ALGERIA: The Reluctant Rebel

(See Cover)

On both sides of the broad Algerian boulevard stood columns of red-bereted French paratroopers, Tommy guns slung across their chests. Inside the square 15,000 Algerians—Moslem and European —gazed expectantly at the towering figure on the distant rostrum. They had come to hear General Charles de Gaulle abandon his Delphic evasion and spell out his plans for stanching the wounds of France and Algeria.

“Last Sunday,” boomed the deep voice from the rostrum, “3,500,000 men and women of Algeria, without distinction of community and in complete equality, gave France and myself their vote of confidence . . . This fact is fundamental because it pledges Algeria and France one to the other, mutually and forever.”

The Walkout. This ringing statement seemed to suggest that France would never consent to independence for Algeria, and Constantine’s European settlers were cheered. But not for long. In fact, within a few minutes, the leaders of Constantine’s right-wing Committee of Public Safety—seated not on the rostrum but in a stand near by—stomped out angrily. They might have helped bring De Gaulle to power, but the triumphant Premier no longer needed them.

The general still did not commit himself on Algeria’s ultimate political status: “I believe it would be completely useless to petrify in advance in words something which our enterprise itself will outline,” he said. But he made it abundantly clear that the day of European privilege in Algeria was ending. “In two months,” he said, “Algeria will elect her representatives under the same conditions as Metropolitan France. It will be necessary that at least two-thirds of her representatives be Moslem citizens.”

De Gaulle outlined, too, an ambitious five-year plan to raise Algeria’s Moslems to something like economic equality with Frenchmen. But this would require peace. “Therefore, turning to those who are prolonging a fratricidal conflict, I say: Stop this absurd fighting, and you will see at once a new blossoming of hope all over the land of Algeria. You will see the prisons emptying; you will see the opening up of a future great enough to embrace everybody.”

His speech ended, De Gaulle solemnly began to intone the Marseillaise. Sullenly, the majority of his audience kept silent. In lonely splendor the general carried on, his firm voice ringing out over the loudspeaker.

Searching the Wind. To Constantine’s Europeans, the speech may have been a bitter disappointment. But De Gaulle was speaking to another audience too, offering them not all they wanted either, but an opening. This unseen audience sat 1,600 miles away, huddled around a conference table in a spanking new, six-story apartment building in Cairo.

Unlike De Gaulle, the men in the Cairo apartment building had no legal mandate from the Algerian people. Most of them, in fact, had little in common with the hopeless, half-starved Moslem peasants who make up the mass of Algeria’s population. Some were the sons and brothers of French army officers. Nearly all were French-educated, and only two out of 14 could speak really good Arabic. The oldest of them, a warm, voluble man with grey eyes, looked and acted like a French provincial schoolteacher. He was perhaps the most reluctant rebel of modern times, a man who once wrote: “If I had discovered the Algerian nation I would be a nationalist . . . But I would not die for an Algerian fatherland because that fatherland does not exist. I could not find it. I questioned history; I questioned the living and the dead. I searched through the cemeteries; nobody spoke to me of it. You cannot build something on the wind.”

Today, less than three decades since he wrote those words, Ferhat Abbas, 58, is Premier of the self-proclaimed Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic—an organization which in the name of Algerian nationalism wages merciless war on France. Dirty and cruel, the Algerian rebellion is a war of torture and treachery, of ambush and sabotage. In the four years since it began, it has claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 Moslem civilians, and for the past two years French army dead have been running about 900 a month. To keep Algeria French, the Paris government is currently spending $2,400,-000 a day, has recalled 800,000 reservists to tours of active duty, winked at atrocities worthy of Hitler’s SS, severely strained the NATO alliance, and collapsed the Fourth French Republic. Unchecked, the war could also kill the Fifth Republic, and turn all North Africa against the West.

To the outsider, Algeria scarcely seems worth such blood, treasure and agony. Save for a narrow belt along the Mediterranean coast, it is a barren land, dominated by harsh mountains and sterile desert. Because of the nationwide water shortage—Algeria’s third biggest river is only three feet wide along much of its course—only one-tenth of the country’s 500 million acres are cultivated. With enormous investment and years of effort, the oil of the disputed Sahara may one day provide a reliable source of industrial energy. Otherwise, Algeria has virtually no energy resources.

Greed and mismanagement as well as nature’s niggardliness have contributed to Algeria’s poverty. Once famed (along with Tunisia) as “the granary of Rome,” Algeria was successively fought over—and despoiled—by the Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards and Ottomans. By the beginning of the igth century, the country’s once-flourishing agriculture had all but disappeared, and even the piracy on which her Barbary ports had battened for two centuries had ceased to pay off. The Deys of Algiers, who nominally ruled all Algeria on behalf of the Turkish Sultan, actually controlled about one-fifth of it. Inland, Algeria’s original inhabitants—the Caucasian Berbers converted to Mo-hammedism—lived according to their ®wn rough laws and customs.

The Fly-Whisk War. In 1827, angered by an intricate financial deal in which he felt he was being cheated by the French government, Khoja Hussein, the last Dey of Algiers, called in French Consul Pierre Deval, charged him with being a “wicked, faithless, idol-worshiping unworthy,” and struck him three times with a peacock-feather fly whisk. After brooding over this outrage for three years, France finally saw it as an opportunity, sent General Louis de Bourmont and 37,000 men sailing south from Toulon. Within three weeks of their landing, De Bourmont’s troops paraded in triumph through Algiers to the strains of Wilhelm Tell.

But the Berber tribes of the interior were no readier to accept French authority than that of the Dey. Rallying behind AbdelKader, the handsome, 25-year-old son of a holy man, they launched a jihad (holy war) to expel the infidel. French General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a veteran of Napoleon’s Spanish campaign, where the word guerrilla was invented, responded with a tactic called the razzia —a swift, merciless strike at a native village, sparing nothing and nobody. In one razzia, in 1845, nearly 500 Algerian men, women and children were asphyxiated by fires lit at the mouth of a cave in which they had taken refuge. After 15 years of this kind of warfare, Abdel Kader finally surrendered, and in 1848 Algeria became legally part of France.

The Dispossessed. In one respect Algeria did, in fact, become part of France. When France lost Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871, tens of thousands of Alsatians who were unwilling to become German citizens settled in Algeria. They were followed over the years by a steady trickle of impoverished French and Corsican peasants and by the dispossessed of Spain, Italy and Malta. Today, one Algerian in ten—some 1,060,000 people—is of European ancestry, though perhaps only a third of those who call themselves French are, in fact, of French descent.

Unlike the British in India, the Frenchmen of Algeria are far more than just a governing caste. Though they are often all loosely called colons, only 22,000 of them are landowners, and of these only a few score are genuinely wealthy. The rest of Algeria’s Europeans are policemen, office workers, garage proprietors, locomotive drivers, skilled laborers and tradesmen who call themselves French but call Algeria home. To their talent and initiative, the land owes such economic strength as it possesses.

The Price of Success. For the 9,000,000 Moslems in Algeria, nine-tenths of the population, the cry that “Algeria is France” has proved a cruel delusion. The very achievements of French rule have served to increase the misery of the Moslem masses. Many of the highly efficient farms operated by French colons—often on land expropriated from Moslems in the 19th century—are not devoted to producing the food that Algeria so desperately needs; instead, they produce wine —which Moslems do not drink. The modern medicine which France introduced has all but wiped out the malaria, typhus, typhoid and venereal diseases which once plagued the Moslems. It has also sent the Moslem population zooming. In 1914 there were 4,000,000 Algerian Moslems; today there are 9,000,000 and by 1988 there will be 18 million. Since Algeria is unable at present to feed more than 3,000,000 people, the result has been mass pauperization. Some 800,000 able-bodied Moslem men are chronically unemployed. At least 2,000,000 Algerian Moslems live entirely upon remittances sent back by the 300,000 Algerian laborers digging the ditches and working the roads in Metropolitan France.

For any Algerian Moslem who sought to rise in the world, the odds were staggering. In 1954 only one out of five Moslem boys and one out of 16 girls went to school. The lucky ones read French textbooks speaking of “our ancestors, the Gauls,” but in French army messes, Moslem noncoms drew only two-thirds of the food allowance of Frenchmen of equal rank.

Silver Braid. No one more completely personifies the dilemma of Algeria’s Moslems than the gregarious druggist who is Premier of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic. Not long ago, sipping fruit juice in a Tunis cafe, Ferhat Abbas mused: “You know, if I had been born, say, an Egyptian, I would have grown up in Islamic culture and would have been able to feel deeply part of a nation. But my life has been different.”

Abbas does not even know whether his ancestors were Berbers or Arabs or both. Family legend has it that his grandfather was a wealthy landowner whose property was confiscated by the French after the bitter, yearlong Kabylia revolt of 1871. But by the time Ferhat was born (Oct. 24, 1899), the Abbas family was completely identified with French rule—so much so that Ferhat’s fattier, a caid (local governor) in the northern Constantine village of Chahna, was ultimately rewarded for his loyalty with the rosette and silver braid of a commander of the Legion of Honor. After running wild with the local shepherds until he was ten, Ferhat entered upon a pattern of life very much like that of any young French boy in Normandy or Picardy. He got his baccalaureat at a French lycee in Philippeville, did three years compulsory service as a sergeant in the French army medical corps, then entered the pharmacy school of the University of Algiers, where he avidly read Victor Hugo, Sophocles, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

More than anything else, Ferhat Abbas wanted to be a Frenchman of Moslem faith. (At that time, an Algerian Moslem who wanted French citizenship was obliged to abandon his “personal Koranic status,” i.e., Moslem practices, such as plural marriage, which conflicted with French law.) In Setif, a drab Algerian copy of a French provincial town, where he opened a drugstore upon leaving the university, Abbas divorced his first wife (a Moslem), married Marcelle Perez, a handsome, full-blown blonde of Alsatian origin. She was Algerian-born and an expert at preparing that favorite North African dish couscous,* and to this day is more fluent in Arabic than her husband.

Cafe Companions. Too mercurial and visionary to be a good organizer, Abbas had eloquence and personal charm. As president of the influential Algerian Moslem Students’ Association he traveled frequently to France, where he sat up until the wee hours in Paris cafes talking politics with other young North Africans. (Among his cafe companions: Ahmed Bal-afrej and Habib Bourguiba, today respectively Premier of Morocco and President of Tunisia.) All that was needed to transform Algeria “from a colony to a province,” he liked to say, was legal equality between Algerian Moslems and other Frenchmen. And when World War II broke out, Ferhat Abbas, at 40, enlisted as a medic in a Senegalese outfit. “If I am killed,” he said in a goodbye statement, “someone else will continue my task. Vive la France! Vive l’Algerie!”

When he returned unscratched to Algeria after the fall of France, Abbas began to sing a different tune. The Nazi victory over the French army damaged France’s prestige in her colonies; the U.S. landings in 1942 filled North Africa with heady talk of the Atlantic Charter and a brave new postwar world. Called into private conference with U.S. Minister Robert Murphy (who was trying to whip up Moslem support for the war effort), Abbas emerged with a bold new line: “Henceforth an Algerian Moslem will ask nothing else but to be an Algerian Moslem.”

Challenge & Response. Bold as his new stand sounded, events were about to leave Ferhat Abbas far behind. Unnoticed by him—and by the French—a new generation of leaders was emerging in Moslem Algeria. They were a tougher lot. They had seen something of the world in the French army, had learned at first hand about violence, stealth and collective action. Impatient with the political soul-searching and ringing manifestos so dear to Abbas, they preferred the doctrines of fiery Messali Hadj, the artisan’s son from the religious center of Tlemcen, who since 1926 had been working for total independence from France. Unlike Messali—who spent most of his time under house arrest or agitating among the Algerians in France—the young postwar nationalists were practical, disciplined men.

On the morning of V-E day, 1945, ten thousand Moslems appeared in the streets of Abbas’ own home town of Setif brandishing banners which read, DOWN WITH COLONIALISM, FREE MESSALI. There was a scuffle as gendarmes tried to wrest the banners away, and then, inevitably, a shot rang out. In sudden fury, bands of Moslems took off through Setif, savagely attacking every European they saw with clubs, knives and hatchets. And as word of the Setif “uprising” spread through the rugged mountains of Kabylia, bloodthirsty Berber bands, killing, pillaging and looting, set off on the warpath against the area’s 200,000 Europeans.

The French response was a holocaust. Throughout the countryside Senegalese, spahis and Foreign Legionnaires were given carte blanche to kill and pillage the

Berbers. Three cruisers of the French navy shelled coastal villages and French air force bombers destroyed 44 native settlements inland. In vengeance for 100 European dead, the French killed thousands of Moslems. Officially, French authorities place Moslem casualties at 1,005, but a prominent French politician recently estimated that the actual figure was closer to 20,000.

The Hammer & the Fly. To Algeria’s young nationalists the massacres of May 1945 meant one thing: the only way Algeria would ever get self-government was by armed revolt. Avidly they began to read military history, concentrating on guerrilla warfare—memoirs of French resistance officers, Tito’s partisans, Irish rebels. Their first attempt at an underground, the Organisation Spéciale, soon had 3,000 recruits, ample stocks of hidden weapons, too ambitious and complex a hierarchy, and a card file of members. Result: when French police once got a lead into the O.S., it swiftly collapsed.

Doggedly the nationalists started all over again, this time on the principle that “if the French come against us with a hammer, we will become mosquitoes.” Instead of a single large army, they concentrated on building small, highly trained cadres. As the nucleus of the F.L.N. (Front de Libération Nationale) took shape, Mohammed ben Bella, a former French army noncom with a brilliant World War II combat record, negotiated promises of aid from Egypt. Then at i a.m. of All Saints’ Day, 1954, simultaneously across Algeria, 30 F.L.N. bands struck. The Algerian war had begun.

Collective Responsibility. Only a few months before, neighboring Tunisia had with little bloodshed won from France the promise of internal autonomy. Perhaps F.L.N. leaders did not foresee a long fight for themselves. But in French eyes, Algeria was not a mere colony like Tunisia; it was an inseparable part of France “The only negotiation,” announced French Interior Minister Fran-gois Mitterrand, “is war.” By middle 1956 there were 400,000 French troops tied down in Algeria. The following year, to seal off Algeria from Tunisia, French forces began construction of the grandiose Ligne Morice (named after former Defense Minister Andre Morice)—a 150-mile, electrified barbed-wire fence running south from the Mediterranean coast parallel to the Tunisian frontier.

As the fighting spread from Algeria’s mountains to its rich coastal strip and bustling cities, and as terror bombing deliberately sought innocent victims, the French army in response resorted to measures that outraged the world. When the rebels in August 1955 massacred 70 European settlers, including women and children, the French, adopting the doctrine of “collective responsibility,” razed ten Algerian villages. In a report, which the

Paris government last year did its best to suppress, a commission composed of some of France’s most distinguished civil servants, doctors, diplomats and soldiers stated, among many examples of brutality and injustice, that on three occasions Moslem “suspects” were locked up for the night in empty wine cellars; in the process 68 died of asphyxiation.

The F.L.N., loud in its denunciation of such French “barbarities,” was no less brutal to French soldiers, European settlers or their own reluctant Moslem countrymen. In May 1957, to discourage the villagers of Kabylia from rallying to the cause of Messali Hadj—who had long since become the F.L.N.’s bitter enemy—F.L.N. gunmen herded more than 300 peasants into the village of Kasba Mechta (TIME, June 10, 1957), and, when darkness fell, passed among them shooting and stabbing until all were dead. Moslems who persisted in active loyalty to France risked F.L.N. “Execution”—or being found alive but minus ears, noses or tongues.

Will-o’-the-Wisps. Whether by voluntary allegiance or enforced support, the F.L.N. has grown steadily more powerful. After four years of the Algerian war, whole regions of the country (see map) have fallen into rebel hands, are effectively ruled by F.L.N. mayors, tax collectors and administrative officers. The National Liberation army itself has grown from scattered bands of fellaghas to a regular force of 120,000 men armed with Mausers, Lee-Enfields, Bren guns, German-made mortars and U.S. 75-mm. recoilless rifles. Between the Morice line and the Tunisian border the rebels have established a major supply depot and training center protected by antiaircraft guns. In Tunisia itself, with the open connivance of President Habib Bourguiba’s government (which is not strong enough to resist them if it wanted to), there are five F.L.N. command posts, two replacement depots, eight hospitals, nine arsenals and three training camps.

Though now a highly organized and professional army, the F.L.N. sticks to guerrilla tactics and suffers when it does not. Sleeping by day and fighting by night, it moves in 40-man combat groups, attacks only when it has a French unit at a disadvantage, withdraws in the face of any major French force. Result is that although the overweight French army has won some local successes—notably the stamping out of terrorism in the casbah of Algiers by General Jacques Massu’s hardened paratroopers—most of its time is spent in vain pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp opponent.

The Sleepy Recruit. To Ferhat Abbas, who deplores violence, the Algerian war at first seemed an unmitigated disaster. During the early months of the revolt he tried to act as an intermediary between the F.L.N. and the French. But in February 1956, when a shower of rotten tomatoes thrown by Algiers colons frightened Socialist Premier Guy Mollet into taking a “tough line” in Algeria, Abbas lost the last of his faith in French good will. Within three months he dissolved his own party, the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto, and turned up at rebel headquarters in Cairo, where he told a press conference: “There is only the F.L.N.”

The F.L.N.’s tough young masters, who still suspected him of pro-French loyalty, put him through an apprentice course in clandestine operations, sent him scurrying about Europe, the Middle East and South America as a spokesman for the cause. This was hard work for sleep-loving Ferhat Abbas, who likes to get to bed before 9 every night, already wonders how he will hold his head up at evening functions if he ever becomes head of a genuine Algerian state. Slow as he had been to join the rebellion, Abbas still possessed an asset of incalculable value to the F.L.N.—the most respected name in Algerian politics. Three weeks ago, when the rebels proclaimed formation of a government in exile, everyone agreed that “Papa” Abbas was the logical choice for Premier.

Something Borrowed. The Cabinet over which Abbas presides—he is heard with respect but has no decisive voice—is made up of two loose factions. One, which includes Abbas himself, favors some kind of continuing tie with France, in common with the neighboring Moslem states of Morocco and Tunisia. The other group, made up of men intrigued by the dream of Pan-Arabism, favors more extreme measures in fighting the French.

Paradoxically, two of the leading moderates are the Cabinet’s military men —Minister of War Belkacem Krim, a moody, 35-year-old Berber with five death sentences over his head, and Minister of Supply Mahmoud Cherif, 43, a onetime career lieutenant in the French army. The extremists are the politicians, notably Foreign Minister Mohammed

Lamine-Debaghine (whose spectacles and partially paralyzed face have won him the nickname “Mr. Moto”) and Minister for North African Affairs Abdelhamid Mahri, an Arabic scholar who sometimes talks like a fellow traveler, argues that the F.L.N. is being pushed into ties with the Communists because of “U.S. support of France.”

Many F.L.N. weapons are arms that the British left by the thousands in Egypt, and that Nasser, who now has shiny new Soviet guns to replace them, has turned over to the Algerians. Diplomatically, the F.L.N. has had Soviet bloc support in the U.N., and its newly proclaimed state has been formally recognized only by Red China, North Korea, North Viet Nam and Outer Mongolia among non-Moslem states. (Soviet Russia, playing a devious game in hopes of keeping its influence in Paris, has yet to recognize it.)

F.L.N. leaders like to say that they are grateful for aid from anywhere, but that it is their own soldiers who are doing the dying, and many are resentful i^ particular of Nasser’s attempts to pose as the real force behind the Algerian revolt. They say they have no intention of winning their freedom from France only to lose it to Egypt. Partly to demonstrate its independence of Egypt, the government in exile is planning to transfer its headquarters to Tunisia, will move a first contingent of ministers there this week.

On the Offensive. The tragedy of Algiers is that neither side is strong enough to make a country without the other, and neither army is strong enough to defeat the other. De Gaulle’s coming to power last June was the first break in the futile, desperate struggle. De Gaulle, though the candidate of the paratroopers and the diehard European extremists who toppled the ineffectual Fourth Republic, is not their stooge. Empowered now by his overwhelming mandate, De Gaulle plans to kick Algeria’s shilly-shallying Commanding General Raoul Salan upstairs as Inspector General of the French army, and to transfer the impetuous paratroop General Jacques Massu back to France.

De Gaulle’s bold decision to have Algerian Moslems vote in his constitutional referendum was a direct challenge to F.L.N. authority. The rebels warned Moslems to stay away, and threatened vengeance on those who voted. An astonishing 80% of all eligible Algerians, including Moslem women voting for the first time, got to the polls. Many were taken there by the French army, but the size of the poll was nonetheless an impressive indication of France’s ability to summon some degree of cooperation from Algeria’s Moslem population. It could also be read as a Moslem longing for peace, and as a clear rebuff to the F.L.N.

As a soldier, De Gaulle knows that one can only make a peace with those he fights. But he also wants to talk past the F.L.N. to other more moderate Moslem elements in Algeria. That is why, in last week’s speech which so annoyed the European extremists in Constantine, De Gaulle sought to conjure up his dramatic vision of economic equality. Among the announced goals of his five-year plan: 1) equalization of wages in France and Algeria; 2) distribution of 625,000 acres of reclaimed land among Moslem farmers; 3) schooling (by 1966) for all Moslem children; 4) 10% of all civil service jobs in Metropolitan France and more in Algeria to go to Moslems.

De Gaulle’s plan was clearly intended to redress many of the underlying grievances of the Algerian war. But F.L.N. leaders, though trusting him more than his predecessors as a man strong enough to do right, were nonetheless indifferent to his economic promises. Accustomed to thinking only in military and political terms, they were unimpressed by estimates that to raise Algeria’s living standards by 2% a year would take an annual foreign investment of $850 million, and they dismissed with a wave of the hand the obvious fact that without French capital Algeria would face economic catastrophe. Asked what their own economic plans are, the rebels reply: “There’s a committee working on it.”

The Moment to Negotiate. On the surface, the F.L.N.’s response to De Gaulle’s psychological offensive has been uncompromising toughness. In late August the rebels extended the war to France, and in a month of operations struck 180 times against targets ranging from oil dumps to the Eiffel Tower, from cops on the beat to Information Minister Jacques Soustelle.

In actuality, F.L.N. leaders felt neither so confident nor so uncompromising as their public pronouncements suggested. Last week, in the first interview he has granted since he became chief of the government in exile, Ferhat Abbas spelled out for TIME Correspondent Stanley Karnow the F.L.N.’s current position: “As long as De Gaulle does not reveal his hand, we will go on fighting. Our army has never been as strong. We are in a position to take a step forward to a ceasefire. We want to find a humane solution to this war. But while it is true that De Gaulle has not mentioned integration, the French army continues to wipe out villages and kill Algerians.”

For the first time since the Algerian war began, the F.L.N. has proclaimed itself ready to discuss a settlement with France without insisting on prior French recognition of Algerian independence. To indicate that they have an alternative, should De Gaulle not respond, the F.L.N. is talking up a daring scheme that could create real trouble: they would call for “armed volunteers” from the Arab world, not because they lack manpower but in order to widen the conflict.

The hope of peace, amidst so much hatred and recrimination, relies on whether both sides at this crucial moment are capable of trust, magnanimity and wisdom. “Stop this absurd fighting,” pleaded De Gaulle last week. Answered Ferhat Abbas: “Now is the time to negotiate. We can work out a new kind of relationship between Algeria and France. Even those who are fighting are prepared to find new bonds.” The world could only hope so.

* Boiled semolina with vegetables, meat or fruit added.