Foreign News: THE CASE FOR FRANCE IN ALGERIA

Before the United Nations Political Committee in New York City last week, France’s Foreign Minister Christian Pineau made the most vigorous and persuasive statement yet heard of the case for French rule in Algeria. Excerpts:

WHAT is occurring in Algeria is not a national uprising against foreign oppression, but a political enterprise undertaken by a minority wedded to the well-known methods of terrorism and subversive war. It would have foundered long before this had it not received help from certain countries which supply it with arms, money, directives and even bases of operations.

The heads of the F.L.N. [National Liberation Front] contend that they are the real representatives of the peoples concerned, simply because they kill more people than the others. In order to ensure themselves of this monopoly, they have undertaken the destruction of other parties in the purest totalitarian tradition. In the interior of the country the bands fight at gunpoint over control of the sectors that bring in the fattest dividends in pillage and gunrunning. In the first ten months of 1957 alone, about 600 Algerian Moslems have been killed in France and more than 2.000 wounded, victims of other Algerian Moslems. [In Algeria itself] between Nov. 1, 1954 and Nov. 1, 1957, the rebels murdered 8,429 civilians, of whom 310 were women and 120 children. This tragic picture includes 1,126 European victims and 7,030 Moslems.

The proportion of Moslems killed by those who claim they are fighting on behalf of the Algerian people is, therefore, approximately seven Moslems to one European. If any conclusion is to be drawn from these figures, it is that the rebellion does not enjoy spontaneous support from Moslems. The F.L.N. relies more on totalitarian methods than the support it might get from public opinion.

In fact, the disgust aroused by certain methods used now alienates the majority of those who under abuse or duress at one time supported the rebellion. Every passing day confirms this. Practically all over Algeria, life has returned to normalcy. Last June more than 100 victims of terror fell in Algiers; no attacks occurred in September, and but one in October. Everywhere, in the country as well as the cities, people are at work; cars travel on the roads; and—this detail is important for a country which we are supposed to believe is in the throes of an insurrection—takes are collected normally. We know, furthermore, of the failure of the [rebels’] order to boycott schools: about 400,000 Moslem children now attend classes, compared to some 300,000 on Oct. 1, 1954, on the eve of the rebellion. Free medical consultations have advanced in one year from 250,000 per month to 610,000. A total of 3,400 Moslems sit in the municipal assemblies, compared with fewer than 800 Europeans.

To define what it has called the “Algerian personality,” the government has deemed it necessary to undertake, without delay, the application of a program in its loi-cadre. It permits of an evolution, in liberty and respect for human dignity, of institutions which undoubtedly do not embody all virtues, but make possible without further delay the promotion of a new elite in whose hands will be placed the future of the country.

France, in mobilizing her efforts, her technology, her capital and her men for prospecting and developing the resources of the Sahara, does not intend to introduce in these areas what you might call a neocolonialism of the desert. On the contrary, she intends to associate the neighboring countries in this huge task of economic and social development, and to bring them to share in the hoped-for results.

The rebels have lost on the military front. They have also lost on the psychological and political fronts. They know that France is ready to meet with positive action the legitimate aspirations of the Algerian populations without thereby abandoning their territory to anarchy and poverty. What can they hope for now, except that you help to give them back the prestige they are now losing?

Must we deliver the peoples of Algeria to terror, to poverty, to totalitarianism, or to anarchy? Or must we, on the contrary, give them their only chance of attaining democracy, which will guarantee every man and woman freedom and peace?

Take your choice. France has already made hers.