Algiers Rowdies and M. Debr6
By DARSIE T must be a perpetual surprise to the political Irowdies that they are covered with flowers one day and contemptuously scattered by the police another. It was no doubt the same few hundred young men in Algiers who threw rotten tomatoes at Guy Mollet three years ago, took the Govern- ment-General by storm last May, and who failed to raise an echo when they howled 'Hang Ben Bella' last Monday while the Prime Minister, M. Michel Debrd, was laying a wreath on the Algiers war memorial. This slogan is a protest against • President de Gaulle's action in shifting the rebel leader Ben Bella from a common prison in Paris to an island fortress. A large section of Euro- pean Algerian opinion attributes the increased insecurity in the countryside to President de Gaulle's gestures of clemency. It is therefore an anti-Gaullist cry. The demonstrators at a public meeting in Algiers on Saturday night had been much more specific. Called by the 'Algeria Is French' Association, which by Paris standards is ultra, it turned out that to half the audience this was little better than a bunch of softies if not a gang of traitors. 'De Gaulle is a murderer' was one of the cries from the hall. Shouts of 'Long live the Marshal' recalled that Algeria had, been much more Petainist than Gaullist during the war. Indeed the plot of May 13 was not in essentials a Gaullist plot, though it was cleverly annexed,by Gaullist conspirators, with the help of generals who were out of their depth and saw little hope of controlling the mob without an appeal to his authority.
But disappointed as Algiers naturally, is that the war and terrorism continue (though not to any extent in Algiers itself, where General Massu and his parachutists stamped it out two years ago) and that. Paris, even President de Gaulle's Paris, refuses to understand that integration is the sovereign remedy for Algeria's and France's ills, it is not, for the moment at least, ready to follow the rowdies in the street. Paris has a government and that government will not easily fall down, nor easily yield to mob pressure. But Paris still has a weakness: it could be detected in M. Debra's speech. No clear statement of the French Govern- ment's intentions has yet been made.
President de Gaulle may be supposed to believe that sooner or later Algeria must have a status somewhat like that of the autonomous States which form the French Community, that the best his economic and social development programme can do is to make possible this evolution un- accompanied by a violent scramble for complete independence. But as long as his sybilline phrases do no more than keep the door open, as long as M. Debra's do no more than assure the European Algerians that `France will remain in Algeria' (whatever that means) and that `Algeria is one of the lands of French sovereignty' (whatever that means), everyone in Algeria has ground for doubt as to where the country is going.
The Minister of Information, M. Frey, has de- clared that there is no difference between the attitude of the President and the Prime Minister, or between the Prime Minister and the main body of Government supporters in the Assembly. the UNR. But the UNR has been specific. It has endorsed the Algerian deputies' four-point pro- gramme which would make Algeria a mere geo- graphical expression. There are members of the Government who will tell you that to talk of 'the personality' of Algeria, as the President has done, means no more than to talk of the personality of Alsace or of Brittany, a mere matter of pic- turesque headdress worn once a year by girls who are normally careful to follow the Paris fashions.
In this atmosphere it is still impossible to con- duct any serious discussion about the kind of status that Algeria might have, or to mobilise any section of French opinion so as to give coherent support for a policy which would begin to satisfy the movement behind the rebellion, a movement which has expressed its resolution with the blood of 80,000 dead.
So while it is satisfactory that the insults shouted by the Algiers rowdies echo in the void, and funny to hear men like Lagaillarde and Biaggi, who have hitherto passed for being as ultra as a man can be, shouted down as milksops and political cuckolds, it remains disquieting that the wild men of Algiers are still mad. Until there is a clear policy in another direction there can be no political force to oppose the madmen should the puzzled and alarmed Algerians be tempted to follow them again.
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