One such group five hundred strong was created, armed and uniformed in eastern Kabylia under a former M.T.L.D. municipal councillor called Bellounis. At first the F.L.N. reacted by slitting a few random throats. In Algiers, Soustelle's psychological-warfare experts began to toy with the idea of using Bellounis's dissident force as an "anti-guerrilla" along lines that had proved profitable in Indo-China. Then, with the summer of 1955, the ferocious Amirouche—in whose sector Bellounis had appeared—moved in, encircling Bellounis's camp at Guenzet and attacking it by surprise. The internecine massacre lasted forty-eight hours, watched gleefully by neighbouring French troops without intervening. Only Bellounis and a handful of his five hundred men escaped alive. Bellounis now directed his footsteps towards the French. Amirouche's operation did, however, signify the end of the M.N.A. challenge in Kabylia, and the beginning of its elimination as a serious rival to the F.L.N. throughout the country followed in the second half of 1956; an elimination that was to have meaningful echoes when, by the first Evian negotiations of 1961, Gaullist France toyed vainly with hopes of the all but extinct M.N.A. providing an interlocuteur valable alternative to the F.L.N.

DEFINE: Clarifies the internal rivalry between the F.L.N., M.T.L.D., and M.N.A. factions within the Algerian independence struggle.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 422