4 ideas
On 15 March 1962, an OAS commando entered a meeting of the Centres sociaux éducatifs at Château-Royal in El Biar, Algiers. They lined Mouloud Feraoun, a Kabyle teacher-writer and school inspector, against a wall with five colleagues, both French and Algerian, and shot them.
In a guerrilla war, each armed side asks villagers for proof of loyalty that the other side treats as a capital offence. Kabyle peasants paid FLN levies and risked execution as informers, then faced French searches, reprisals and torture for having paid. Neutrality is not a position the civilian can hold, only a gap both sides punish.
Feraoun records that French collective punishment of villages, including burnings, round-ups and torture, did more to bind Kabyles to the FLN than FLN persuasion did. Reprisals erased the distinction the army claimed to draw between rebels and the population, so the population took the rebels' side. FLN terror against its own people bred fear and resentment, not conviction, which left the villagers loyal out of necessity rather than belief.
The French-educated colonized intellectual is claimed by the colonial power as proof of assimilation and distrusted by the nationalists as its product. Feraoun was a French-language novelist and republican schoolteacher who insisted he was Kabyle and Algerian. That dual position gave him an unusually clear view of both camps' lies and left him exposed to violence from all sides, the OAS in the end.