Summary: In the previous ten episodes of this series we reviewed the circumstances leading to the start of the Québec Rebellion; the early years of the rebellion itself; and the RCAF napalm bombing campaign of 1972-73 with which the Trudeau government tried to crush the FLQ once and for all. In this chapter, we'll look back at the FLQ rebels' last- ditch attempts to force Trudeau to the negotiating table in the spring of 1973 and the massacre allegations that destroyed the last traces of support for the FLQ among Québec's civilian population.

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Throughout the first days of February 1973, the FLQ rebels were conspicuously quiet, leading CDF intelligence officials to wonder what the insurgent group was up to. In most mainstream Canadian newspapers and on the CBC's daily TV newscasts, the conventional wisdom held that the FLQ was getting ready to pack it in after the losses it had taken in the recently concluded napalm strikes by the RCAF. At least one CBC political commentator was explicitly predicting the insurgent forces were about to throw in the towel on their efforts to force the Ottawa government to grant Québec its independence. But as events were about to graphically demonstrate, the FLO wasn't finished yet; if anything, the rebellion was about to enter its most dangerous phase as it fought to stave off what increasingly looked like inevitable final defeat.

      But at the same time, explosive accusations regarding the rebel group’s fighting tactics would surface that would not only shatter its last remaining fragments of support among French-Canadians but would also inflict catastrophic damage on the old dream of making Québec an independent nation. What one Toronto journalist would later accurately dub “the My Lai of the Québec Rebellion” would explode along the front pages of Canada’s major newspapers just as the insurgents were getting ready to launch their final bid for victory in their now nearly four- year-old revolt against the Trudeau government. For weeks TV screens in every corner of Canada-- and much of the United States too --displayed graphically shocking images of civilians being subjected to every kind of violation of the Geneva Convention imaginable, and those images would in the end help to put the final nail in the coffin of FLQ hopes for winning independence from the Ottawa government.

      During the second half of February, rebel activity started to pick up again. CDF intelligence knew something major was brewing with the FLQ but weren't entirely sure what it was. So many contradictory reports were coming in all at once that it was difficult for the intelligence officers to make heads or tails of them. That uncertainty would cost the Trudeau administration dearly when the insurgents finally made their next move....

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     ...which the FLQ forces would do in the first week of March, 1973 as they launched what would become popularly known in the Canadian press as “the Molson bottle campaign”, a nickname derived from the fact that some of the FLQ fighters taking part in the offensive used Molson beer bottles to make Molotov cocktails with which to attack CDF armored vehicles. Striking along three fronts, the FLQ guerrillas hoped to push toward Sherbrooke and capture the city within two weeks from the date of their initial attacks. In the first twelve hours or so of their offensive it looked like they might succeed in that objective as they drove the started CDF units opposing them into a hasty, somewhat disorganized retreat; at one point the insurgents managed to capture an entire battalion of CDF infantry.

     But as had been the case many times before, RCAF close air support strikes gradually began to turn the tide of battle back in favor of the CDF troops. The FLQ drive toward Sherbrooke stalled with insurgent forces still nearly 75 miles away from the city, and by the 48-hour mark of the offensive it was the rebels' turn to retreat. Two of the guerrilla forces' most senior surviving commanders were killed around this time, becoming casualties of RCAF strafing runs as the CDF harassed the fleeing insurgents; to add insult to injury, most of the same CDF prisoners the FLQ had captured during the first twelve hours of their drive on Sherbrooke escaped to rejoin their fellow federal soldiers and pursue their former rebel captors. One CDF corporal who had briefly been in FLQ custody took the opportunity to cut his old jailer down with a machine gun burst.

     On March 10th, 1973, as FLQ fighters were trying to regroup from the CDF's counterattacks on their front lines, CBC-TV's nightly news program The National aired a story that would shock even the most hardened veteran observers of the separatist movement. The eight-minute special report, broadcast from Montreal by a CBC national affairs correspondent familiar with both the FLQ and the horrors of sexual assault, told the story of a young Irish-Canadian woman who accused an FLQ squad commander of organizing his soldiers to commit group rape against her while her southern Québec neighborhood was briefly under FLQ occupation. That by itself would have been shocking enough to CBC viewers, but the young woman-- who disguised her face and voice for fear of FLQ reprisals --had a second allegation to make which would further heighten public outrage about the first. She stated in no uncertain terms that rebel forces regularly committed atrocities of every kinds against English-speaking civilians as a method for breaking opposition to their aim of forcing Ottawa to recognize Québec as a separate country.

     The first corroboration of her charges came just thirty-six hours later in the form of an FLQ defector who walked across the Québec-Ontario provincial line and surrendered himself to a startled RCMP desk sergeant at a station southwest of Hamilton. Under questioning, the defector stated he had personally witnessed a number of sexual assaults(though he'd never participated in any) against women who opposed the FLQ's activities as well as a dozen arson fires set by insurgent fighters at the homes of French-Canadians accused of collaborating with the CDF. As proof to back up his claims, the defector presented his interrogators with an extensively detailed journal which he had kept hidden from his old comrades for months; it spelled out in horrific detail just how far the FLQ had been willing to go to achieve its goal of a separate Quêbecois state.

     And it wasn't just rape and arson the defector's former brothers-in-arms were guilty of-- the journal also confirmed long-standing suspicions held by the Trudeau government that the FLQ had been responsible for a massacre of English- Canadian civilians at a town on the Québec-Ontario provincial line early in the guerrilla war. In the summer of 1971 a tour group of twenty-eight people getting ready to travel to Toronto on a sightseeing trip had been killed when a group of masked men toting shotguns and automatic rifles had strafed the tour bus; it had long been suspected that the FLQ rebels were behind the attack, but the federal government had never been able to conclusively prove it until the defector came forward with his journal.

    Under airtight security the defector, code-named “Ricard” by CDF military intelligence officials, was smuggled up to a safe house near Ottawa for further questioning by CDF and RCMP investigators. He then appeared before a Canadian Senate intelligence committee; his testimony was carried live on all Canadian TV networks, and it would prove to be the spark which lit the fuse for an explosion of anti-FLQ rage throughout Canada. Effigies of the major FLQ guerrilla leaders were burned in almost every major city in the country the day after the hearing, and in many cases the Québec provincial flag was burned right alongside them. An RCMP constable of mixed French and Irish descent was fatally shot in the suburbs of Calgary by neo-Nazi extremists who claimed the killing was an act of revenge for crimes committed by the FLQ against English-Canadians. Catholic churches, an ancient symbol of French-Canadian culture, were ransacked by angry mobs looking to gain payback for what they deemed the Québecois’ “betrayal” of Canada. Only the beloved Montreal Forum was spared from the extremists' fury, and even there a sizable crowd of protestors marched demanding the Trudeau government totally and immediately revoke French-Canadians’ federal citizenship rights.

     The repercussions of Ricard's testimony were felt well beyond the borders of Canada. For the Soviets, who'd been reluctant from the very beginning to get too close to the FLQ insurgency, the unrest which greeted Ricard's revelations served as vindication of the “hands off” stance recommended by the KGB early in the guerrilla war. In West Germany, where student leftists normally embraced anyone who opposed capitalist ideology in general and North American capitalism in particular, the revelations about the FLQ's war crimes touched off a crisis of conscience whose effects would still be felt well into the 1980s. In Paris, French president Georges Pompidou publicly and harshly condemned the insurgents' brutality in a speech before the French National Assembly. At the White House,  President Richard Nixon issued a statement blasting the FLQ rebels as “a gang of fascist thugs” and hinting that the U.S. Air Force might deploy fighter jets to Québec to mount air strikes against the insurgents in support of the Trudeau government. Even Mao Zedong, not exactly a shrinking violet by any means, found the revelations about the FLQ's atrocitiies against civilians hard to stomach. In Tel Aviv Israeli founding father David Ben Gurion cited these atrocities as a clear sign of the moral decay he saw as infecting the entire FLQ organization.

     In Québec itself, the French-Canadian community all but disowned anybody who'd been part of the FLQ or was still a member of the rebel faction. It says volumes about the internal repercussions of Ricard's testimony that the prison suicide rate among inmates known or suspected to be FLQ sympathizers more than tripled between April and June of 1973; a similar spike in suicide rates among rebel POWs in CDF custody was noted by Canadian psychiatric experts during the first weeks after Ricard spoke before the Canadian senate. An entire sub-genre of Canadian literature has developed since the early 1980s whose central themes relate to the rupturing of family ties and friendships in Québecois society as a result of Ricard's disclosure of FLQ war crimes.

       From this point on, the FLQ insurgents found themselves fighting alone in what was increasingly becoming a losing war with the Trudeau government. As investigations by the RCMP and CDF intelligence personnel uncovered fresh new evidence supporting Ricard's testimony, the cause of Québec independence took another body blow. It was only through sheer luck, assisted by petty personal disagreements within the CDF general staff, that the insurgency didn't collapse immediately as a result of Ricard's testimony. As it was, the rebels' inexorable slide toward final defeat was now well underway; within fifteen months after the Canadian Senate heard Ricard's testimony, federal soldiers would drive the final nail into the FLQ movement's coffin....

To Be Continued