The Street Against the Council Chamber
From DARSIE GILLIE PARIS THE street murders, the lynchings, the OAS's mobilisation posters in Algiers and Oran, the renewed activity of at least some of the FLN's guerrillet•os in the Algerian hills are thrusting the Franco-Algerian negotiations into the back- ground. The authority of a government which has declared that it is on the way out from a territory is necessarily restricted. President de Gaulle has done this in no uncertain terms with regard to Algeria. He had also already withdrawn both the civil and the military headquarters of French authority in Algeria from the capital into rural retirement, in the hope of shielding them from the pressure of the Algiers mobs. Alas, this has meant that the Government's representatives have them- selves been still further devalued. This is no doubt Partly due to the policy of keeping the local executants as mere executants, but this in itself is a confession of inability to find men capable of standing up to the emotional tidal waves of Algeria. President de Gaulle has evidently decided that his policy can only be carried out under his own immediate impulsion, but he is a long way off in Paris and even his personal Courage must flinch at the thought of personally visiting a territory where his own countrymen now hate him with an intensity that can almost be recorded on a thermometer.
So, though the French continue to found universities—in Constantine and Oran—the problem is more and more what kind of liquida- tion will the local forces permit. It is very difficult to get information about up-country Algeria. What is happening in the small towns where the French residents are a mere handful?The military Posts have been reduced in number by about one- fifth already, and there must be further reductions When the next two divisions are withdrawn. Pre- sumably the FLN political network is being rapidly reconstructed as the French administra- tion assumes a more provisional air.
The French have very sensibly been rapidly increasing the Moslem elements in the administra- tion and one supposes that the men accepting these jobs have arranged matters with the FLN, but one does not know. One doesn't in fact even know for certain whether the local FLN repre- sentatives are entirely reliable from the point of view of Mr. Ben Khedda, the Algerian premier, now with all his government in Morocco. With all his government, that is to say, except Mr. Ben Bella and his four companions, still prisoners of the French—though now privileged prisoners, allowed to use the telephone and to enjoy untram- melled communication with the personal emissary of the King of Morocco.
What are Mr. Ben Bella's views about the negotiations? He made it clear by his hunger strike that he too is a political force; but is his influence mainly with the highly combative: FLN organisation in France, or can he also rely on wide support in Algeria? Is he ready to ally him- self with the revolutionary extremists inside the FLN? These are questions which no one can safely answer; but meanwhile. the physiognomy of the great coast towns is changing under the pressure of violence. The only imaginable policy for the OAS is to seize those cities where the Europeans represent from one-half (at Oran) to perhaps one-third (at Bone) of the population. The OAS has always claimed that it has Moslem sympathisers. No doubt there are or were a good many Moslems who from personal taste or from reasons of interest or security would like to opt for France. The plans of intelligent staff officers nominally leading the OAS, such as ex-general Satan and ex-colonel Godard, must have taken this into account. Even if most of the Moslems in question would only remain passive in a crisis this would modify the local situation in favour of the Europeans. But there are evidently other leaders beside former staff officers in the OAS, or at least forces which the staff officers do not control. These are the sympathisers with the romantic Fascists like Ortiz and Lagaillarde, now interned in Spain, or mere blind racialists. It is they who have given free rein to the insane savagery of the 'Young Lions' of Oran. It looks as if it is on these same 'Young Lions' with their lynching parties that the local FLN leaders are counting to defeat the Salans and Godards.
It is difficult to find any other explanation for the oft-repeated pattern of events in that un- fortunate town. Again and again the day has begun with the indiscriminate murder of some Europeans in the street and has ended with the lynching of Moslems. The city where the rebellion was for six years least alive, where Europeans and Moslems were most intermingled, is now a city of violent community hatred, where Europeans who lived amongst •Moslems and Moslems who lived amongst Europeans are flying from their homes. Although the staff officer leadership within the OAS has kept the lynchers under better control in Algiers, the same tendency is evidently at work there. Moslem and European quarters and shopping areas arc rapidly becoming mutually exclusive because neither European nor Moslem feels safe if he is in a minority in a street.
It is difficult to see how this can help the OAS. At first sight it might perhaps suit the French Government's proposal that the Europeans should form an organic community constitutionally defined in the new Algeria—a little like the Turks in Cyprus. This has so far been sharply opposed by the Algerian rebel leaders. But so radical a separation as is now developing would seem in the long run to deprive the Europeans of their part in the country's economic life and facilitate their exclusion altogether. In spite of the terrorist discipline of the OAS which has branded Europeans who leave Algeria as traitors and places plastic bombs under their removal vans, the value of real estate in Algeria has dropped to between a quarter and a tenth of what it was. It may be that the ultimate solution of the Algeria problem is being worked out on the spot rather than in Cabinet meetings or secret negotiations.
But whatever the Algerian solution, it will leave traumatic traces in France. The fugitives from Algeria, with their hatred and frustration, will reinforce the extreme Right. This is at least beginning to provoke protective reaction. At present the political torpor of the majority is in sharp contrast with the fever of hatred behind the numerically very small metropolitan OAS and those limited Republican circles still capable of reaction. Political torpor has been encouraged by the Government. It has perhaps begun to regret this disarmament of the nation's political con- sciousness. The obvious, indeed the only, card for the OAS to play in France is to set up as the one serious safeguard against Communism, just as it is the Communists' obvious policy to set up as the one serious barrier to the OAS. The Govern- ment's arrogant isolationism is beginning to look insubstantial and foolish in face of the OAS's constant self-advertisement by bomb, theft of arms and murder. When the Communist Party called for a demonstration last Saturday in pro- test against acts of OAS terrorism directed at its offices and members, both the Government and the Communist Party seem to have decided that violence was not in their immediate interest. The Communists were not allowed to reach their objective but they were not dispersed by police batons. The Communists had found themselves without allies. For the non-Communist Left, both trade unions and parties extending from the independent Socialists of the opposition weeklies to even the MRP still represented inside the Government, have at last decided to get together and build their own rampart against Fascists as a necessary preliminary to co-operation with the Communists. A belated but still encouraging symptom of sense.
'The First Prize is an MBE.'
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