Then, on 17 June, there was announced one of the more extraordinary events of this extraordinary war: the O.A.S. and F.L.N. had concluded a truce. Already, in April, Major Azedine, formerly the redoubtable and much-wounded veteran of Wilaya 4, had been sent by the G.P.R.A. to Algiers to reorganise the Z.A.A. structure and prepare the takeover of the city for the time of the French withdrawal. After a particularly nauseating outrage, when Deltas had destroyed a clinic they considered to be an F.L.N. “hospital”, gunning to death nine Muslim patients in their beds, Vitalis Cros had taken the unprecedented initiative of seeking out Azedine in a desperate attempt to collaborate in combating terrorism. Next, the shadowy political brain of the O.A.S. who had assumed leadership since the capture of Salan, Jean-Jacques Susini, the first to realise that the battle was lost, made contact in mid-May with Farès, the president of the Provisional Executive. Nothing came of these talks, but a bridge was created between Susini and the F.L.N. representatives. Under the mediation of Dr Mostefai of the Provisional Executive and Jacques Chevallier, the former liberal mayor of Algiers, a truce was finally concluded on Sunday, 17 June.

XREF: The Algerian War settler-fervor dynamics echo other colonial-endgame civil conflicts the reader has encountered.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1615