With the profound global shifts in the post-World War II balance of power, guerrilla warfare received a galvanic fresh impetus. Very much weakened, the European colonial powers could no longer resist the rising tides of nationalism in both Asia and Africa. By 1960 most former colonies had attained independence, the majority without recourse to armed struggle. The breaking of the "colonial yoke" did not, however, inaugurate a new era of peace and stability, for there were many contenders for dominance in the newly established countries. Radicals fought conservatives, national minorities pursued separatist policies, and the conflicts frequently took the form of guerrilla, or quasi-guerrilla war. Of these many wars no two were alike. Some, as in Palestine, predated World War II in origin, some were given a fillip by it, with continuing resistance merely switching its focus — as in Greece, Malaya and the Philippines, for instance — once the territories concerned were no longer occupied by the wartime invader. Some of these wars were short, others protracted, some ended with the victory of the insurgents, others with their total defeat. The Greek and the Malayan insurrections were Communist-inspired and led, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was in the time-honored tradition of anticolonial uprisings. In Malaya, Palestine and Cyprus the wars were further complicated because they took place within a multinational society. In the military sphere, too, the patterns were infinitely variable. In Indonesia the rudiments of a regular army had come into being during the war; in Palestine and Cyprus the accent was for the most part on urban terrorism, in Greece and in Indochina the Communists transformed their guerrilla groups into militias and even regular army units of brigade and division strength. The Greek and the Indochinese Communists received key support from neighboring Communist countries whereas the Huks in the Philippines were given no such assistance. In Greece most of the fighting took place in the mountains, in Southeast Asia, on the contrary, in jungles and forests.
A periodization of guerrilla warfare is possible only in very general terms. By and large, the first phase was over by the mid-1950s with the end of the Malayan insurgency, the lull in Indochina, the defeat of the Huks and the Mau Mau. But it was just at this moment that the Algerian rebellion began, with Castro's landing in Cuba coming close on its heels. In the 1960s, following the victory of the Algerians and the Cuban rebels, the principal scene of guerrilla operations shifted to Vietnam and Latin America, although there was also some fighting in Africa south of the Sahara. By the late sixties the rural guerrillas in Latin America had been subdued, to be replaced by urban terrorists. Simultaneously there was an escalation in the Middle East, and the war in Indochina reached its climax. But the Indochinese war had meanwhile become increasingly conventional, with guerrilla operations as only a supplementary weapon, while the Palestinians used techniques which were no longer "guerrilla" in the familiar sense.
In some guerrilla wars there was direct superpower involvement, in others help was extended obliquely, and in yet others there was no interference at all. Nor may it be ignored that in addition to the major wars that have been mentioned, guerrilla war was endemic in certain parts of the globe — in Kurdistan and Burma, to name but two. The political character of these more minor wars was in turn so complex as to defy generalization. Some were Communist in inspiration, but with the gradual erosion of the Communist bloc the general trend was towards a nationalist socialism or a socialist nationalism. Some gravitated to Moscow, others to Peking, and they all tried to get support from both. This, however, did not necessarily mean that they were willing to toe either the Soviet or Chinese line; the one common denominator was that each country insisted on its independence. Most Latin American guerrilla movements and the Palestinians were split along political lines, whereas in Africa the divisions derived usually from the tribal or confessional (ELF) background. Sometimes the factions would join forces against the mutual enemy, but more often than not they would be at odds with each other. The differences, in short, were altogether more pronounced than the similarities and any attempt to classify these guerrilla movements according to their ideology, their geographical location or their eventual achievement (victory or defeat) is at best an arbitrary exercise. And yet, for all that, it is only by comparing and juxtaposing the individual wars that something of a clearer picture ultimately emerges.
The British decision in 1947 to evacuate Palestine and to hand over the thorny problem to the United Nations came after three years of military and political feuding. Jewish resistance was splintered. There was the Hagana, a militialike self-defense organization that had been tolerated although never officially recognized by the British Mandatory authorities. During World War II its members had been voluntarily mobilized for the war effort against Nazi Germany. The IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi) had been founded in the 1930s by the right-wing Revisionist party in protest against the purely "defensist" line taken by the Hagana against Arab insurgents. With the outbreak of war the IZL, like the Hagana, declared a truce. But its attitude changed as the danger of a Nazi victory passed, as the full extent of the holocaust in Europe became known and as the British government persisted nevertheless in its opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine. Thus the IZL renewed its activities in February 1944 with attacks directed against police stations and other government buildings. It was IZL policy at this early stage to avoid, if possible, causing loss of life. The avowed objective of the movement was to expel the British from Palestine and to create a Jewish state.1 The third resistance group was LEHI (Lohame Herut Israel — the "Stern Gang"), an offshoot of the IZL. Abraham Stern, its leader, had been shot early in the war while allegedly resisting arrest, and most of its members had been detained. In November 1943 some twenty of them broke jail and almost immediately reactivated their organization. Their program was a curious mixture of extreme right-wing and revolutionary elements; the enemy was British imperialism, the ally every anti-imperialist force including the Soviet Union and "progressive" Arabs. The great historical model for both the IZL and LEHI was the Irish struggle for independence and, to a lesser extent, the Risorgimento. LEHI had no qualms about political murder and fashioned itself after the classical terrorist organizations reaching back through the ages. An attempt in August 1944 to assassinate the High Commissioner of Palestine was unsuccessful, but in November of that year two of their members killed Lord Moyne, British minister for Middle Eastern affairs, in Cairo.
The Hagana had collaborated with the British police in hunting down members of both the IZL and LEHI because they regarded their activities as detrimental both to the anti-Nazi war effort and the Zionist cause. Nor were they willing to put up with acts of defiance against their own official underground army, representing the majority, the elected institutions of Palestine Jewry. But a few weeks after VE Day collaboration between the Hagana and the British (saison) came to an end. In late October 1945 the IZL and LEHI joined with the Hagana in sinking three British naval craft and wrecking the railway lines at a number of points. Throughout 1946 and 1947 the IZL and LEHI continued their operations, directed for the most part against British troops in the major cities. The Hagana's actions were far fewer but on a larger scale, concerned chiefly with the sabotaging of lines of communication. The most spectacular terrorist operation (carried out by the IZL) was the mining of a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which several government departments were at the time located, with the loss of more than ninety British, Jewish and Arab lives. Terrorist acts were suspended, however, with the outbreak of the Arab-Jewish war in December 1947.2
The dissident organizations nonetheless continued their separate existence until shortly after the end of the war of independence (summer 1948), although while it was yet in progress Ben Gurion, himself an activist second to none, was firmly resolved that the Hagana — or the Israeli army, rather, of which it had become both nucleus and backbone — should impose its authority on the "dissidents," even at the risk of a civil war within the shadow of the wider one being fought; the Altalena, a ship chartered by the IZL with badly needed ammunition and provisions, was shelled and sunk off Tel Aviv midway through the war since the dissidents were not willing to hand it over to the government. Eventually the IZL and LEHI were dissolved and their members incorporated in the body of the Israeli army but still not before the Deir Yassin massacre had been perpetrated. And it was members of LEHI who after the war assassinated Count Bernadotte, the Swedish mediator appointed by the U.N. Both dissident groups later went into politics. Members of the IZL established the right-wing Herut party, while members of LEHI were involved in the foundation of a short-lived national Communist party.
LEHI in its heyday consisted of no more than a few hundred activists; the IZL had a few thousand members and active adherents. The Hagana was a much bigger, but also much looser organization with perhaps between sixty and eighty thousand members of whom, however, only a small number saw action in the anti-British operations of 1945-1947. The command structure of the IZL envisaged three divisions: the "Army of Revolution' (which somehow never came into existence); "Shock Units"; and a "Revolutionary Propaganda Force." Like the Hagana and LEHI, it had a small, mobile broadcasting station. The IZL and LEHI had only light arms and explosives; for a long time they could not get automatic weapons. But Hagana had no artillery either prior to 1948.
The political effect of the terrorist operations has been hotly debated and has remained a matter of bitter controversy to this day. Some Zionist leaders have argued that without the Irgun the state of Israel would not have come into being; Menahem Begin, commander of the Irgun, has claimed that "we succeeded in bringing about the collapse of the occupation regime."3 Other authorities maintain that the "dissidents" did more harm than good to the cause. The international auspices were at the time more than favorable from the Zionist standpoint. With delayed realization of the great disaster that had overtaken the Jewish people in Europe during the Hitler era, there was much sympathy for its aspirations to establish a Jewish state. Notably weakened by the war, Britain found the administration of the Mandate a thankless task. From a strategic and economic point of view Palestine was of no great importance. British antiguerrilla operations, though far from ruthless, had a bad press the world over and were not popular at home. In the circumstances a minimum of force was needed to precipitate the British exodus; the dissidents played a certain part in the process but not a determining one.
On 16 October 1949 the Greek Communist radio transmitter situated somewhere in Eastern Europe announced that the Communist army had put a stop to operations in order to "avoid the total destruction of the homeland." The announcement, magnanimous in spirit, came a month after the army had ceased to exist. During the preceding three years it had successfully challenged the Greek government, defeated its armed forces, and a stalemate, if not a Communist victory, had seemed virtually inescapable. The third round in the fight for power in Greece had started with small-scale Communist attacks launched in February-March 1946. Zakhariades, the secretaiy general of the party, wrote in retrospect that "we all agreed that the situation was ripe, that we should take up arms and fight. . . . The People's Democracies were behind us.' But a few British forces were still in Greece and it was not in the Communists' interest to bring about their intervention. The attack, in other words, had to be directed not against the foreign enemy but the domestic foe.4 It is not entirely clear to this day to what extent the Greek Communists had been encouraged by their mentors abroad; it has been asserted that they were prodded by Tito to start the insurrection, that Stalin was first in favor and then skeptical about the outcome of the venture. Perhaps he had no strong views one way or the other. The ultimate decision had to be taken by the Greek Communists themselves, but it is patent that they would not have gone to war if Stalin had been opposed.
The conditions seemed propitious. The postwar economic crisis had not been overcome, the police force was inefficient and the army in the process of being rebuilt. There was no stable government, let alone strong leadership. Much of Greece consists of mountainous territory which favors guerrilla warfare; the border between Greece and her Communist neighbors, seven hundred miles in length, is almost impossible to secure. Thousands of Communist activists had gained military experience in World War II. The Communists had bases, training grounds and steady sources of supply in Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The Greek Communist party, to be sure, was relatively small; it had never polled more than ten percent in general elections, but it was far more tightly knit than the other Greek parties and could rely on a high degree of militancy and discipline. It had supporters both among the urban intelligentsia and the industrial workers; it was especially influential among the Greeks from Asia Minor who as the result of the population transfer after World War I had been repatriated to Greece. Both Markos Vafiades, the commander in chief of the Communist army, and Nikos Zakhariades who later replaced him, had been born in Turkey. The Communist partisans did indeed appear to have the advantage. They were more deeply motivated, their morale was sturdier, they fought better than the government troops. They were also more ably led, at least until the very last stage of the fighting.
Two reasons have been advanced to account for their defeat nonetheless in 1949. The first is the decision taken in November 1948, apparently against Markos advice, to convert their guerrilla army into one of larger formations (divisions), and to engage in positional warfare in defense of the liberated areas; this, when they had been at their potent best in 1947-1948 operating with units of company strength (fifty to a hundred men) and, at most, in battalions (two to four hundred). The second frequently cited reason is Yugoslavia's rift with the Communist camp which eventually resulted in the closing of the border with Greece. These circumstances had, needless to say, their adverse effect but they were by no means the only causes of the Communist rout. The very decision to embark on an armed offensive had been a mistake, as the Communist leaders themselves later admitted. The country's mood was not as revolutionary as they believed. Greece was, after all, not a dictatorship at the time; the Communists' deliberate boycotting of the first postwar democratic elections was generally interpreted as a confession of weakness.
When they made their fateful choice, the Communists had banked above all on the demoralized state apparatus and an undermined army, lacking both training and modern equipment. A protracted war, it was figured, would of necessity bring about the collapse of the regime. They overlooked—or perhaps preferred to ignore—the possibility that a long war might precipitate the reorganization of the army. Between 1946 and 1949 the United States supplied Greece with approximately three hundred and fifty million dollars' worth of arms; this undoubtedly contributed to the Communist defeat, but even more telling was the revitalization of the Greek army under Papagos, who became commander in chief in early 1949. As an American observer wrote later: "The army was galvanized into action. Its manpower was not increased, its training was not greatly improved, and there was no significant increase in its equipment. The army was simply made to do what it was capable of doing, and no more than this was then needed to gain the victory."5 But even if the Greek Communists had not made the mistake of transforming their forces into a semiregular army, ii they had continued to operate in small units, they would still have had no chance. The shift to conventional warfare was a fatal error, easy though it is to see why the step was taken. Some Communist leaders felt that time was running out, with Yugoslavia's "defection" the international situation had from their point of view deteriorated, it would be wisest to move against the Greek army while it was still depleted.6
Guerrilla tactics would have made it more difficult for General Papagos to defeat the Communists, but without bases inside Greece, which they did not have, the guerrillas could anyway not have existed much longer; their cause in fact lost more of whatever appeal it initially had with each month the war dragged on. The Communists had no popular aim, no obvious, all-embracing slogans such as the overthrow of the tyranny or the reapportionment of the land. They tried to use anti-imperialist slogans, but to little purpose; there were, after all, no more than three thousand British soldiers in Greece at the time, who did not participate in the fighting, and a few hundred American military advisers. On the other hand, the Communists had to defend themselves against charges of treason, since they supported the establishment of an independent Macedonian state. The proposal to surrender Greek territory to the Bulgarians was anything but attractive. Even the Greek Communists were not enthusiastic about this item in their political paraphernalia; perhaps it was part of the price they had to pay for the help they received from their comrades abroad. Their having to press-gang young peasants into their army during the last year of the fighting merely antagonized villagers the more, and at no benefit to their fighting machine either, for there was not time enough to indoctrinate the new recruits.
The Greek Communists were better armed than most postwar guerrilla movements. After the battles in the Vitsi and Grammos mountains, the government forces captured about a hundred pieces of artillery, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, some 650 machine guns, 216 heavy mortars and 142 rocket launchers. Considering that the guerrilla forces had never numbered more than twenty-five thousand soldiers (up to twenty percent of them women), they seem to have had about as much equipment as they could possibly absorb. They had no air force, but the government air force was minute and until the last phase of the fighting played no significant role in the campaign. The war was fought with great bitterness, clemency was rare and atrocities common to both sides. The Greek government forces suffered about sixty thousand casualties, among them sixteen thousand dead and almost five thousand missing. More than four thousand civilians were executed by the Communists. No accurate figures are available about the extent of Communist losses. They were, in all probability, as large as those of the government. Greece, a small and poor country with about seven million inhabitants at the time, needed years to recover from the trauma of the civil war, the material destruction wrought and the loss of life. With the Russian and the Spanish civil wars heading the list in that due order, the Communist insurrection in Greece ranks as third among the major European internal wars of this century.
As World War II came to its shuddering end, the calls for national independence began to reverberate across Southeast Asia. The easy victories of the Japanese against the European colonial powers had given an enormous boost to the native national movements. In India, Pakistan and Burma, Britain abdicated without a struggle; the course of events in Indochina has been described elsewhere in this study. But in Malaya and the Philippines, guerrilla movements mushroomed, while in Indonesia the Dutch attempts to reimpose their rule also provoked armed resistance.7 The Indonesian bid for independence was won with relatively little fighting, and this despite the movement there being internally split, with the Communists taking, grosso modo, a more militant line than the rest. To compound the confusion, the Communists were themselves divided and all in all there was a real danger that the country might quite literally fall apart. Indonesia's very weakness, however, was its strength, for the Dutch were wary of the chaos whereas the Nationalists and the Communists had no such inhibitions.
There had been no resistance movement in Indonesia during the war; on the contrary, there had been widespread collaboration with the Japanese. Mention has already been made of the fact that under their occupation a small Indonesian army, the Peta, had come into being. Furthermore, all the main political parties had their private armies, such as the Masjumi (Hizbullah) and the Darul Islam. The Peta consisted of fewer than a hundred thousand officers and men, the private annies of somewhere in the neighborhood of double that number. The two Dutch "police actions," in 1946 and 1948, were carried out by much smaller forces, but these were highly trained and well-organized units which had no trouble whatsoever coping with the untrained, ill-disciplined and badly equipped Indonesian troops. But the real problems, as so often in this kind of war, emerged only after the Dutch had seized the key cities and lines of communication. A hundred thousand Dutch soldiers were not sufficient to control the heartland of Java and Sumatra, let alone the other islands. The Dutch army was, in the words of one observer, incapable of occupying an overcrowded area of fifty million people, short perhaps of an outright campaign of terror, for which the Dutch were "temperamentally unsuited,"8 Facing an economy in ruin, the prospect of general turmoil, the condemnation of the United Nations (still a moral force to be reckoned with in those days), facing the strong disapproval of the United States and their other allies, the Dutch opted for withdrawal and Indonesia became a sovereign republic. Weak as the national government was, the Communists were in no position to challenge it for their force had been much reduced in the fighting, notably in the Madiun rebellion. Moreover, by the time they recovered from their internal splits (1952-1953), world Communist policy was no longer that enthusiastic about armed struggle outside the colonial context. So the Indonesian Communists reshaped their strategy to one of political action, demonstrations, strikes, and eventually even of collaboration as the Sukarno government veered towards "anti-imperialism."
Communist guerrilla warfare in Malaya began in 1948, reached its climax in 1950-1952, and petered out in 1956-1958. In the Philippines fighting developed in 1947, continued on and oil for about seven years and then gradually died down after the surrender of Luis Taruc, the Communist leader. Both in Malaya and the Philippines the leading cadres of the postwar insurgency were composed of the same men who had organized the wartime resistance. The Chinese Malayans had established a guerrilla force in February 1942, and the following year British officers ("Force 136") landed and cooperated with them; Chin Peng, the commander of the MPAJA (the Malayan resistance forces), which numbered some six thousand fighters, was to be awarded the OBE. The Philippine Hukbalahap was founded in March 1942; its relations with the small U.S. guerrilla forces in the islands were, however, anything but cordial, and although the Huks contributed in no small measure to the war effort against the Japanese, they were equally if not more eager to settle scores with their own domestic political enemies. Although the leadership of the Huks was Communist, this fact was not made public at the time. Whereas to all intents and purposes the MPAJA was identical with the Malayan Communist party, the relationship between the Huks and the Philippine Communist party was more complicated. The political situation in Malaya was anyway altogether dissimilar to that in the Philippines. Malaya was still a colony while the Philippines had almost attained independence, even if the Communists would argue that this independence was a mere legal fiction. Which does not alter the fact that the Malayan guerrillas still had to contend with the British army and police, whereas the Huks were by now free to take on their own people. Again, recruits to Communism in Malaya came almost entirely from one community, the Chinese; the membership of the Huks, on the other hand, was not limited to a national minority.
The timing of the insurrections in Southeast Asia was probably not altogether uncoordinated. They all broke out within the space of a few months in 1948 and this has tempted observers to look for a definitive guiding hand behind the eruptions. Attention has been drawn to the Calcutta Conference of the World Federation of Youth and Students in February 1948.9 The resolutions of the conference attacked the "false independence" of India and Pakistan and called for an intensification of the struggle for true independence, which in the circumstances did not of course mean the concentration of one's efforts 011 electoral contests. It is most unlikely, however, that the Cominform would have chosen a minor meeting to coordinate its policy in Southeast Asia. Whatever coordination there was had most probably taken place at the highest level. The "general line" of Communist policy, the "two camps" concept, had been defined by Zhdanov and others well before then and the new militancy just happened to coincide neatly with the desires of the Southeast Asian Communists. But this is not to say that the policy was clear-cut, or planned in detail. During World War II the Soviet Union would have taken a dim view of any fraternal party which did not contribute its share toward the defense of the Soviet Union. The world situation after the war, however, was infinitely more complex and there could be no imposing of one rigid universal law. Between 1947 and 1952 the stress was certainly on the armed struggle, at that point peaceful coexistence became the watchword. But just as not everyone everywhere took to arms in those five years, so neither did all armed insurrections cease after 1952. It all depended on local factors, "objective" and "subjective" alike.
Malaya is a small country, four-fifths of its area uncultivated jungle. It was (and is) a major producer of tin and rubber, of its 5.3 million inhabitants (1945), forty-nine percent were Malay and thirty-eight percent Chinese.10 The Chinese were better educated and had, on the whole, a considerably higher living standard. After the war the Communist party had become legal; its new head was the now twenty-six-year-old Chin Peng, the guerrilla hero who had cooperated with the British. His predecessor, Loi Tak, had been successively a French, Japanese and British agent, a particular learned only later and that anyhow did not affect the party line.11 At its fourth plenary meeting (May 1948), the MCP decided that "an armed struggle will be inevitable and will constitute the most important form of struggle."12 This decision coincided with the final victory of Mao's forces in China and was probably not unconnected with it. There is reason to believe that the secretary general of the Australian Communist party, on a visit to Malaya at the time, acted as an emissary and that he advised the local Communists against continuing the constitutional struggle.
Communist strategy, insofar as can be ascertained, was to liberate certain areas near the jungle, to seize plantations and mines, and then to envelop the cities. From the guerrillas' point of view the squatters' villages on the fringe of the jungle were of paramount importance; they relied on them for intelligence, food and supplies. After some hesitation the British authorities decided to resettle the squatters in new villages. This proved an easier task than had been envisaged and it aggravated the guerrillas' supply situation. But it did not solve the authorities' military problem, for with great tenacity the guerrillas continued to fight on in adverse conditions. General Clutterbuck, who was actively involved in counterinsurgency, writes admiringly not only about the organization of the Communist guerrillas but of the "fortitude of tiny bands of guerrillas holding out against the concentrated efforts of twenty or even sixty times their strength of soldiers when the war was already lost — ranking high in the annals of human endurance."13 It has been pointed out that the main aim of the insurgents at the start of the guerrilla war was to cause maximum disruption to the country's economy and the administration. But in contrast to Vietnam, the Communists never quite succeeded in achieving their objective; the administration continued to function throughout the country, the government collected taxes, the schools were kept open and justice was administered. Unlike their Vietnamese comrades, the Chinese guerrillas in Malaya had no active sanctuary, no secure line of supply from beyond the border. Their staunchest ally was the well-nigh impenetrable jungle in which their camps could be tracked down only with the greatest difficulty. Individual terrorists would be seized only by accident.
The first phase of guerrilla fighting (1948-1949) was not an outstanding success inasmuch as the government failed to collapse. But the guerrillas continued to launch constant attacks from their bases in the jungle and their assault reached its climax in 1951, a year in which the security forces suffered some 1,195 casualties, including 504 killed. (One of the victims was Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner, who was killed in an ambush.) But the toughest year of the emergency was also the period in which the tide turned, though few realized it at the time. Guerrilla casualties in 1951 were over two thousand, including a thousand killed and three hundred and twenty captured or surrendered, an unacceptable number considering that there were no more than ten thousand of them in all, and most of the time only about five thousand.14
Looking back on the years of fighting, the Communist leaders acknowledged that certain mistakes had been made. They had subjected the masses to great losses through their acts of destruction and sabotage — "blind and heated foolhardiness" was to be avoided in future, the emphasis was to be on "regulated and moderate methods."15 This meant among other things no more slashing of rubber trees, and no more indiscriminate assassinations. Internal purges, however, continued; a leading party member was executed for having dared to criticize the top leadership. But instead of having the desired effect, this execution led on the contrary to the defection and surrender of other dissenters. The government tried psychological warfare with some degree of success; once it had been established that the British would not shoot deserters, there was a steady trickle of surrenders, averaging two hundred a year. This damaged the morale of those remaining in the jungle and provided intelligence to the British commanders.
The serious British counteroffensive began in late 1951 and lasted for about two years. By 1953 the security forces were killing or capturing six guerrillas for each of their own men lost.16 The British had managed to cut the guerrillas off from their regular food supplies, and driven them deeper into the jungle where they lived with the aborigines. They had become far less dangerous, but to flush them out from those tangled depths was an almost fiendishly frustrating exercise. As many as a thousand man-hours could be spent even so much as to encounter a guerrilla. But there were limits, too, to Communist endurance; the guerrillas were aware that they had been isolated and this finally undermined their will to continue the struggle. By the end of 1955 the number of jungle fighters was down to three thousand, by late 1956 only about two thousand were left, the following year the remaining Communist units disintegrated and the "emergency" was virtually over.
One of the major mistakes of the guerrillas (in the opinion of one who fought them) was to adhere too rigidly to Maoist strategy in so altogether different a setting.17 After 1954 they realized that they had neglected indoctrination and they tried to broaden their mass basis. But several valuable years had been wasted; the British had meanwhile carried out administrative reforms and promised independence. The Communists still found little support outside the Chinese community; their principal bases were the Singapore secondary schools. It has been reasoned with hindsight that the guerrillas might have come closer to success had they engaged in simultaneous urban terror and rural guerrilla operations, or if they had concentrated their attacks against plantations and mines. But they were not strong enough to carry out projects on such a massive scale. Even within their own community they lacked full control; they were not able, for instance, to win over the powerful secret societies. The official name of the guerrilla movement was the MRLA — Malayan Races Liberation Army — but for all that, no determined effort was made to rally Malay supporters, although the tensions between the component nationalities were so palpable that the attempt would probably in any event have proved abortive. Small guerrilla units continued to exist near the Thai border; the headquarters of the MRLA (later restyled the MNLA) were transferred to southern Thailand as early as 1953. After the collapse of the revolt, the Communist party of Malaya veered toward Peking, to have the decision to give up its active fight criticized later as a "revisionist deviation." But despite the appeals in 1961, in 1963, and again in 1968 to correct the "capitulationist line" and to persist in the armed crusade in rural areas to the very end, Malaya was to remain quiet for almost two decades.
In later years Communist writers were to maintain that the guerrilla insurrection in the Philippines was bound to fail because there was no "objective" revolutionary situation.18 In actual fact the prospects for a successful takeover were better in almost every respect in the Philippines than anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Political and economic power in the islands was in the hands of a small oligarchy which owned all the large farms. The agricultural system was almost entirely feudal in practice, with peonage widespread and an immense landless proletariat. Potentially, the Huks had even greater peasant appeal than had either the Chinese or Vietnamese Communists; they had laid the broad foundations for it during the war on the dual count of fighting the invader and their insistence on a just redistribution of the land. (In China, it will be recalled, the agrarian demands of the Communists were played down while the war continued.) The Philippines had, besides, a long guerrilla heritage dating back to the resistance of the tribes to the Spanish invasion. It had manifested itself again in the struggle of Aguinaldo, the national leader and guerrilla chieftain who had withstood the Americans for two years after the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898.19 Sixty thousand Americans had fought forty thousand Philippine patriots based chiefly in the north of Luzon, and the U.S. suffered six thousand casualties before they succeeded at long last in surprising and capturing Aguinaldo in his headquarters. Clashes on a smaller scale continued well beyond 1902. (Aguinaldo was still alive when the Huk insurrection broke out in 1947.)
The Huk rebellion reached its climax in the years between 1950 and 1952 when "they were the masters of the countryside and of several cities. . . . The people paid them taxes, fed and sheltered them, gave them valuable information and sometimes rendered military service to them."20 They numbered then some twenty thousand men with perhaps fifty thousand auxiliaries, and two million people lived in the areas they dominated. Luis Taruc, who had been the commander of the movement when it had first been set up to fight the Japanese, wrote after he had left the party that "errors were made and innocent people died . . . but the common people certainly loved and respected us."21
The forces opposing the Huks were weak and inexperienced. The Philippine army consisted altogether at the time of only two fighting battalions, the rest were engaged in service, administration and training and could not be enlisted for active duty.22 Nevertheless the Huks (whose name had meanwhile been changed to the HMB — People's Liberation Army) could not prevail in their long and bitter war. For all the discontent and the internal tensions, they found it harder to mobilize the peasants against their own masters than against the foreign foe. Nor was there any powerful Communist neighbor to act as a protector, to provide them with a steady supply of arms and ammunition, food and medicines. Further, the Huk leaders seemed to have no clear notion of how to proceed beyond rural guerrilla warfare. Finally, they had the misfortune to meet up with a gifted opponent in Ramon Magsaysay. Thanks to his initiative, the army and the administration were revitalized, and local government was reformed. Handsome rewards ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars were given for information bringing about the capture of any of the HMB's leaders. At the same time former members of it received both an amnesty and fifteen to twenty acres of land apiece. This "left hand, right hand policy produced fairly quick results. In 1953 Magsaysay was elected president; by the time of his death in an airplane accident the war was virtually over. A few hundred Huks remained in their mountain hideouts, but the Communist party was no longer a danger. Jesus Lava, the pro-Soviet secretary general, returned to Manila, abjured the armed struggle and became a loyal oppositionist. The remnants of the Huks engaged in brigandage; in 1969 a new Maoist New People's Army (MNA) came into being. But a more effective threat was the Muslim revolt in the southern islands in 1973.
The Philippine Communists suffered a series of setbacks, some of them self-inflicted. When in 1950 the prospects were at their brightest, half of the Politburo was arrested in a police raid in Manila, leaving the party disorganized. The leadership was ridden by ideological and personal disputes from the start. Above all, as in China, the Communists were entirely on their own. But conditions in the Philippines after the war did not resemble those in China during the Japanese invasion, Taruc and the Lava brothers lacked Mao's qualities, and Magsaysay was infinitely more competent than Chiang Kai-chek.
Since World War II, guerrilla warfare or one kind or another has taken place in every country throughout Southeast Asia. In Burma it is inherent and latter-day Burmese politics have largely been dominated by the struggle between the government and Communist guerrillas of various persuasions, as well as with national minorities such as the Karen. The Indian Communist party engaged in rural guerrilla warfare in Andhra Pradesh in 1948-1951. Later, the Indian army came up against similar warfare in Nagaland. Under Maoist inspiration, the Naxalites in West Bengal organized poor and landless peasants for an armed struggle in 1967. This revolt, which aimed at the physical extermination of the "class enemy," meaning landowners and moneylenders, reached its climax in 1969-1970. Along the way, the Naxalites also killed policemen and teachers, and members of rival political parties — including the pro-Soviet Indian Communist party — and destroyed symbols of enemy rule such as Gandhi and Tagore monuments. The campaign had originally been launched under the umbrella of antifeudalist slogans, but soon the target was redefined as the seizure of power.23 Following Peking's criticism of their strategy, the Naxalites split into eight factions, and eventually some thirty thousand of their members and adherents, students for the most part, found themselves in Indian jails.24
Partisan warfare was conducted in Korea between 1951 and 1954. But none of these campaigns was successful, and though each was different, a detailed analysis would add little to a general understanding of the guerrilla phenomenon.
Early on in the Algerian war, General de Gaulle had realized that France could not keep Algeria against the wish of the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants. The revolt had started in 1954, by 1956-1957 the FLN thought victory was at hand. Their optimism, however, was premature, for in the following years their units were crushed by the French army. But de Gaulle insisted that there was no solution other than total independence. It would be different if France were still a "mastodon" as it had once been. In present conditions, "only Bussia with its Communist methods" could put an end to the rebellion. Having already killed two hundred thousand people (de Gaulle argued), France could certainly continue the war. But where would it lead? The army, seeing no farther ahead than the next djebel, did not want to be deprived of its victory, it had only one remedy: to break the bones of the fellaghas. But this would merely lead to a new war in five or ten years and by that time the Arabs would be even weightier in numbers.25
The French position in Algeria, it goes without saying, was far stronger than in Indochina, quite apart from the fact that the French army had learned from its unfortunate experience in Southeast Asia; a second Dien Bien Phu was ruled out. Algeria was not a colony but part of metropolitan France, the distance from Algiers to Marseille was no greater than from Marseille to Lille. At the beginning of the war there was full support for it in France. Algeria had no jungles or forests in which the rebels could hide; the French air force could easily spot enemy concentrations. One million Frenchmen lived in Algeria and were well acquainted with the country and its inhabitants. The rebels were not members of a monolithic party as with the Communists in Vietnam — there was much less discipline and much more in-fighting; thousands of Algerians were killed before the FLN had defeated its domestic rivals. French army losses were small; during the seven years of the insurrection the average annual number killed was two thousand. For all that, as de Gaulle had predicted, the French army was neither strong nor ruthless enough to win the war. By 1960 half a million troops had been concentrated to police a country several times the size of France; the cost of this amounted to almost a billion dollars a year. Domestically, France passed through the most difficult spell in its postwar history; there was no leadership, no stable government, the crisis in Paris affected the situation in Algeria, and the Algerian war aggravated the French crisis. Most Frenchmen were outraged by the Algerian atrocities: they wanted to keep Algeria but they were no longer willing to fight for it. Gradually the war found decreasing favor at home.26 To suppress the rebellion effectively the French security forces would have had to use the same means, if not more drastic ones, than the insurgents — indiscriminate assassination, systematic torture — and though the French paras were not plagued by excessive humanitarian scruples, there were in the last resort limits to what means the security forces of a civilized country could apply.
The FLN would still have been routed but for their active sanctuaries in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco. Their situation was more advantageous than Abd el-Kader's, for whenever they were hard-pressed they could cross the border, while France, in contrast to a hundred years earlier, could no longer invade Morocco. However much the French generals might rave, they were powerless to pursue the enemy. Even a minor air attack against an FLN base on the Tunisian side of the border (Sakiet Sidi Yusef) provoked a major international scandal; a massive attack was altogether unthinkable since the French government felt it could not commit such an affront to world public opinion.
Algeria had been under French control since the 1830s but native opposition had never been far from the surface. In World War II, France's position in North Africa had become much weaker and in 1945 there was a major insurrection; according to an official estimate, fifteen hundred Algerians were killed, and the nationalists claimed twenty thousand victims, the real figure being perhaps somewhere between five and eight thousand. The fact that Morocco and Tunisia had made greater advances on the road to independence added fresh fuel to Algerian nationalist fervor, so did Nasser's rise to power. Egypt, where the North African liberation committees were located, was the first base of the insurrectionists; only two years later the Algerians shifted their headquarters to Tunisia and Morocco.
The prehistory of the rebellion is still something of an enigma. Officially the coordinating body was the CRUA (Comité Révolutionnaire d'Unité et d'Action), an activist group which had split from the MTLD led by Messali Hadj. The nine leaders were Ahmed ben Bella, Belkacem Krim, Mohammed Boudiaf, Mohammed Khider, Mustapha ben Boulaid, Larbi ben M'hidi, Mourad Didouche, Babah Bitat and Ait Ahmed Hocine. Yet these nine had never actually met before the insurrection started on 1 November 1954.27 The real kernel was the special organization of the MTLD established in 1948, which engaged in occasional bank robberies, the collection of arms, and sporadic acts of terror. This special organization (OS) was headed by Ahmed ben Bella who had served with distinction in the French army during the war. In 1950 ben Bella was arrested following a robbery at the Oran post office but made a successful getaway from jail. Of the early leaders of the rebellion, hardly any were of peasant background but quite a few had served in the French army. Some had been in politics before: ben Bella had for a short while been deputy mayor of an Algerian town; Khider, who was older than the rest, had been a member of the French parliament. Most had belonged before to the MTLD, a few had been Communists. One observer records that Belkacem Krim, a former French army corporal, had organized a Kabyle maquis of his own prior to 1954, a second one puts it that he was a notorious brigand chief.28 For all their fervent nationalism, most of the FLN leaders were culturally uprooted men; scarcely one of them had a command of literary Arabic.
According to conventional liberal wisdom of the day, the Algerian problem was basically one of poverty, and consequently the solution had to be primarily socioeconomic in character. There was indeed great poverty and social discrepancies were immeasurable. Algeria was still a predominantly agricultural country. Oil had been discovered, but production amounted to only eight million tons in 1960. Ninety percent of Algerian industry was in French hands. Six million Muslims farmed some 4.7 million hectares, whereas a hundred and twenty thousand Europeans had farms of 2.3 hectares. While the urban Muslims had benefited to some extent from the postwar boom, most of the peasants were still desperately poor. There seemed to exist all the makings for a major agrarian rebellion and the FLN leaders stressed in their articles and speeches the importance of land reform once the war was over; in this respect, as in some others, their policy resembled Nasser's. Yet the agrarian issue was far from central to the rebellion and the FLN by no means supported a social revolution. As one of its leaders put it, "The problem is not posed for us as in China. The Chinese carried on both national resistance and social revolution.... We have taken up arms for a well-defined aim: national liberation."29 Some FLN leaders such as ben Bella used more radical phraseology than others, but even most sympathetic observers have noted that much of the ideological verbiage was simply a mask for maneuvers of various groups within the elite which aimed at securing or bolstering their own positions of influence.30 Thus the bedrock of the struggle against the French was nationalistic, with socialist demands, other than seizing foreign property, little more than scatterings of topsoil dressing. Toward the end of the insurgency there was a shift in FLN orientation in the direction of the Soviet Union, but the motivation was largely pragmatic; the French generals and colonels who claimed that their army was the "first in the world which had agreed to fight on the ground chosen by the Communist revolution to destroy Western civilization" were quite mistaken.31 The FLN was perhaps more anti-Western than most European Communist parties, but it was certainly not part of a "Communist conspiracy."
With the outbreak of the rebellion CRUA became the FLN, the ALN acting as its military arm. Unlike in China, Cuba or Vietnam, there was no one outstanding figure whose authority was undisputed: some of the founder members were killed in the war, and four leaders, including ben Bella and Khider, were captured by the French in 1957 and spent the succeeding years in prison. The ALN was subdivided into five regions (wilayat) under a colonel, with a sixth one (Sahara) added later. Estimates as to the number of Algerian guerrillas vary enormously; at the beginning there were only a few hundred of them, equipped mainly with rifles and some automatic weapons. By 1956 there were forty thousand according to Algerian sources, twenty-five thousand (including auxiliaries) according to the French. After 1955 the rebels were equipped with machine guns, mortars (German 81 mm) and recoilless rifles, and there was no shortage of mines and bangalore torpedoes.
The rebellion had started in the mountainous regions of Kabylia, Aurès and northern Constantine; during 1955 it spread to other parts of the country. The hit-and-run tactics focused on destroying French farms, cutting lines of communication and punishing Algerian collaborators — sixty thousand Algerians were fighting in the French army. The attempt to carry the war to the capital in September 1956 ended in a débâcle; the French paratroopers smashed the ALN apparatus in Algiers with great losses to the insurgents. But the political objective was largely achieved — the internationalization of the conflict and the political isolation of the French government. The FLN gained increasing support in the Arab world and it was joined by Algerian political leaders who had initially been hesitant. The French army had at first underrated the extent of the rebellion; but after 1957, strong reinforcements were brought in and systematic measures employed to combat the insurgents. The ALN lost the initiative; the Morice line along the Tunisian border made crossing difficult, and the "regroupment" of villages cut the ALN off from much of its support. By 1961 the number of fellaghas inside Algeria was down to five thousand men, scattered in small groups; they could still vex the French but do nothing much of harm otherwise. If FLN morale was low, however, among the French it was at breaking point. They could not keep huge garrisons indefinitely in all the major centers, along with large mobile reserves besides. Twenty thousand Algerian guerrillas were concentrated in Tunis beyond the reach of the French. The European population of Algeria was up in arms against the défaitistes in Paris, the military commanders in Algeria paid no attention to the orders emanating from the capital. France, in brief, was on the verge of a civil war as General de Gaulle took over, nor did the danger pass until he had been in power for several years. Meanwhile the FLN had established itself as a government in exile, recognized de facto or de jure by some fifteen countries (including China and the Soviet Union). De Gaulle had been ready to cut France's losses without at first making his policy public; he had no illusions, was fully sensible that this meant surrender, the exodus of French Algerians and the loss of French property.
Thus, after seven years of struggle, Algeria attained independence. The exodus of the Europeans did not ruin the country as many had expected, just as the influx of pieds noirs did not make for the Algerianization of France. Very much in contrast to what Fanon had hoped, Algeria became a dictatorship, first under ben Bella, later under Boumedienne. Ten years after victory, all but one or two of the surviving early leaders of the revolt found themselves in prison or exile. On the first day of the rebellion the FLN had published a proclamation defining its goal as national independence through the restoration of a sovereign democratic state within the framework of the principles of Islam, and the preservation of all fundamental freedoms. The Algerian state that emerged from the war of liberation was not exactly the country of the rebels' dreams; "Heureux les martyrs qui n'ont rien vu," one of them wrote.32
According to some observers (such as Charles Andre Julien), the story of Algeria and of the Maghreb in general is one of the lost opportunities insofar as France is concerned. Much play has been made of Algeria's economic maladjustment, and the failure to integrate the Algerians into a modern economic system.33 But there is no good reason to assume that Algeria would have remained part of France even had there been a much higher standard of living and no unemployment. The Algerians belonged to a different civilization; given the upsurge of nationalism after World War II and the weakening of the European powers, neither economic or social or even political reforms would have made the slightest difference. It might have postponed the struggle for independence by a few years; the FLN did not demand total separation at the start of the rebellion. But whatever the timing and the means, Algeria would eventually, riding the current of the tide in the affairs of the world, have demanded and obtained its independence.
Cuba and Algeria, scenes of the two major guerrilla wars of the 1950s, were different in almost every aspect except that the key to victory was political not military in both instances. The Algerian FLN faced a colonial power, Castro and his comrades fought native incumbents. The struggle in Algeria lasted for seven years, it was waged against an efficient regular army of half a million men and was exceedingly costly. The campaign in Cuba took two years and did not involve much fighting; the Cuban army was small (forty thousand men), ill equipped and lacked both experience and above all the will to fight. The Cuban war is very much the story of one man and his "telluric force"; without him the invasion would not have been launched in the first place, after the initial setbacks it would have been dropped.
Castro's force was so small that it is hard to explain its success even in retrospect. Almost up to the end of the war there were no more than three hundred guerrillas, but they made as much noise and received as much publicity as three hundred thousand might have done. The materialization of three hundred guerrillas induced Washington to declare an arms embargo, weakening Batista both politically and militarily. Even professional military journals were quite deluded about the strength of the insurgents; according to an account in the Marine Corps Gazette (February 1960), Castro commanded not less than fifteen thousand men and women.34 From a Marxist point of view, Castro's success is not easy to explain either. It was neither an agrarian rebellion, certainly not a proletarian revolution, nor was it an opposition movement headed by the "national bourgeoisie," or a combination of all these forces, a people's war. If anything, it was Blanquism transferred to the countryside. Cuba was not an underdeveloped country; it was semideveloped, or, to be precise, suffered from arrested development. Its rate of literacy was high, its standard of living about equal to Italy's (before the miracolo) and higher than in the Soviet Union. Some of the most respected observers of the Cuban scene have laid Castro's victory variously to the state of the Cuban sugar industry (Hugh Thomas) or the tensions within Cuban social structure such as the disparity between cities and countryside and the sluggish rate of growth.35 It is of course perfectly true that Cuba was at the mercy of world demand, that the price of sugar was highly volatile and that the industry was in a state of decline (even though 1957 was a bumper year). There was indeed a great gap between the level of income in urban and rural areas, but there was a similar, even greater gap in many other parts of the world. As Theodore Draper stresses, vast tracts of sugar land belonged to American owners, but this was not one of the central issues in Castro's program; Draper emphasizes that there was less antigringoism in Cuba than almost anywhere else in Latin America. All this is so, but it still does not explain why Batista's regime collapsed like the walls of Jericho at the mere sound of trumpets. Hugh Thomas has it that the institutions of Cuba in 1958-1959 were for historical reasons amazingly weak. But were not the historical reasons largely accidental? Batista was a weak and ineffectual dictator, cruel enough to antagonize large sections of the population, yet not sufficiently harsh (or effective) to suppress the revolutionary movement. Cuba had a long record of political violence and (as in Algeria) of guerrilla warfare. The bureaucracy was weak and lazy, the police and army underpaid and demoralized, corrupt, sedentary and internally divided.36 But all this could with equal justification be said about a great many other countries. Batista had not been unpopular with the masses when he first came to power; in 1940 he had been, as Castro reminded him, the presidential candidate of the Communist party. But the Batista who came to power in 1952 was a changed man; he had become lazy, ate sumptuously and spent much of his time playing canasta or watching horror movies.37 Batista's coup in 1952 was by no means inevitable; another slightly more intelligent and energetic ruler or even Batista himself, fifteen years younger, would have realized that in the interest of survival he had to strengthen and modernize the police and the military establishment and to make both more efficient. However tyrannical and unpopular, such a ruler would not have been overthrown by Castro and his three hundred. It has been maintained that an unpopular regime cannot possibly be saved by means of repression, however well organized, but the Latin American experience simply does not bear this out. It was not so much Cuba the country, its economy, society and politics that were unique, but the specific political constellation prevailing there in the late 1950s. This is neither to magnify nor to belittle Castro's undoubted courage, personal magnetism and qualities of leadership; it is to point to the fact that the Batista colossus had feet of clay. It was not through farsightedness or by instinct, but through sheer foolhardiness that Castro dared to challenge the dictator, only to discover to his and everyone else's astonishment how brittle the regime was, and how near to collapse. Castro certainly did not lack self-confidence and Havana University, where he had studied in the late 1940s, had been an excellent training ground. It was, as he noted years later, much more dangerous than the Sierra Maestra. There still could have been an accident — a fatal mishap during the landing of his group, or perhaps a quarrel with Crecencio Perez, the popular bandit who during the critical period after the landing was Castro's main link with the "masses." It is doubtful whether any of Castro's companions had the qualities to lead the rebels from the Sierra to Havana. It was only in March 1957, four months after the landing, that Castro was joined by new recruits from the towns and became less vulnerable. The key questions with regard to the victory of the Cuban revolution concern not Castro, but his enemies and rivals. Why was there no resistance, why did the middle class, the Church, the foreign supporters desert Batista?
The military operations were few and of no outstanding interest. Guevara, in his Episodes of the Revolutionary War, recounts various "battles," such as the battle of La Plata or the battle of Arroyo del Infierno. But these were either minor ambushes or attacks against small police or army posts carried out by twenty or thirty men.38 The decisive "battles" of the war were fought by a hundred men or less; there was only one serious counterinsurgency operation by Batista's force, the "big push" in May 1958. In mid-June the government forces made contact with the rebels, but Castro's combat intelligence was excellent, Batista's forces did not find their way in unfamiliar territory, they were bombed by their own aircraft, and within a few weeks the fighting was over. The "rebels" fought well on the rare occasions they had to fight; there is evidence that in some cases money was offered, and accepted, and that Castro's men did not owe their success entirely to their military prowess. There were certainly more victims during the fighting in the towns (as during and after the naval mutiny at Cienfuegos) than in the Sierra, where police or army posts often surrendered after being exposed to no more than a few minutes of shooting.
Castro's officers and men showed infinitely more fighting spirit, initiative and intelligence than their opponents. Some of the regular army commanders were superannuated, having entered service before Castro and Guevara were even born. A capable and efficient officer was likely to be replaced because his superiors either envied or distrusted him. There was no overall plan and strategy on the part of Castro; neither he nor Guevara had read Mao at the time.39 If anything, they were guided by the experience of nineteenth-century Cuban guerrilla warfare — every Cuban child was familiar with the exploits of Antonio Maceo and Maximo Gómez; the heroes of the war of independence provided inspiration for the fighters in the Sierra Maestra.
Some American observers insisted from 1957 on that Castro was a Communist, or surrounded by Communists, and Castro in later years himself declared that he had been far more radical in his political views from the very beginning than was generally known. His reasoning went that if he had come out openly in favor of Marxism-Leninism, the rebels would not have been able to get down to the plains, "because there would have been no support for them." But these are rationalizations after the event. The Castro who landed in Cuba was certainly not a Marxist-Leninist, but a radical who could have moved "left" or "right" with equal ease. Many Cubans who supported Castro expected a different revolution from the one they got; it is no less a certitude that Castro and his comrades were primarily men of action, and that while the fighting was going on in the Sierra Maestra they had little inclination to engage in ideological hairsplitting. Gradually they moved toward Communism. This conversion was not altogether surprising, for Fascism was in disrepute and liberalism was out of place in Cuba. On the other hand, there was a strong residue of free-floating radicalism in Cuba, and a growing estrangement from the United States. But all this belongs to a subsequent chapter in Cuba's history. The Cuban revolutionary war was not fought under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, its leaders were not members of the Communist party, and the Cuban Communists established contact with Castro only toward the end of the war. It was fought under the pennon of patriotism, national unity, of freedom from tyranny and corruption.
The Palestinian attacks against Israel have attracted far more attention than other guerrilla wars in the Middle East chiefly because of their international ramifications and the involvement of other Arab states. But there were other wars such as the insurrection in southern Sudan during the 1960s or the fighting in Kurdistan which punctuated most of the postwar period. Guerrilla operations in the Persian Gulf (Oman) have lasted for more than a decade and there was sporadic "urban guerrilla" warfare in both Turkey and Iran. The first armed raids into Israel by Palestinian fedayeen occurred in the early 1950s and provoked immediate Israeli reprisals. On a larger scale, attacks began only with the creation of Fatah in 1965. Its activities became more widespread after the Six Days' War (June 1967), for though the Arab armies had been routed, Israel had occupied lands with a population of more than a million Arab inhabitants. More important yet, the Palestinians now received very substantial support from Arab governments, whereas before 1967 such aid had been given only grudgingly and selectively. The refugee camps in Israel and outside provided a unique reservoir for the mobilization of new recruits, as well as centers for training and as hiding places. Between 1967 and 1970 Fatah expanded from a few hundred to between fifteen and twenty thousand members. Immediately after the Six Days' War it had attempted to stage "revolutionary guerrilla warfare" both in the cities of Israel and elsewhere about the country. But the terrain was unsuitable, the local Arab inhabitants not too cooperative and the Israeli countermeasures quite effective. (The Gaza region became the classic example of a successful counterinsurgency campaign.) After only a few months Fatah headquarters and most of its members had to be removed from the West bank to the other side of the Jordan; Fatah became a guerrilla movement in exile. Sporadic terrorism continued on a limited basis for many years and there were occasional demonstrations and strikes, but this was certainly not the "general insurrection" Fatah had been waiting for. Located abroad, there were three potential avenues open to the Palestinians for pursuing their war. They could infiltrate guerrillas into Israel either for hit-and-run attacks or in the hope that these would be able to establish foci. Alternatively, the Palestinians could shell Israeli settlements from beyond the border; they had missiles in their arsenal which reached fairly deep into Israeli territory. The Israelis would be unable to retaliate without putting themselves in the wrong vis-à-vis international law; Israeli reprisals moreover would aggravate relations between Jerusalem and its Arab neighbors and help prevent a "sellout" by some Arab governments. Lastly, the Palestinians could attack Israelis, Jews and even non-Jews, as well as Israeli installations and institutions outside the country; the "acts of despair" would demonstrate that unless justice were done to the Palestinians, there would never be peace in the Middle East.
Fatah and the other Palestinian organizations tried all three approaches with varying success.40 Small units were infiltrated into Israel from Jordan, and later from Syria and Lebanon. But despite the covert sympathy for them among some of the domestic Arabs, the terrorists' position was more like that of goldfish in a bowl than fish in an ocean. Only very small units (up to four or five members) could be infiltrated. They were usually intercepted within a few hours, at most within a few days; only one or two groups managed to stay undetected in Israel for as long as two months, and this primarily because they refrained from outright violence. Between 1968 and 1971 there were nonetheless innumerable cases of infiltration, or random shootings, of bombs, resulting not alone in losses to the Israelis, but in sizable ones to the raiders, and gradually this type of tactic was restricted to a very few hit-and-run attacks with clearly defined aims. Because of their dramatic character, they were to attract far more publicity; instances of this were the Lod Airport massacre (carried out by Japanese terrorists), the attack against a school at Ma'alot (1974), and a hotel in Tel Aviv (1975). The shelling from across the borders began early in 1968 in the Jordan valley, spread in October 1968 to southeast Lebanon, and during 1969 to the whole of southern Lebanon (Fatahland). Again there was Israeli retaliation, first against the Jordanians and later against the Lebanese. A certain pattern emerged. The Palestinian terrorists would shell Israeli settlements from across the border. The Israelis would then retaliate, but since the Palestinians would have evaporated, the Jordanian and the Lebanese regular army units would have to bear the brunt of the Israeli attack, which did not improve relations between the Palestinians and their hosts. Following heavy clashes with the Jordanian army in 1970, the Palestinians had to transfer their activities to Lebanon, which became their major springboard for attacks against Israel. In the south of Lebanon the Palestinians established a virtual "state within a state," leading to severe tension and to bloody encounters in turn with the Lebanese.
The shelling of one country from the territory of another is certainly a warlike action; whether it can be defined as guerrilla warfare is a moot point. But the most controversial aspect of the Palestinians' activities were those carried out in third countries — the killing, for instance, of members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, the hijacking of airplanes, most of them not belonging to Israel, the dispatch of letterbombs, and other gambits such as the attacks against foreign ambassadors in Khartoum. It looked — and has so been argued — as though the Palestinians had simply found by trial and error that there were better means than the traditional ones of guerrilla warfare for furthering their cause, that publicity was the vital weapon, that what counted beyond all else in the last resort was to keep the Palestine issue alive. However widely condemned, all these outrages were given enormous notoriety. It is nevertheless unlikely that this strategy would have worked but for the growing dependence of the industrialized countries on Arab oil. There were far more kidnappings in Brazil but it led the urban terrorists nowhere. The Palestinians, however, had powerful allies and benefited from exceptionally auspicious international circumstances. Militarily, they failed, but as the Algerian example had demonstrated, military failure per se meant nothing. Politically the Palestinians succeeded; they were recognized by many member states of the United Nations and an assortment of other international organizations besides.
The splits within the Palestinian resistance did not bring any immediate harm to the common cause. More serious were the longterm effects of the terrorist operations. These stiffened Israeli resistance, made a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians virtually impossible and, in addition, hampered any attempt to work out any unified Palestinian policy for the future. A policy aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state might have conceivably worked in the pre-atomic age, but with the development of the means of mass destruction the rules of the game had changed. If Fatah and the other Palestinian organizations had little to fear directly from the nuclearization of the conflict, this was not so with regard to Israel's Arab neighbors, and without their support the Palestinians could not continue their struggle in the long run. Worse yet, in the case of a nuclear attack against Israel, the Arab residents of that country were as likely to perish as its Jewish citizens. Further, there was a growing discrepancy between Palestinian theory and practice. Much of the fighting against Israel was done by others. If other guerrilla movements throughout history never had enough money, the Palestinians, thanks to the oil windfall, had almost too much of it.41 The abundance of funds made it possible to engage in various kinds of operations, military and propagandistic both, beyond the reach of other, less affluent guerrilla movements. At the same time a surfeit of money bred corruption; guerrillas must be lean and hungry, a condition which exposure to life in Hilton hotels did nothing to encourage.
While Fatah proclaimed resoundingly that the shame of the defeat was to be washed away by the mass struggle of the Palestinian people, it became only too manifest after 1973 that not the armed assaults, let alone the masses, but the profits of the oil-producing states had brought about the change in Palestinian fortunes. It could be argued that whether the Arab masses did or did not in fact participate in the striving against the Zionist enemy was beside the point, all that mattered, again, was the result. It is unlikely, however, that a Guevara or a Fanon would have approved such a rationalization; they would have held that a people that owed its national liberation to financial manipulations could scarcely be accounted free.
The Israelis tended to belittle the role of the Palestinians, and the fact that there was so much "guerrilla by proxy," that is, terrorist acts committed by Japanese, French or Latin American mercenaries, only strengthened their contempt for the military qualities of their opponents. There is no denying that in contrast to other guerrillas, rural and urban, the Palestinians usually avoided clashing with the Israeli security forces and directed almost all their attacks against the civilian population. But all this does not change the fact that the Palestinian organizations were by no means totally ineffective, and that individual infiltrators did show courage; realizing that they could not conduct guerrilla warfare along conventional lines, they had to look for other means to harass the enemy even if this approach led them beyond guerrillaism and even urban terror, however liberally these terms are interpreted.
If the ups and downs of Palestinian resistance point up the overriding significance of foreign help, the fate of the Kurds only accents that importance the more. The Iraqi Kurds, who constitute about twenty percent of the population of the country, fought for their autonomy from 1960 to 1970. They had taken up arms on many previous occasions but never for so long a period. The Iraqi army was fought to a standstill by the Pesh Merga in the hills of Kurdistan despite their numerical superiority and the fact that the Kurds had only light arms; it was only during the last year of the war that the Kurds acquired some anti-aircraft guns. The Kurdish war also proves that a mastery of guerrilla doctrine is not really of decisive import; their leader Mulla Mustafa Barazani had in all probability never read a single manual on the subject, he and his men simply knew all there was to know about it by instinct. There was far more fighting, and many more casualties in the war in Kurdistan than in many, much better-publicised guerrilla wars, including the Palestine-Israel conflict. But it never attracted much attention, perhaps because the Kurds failed to appreciate the great strategic importance of oil and did not attack the Kirkuk oilfields. When the war was renewed in 1974 the Kurds were defeated with relative ease, the international situation having changed in their disfavor. Up to 1970 the attitude of the Soviet Union had been one of friendly neutrality. But with the emergence of a pro-Soviet dictatorship in Baghdad, the Kurdish struggle no longer served any useful purpose from the Soviet point of view, and the Iraqi army, supplied and trained by the Russians, was now able to cope with the problems of mountain warfare. Furthermore, Iran, which had hitherto provided arms and supplies to the Kurds, closed its border, the Shah fearing that an escalation of hostilities with the Baghdad regime, and indirectly with the Soviet Union, might endanger his regime; the stakes in the game had suddenly become higher. Thus Kurdish resistance collapsed, not because Pesh Merga was fighting any less bravely but because, to quote an old Kurdish proverb, "Kurds have no friends."42
The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), on the other hand, did have friends. Founded in Cairo in 1958, this separatist organization launched in 1961 a terrorist campaign which, until 1975, was on a relatively small scale. There was certainly much less fighting in Ethiopia than in Kurdistan, and for years the ELF had no more than a few hundred active members. It had, however, strong backing in the Arab world, particularly in Syria, and it had the political support of the Muslim states in Africa. It was well supplied with arms and money. Thus, in the course of a decade, a minor army came into being, and as Ethiopia faced a major domestic crisis, the ELF could stake its claims with much greater vigor.43
A third example of the decisive impact of outside help is PFLOAG (People's Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf). Established as the Dhofar Liberation Front in 1965 by nationalist opponents of the Sultan of Oman and active in Dhofar province, it was taken over by "scientific socialists" three years later. Although the rebels at no time numbered many more than a thousand, the sultan had only twenty-five hundred men at his disposal up to 1970, altogether insufficient on any count to crush the insurgents. Later the sultan's small army was reinforced by British advisers and Iranian and Jordanian troops. The headquarters of PFLOAG were located in South Yemen, which served also as a sanctuary, the main supplier as well as the fountainhead of ideological inspiration. The Chinese and the Soviets competed for a stake in this interesting attempt to apply Marxism-Leninism (or Leninism-Maoism) in conditions varying between those of the stone age and the feudal era; Chinese influence was on the decline after 1970. PFLO (the AG was subsequently dropped) was the most antireligious of all Arab extremist movements, but this did not deter Colonel Ghadafi from providing financial assistance any more than it did the Iraqis from proffering help. Seldom in guerrilla history has such a small war in such a remote country attracted so many foreign powers. Bussian artillery operated by Chinese-trained guerrillas in South Yemen territory shelled Iranian forces engaged in counterinsurgency operations on Oman territory. The original initiators of the revolt had invoked their belief in Allah and pan-Arabism, but they were bitterly criticized by the professionals who took over the leadership from them in 1968 for having chosen "the mistaken path of spontaneous action under a leadership incapable of leading armed struggle."44
Attempts to launch guerrilla warfare in Turkey and Iran in the 1960s were, on the whole, unsuccessful. The Iranian peasant was too conservative and the Shah's agrarian reform had to a certain extent taken the wind out of the sails of the revolutionaries. "Armed confrontation will start in towns and their suburbs," wrote Farahani, "as the Iranian peasantry with its rustic environment is not conducive to revolutionary preparedness. 45 The Iranian revolutionaries were split into several factions (Maoists, Siahkal, and the National Liberation Movement). One of the peculiar features of the Iranian resistance is the collaboration between the extreme left and the (Shi'ite) religious fundamentalist sectarians (NLM) who, led by ulema, established a little guerrilla army of their own.46 This political alliance dates back two decades and is based on opposition, albeit for different reasons, to the Shah's reforms.47
Guerrilla warfare in Turkey was similarly impeded by internal dissent. Various small sects that would emerge from time to time engaged in kidnappings or assassination, but there was no coordination between them. Most of them derived from Dev Gene, the Federation of the Revolutionary Youth of Turkey, a roof organization for an assortment of radical groups.48 They all favored armed struggle, but some were Maoists tending toward rural guerrilla warfare and the creation of a Vietnam situation in Turkey, others called for a second Turkish war of independence. Some wanted to infiltrate the Turkish armed forces and to conquer them from within; others, on the contrary, looked for a confrontation with the army. Yet for all that rural Anatolia with its backwardness and abject poverty should have been fertile soil indeed for the recruitment of guerrillas, the students of Ankara and Istanbul failed to gain any substantial foothold outside the universities.
Guerrilla warfare in the Middle East was most successful in the very place in which it seemed most unlikely. At the height of the 1950s Cyprus insurgency, twenty-eight thousand British soldiers were chasing some two hundred and fifty terrorists on an island of half a million inhabitants. The leader of EOKA was an old man by military standards; Grivas, a native of Cyprus, an ex-officer of the Greek army, was fifty-seven when the campaign started. He had some support from this and that influential politician in Greece, but the Athens government was far from enthusiastic about his venture and on several occasions threatened him and demanded that he stop it. Archbishop Makarios, the political leader of the Greek Cypriots, was also initially opposed to Grivas's move; he would much have preferred a campaign of sabotage, and (according to Grivas), the throwing from time to time of a few hand grenades into Turkish mobs, just to teach them a lesson.49 A year after the outbreak of the rebellion, however, Makarios was to declare that the terrorist operations had been more effective than seventy-five years of "paper war." Grivas had the Cypriot Communists against him, the strongest single party on the island; early on they revealed in their manifestos the real identity of "Dighenis," Grivas's pseudonym. That the Turkish minority saw in EOKA a mortal enemy scarcely needs saying. International public opinion did not support EOKA; the Communist bloc, the Chinese, the Third World countries, all the traditional sympathizers of guerrilla movements showed a lack of interest, and quite often downright hostility. But despite all these handicaps, Grivas succeeded in a three-year campaign (from ι April 1955 to Christmas 1958) in ousting the British from the island, which led to the declaration of Cypriot independence. The British suffered relatively few losses, but since Britain was reconciled to liquidating the remnants of its empire anyway and since it found the task of policing a rebellious island too burdensome, not much force was necessary to persuade Whitehall to sur render.50 The long-term results of the Grivas campaign were nonetheless disastrous, for victory in 1958 was followed by tragedy in 1974. The EOKA campaign had sharpened the old conflict between Cypriot Greeks and Turks. Eventually the Turks invaded Cyprus and the country was de facto partitioned. Grivas's old partner and antagonist, Makarios, bore an equal measure of responsibility for these tragic developments, for he had shown no greater willingness than Grivas to work for an accommodation with the Turkish minority.
Power was transferred in a more or less orderly fashion by the colonial administration to the new rulers in most African countries. There were exceptions, such as in the Congo, and guerrilla warfare occurred in the Portuguese colonies. In addition, there was a good deal of internal fighting in the postindependence period; some of it was tribal in character, or separatist (Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Eritrea), elsewhere it was a conflict between various contenders for power. Not all these opposition movements were strikingly effective (the Nigerian Sawaba or the Senegalese AIP), but in other cases, as in Biafra and the Congo, the internal feuds were much more bloody than the anticolonial guerrilla wars themselves. In contrast to Latin America, China and Southeast Asia, the African guerrilla leaders hardly ever lived and fought with their troops; their headquarters were almost invariably in some neighboring country. The anticolonial guerrilla movements were usually split; in almost every country there were two or more such groups battling each other even more fiercely than they fought the common enemy; their "mass basis" was in essence tribal rather than national. The Algerian P'LN and the Vietnamese Communists also had to face competition early on in their struggle, but they destroyed their opponents and thus were able to monopolize the field. In Africa, on the other hand, the splits persisted in many instances, and this affected both the character and the course of the guerrilla war.
The Mau Mau revolt in 1952 was the first of the postwar insurrections. Dating back in origin to the 1920s, it was led by educated members of the Kikuyu tribe. They complained, not without justification, that some of their best land had been taken away from them; they resented the fact that there was no secular education and that female circumcision had been banned. In a solemn oath, the members of Mau Mau swore never to sell land to a European or an Asian, not to smoke foreign cigarettes or drink foreign beer, never to sleep with a prostitute and to behave in general as a patriot and a decent citizen.51 Considering the relatively small number of people involved and that it was geographically restricted to a part of the country, the Mau Mau revolt was quite bloody; more than eleven thousand Kikuyu (but fewer than a hundred Europeans) were killed. The revolt failed, but within a matter of only a few years the British departed and Kenya became independent. The survivors of the Mau Mau land army were given a hero's welcome, but after that a determined effort was made to erase Mau Mau from Kenya's public memory.52 It was not that anyone doubted that the Mau Mau had made a contribution to Kenya's independence, but many of their practices had been repugnant in the extreme. Above all, the massacres perpetrated by the Mau Mau against Kikuyu loyalists (as in the Lari massacre), and members of other tribes, were divisive and did not augur well for the future of a country in which a variety of tribes would have to live peacefully side by side. The next major rebellions to occur, in Angola in March 1963 and in the Congo in 1964, were also basically tribal in nature. While Europeans were killed, the number of blacks of other tribes, and of mestizos and assimilados who came to grief was far greater.53
After concluding a trip of African capitals in 1963, Chou En-lai observed that the prospects for revolution in Africa were excellent. Events in the suceeding years did not quite bear out his prediction. True, a great number of liberation movements came into being and were duly registered on the payrolls of the African Liberation Committee, the coordinating body of the OAU. They would publish victory communiques from nonexistent war fronts and celebrate the establishment of liberated and semiliberated zones; the Mozambique Frelimo had a particularly bad record, but others were not far behind.54 As in so many other cases, they would more often clash with each other than with the declared enemy. To some extent this was the result of old tribal feuds which made the formation of national movements difficult. Thus SWAPO was essentially an Ovambo organization (despite all disclaimers), and the UPA and FLNA had their power base in the Bakongo tribe. Existing dissension was fanned by Sino-Soviet rivalry for influence in the continent. At one time or another almost all African liberation movements split into a pro-Soviet and a pro-Chinese wing, beginning with the first of the "modern" (i.e., quasi-Maoist) guerrillas such as the Camerounian UPC which, founded in 1947, started armed struggle in 1956. Lastly, the conflicting ambitions of leading personalities often collided. The list of leaders of African liberation movements assassinated by political or personal rivals (sometimes with a little help from the colonial powers) makes depressing reading. It includes some of the most gifted leaders, such as Amilcar Cabral (of PAIGC) and Eduardo Mondlane (of Frelimo). Some guerrilla movements practiced almost constant internal "purges" (Fre limo again was one of the worst offenders). The sad events in Angola in 1975 brought into the limelight a state of affairs that had existed, on a smaller scale, for many years previously. Least affected by internal disputes and tribal rivalries was PAIGC in Guine-Bissau, headed by Amilcar Cabral, a talented leader, about whom more below.55 But in Guine as well, after a decade of fighting, a sympathetic observer noted that "a clear-cut military victory that would expel the colonial forces would ... be a miracle."56 Another historian of the African liberation movements, writing in 1971, prophesied victory over the Portuguese not before the 1990s.57
In retrospect it is easy to understand the reasons tor these misjudgments. After the initial upsurge in the early 1960s, the tide turned against the guerrillas almost everywhere in Africa. The ANC-ZAPU units which had infiltrated into South Africa were destroyed, SWAPO activities were largely ineffective, the MPLA campaign in Angola collapsed in 1966, and Roberto Holden's GRAE was largely inactive after its initial operations in the early sixties had petered out. Frelimo failed to prevent the building of the Cabora Bassa Dam. Only in Guine-Bissau, PAIGC made progress; the number of guerrillas there increased from four thousand in 1964 to (allegedly) ten thousand in 1970. After ten years of strife, the three Angolan independence movements had altogether some ten to fifteen thousand fighters, and the Portuguese armed forces had fewer casualties in a decade than the French in Algeria had in a single year. The leaders of the African guerrilla movements spent far more time attending international congresses than in stepping up guerrilla warfare. The Liberation Committee of the OAU was taken to task in 1967 for incurring "excessive administrative expenses and subsidizing certain individuals.
In view of these and other weaknesses, the eventual successes of the liberation movements against Portugal seem almost inexplicable. But however small the guerrilla forces and infrequent their operations, they enjoyed certain distinct advantages such as secure bases in neighboring African countries, sufficient financial help from the OAU, the Soviet bloc and China, and a steady supply of arms. Frelimo and the MNLA were as well armed toward the end of their war as their Portuguese opponents, save that they had no artillery (which was useless in the bush) and no air force (which would have been of limited assistance only). Above all, they were facing the poorest European nation, which could ill afford to pay for a protracted guerrilla war in colonies which, with the exception of Angola, were of little economic value. Even the suppression of a small insurrection such as the Mau Mau had cost some hundred and thirty million dollars, while the Algerian war cost anything from five to ten billion dollars. The very presence of guerrillas in neighboring African countries made the stationing of considerable forces necessary (a hundred thousand men in the three main colonies), and this the Portuguese simply could not in the long run afford. By 1970 the Portuguese had spent two billion dollars on their colonial wars. Furthermore, there was considerable international pressure which the Portuguese notwithstanding all their defiant gestures could not ignore. The Portuguese commanders knew, in brief, that they were fighting a rear-guard action, and this scarcely made for any great enthusiasm or high morale.
Attention has been drawn to the intense rivalry between the Soviet Union and China in Africa. During the cultural revolution and for several years thereafter, the Chinese were almost totally preoccupied with their domestic affairs, and by the time they returned to the African scene in 1971-1972, the Soviet Union had made considerable strides in winning support in most major African liberation movements. But how deep was Soviet and Communist influence? Radical African leaders have frequently described themselves as "Marxist-Leninists"; on the other hand, they have claimed that their movements were "authentically African."58 They have declared at one and the same time that their movements had no official ideology, yet that only "scientific socialism" could serve as their lodestar. Such contradictions are more apparent than real. While individual leaders had acquired the rudiments of Marxism in European universities, this certainly did not apply to their followers, and in any event, the problems facing the guerrilla movements either during their struggle, or after victory, were such as neither Marx nor Lenin, nor even Mao, had ever envisaged. Eventually military leaders came to power both in those African countries in which the transition had been peaceful and the others which had fought for their independence. The poor countries were still poor after independence, the rich remained rich, and the importance of ideological pronouncements should not be overrated.
Guerrilla operations in Latin America reached their climax in the early 1960s. They were mainly concentrated in the countryside, but with the failure to establish secure rural bases (Argentina and Brazil in 1964, Peru and Venezuela in 1965, Bolivia in 1967), urban terrorism became the fashion, principally in Uruguay (MLN — the Tupamaros), Brazil (ALN), and Argentina (ERP and Monteneros). The political doctrine and overall strategy of these movements are discussed elsewhere,59 but the causes of success and failure remain to be analyzed.
The chances of guerrilla warfare in Latin America were excellent in many ways. Capitalist development in the continent had few achievements to its credit but all its defects were only too manifest. There was poverty, glaring exploitation and widespread anti-Americanism. The establishment was not usually noted for its social conscience or its reformist fervor. A comparatively large class of intellectuals violently opposed the status quo, looking on the urban slum dwellers and landless peasants as their revolutionary reservoir. There was a long history of political violence, and Castro's victory had given fresh hope to all revolutionaries; victory was possible, after all, even in a single country. The ruling strata were weak, disorganized and devitalized, the forces of repression inefficient. In short, there was a revolutionary situation with all its classic ingredients, "objective" and "subjective." There was no lack of discontent nor of idealism; there was mass support on the part of the younger generation in the universities and even in sections of the army. And yet, without exception, the guerrillas failed to reach their goals and the intriguing question is why.60
An analysis of the development of guerrilla movements in Latin America indicates above all that they were nearest to victory in the least repressive countries such as Venezuela and Uruguay. Bolivia was a military dictatorship when Guevara tried to establish his foci there, but President Barrientos was a populist of sorts with considerable backing among the campesinos. The new upsurge of guerrillaism in Colombia in 1975 occurred precisely at a time when the relatively liberal government of the day was engaged in carrying out a policy of reform. The insurrection in Venezuela in the early 1960s, spearheaded by the MIR and the Communists (who together established the FALN — Armed Forces of Liberation) and the urban terrorist operations of the UTC, came closer to success than in any other country in the continent. But even they had no real mass basis, as the results of the 1963 elections proved. The brutal character of many guerrilla operations antagonized the masses and isolated the insurgents. Usually the guerrillas assumed that the regime could be overthrown with one forceful push (golpe). The inevitable setbacks caused splits in their ranks; if the Tupamaros' strategy of provocation in Uruguay at least brought about the downfall of liberal democracy and the rise of a military dictatorship, the Venezuelan guerrillas did not carry even that much weight.
It is difficult to generalize about Latin American guerrilla movements because conditions varied so much from country to country, and the movements themselves were so disparate. Some countries were predominantly rural, others primarily urban; the Guatemalan MR-13 was launched by young officers, the Tupamaros by students, the Venezuelan guerrilla groups by political parties. In Peru and Colombia there was a connection with spontaneous peasant uprisings; in Venezuela the Communist party supported the guerrillas, elsewhere it opposed them. Yet for all these differences, certain staple patterns emerge:
1. If the guerrillas were inspired by Castro's victory and had assimilated its lessons, the government forces had also learned from the Cuban example. Initially unprepared for counterinsurgency, they became quite adept at it; sometimes they knew more about it than the guerrillas themselves. The armies were built up and modernized, the use of helicopters made guerrilla activities in the open country very hazardous indeed. Moreover, as Malcolm Deas has noted, soldiers in Latin America are not as unpopular as policemen — the army has a different relationship with the population. "No Latin American army had the combination of vices to be found in Batista's army."61 But the establishment had not only learned from the military' tactics used by the guerrillas; in Peru, farreaching agrarian reforms carried out by the army stole the guerrillas' thunder and a sizable part of their forces went over to the government, or at least became a loyal opposition.
2. In most Latin American countries (as in the Arab world, Ulster and Africa), there was not just one guerrilla movement but several; their internal splits and the tortuous relations between nationalist, pro-Moscow Communist, Trotskyite and Maoist parties were an ever-present source of friction. On rare occasions the guerrilla movements would make common cause: in February 1974 the Bolivian ELN, the Tupamaros, the Chilean MIR and the Argentinian ERP set up a Junta of Revolutionary Coordination (JCR). But far more often there would be disunity, internal strife and purges. The Colombian ELN was notorious for the acts of terror committed in its own ranks; the commander Jose Ayala was shot by his own men, and Fabio Vasquez had many of his rivals liquidated, sometimes by "war tribunal," sometimes without such legal niceties. There were bitter, though less bloody mutual recriminations among the Venezuelan, Peruvian and Bolivian guerrillas. Above all there was the Communist problem. The Cuban revolution had developed in its early phase quite independently of the Communists, but in other Latin American countries the revolutionary potential usually belonged to one political party or another, and no incipient guerrilla movement could afford to ignore this elementary fact of political life. The guerrillas (with the notable exception of Uruguay) became involved in sectarian in-fighting on ideological, organizational or simply personal lines.*
3· Following the Cuban example, the guerrillas at first envisioned the countryside as their main field of action, yet strategic considerations quite apart, they found it unexpectedly hard to rally the support of the peasants. There were exceptions, such as Hugo Blanco's POR in Peru, although this created problems of its own, for while the campesinos were willing to defend their homes and land, they were reluctant to operate outside their immediate neighborhood. The leaders of the guerrilla movement were, for the greater part, city people of middle- or upper-class origin, young men (and in a few cases, women) who spoke, quite literally, an altogether different language from the peasant population, which belonged to all intents and purposes to another race. Just as the mestizo leadership of the Angolan MPLA did not understand the tribal tongues of their own warriors, so the Peruvian and Bolivian city revolutionaries were at a frustrating loss to communicate with their Indian recruits. For all their enthusiasm, they also found it anything but easy to adapt themselves to the hard life of the countryside; they were genuinely shocked by the miserable lot of the peasants, but at the same time they shared the contempt for manual labor deeply rooted in Latin American (and African) society. Since as revolutionaries they had to live, work and fight side by side with peasants and manual workers, this instinctive attitude, which only a few of them could completely overcome, did not exactly make for smooth relations with the toiling masses. Although any number of sound tactical reasons could be cited for the later withdrawal of the guerrillas from the country areas, there is no doubt that on the whole they were only too happy to get back to a city milieu more familiar in every respect and certainly less arduous.
4. The peasants (campesinos) had a tendency to adopt a wait-and-see attitude rather than embrace the revolutionary cause on sight. If the guerrilleros successfully defied the government forces, they could count on at least the passive support of the rural population. But if they suffered a setback and it appeared that the forces of law and order were after all stronger, there would be no help for the insurgents and they would find themselves betrayed to the authorities. And even if the peasants were prepared to join in their fight, they would do so, as mentioned already, only within the district in which they lived. This has been one of the traditional weaknesses of rural guerrilla warfare; peasants cannot easily be turned into professional revolutionaries willing to give up their ties and roots.
5. The guerrillas were caught on the horns of several dilemmas from which there were no easy disentanglements. Guerrilla ideologists have claimed since time immemorial that rugged and forest country is the most favorable for guerrillas. But if the country was too rugged or the forest too thick, the guerrillas would be hard put to it to get supplies. If they retreated into remote, unpopulated areas that were not easily accessible, they would be secure but ineffectual — as Guevara had noted. If they opposed elections (as in Venezuela), this would damage their image as staunch fighters for democracy. If, on the contrary, they contested elections, they would be defeated — as in Uruguay — and by extreme reactionary forces at that. If they waged guerrilla warfare in small elitist conspiratorial groups, consisting primarily of students (or recent graduates), they would be reasonably safe from detection, but the moment they tried to broaden their urban base and "mobilize the masses," they would expose themselves to infiltration by enemy agents.
6. A successful guerrilla movement could weaken or bring about the overthrow of a relatively democratic regime, or an ineffectual autocracy. The strategy of provocation predicted that the democratic regime would be replaced by a reactionary and ineffective military dictatorship which would within a short time antagonize the middle class and especially the intelligentsia so that, as in Cuba, the guerrillas would gain the support of the majority of the population. But not all military dictators were as inadequate as Batista; others showed far greater determination and ruthlessness. Through terror and counterterror, they succeeded in paralyzing or altogether destroying the guerrilla movements (Guatemala, Brazil). Antiguerrilla murder squads came into being and torture was practiced with considerable effect.62 Worldwide public opinion was enlisted against these atrocities, but appeals and manifestos from foreign lands showed diminishing returns and were in any case a poor substitute for guerrilla victory. This raises the general question of the strategy of destroying the stable image of the government and creating a "climate of collapse." Modern governments, as Robert Taber has observed in his War of the Flea, are highly conscious of "world opinion," they do not like to be visited by human rights commissions,
their need of foreign investment, foreign loans, foreign markets, satisfactory trade relations, and so on requires that they be in more or less good standing with a larger community of interests. Often too, they are members of military alliances. Consequently, they must maintain the appearance of stability, in order to assure the other members of the community that contracts will be honored, that treaties will be upheld, that loans will be repaid with interest, that investments will continue to produce profits and be safe.
The weakness of this strategy is that it usually works only up to the point where the terrorist ceases to be a mere nuisance and becomes a real danger to the regime. Once this point is reached, the state — however concerned it may be about the U.N., a human rights commission and adverse publicity in the press — will react in kind, cruelly, unhampered by laws and conventions or humanitarian considerations. Once the Brazilian ALN and other such groups opted for individual terror, the government responded with all but indiscriminate counterterror. Terrorists, sympathizers, and no doubt some innocent people as well disappeared without a trace. There were no trials and no death sentences, which made it all the more difficult to organize protests at home or abroad. Despite the only too justified outcries about repression and torture, the stable image of the government was not destroyed; the terrorist movement collapsed, not the state.
7. When fortune smiled on them, the guerrillas were on top of the world; victory appeared to be just around the corner. But they were not good losers, even though they knew most of the time, certainly in theory, that their struggle would be long and punishing. They had been spoiled by the Cuban example; by temperament, most Latin American guerrillas were golpistas, burning to topple the system with one big shove. Psychologically, they needed quick results, and if these did not come, there would be despondency and mutual recrimination. They were capable of great sacrifice and exertion for a short time, but not of sustained effort or of fortitude in adversity. This applies to both rural and urban guerrillas. The rapid success of the Guatemala army in November 1966, of the Peruvian security forces against Hugo Blanco (1963) and Hector Bejar (1965), the collapse of Douglas Bravo in Venezuela and of the Bolivian guerrillas, are a few of the many examples. The one exception was the Columbian ELN under Fabio Vasquez which continued its struggle for more than a decade with varying success; but most of the time they operated in remote areas and were no real threat to state security.
With the defeat of the rural guerrillas, action was transferred to the cities with great initial effect. From 1968 to 1972 hundreds of banks were attacked in Brazil and Uruguay, stores were robbed, political leaders assassinated, businessmen and foreign leaders were kidnapped, "enemies" were executed or kept in "people's prisons." After the defeat of the urban guerrillas in Brazil and Uruguay, Argentina in 1974 became the chief scene of such action. The objective was not alone to spread fear and confusion, but to establish a "parallel government" comparable to that of the Soviets in Petrograd in 1917.
The immediate successes were astounding. The slums of the big cities — but also the upper-class residential areas — provided far better cover for operations than the Sierra. It was easier to get money and weapons in the city than in the countryside, and to collect information about the targets for attack. All this daring found an echo far beyond Latin America— in the United States, Canada and even in some European countries. If the old-style guerrilla tactics had been applicable only to backward countries, the new urban guerrilla warfare seemed to offer immense possibilities to almost every country in the world, including the most developed ones. Nevertheless, the startling successes of the first years were again followed by grave setbacks and in some cases by total collapse. Unable at first to cope with this new danger, the forces of order were learning quickly. However strictly conspiratorial rules were observed, sooner or later the traces of a single Tupamaro would lead the police to a whole group, to its arsenal, and eventually to its headquarters, and once this happened, escape was difficult, far more so than in the Sierra. Marighela's assertion that the police "systematically fail" was overly optimistic — they certainly did not fail to shoot him, as well as the other urban guerrilla leaders in Brazil and Chile, and to arrest the Tupamaros. But individual failures quite apart, the entire urban guerrilla strategy was found wanting. It is true that urban guerrillas would get more publicity in a day than rural ones in a year; as far as the media were concerned, their exploits were far more newsworthy. But with repetition interest inevitably diminished; once a consul had been kidnapped for the fifth time, the news no longer automatically commanded the headlines. The terrorists had to think of new, sensational and even more bizarre exploits, such as the theft of the remains by the Monteneros of former President Aramburu (whom they had killed in 1970) from his grave. But there were limits to human imagination, and in any case publicity could not in the long run replace an overall policy. Urban guerrillas frequently referred to the Algerian example, but it was precisely in the city of Algiers that the FLN had suffered its greatest defeat. The FLN could not compel the French colonial government to evacuate Algeria; in no circumstances would a French guerrilla movement have been able to take over France even under the weak governments of the Fourth Republic. It was one thing to appear as the spearhead of a national movement against the hated foreigner; it was another, infinitely more difficult task to compete with other native political parties in the struggle for power.
This was the overall lesson learned by the Latin American guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s. But seen from the guerrilla point of view, the picture was still not all dark. The old Latin American social order with its inefficiencies and inequities could not last, and armed struggle was certainly one of the possible ways of changing it. Cuba had been a success, perhaps there would be a victory elsewhere, given some fortunate juxtaposition — a prolonged political and/or economic crisis, able guerrilla leadership, and bungling by the forces of law and order. "Objectively" there still is a revolutionary situation in many Latin American countries.
In the late 1960s rural guerrillaism gave way to urban terrorism in many parts of the world. The major exceptions were Vietnam (where the war had, however, proceeded far beyond the guerrilla stage), the Portuguese colonies, and some minor theaters of war such as Burma, Thailand, the Philippines and Eritrea. Elsewhere the hijacking of airplanes, the bank raids and the kidnapping of diplomats and other public figures rather than the ambush in some remote jungle village became the symbol of armed struggle. Skyjacking had taken place since the early 1930s, with an average of about two to three cases annually, most of them not even political in character. But there were thirty-five cases in 1968 and eighty-seven in 1969. They affected twenty-three countries; Israel was the victim in only one case. After 1969, the number dropped, both as a result of diminishing returns and more stringent security measures. The wave of kidnappings and assassinations started with the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala and two American senior army officers by the FAR in Guatemala in 1968. This was followed in 1969 by the kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador to Brazil (by the ALN), the murder of the West German ambassador to Guatemala (by the FAR) in 1970, the kidnapping of the West German ambassador to Brazil (again by the ALN), the murder of the Quebec minister of labor by the FLQ, the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador to Brazil by the ALN and of the British ambassador by the Tupamaros, of the Israeli consul general in Turkey in 1971 by the TPLA, the murder of the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats in the Sudan by Black September. After 1972, Argentina became the main site of kidnappings with the ERP concentrating on businessmen; Mr. Aron Bellinson was released in June 1973 after the ransom of a million dollars had been paid, the release of Mr. Charles Lockwood, the following month, cost two million dollars, and of Mr John R. Thompson, the same month, three million. The ERP allegedly received fourteen million dollars for an oil executive in June 1974. A record was established in 1975 with the kidnapping of two Bunge and Born heirs for whom some sixty million dollars were reportedly handed over.63
Hijacking and kidnapping were also the favorite ploys of the Palestinian organizations and of some of the European terrorist groups. But there was competition in this field by angry or mentally unstable individuals; to launch rural guerrilla war at least a small group of people was needed, whereas any single madman or criminal could put a time bomb on a plane. The clandestine nature of urban terrorist operations made it difficult to establish how many members the terrorist groups numbered, in whose name they were operating or speaking, whether the motive was political, or whether the love of excitement or money was the driving force, and to what extent the whole phenomenon belonged to the realm of psychodrama rather than politics. Some Latin American terrorist groups consisted of no more than a few dozen members, the Japanese URA had at its height three hundred, but the number was reduced by defections and mutual assassinations, the FLQ had fewer than a hundred and fifty members, the TPLA fewer than a hundred, the British "Angry Brigade" eight, the Symbionese Liberation Army about ten, and after its shootout with the police, only three or four. But even if there were only three members left, to the media the "Army" was still an "army," "bulletins" were published, "ideological platforms" hammered out and spectacular exploits, whether an assassination or a bank raid, still caught the headlines. Ideologically there was often utter confusion; leading members of the pro-Fascist Tacuara (Argentina) moved over to neo-Trotskyite groups, the Monteneros (also in Argentina) stressed at one and the same time both their "Christian" (anti-Semitic) and radical-socialist character; the Canadian FLQ and the Official IRA presented a mixture of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and religious-nationalist sectarianism. Urban terrorist interest in political philosophy was strictly limited — the deed was more important than the thought.
The most active of the urban terrorist groups was the Provisional IRA which had split from the "Officials" in 1969.64 The Provos had some five to six hundred militants, the Officials about four hundred, but they enjoyed considerable support among the Catholics in Northern Ireland against a background of deep-rooted anger about national and social discrimination. The IRA had a sanctuary and a supply base in the Irish Free State. Officially it was banned there and the Irish government regarded their activities with disfavor, but being doctrinally committed to the idea of a united Ireland, it could not drop the northern activists entirely. Like other urban terrorist movements, the IRA had international connections; money came from well-wishers in the United States, money and arms from Libya's Colonel Ghadafi — a protector of terrorists from Northern Ireland to the Philippines — and from Eastern Europe. The ideological differences between Provos and Officials are discussed elsewhere in this study;65 cynics had it that the only difference was that the former went to church each week, and the latter only once a year. In practice, as opposed to doctrine, their operations were not so much directed against the British government, but against the Protestant community. As the fighting progressed, it became a straightforward sectarian civil war, with the British army in the thankless role of an arbiter trying to limit the fighting and to isolate the gunmen from the community. The Protestants had paramilitary organizations of their own (the UVF and others) and their terrorist record resembled that of the IRA. Looked at in historical perspective, the armed struggle in Northern Ireland since 1969 was not a novel phenomenon but simply a new stage in the age-old struggle between two neighboring communities. The methods used in this civil war were on the whole old-fashioned; the IRA tried to extend its operations to England, but this, too, had been tried before World War II, and on a small scale even back in the nineteenth century. The IRA was more successful than other urban terrorist groups because it had a fringe, albeit small, of supporters; and it was probably not accidental that this base was sectarian-religious rather than "revolutionary" in makeup. The FLQ lacked both a sanctuary and a clear program and, since Canadian political culture was considerably less murderous than in Ireland, its movement was much more short-lived. The Basque ETA, with its bank robberies, holdups, bombings and kidnappings, was a little more effective because, like the IRA, and unlike the Latin American urban terrorists, it had its base in a national minority. Urban terrorist operations in the United States and West Germany (on which more below) had no major political impact even though they greatly preoccupied journalists, psychologists, lawyers, judges and law enforcement officers.
The international character of urban terrorism has already been remarked: the Palestinian PFLP engaged in combined operations with the Japanese URA, various Latin American urban terrorists would cooperate with Palestinians, who in turn collaborated with Baader-Meinhof and other gangs, as the 1975 "Carlos Affair" (the case of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez) demonstrated. Foreign governments would take an active interest; the Iran urban guerrillas were financed for years by Iraq; Cuba continued to contribute to various Latin American terrorist groups even though, in principle, it favored rural guerrillas. "Carlos" had been trained at the Lumumba University in Moscow. The Soviet attitude to urban terrorism was ambivalent; on the one hand they would welcome and support movements likely to cause disruption in the West, on the other, they could not fail to realize that small ineffectual factions such as Baader-Meinhof would bring a political backlash that would be directed not only against members ofthat specific group but against Communists in general. Terrorism came to resemble the workings of a multinational corporation. An operation would be planned in West Germany by Palestine Arabs, executed in Israel by terrorists recruited in Japan with weapons acquired in Italy but manufactured in Russia, supplied by an Algerian diplomat, and financed with Libyan money.66 With the improvement and greater accessibility of modern technology, the potential for destruction for small groups of people became much larger.67 As technical progress continued, society became more vulnerable to destruction. A single individual could spread alarm and confusion even by means of a telephone call about a bomb that had allegedly been placed in some vital place. This new power acquired by a few has, however, its limits; it could paralyze the state apparatus but it could not take over. Urban terrorism faced its practitioners with an insoluble dilemma — to reduce the risk of discovery they had to be few in number. The political impact of a small anonymous group was bound to be insignificant. Urban terrorists are not, as the Palestinian (1948) and Cypriot experience had shown, serious contenders for power; once the foreign enemy had withdrawn, they dropped out of the picture since they were so few and had no political organization. Prospects are better perhaps where terrorists operate as the military wing of a political movement rather than on their own initiative. But in this case there are always the seeds of conflict between the military and the political leadership of the movement. In urban terrorism it is the action that counts, not consistent strategy or a clear political purpose. It is a Herculean task to disentangle its rational and irrational components, and not always a rewarding one.
An aristocracy and a proletariat emerged among the urban terrorists of the 1970s. The "proletarians" were shunned by the Russians and the Cubans because their activities did not fit into Communist policies; they were rejected by the Libyans and Algerians because they belonged to the wrong religion or nationality, and refused a haven even by South Yemen. Yet the "proletarian" terrorists were unquestioningly sincere whereas there were a great many question marks with regard to the political bona fide of the terrorist aristocracy, those with powerful protectors and rich financial backers. Were they not mere pawns manipulated by outside forces? It was by no means always clear whose interests they tried to serve and their ideological declarations could not be taken at face value.*
* The climate of dissension in these groups has been vividly described in Régis Debray's novel L'indésirable (Paris, 1975).
* The attack against OPEC headquarters in Vienna in December 1975 and the abduction of oil ministers was a typical illustration of the mysteries of transnational terrorism. The leader of the group was said to be a Venezuelan who had been in close touch with Cuban intelligence, according to the French authorities who had first established his identity. But according to the Egyptian press the operation in Vienna had been paid for by the Libyans. In this maze of great and small power rivalries, of big business and intelligence intrigues, there were no longer any certainties apart perhaps from the fact that the official purpose of the attack (to save the Palestinian revolution) was most probably not the real one.