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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 66
then to the other, which has the effect of displeasing everyone.
But a voter is not a politician. Voting is not engaging in politics, but approving or
rejecting precisely what is unambiguous about a given policy.You should not say to the
voters: ‘You will be voting for a man who is running into such and such resistance, who
has to manage such and such a group, and who in any case will be made to do something
different from what he is asking you to approve’. You should give them a clear choice.
Today they are saying to us : ‘If you vote for provisional institutions, you will be
voting for negotiation and self-determination.’ What does that mean? Either we vote for
the institutions, in which case self-determination will be prefabricated. Or we vote to give
de Gaulle the necessary authority to negotiate. In this case, the wrong question is being
asked. It should have been: ‘Do you want a negotiated peace?’ Saying ‘yes’ to the
institutions in no way reinforces de Gaulle’s position vis-à-vis the right and the army.
They will say: ‘The French may well have voted for the institutions, but not for you to
negotiate.’ This is where Machiavellianism turns against Machiavelli. Even if de Gaulle
obtains 90 per cent of the vote, it will be a vote whose mandate can be interpreted any
way you like since one response will have been made to two contradictory questions.
L’Express: In fact, it’s really a case of enabling de Gaulle to pursue his policy
and allowing him the choice of methods.
Jean-Paul Sartre: What is this policy? It consists of putting provisional institutions in
place in Algeria, with certain powers entrusted to selected individuals in both
communities. These institutions – as the recent events in Algiers and Oran have shown –
will have no authority over the population. Anyone who agrees to participate in them will
be regarded by the Muslim majority, and probably also by the Europeans, as Quislings.
Their authority, therefore, will be able to rely only on force. For that the harkis will not
suffice. The French Army will be needed.
All in all, to vote for the institutions is to enable the French Army to stay on in Algeria,
no longer to ‘pacify’ as it has been doing up until now, but to preserve a supposedly
achieved peace. Basically, nothing will have changed. The work will be a bit different,
however. Instead of shooting at men who are fighting for their independence but who are,
after all, combatants, instead of doing police jobs which degrade it morally but can pass
as the hunt for terrorists, this time the Army will have to shoot at unarmed crowds. That’s
what happened during the latest demonstrations.
There has been a lot of talk about the thirty victims whose post mortems proved that
they were killed by civilians. But since the official figures are faked and even the
Europeans talk about 500 deaths and not 150, we really have to come to the conclusion
that it was the paratroops who killed most of them. We will therefore have an Army
which, on the pretext that peace already exists or that it is in sight, will be forced almost
the whole time to shoot at unarmed demonstrators.
We can ask ourselves, therefore, whether the Referendum doesn’t in fact amount to
justifying keeping the Army in Algeria while at the same time aggravating the nature of
its action. Perhaps de Gaulle doesn’t realize this. It is certain, however, that the Army
sees a big difference between the Referendum and negotiations. If negotiations had been
announced, it would not have had the basically consenting attitude it adopted to the