The Future in Algeria
C OME time at the beginning of next week it a will be announced to cheering Moslem crowds that Algeria has voted itself free. The tricolour will be hauled down, except in the French army cantonments; the green-and-white Algerian flag will be run up. For the great majority of French- then, whatever their political convictions, there will be at least a pang of sorrow. Algiers and Bone and Oran and Mostaganem were for at least two generations predominantly French towns, and it had looked in 1900—superficially, We can now perceive—as if all Algeria would follow their example, with a delay of forty or fifty years perhaps. Europe's limit would have been permanently in the Sahara. Things did not and could not work out that way. Instead we have unhappy embittered Algerian Europeans returning to the continent of their origin at the rate of ten or eleven thousand a day with a couple of suitcases each. In theory, many of them will go back after the holiday season and after the new Algerian Republic has shown it can keep order. There will be no surprise if most of them remain on this side of the
Mediterranean.
To absent yourself from the country that you call clamantly your own at so decisive a moment scarcely establishes your claim to have a say in its future. It is true that there are grave risks of disorder and of ugly indiscriminate ven- geance; but the European community in Algeria has allowed the situation so to develop over the years that the only valid representatives of the Moslems are the FLN and of the Euro- peans the OAS. It is considered natural in Algeria that in the course of a negotiation you should blow up your own town hall, a school or two and a university library just to show that you mean what you say. There are moderate men among the Moslems and reasonable, generous ones among the Europeans, but they have not held the leadership in their hands and are now called in when the toughs want someone to. pat them on the back and say that at heart they are men of peace. The moderate and reasonable are going to have their hands full in keeping events during the .next few months within the lines laid down by the Evian agreement. This is of the greatest importance if a sufficient number of Europeans are to be induced to remain or, indeed, tempted back. That there would be a big flight across the Mediterranean was inevitable and there are a great many Algerian Europeans whose ideas and emotions, set in nineteenth-century moulds, are of little use to any. country. But though better off for educated young men than many newly independent countries, Algeria will still be acutely short of them. The first request to France will no doubt be for schoolteachers, as it was in the case of Morocco and Tunisia. It is one that France with her own rapidly expand- ing school population will find difficulty in supplying. There are, indeed, at the present moment in France thousands of would-be French volunteers for service of different kinds - in the new Algeria, but most of these young people are thinking of this in terms of a few months and they are likely to find themselves in a country not only gravely disorganised during a difficult take-over, but also a prey to internal quarrels which have hitherto been kept in the background. The candidature of M. Ben Bellah for leadership of the 'pure' patriots who had no responsibility for the compromises in the Evian agreement, since he was a prisoner of the French at the time, is only too obvious. One test will come immediately after the referendum when the Provisional Executive at Rocher Noir should, according to Evian, take over during the few weeks that must elapse while a Con- stituent Assembly is elected and a Government formed on a parliamentary basis. If this arrange- ment can be preserved there will be a strong argument for recommending the Algerian Euro- peans to trust the guarantees for them worked out at Evian. if these provisions are not kept it will be harder to argue that the minority has already the assurances it demands.
The belated agreement between the OAS and the Provisional Executive at Rocher Noir will enable the referendum to be held in respectable order at Algiers itself and most other cities, even if not at Oran. It can scarcely, however, be argued that the French Government was re- sponsible for this relatively satisfactory outcome, nor, therefore, is the French Government in a position to protest as loudly as would be desir- able over the unpleasant list of Europeans kid- napped during recent weeks. The transfer will be made by men of good will thankful that things have not turned out worse, but aware that the record of the French authorities in try- ing to• control the OAS has been poor in the most important towns, even though it has been very. much better in its dealings with the FLN in the country.
Will French governments of the future be able to sustain the prospect of co-operation that has been opened lip? In this matter the French record in Africa has been pretty good. There never was in France an idea that it was positively good for colonies to pay for themselves. But there is a growing belief that there is no point in going on paying for them when you have lost them. That is not at all President de Gaulle's point of view. Twelve presidents of African re- publics have already paid State visits to Paris. Twelve times an unknown flag has adorned the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elys6es. Twelve times presidents have exchanged meals and attended together a performance of the opera —and this whatever other problems may have been pressing for attention at home or abroad. There are two more French-speaking presidents to be entertained—Mali and Cameroon—not to mention Guinea, which is rapidly coming back into the fold. -Each of these governments is a candidate for large-scale help. Then there is Morocco with its thousands of French school- teachers and Tunisia with almost as many. Now Algeria is to go free, but keep her French in- vestment budget and her French schoolmasters. The French Republic will probably also be asked to pay for the expropriation of French estates there, not to mention the damage done by the OAS. C'est magnifique, mais est-ce la finance—especially when France is going to spend vast sums on resettling in France the. Algerian Europeans, and indeed Moslems, who do not want to go home?
As long as President de Gaulle remains in power these stupendous programmes, will no doubt be executed. But you have only to listen to the Paris man-in-the-street when the President is entertaining one of his 'black friends' to fore- see a day when someone will seek popularity by cutting the lavish flow of-subsidy to Africa— both north and south of the Sahara. Meanwhile many of the pre-referendum meetings in Algeria are being addressed by FLN leaders, not in any form of Arabic or Berber, but in French.
Previous page
