Royan (France) (AFP)
"The attack that struck me the most was at the Cirque Monte-Carlo in September 1960. There you react in a brutal and bestial manner".
Shortly after, Régis Guillem joined the Secret Army Organization (OAS) which in turn would bloody Algeria.
Sixty years after the creation of the OAS, on February 11, 1961, these three letters remain associated with the darkest pages of the Algerian War, between a pro-French Algerian insurrection and violent acts of extreme right-wing extremism. which overflowed into the metropolis.
For Régis Guillem, a young bookkeeper from Mostaganem (western Algeria), the OAS then becomes the ultimate bulwark against the National Liberation Front (FLN) which itself leads a merciless struggle for the independence of Algeria since 1954.
"At the age of 12, I had already seen decapitated heads along a railway line. They were gatekeepers, husband and wife," he says.
The voice of Régis Guillem, now 76 years old and retired sales director in Royan (West of France), still breaks at the memory of that evening.
“When my friend took his fiancée, who was there, she had no legs. The bomb fell on her,” he said.
"I said to myself + now it will be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth +", adds the future fighter of the OAS, first passed through Jeune Nation, a revolutionary nationalist movement born in metropolitan France which established itself in Algeria at the end of 1956.
- "A job to do" -
"From that moment, with friends, we started doing what we called counter-terrorism. Then the OAS arrived, I was recruited because I already had a small commando ", relates Régis Guillem.
"Recovery" of vehicles, weapons, hold-up to collect funds: the young fighter of French Algeria participates first of all in the logistics inherent in any clandestine organization.
Passed from Mostaganem to the large neighboring metropolis of Oran, where urban guerrillas are raging, he finds himself struggling with the mobile guards, sometimes in real street fights.
But it will also be associated with much more muscular operations at the very heart of the DNA of the organization: the "targeting" and the elimination of the "adversaries" of French Algeria.
Lawyers for FLN activists, traders suspected of feeding the organization, fellaghas, communists, police officers and soldiers tracking down the OAS ... at least 2,200 people will be killed in Algeria or in mainland France, victims of plasticization, summary executions or collective attacks.
If he says he “does not regret anything”, Régis Guillem remains silent on the intentional homicides which he will be accused of a few years later by the French courts.
Charges which he will escape by enlisting in the Foreign Legion.
"I had a job to do, I was doing it," he dodges.
"Our mission at the start was to prohibit the access of Mostaganem to any veiled woman. The people of the FLN used this stratagem to enter and throw grenades", he concedes at most, suggesting that some controls were able then be fatal.
Accused of assassinations and terrorism by their detractors, Régis Guillem and his companions prefer to define themselves as "resistance fighters" in the service of French Algeria.
- "Cul-de-sac of History" -
"The OAS, it was the last resort to save the tricolor in Algeria. We lost. History always proves the victors right," he says.
An observation that makes Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia jump, 79, son of one of the six leaders of social educational centers killed by the OAS on March 15, 1962 in Algiers, just before the Evian agreements which would record independence from Algeria.
"They were resistant against what? Against France? They were nationalists against the Nation!", Replies the son Ould Aoudia, now a retired doctor in Clamart, near Paris.
"It is not by murdering in cold blood and back, by treachery, individuals in the street, who have nothing to do with, that we will ennoble the cause that we claim to defend", judge t -he.
At home, too, an attack was to shake up a whole life.
An OAS commando, partly made up of soldiers, entered the building where the six leaders of the social centers, including the writer Mouloud Feraoun, were holding a working meeting.
The six officials, former teachers suspected of sympathy for the Algerian cause, were taken outside, their backs to the wall, and shot in cold blood with machine guns.
"The killers first shot in the legs so that the bodies collapsed and the ordeal lasts a few seconds longer," said Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia.
"They fired 103 bullets (..) I had difficulty recognizing the face of my father who had been disfigured by two knockouts of 11.43", recalls Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia.
For him, the OAS fight was hopeless.
"I understand that they continue not to accept being a dead end in history. If their goal was to stay in Algeria (...) they did it the worst. manners, "he asserts.
© 2021 AFP