The Battle for Algeria. Jennifer Johnson
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to visit remote locations and interact with Algerian locals. However, the military gave explicit instructions about guarding SAS safety and treating the population with caution. Due to the “subversive” nature of the conflict, the military inherently distrusted the Algerian people it was charged with helping and grew suspicious of their motives for coming to a mobile clinic; was it for medicine or an ambush? Therefore, the military advised medical personnel to be vigilant at all times. Army officials acknowledged that distributing medical care was an important French propaganda tool, but they insisted that medical personnel still approach Algerian patients as potential combatants. As such, sick Algerians were not to be brought to French hospitals, nor were they to be transported in French military vehicles.99 In the event of an epidemic, the SAS were told to notify the closest civilian physician and await his response before responding. Above and beyond their moral responsibilities, the SAS were told to intervene only “in perfect security conditions.”100
The French military grew increasingly suspicious of medicine and equipment requests submitted by medical teams, and letters and reports from top army officials reveal that they questioned whether doctors prioritized the military’s goals over the patients’ health. In June 1958, French general Raoul Salan wrote a letter stressing that “it is indispensable to recall [medication] requests must correspond to real needs,” and they should never “be simultaneously addressed to multiple establishments.”101 His central concern was that medication and supplies could end up in the wrong hands and benefit the FLN, a situation that did occur. Salan therefore reminded doctors that they should only request products that were not “already in their possession” and cautioned against submitting requests more than once per month.
French Military Propaganda
Decentralized reports and propaganda efforts helped mask the complicated landscape and competing medical and military missions, permitting some program heads and French leaders to think the medical campaigns were more successful than they were. Alongside a voluminous collection of letters criticizing the underfunded and understaffed programs were success stories from medical personnel heralding the number of consultations they performed, progress female assistants were having with local Algerian women, and warm receptions they received from local populations around the country. It is precisely this kind of evidence to which colonial administrators could point to claim that these programs were working and provided a level of care far superior to that offered by the FLN and its health-services division.
An Assistance Médicale Gratuite team that was part of a Tizi-Ouzou SAS unit kept detailed consultation notebooks over a two-and-a-half-year period, which shed light on contemporary illnesses and the nature of relationships between the mobile medical staff and the local population. Every single page of two large notebooks beginning on 9 July 1958 and ending on 12 October 1960 was filled with patients’ full names, their sex, age, date of visit, the town in which they resided, and their physical ailment. The first notebook, which chronicled a twenty-month period from July 1958 through March 1960, kept meticulous records that suggest during that time the AMG unit saw patients every single one of those days, well over five thousand patients in all. The second notebook, entitled Assistance médicale des musulmans: Registre des consultations journalières, begins on 21 March 1960 and ends on 12 October 1960, and, although the bookkeeping is not as consistent as in the first notebook, the records indicate that the medical professionals oversaw a total of 6,000–6,500 consultations, with consultations taking place nearly every day.102 The most common sicknesses were pulmonary problems, bronchitis, meningitis, eye diseases, diarrhea, and general body wounds. These illnesses were largely unrelated to wartime military assaults but rather derived from poor medical care and impoverished living conditions over an extended period of time. The AMG team in Tizi-Ouzou was not treating battle wounds. Instead their job called for basic provision of care to groups of people previously neglected during the colonial period.
The SAS and AMG doctors improvised when it came to their offices. They set up tables outside and worked in abandoned buildings or from their vans. Their workstations were far removed from the government offices in Paris and Algiers, granting them a degree of flexibility. These doctors saw more men than women and a significant number of children under the age of twelve. The notebooks did not indicate which member of the medical team assisted which patient, but they did show a consistent and dedicated medical team that was able to consult with Algerians every day for fifteen months. They did not report supply shortages that would have prevented them from meeting with patients, nor did they report any Algerian animosity toward them or their medical initiatives. In fact, they demonstrated the opposite. The medical personnel were able to establish a permanent presence in the Tizi-Ouzou community and saw Algerian patients of all ages and genders regularly. What the notebooks do not confirm was whether the same physicians and assistants remained in Tizi-Ouzou for the duration of the time described in the consultation log. Judging by the pervasive shortage of doctors throughout the country, it is doubtful that those seeing patients in July 1958 were the same ones doing so in October 1960. In any event, their steady presence represented a marked departure from the period prior to 1955.
These notebooks, along with numerous others, obscured a reality that French military officials and colonial leaders did not frequently acknowledge.103 The SAS targeted poor, hungry, and malnourished Algerians who might never have been to a doctor or interacted with a colonial official before in their lives. Therefore, this interaction may not have been wrought with as much suspicion as the theorist Frantz Fanon described. For him, “the French medical service in Algeria could not be separated from French colonialism in Algeria.”104 Even though Fanon did not write directly about the SAS, his observations about how connected medicine and colonialism were remained applicable to the wartime project.105 Jacques Soustelle’s reform initiatives were predicated on inherent power differentials, and the SAS were another opportunity to prove the administration’s moral and physical strength. Medicine was a way for French politicians advocating Algérie française to hold themselves up as the savior and solution to Algerians’ health problems, and they cast doctors and nurses in the role of benefactor to the millions of Algerians who were struggling to survive the war. But Fanon overstated the amount of resistance the French doctors encountered. He described how Algerians “rejected” and “mistrusted” doctors and how “the colonized person who goes to see the doctor is always diffident.”106 He imagined that every interaction between a French doctor and an Algerian patient was a colonial confrontation and could only be understood in dialectical terms. This was certainly not the case when SAS units drove into town and were surrounded by entire families who eagerly awaited their help.
The military captured these moments and published many of the images for the world to see (Figures 2 and 3). These were the kinds of interactions and benevolent behavior the army wanted to highlight—not the war tactics behind them. In Le Service de santé des armées en Algérie, 1830–1958, the military described its glorious history in Algeria from the time of the conquest up to the war and connected the achievements of the military doctors in the nineteenth century to the current physicians working in SAS and AMG teams.107 The publication asked where the “native population” would be without the military’s services and credited the military for bringing preventative health care to Algeria.108 What was more striking than the many chapters that documented the army’s accomplishments was how grateful and happy the Algerians seemed to be when interacting with medical ambassadors of the colonial state. Long lines and crowds of people did not appear to discourage Algerians from waiting their turn to see a doctor. Men, women, and children of all ages gathered around the mobile health unit, their smiles revealing a level of excitement. Doctors cradled infants and caressed little patients who were timid and afraid. Nurses held women’s hands as they waited their turn. Military personnel were seen laughing and at ease with Algerians. These were not the pictures of war, death, and devastation newspapers commonly printed. But that did not make them any less a tool of war. And as Chapter 3 shows, the FLN adopted this strategy and circulated images of their physicians treating Algerian soldiers and civilians.