FRANCE: Open Window

Like two boxers eying each other across the ring, France’s Charles de Gaulle and Algerian rebel “Premier” Ferhat Abbas last week sat waiting for the next diplomatic round. Silent hauteur was Paris’ first response to the counterproposals with which Abbas and his “Cabinet” had met De Gaulle’s offer of Algerian self-determination (TIME, Sept. 28). The rebels were still insisting that if France wanted a cease-fire in the five-year-old Algerian civil war, it must deal directly with their “provisional government.” but this De Gaulle had barred from the beginning. Equally unacceptable to Paris was Abbas’ scorn for De Gaulle’s hint that Algeria might be partitioned to protect the right of French settlers and the rebel leader’s suggestion that no vote to settle Algeria’s future could be valid so long as the French army remained there.

The danger was that France might take Abbas’ words at face value. In fact, much of what he said was clearly designed to establish a bargaining position, and some of it was equally clearly intended as window dressing to make the idea of a possible cease-fire palatable to extremist anti-French forces within the rebel ranks. The essential point was that for the first time since the fighting began the rebels had tacitly agreed to abide by the verdict of a peaceful Algerian referendum.

Stepping in where the U.S. State Department feared to tread, Tunisia’s outspoken President Habib Bourguiba chided the rebels for their harsh reply and pleaded with both sides to get together quickly on a settlement.

“To let the present chance for peace slip away would be criminal,” he insisted. “At last, De Gaulle and Ferhat Abbas agree to a free choice by the Algerian people . . . If I had been in the Algerians’ shoes, I would already have wired De Gaulle, ‘Arriving Orly Airport at such and such a time. Please send someone to meet me.’ ” Hopefully, Bourguiba offered his services as referee: “I am ready to do anything for peace . . . act as a postman, anything. If it would help matters, I am ready to meet De Gaulle.”

But if De Gaulle had shown no public interest in the rebels’ reply, neither had he publicly denounced it. The sides were closer together now than ever before, and it was a reasonable guess that both De Gaulle and the rebels were brooding over the next discreet effort to narrow the gap. As Rome’s Il Tempo put it: “The door is closed, but the window is open.”