instance of post-independence violence against Eurasians took place on 25 September in a Saigon suburb known as Cité Héraud. According to information subsequently collected by the French, at precisely seven in the morning that day, DRVN militants slipped past guards and entered the multi-ethnic enclave. Then, to shouts of ‘All that is French must be annihilated’, they proceeded to kidnap at gun- and knifepoint dozens of people.
94
Most were Eurasians.
95
British Gurkhas intervened but could only save a few of the victims. The rest, including women and children, were never seen again. According to survivors’ testimonies, during their captivity, victims endured ‘incredible sadism’
By the end of 1945, French military intelligence reported ‘total’ anarchy in every province of Cochinchina, that is, the southern third of the country. 101 As French troops returned and tensions mounted through 1946, DRVN security forces took increasingly ‘vicious action’ (action féroce) against Eurasians and Europeans. In a typical incident that occurred after the withdrawal of Chinese Nationalist forces from Tonkin and the signing of a modus vivendi between France and Ho's regime in March 1946, DRVN police set upon five off-duty French soldiers in Haiphong. One of the soldiers escaped. Another, who tried to flee by jumping in a nearby river, was shot and ‘finished off’ with a paddle. The other three were taken to an undisclosed location and ‘put to death in excruciating torments’ (mis a mort dans d’atroces supplices). 102
The perpetrators of such violence were mostly young, rudimentarily trained, unemployed men.
103
Some were members of so-called Attack Youth brigades.
104
These ‘shock’ or ‘vanguard’ units of the ICP-led ‘revolution’ had previously served as Japanese auxiliaries.
105
During the August Revolution, several rallied to the Viet Minh, and some did so with their Japanese commanders.
106
Yet others had served Vietnamese leaders who were or became secret ICP operatives.
107
The extreme behaviour of youth groups was nurtured by strong group identification that removed psychological obstacles to violence.
108
Young men who had militarily trained under the Japanese at Son Tay were notorious
When youth and Binh Xuyen forces perpetrated violence against non-Vietnamese, this was often conducted at random, unlike the units known as ‘Volunteers of Death’, whose acts of violence were tightly directed. In Stalinist fashion, the ICP created specialized death squads to silence prominent political rivals. French observers dubbed them comités de tueurs (killers’ committees), targeting members of the French public security and intelligence community, political figures, as well as Eurasians and indigenous collaborators. 114 Comprising approximately ten individuals, each squad was assigned a specific sector, where it operated clandestinely to carry out assassinations and collect information. 115 The Special Affairs Section of the DRVN's nascent Public Security Department (Cong an Vu) under hardened communists Le Gian, Tran Hieu and Tran Quoc Hoan was responsible for forming and training these units. 116 According to ICP orders, all efforts undertaken against ‘traitors’ had to remain covert so that Ho's regime could maintain the pretence of being ‘friendly’ towards all Vietnamese. 117 To silence low-risk detractors, DRVN security forces resorted to threats and intimidation. They thus ‘neutralized’ traditional community leaders, among them, village headmen, district chiefs, and influential families. 118 Many were sent to internment camps. During the last week of November 1945, DRVN authorities detained more than 1,500 ‘enemies’ of the revolution in a camp on the outskirts of Hanoi. According to François Guillemot, ‘the prospects for stable independence, sustained territorial unification, and a united national front dissipated within a year [after Ho declared Vietnamese independence] owing to the political aspirations of various factions and the inability of the ICP, as master of power, to adapt its political project.’ 119 A May 1947 instruction to the membership underlined the ICP's stubborn refusal to tolerate domestic opposition to its authority and its determination to eliminate opponents. ‘The Government of Ho Chi Minh is the only legitimate government of Vietnam, established in accordance with the Constitution, [and] recognized by the National Assembly of Vietnam,’ the instruction noted. ‘Anyone else who pretends to represent the people or engages with the French will be considered a Vietnamese traitor to the nation, will be prosecuted by the Government for treason and conspiring with the enemy, and will be punished according to the law,’ the instruction concluded. 120
Paradoxically, ICP-sponsored violence against other Vietnamese worked to French advantage. Victims or otherwise disapproving of the draconian and violent measures sanctioned by DRVN authorities in their quest for mastery of the Vietnamese geo-body, a number of non-communist pro-independence groups rallied to the French, a trend that started in 1946. Members of the Cao Dai sect in the southern province of Tay Ninh, targets of ICP extreme violence starting in September 1946 owing to their leaders’ refusal to abide DRVN authority, came to abhor ‘the way the communists seized power by eliminating nationalist elements’ and gladly followed those leaders after they decided to throw in their lot with France. 121 French authorities had successfully exploited Vietnam's multi-ethnic and sectarian politics during the colonial era, and they did so again even before the onset of the Indochina War in December 1946 by contracting formal alliances with sects, ethnic militias and other organizations opposing the DRVN. It was sound policy to ‘weaken the faction in power by rousing its adversaries’ and ‘exploiting personal rivalries,’ a French assessment noted. 122 Essentially, the French weaponized the Vietnamese civil war, aiming as they did, in the revealing words of one official, to ‘transpose the quarrel we have with the Viet Minh party on to a strictly Vietnamese playing field while we ourselves take part as little as possible in the campaigns and reprisals which should be the work of the native adversaries of this party.’ 123 To discredit DRVN leaders while mustering stronger support for their own cause in Vietnam and overseas, the French widely publicized DRVN ‘crimes’ perpetrated against other Vietnamese as well as Eurasian and European residents. 124 Promoting civil war dynamics became integral to French strategy in Vietnam by 1947. 125 Predictably, French alliance-making and manipulation of civil war dynamics invited further DRVN reprisals against ‘traitors to the nation,’ creating a spiral of extreme violence. 126
Civil war dynamics of the Algerian conflict
Local violence patterns as decolonisation pressures increased in Algeria were similar, but less bloodily drawn than in the incipient stages of the Indochina War. After the initial FLN uprising on 1 November 1954, the Algerian conflict grew slowly at first and was punctuated by insurgent attacks and consequent rural crackdowns. Colonial Algeria remained legally schizoid. Once French parliamentarians approved the first state of emergency provisions in April 1955, Algeria was simultaneously governed as a hostile space and an integrated colony whose population could be won over. 127 Emergency legislation made it possible to wage war without prior need to declare it. 128 Law and policing in this context became instruments of repression, not guarantors of social protection. 129 Key elements of the 3 April 1955 state of emergency decree included proscriptions on Algerian political activity and media output. Of greater significance to rural communities was the reintroduction of internment and tighter restrictions on freedom of movement, each extendable by agreement between the colonial administration and army command. 130
Consistent with the precepts of ‘lawfare’, Algeria's civilian majority was no longer presumed innocent until evidence proved otherwise. 131 Quite the reverse: imperial security forces coerced communities, killed civilians and interned more than two million others in punitive actions that supposedly restored order. Yet, even in those regions such as Constantine's rural interior and the Aurès highlands where FLN activity was most intense, administrators repeatedly advised that inhabitants were victims: unable to farm as normal, exhausted by grinding poverty, exasperated by FLN violence, and terrified of the security force ‘clear-ups’ that lawfare permitted. 132
In this topsy-turvy world where law enabled colonial security forces to wage peacetime war against the civilians whom they claimed to be saving, architects of repression in the army's psychological warfare bureau acknowledged an intellectual debt to their insurgent enemies. 133 Civilians were squeezed between anticolonial insurgents and imperial counter-insurgents who were equally prepared to use violence to compel compliance. This was a conflict escalator in which the competing sides outdid each other's acts of violence in trying to sway community allegiance. 134 The conflict's civil war dynamics changed as a result. Infighting between the FLN and its principal nationalist challenger, the Mouvement National Algérien (MNA) was vicious but rarely lethal before the massacres of settlers in Constantine Province orchestrated by local FLN commanders on 20 August 1955. These killings forced the issue. Afraid of being outflanked by its more extreme rival, the MNA endorsed insurrectionary violence three weeks later. MNA leader Messali Hadj condemned the FLN as illegitimate, insisting that the MNA carried Algeria's revolutionary torch. 135 For the Algiers administration, it was now open season on both the FLN and the MNA. Fomenting violence between Algeria's opposing nationalist movements was an obvious means to undermine both movements. 136 Ensuing fratricidal killings illustrated the instructional aspects of decolonisation violence, its objective being as much to coerce those who feared or witnessed it as to silence those who suffered it.
Symbolic acts of violence, like the FLN's Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) massacres of settlers in August 1955, knowingly invited state retribution. Collective punishments heightened civilian fear of further ALN violence and security force reprisal, adding to popular insecurity rather than ending it. On 20 October 1955, two months after the Constantine killings, a group of armed FLN supporters burned down a settler farm in Gastu, a settlement near the coastal town of Philippeville. The attackers hid in homes nearby, having assaulted a rural self-defence militia post the night before their arson attack. Additional settler farms were either burned or ransacked in the weeks ahead. By December, targeted killings of three farmers convinced most remaining settlers in Gastu to leave. 137 On this occasion, military authorities responded to insurgent violence against agricultural communities, not by collective punishment but by organizing a rural network of self-defence units dubbed Groupes Mobiles de Police Rurale (GMPR). Regional administrators hoped that GMPR groups would command sufficient local support to keep out the FLN without additional army or police units to help them. The purpose of the GMPR was thus not to maintain colonial law, but to make isolated communities feel secure. Village GMPR patrols relayed intelligence about suspicious movements to the army, but they had no authority to conduct house searches or make arrests unless police or army officers were present. Rather, the GMPR, as the Algiers administration put it, was meant to create a ‘climate of confidence’ in the countryside. 138
The limitations of these arrangements became obvious as the Algerian War intensified. Echoing the Gastu farm attacks a year earlier, on the evening of Sunday, 23 September 1956, a farmstead at El Fahoul was attacked by around 20 ALN militiamen. The assault was carefully planned. Local GMPR personnel were with their families on weekend leave. The attackers skirted fixed machine-gun posts on the farm perimeter and avoided detection from an army installation only 300 metres away. Still, a firefight took place. An army sergeant was taken prisoner and two policemen were lightly wounded in the exchange before the ALN unit made off with 43 firearms – the entire GMPR armoury. More significant than the weapons haul was that someone had advised the ALN when, where and how to mount their operation. Certain that the local GMPR unit was either infiltrated or disloyal, the departmental administration disbanded it. Insecurity worsened for El Fahoul and the surrounding district. Until a permanent army garrison arrived, the ALN operated freely without fear of denunciation or detention. 139
Reinforcement of rural settlements like this was coming. Six months earlier, French premier Guy Mollet's Socialist-led coalition secured emergency powers in a landmark vote on 15 March 1956. Nevertheless, the insecurity that fuelled inter-Algerian violence continued. At the level of frontline operations, a combination of harsh realism and dislocated unreality about the depth of the problem pervaded the military correspondence surrounding the war's 1956 expansion. Analysts at the military intelligence bureau in Paris sifted through weekly reports on the incidence of ALN killings, the progress of army security sweeps, the state of local Algerian opinion, and administrative difficulties within each sector command. Summarising the reportage received in the final week of March 1956, the Bureau chief, Colonel Dalstein, was cautiously upbeat. 140 His timing was significant. This was the first reporting period after Mollet's government enacted its Special Powers legislation in Algeria. Martial law was applied nationally, and conscripts became liable for service in the conflict – a fate that young Frenchmen avoided throughout the war in Indochina. 141 Massively reinforcing the army enabled the more aggressive pursuit of ALN guerrillas by army units previously preoccupied with local lockdowns. Closure of Algeria's land frontiers with minefields and electric fences began in 1957, isolating some ALN units and shutting out others. 142 However, civilian populations caught in the crossfire of this military escalation faced even more violence and abuse, while their suffering remained concealed in the avalanche of army statistics and media reportage focused on reduction of the ALN. 143
Four months later, in July 1956
Reliance on bureaucratized counter-insurgency, on data collection, statistical analysis of ‘kill rates’ and other supposed indicators of security force advance flattered to deceive. After Soummam, the FLN-ALN refined their methods of social control, from collecting funds and recruiting informants to enforcing boycotts and punishing ‘traitors’ to the national cause. Security force reportage, raw data about ALN losses in particular, offered little insight into shifting local allegiances. Instead, the French army's focus on wearing down the ALN masked the war's most critical micro-dynamic: the FLN's growing ability to force civilian populations to comply with their edicts. 148
In December 1956
Again, it was in villages that violence against civilian officials was the harshest. In part, this was a matter of geography, of remoteness from police stations or army garrisons. More significant, though, was the poverty prevalent in the rural interior of Vietnam and Algeria. Here, the disparities in wealth and social status between those working with the colonial system and those who defied it might have been objectively narrow but remained subjectively significant. From Algeria to Vietnam, community leaders seemed privileged next to the poorest farmers, sharecroppers and labourers who provided the rank and file of rural insurgent groups. A little wealth, a whiff of corrupt practice and accusations of collaboration were enough to condemn countless village officials in the eyes of their neighbours. 153 Low-level intermediaries, mandarins, caïds and mayors, tribal chiefs and village headmen provided the foundations of local government, tax collection and workaday legal punishments, on which colonial authority was constructed. Discerning a line demarcating acts of anticolonial resistance from score settling between insiders and outsiders to the colonial system is analytically misleading. 154 Postholders were targeted because their accommodation with colonial authority caused violent resentment in others. Resistance to foreign rule meshed with the rivalries that were intrinsic to the politics of everyday life because competing local claims to power and resources mapped onto the wider politics of colonial haves and have-nots. 155 Unprotected and insecure, the only option for many indigenous auxiliaries was to get out. In December 1955, the caïds from 11 districts in Tebessa Province on eastern Algeria's Tunisian frontier did just that: jointly resigning in a bid to distance themselves from a colonial regime that failed to safeguard them from the civil war within the Algerian War. 156
Another Algerian example illustrates how the politics of settler ownership and Algerian dispossession shaped patterns of violence. From start to finish, the colony's vineyards were a rural frontline of the Algerian conflict. Some were highly capitalized estates, others small farms and cooperatives. The overwhelming majority, though, were settler-owned. 157 Those who laboured in the vineyards were, for the most part, landless rural workers, who were often the descendants of the families evicted from their smallholdings in the waves of rural colonisation that reserved Algeria's prime farmland to European export producers. 158 FLN recruiters saw a reservoir of potential support among the agricultural workers clustered around farms and estates. This, in turn, stimulated French security forces to move such communities into resettlement centres. Forcible relocations fulfilled a short-term purpose in severing peasant connections with the guerrillas and met the long-term development objective of restructuring the rural economy. 159 Yet, Algeria's wine-growing regions were left bitterly divided.
As the events in Algeria's vineyards suggest, violence helped insurgent groups targeting wealthier landowners, local officials and their protectors to achieve multiple objectives. It removed individuals likely to feed information to colonial authorities. It diminished the opportunities for socially conservative community members to organize against the insurgency. It made the redistribution of land and other resources easier. It served a radical ideological agenda. In addition, it helped insurgents build local coalitions of community self-interest that identified with the rebel movement rather than the incumbent colonial regime. 160 Another factor connected acts of micro-violence at village level to the macro-politics of national struggle. Insurgents, unable to strike at central authority in faraway colonial capitals, made local agents of government their primary targets. Community leaders often hedged their bets in response, either working covertly with rebel groups or cleaving to paramilitary loyalist organizations offering protection. The more that rebels could lay down administrative structures, levy taxes, impose laws and provide public goods, the greater the likelihood that local officials and populations would make a political choice between embracing or opposing what political scientist Ana Arjona describes as ‘rebelocracy’. 161 Even so, those choices were rarely definitive. Anticolonial movements exploited the illegitimacy of colonial institutions to entrench their alternate guerrilla states, but life in rebel-held areas was rarely secure. Resources might be scarce and economic activity disrupted. Meanwhile, the possibility of military intervention or community rejection pushed insurgent movements toward harsher punishments of dissent. 162
Conclusion
Extreme violence in Indochina prefigured events in Algeria. Cycles of internecine killing, massacre and counter-massacre, normalized summary killing, maltreatment of detainees and loss of distinction between civilians, seditionists and ‘traitors’ became features of both conflicts. 163 At the level of individuals, the extremely young and the extremely old fared especially badly, particularly when decolonisation pressures triggered famine, the forced removal of resident populations, or hyperinflation and the consequent unaffordability of essential goods. Among colonised women, sexual violence and anxieties about it imposed unprecedented constraints on behaviour. Other forms of violence, some of it clandestine and deniable, some of it public and demonstrative, targeted alleged supporters of one side or the other. Late colonial violence oscillated between authorized repression and unauthorized, but tacitly sanctioned, killings. Locally, environments of violence differed. 164 Nevertheless, an attempt at generating broad generalisation can still be made. Although systematized and rendered possible by colonial authority, violent acts were increasingly enacted without precise instruction or concomitant constraint, producing performative cycles of retribution that only embedded colonial violence more deeply in affected countries.
The punishers in question were usually members of small paramilitary formations, namely, units of peasants-turned-fighters who were fundamental to the civilianisation of decolonisation's wars. Many such formations derived from community self-defence groups seeking to remain autonomous rather than becoming assimilated into the violence work of the conflict's principal combatants. As a result, the micro-foundations of violence rarely mapped neatly onto the larger dyadic narrative of a single insurgent movement fighting counterinsurgent security forces. A more critical determinant of violence levels and types were the choices made by local militia forces about community protection, strategies of survival and score-settling. 165 Amid the endless epistemological and terminological controversies over ‘counter-insurgency’ and ‘irregular warfare’, civil war dynamics are worth underlining: because conflicts of this type sought to control populations, they were fought among, and often against, compatriots and civilian communities whose status as such was unrecognized and rarely respected. 166
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
