Algeria, Special Weapons Sections

The public audiovisual group France Télévisions had planned to broadcast it this Sunday 16th March, on its channel France 5, as part of the programme ‘La case de l'histoire’, but decided to postpone it indefinitely, claiming that it was more current and urgent to analyse the latest developments in the US-Russia negotiations on Ukraine.

The documentary, aptly titled ‘Algeria, Special Weapons Sections’, was made by director Claire Billet and historian Christophe Lafaye, with the support of the French production company Solent and the Algerian company Thala Films, and funding from France TV itself, the Swiss RTS and the Burgundy-Franche-Comté region. It was immediately broadcast by Algerian public TV channels. Some media outlets in the North African country, especially the official newspaper El Moudjahid, described the cancellation of the broadcast of the documentary in its former metropolis as a ‘monumental scandal’, emphasising that ‘France violates freedom and silences a document that reveals its crimes’.

In all honesty, I have to say that the piece can be viewed on the France TV website, although you do need to register and enter a password. 

And, once viewed, it is clear that the document is particularly interesting, and clearly of the utmost importance for a more complete understanding of the tragedy that was the Algerian War of Independence. In this specific case, it reveals that France used chemical weapons banned by the 1925 Geneva Protocol in its war against the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN) between 1956 and 1962, even though France was the first of the 135 countries that signed the agreement against these weapons, widely used during World War I.

The historian Christophe Lafaye has been able to document the creation in 1957 of the Special Weapons Brigade, whose 119 teams would carry out the so-called Challe Plan (in honour of General Maurice Challe), with a dual mission: firstly, to gas the caves occupied by Algerian guerrillas with CN2D, a mixture of the powerful irritant chloroacetophenone and the emetic adamsite, a derivative of arsenic. A third component was added to these, kieselguhr, a siliceous powder capable of transporting the toxic gas particles to the most remote parts of the human body. The launching of these weapons inside the caves forced both combatants and civilian villagers who took refuge in these caverns (440 have been identified) to flee from the French forces. If they did not leave, they would suffocate to death.

The second objective of the use of such chemical weapons was their periodic contamination, in order to render the caves unusable as places of refuge. This poisoning has proved to be very persistent, as even today the remains of those gases attached to the walls of the caves have made them very dangerous and only accessible if one enters them properly equipped with masks and protective suits.

These caves have had an ancestral use by the peasant population of Algeria, who used them as a storehouse for provisions and as a refuge from atmospheric or epidemic calamities. The documentary estimates that between 5,000 and 10,000 Algerian combatants were gassed to death. There is no exact figure for those who survived, but they did so at the cost of a life marked by all kinds of illnesses associated with the poisonings. In the deterioration of Algerian-French relations, the Algerian government even claimed that this episode of the conflict amounted to ‘war crimes’.

The French did not come out of that operation unscathed either, as those Algerian caves also served as detention centres for French soldiers who were prisoners of the FLN. In fact, more than sixty years after the end of that war, the fate of 700 French soldiers who disappeared in that conflict remains unknown. The documentary also shows that quite a few soldiers from the special weapons sections exposed to these gases developed lung diseases, stomach and skin cancers, leukaemia, etc. One of those veterans who gave his testimony, Yves Cargnino, obtained a sentence from the pension court of Besançon, which recognised that his terrible lung damage was attributable to the effects of CN2D gas in Algeria.

If all this data and detail has been captured in the documentary, it is largely because France opened the archives of the Defence Historical Service between 2012 and 2019. However, from that year onwards, the French government invoked the 2008 Law on non-communicable archives on the pretext that they ‘could enable the design, manufacture, use and location of weapons of mass destruction’. The consequence is that professional historians have seen their access to such archives and their corresponding research greatly restricted. 

In various interviews granted by the historian Christophe Lafaye to specialised media, such as ‘Histoire Coloniale’, he points out that ‘it was not only the French Army that made the decision to use those chemical weapons, it was a political decision by the then Minister of Defence Maurice Bourgès-Manoury’. This politician, a member of the Radical Party, would also go on to become Prime Minister of the ill-fated Fourth Republic, which ended in 1958 with the enthronement of General Charles de Gaulle and a Constitution that granted him powers almost equivalent to those of an absolute monarchy, and which governs France to this day.