Forcing recruits to kill bound them to the F.L.N. through outlawry

Evidence

At an early stage in the revolution it became a customary initiation ritual for a new recruit to be made to kill a designated “traitor”, mouchard (police spy or informer), French gendarme officer or colonialist, in the company of a “shadow” who would dispatch the recruit himself should he show any sign of flinching. Admitting this policy in an interview in a Yugoslav journal, Krim stated: “An assassination marks the end of the apprenticeship of each candidate for the A.L.N.” Through this “passingout ceremony” the apprentice became both proven in reliability and bound, Faust-like, to the rebel cause by his act of outlawry. In their actual techniques of liquidation F.L.N. operatives consciously endeavoured to achieve the gruesome, pour épater les bourgeois, or an act of ridicule—to belittle the dead man. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 416

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘shadow’ who kills a flinching recruit and the killing-as-initiation is a classic comprador-recruitment mechanism also seen in the IRA, Italian mafia, and ISIL. — connects to: Forced assassination riveted F.L.N. recruits to the cause irreversibly; Unauthorized murders were treated as acts of war.

Related

• Forced assassination riveted F.L.N. recruits to the cause irreversibly (similarity 0.95)