Tomorrow Comes to Algeria

By ROBERT KEE

DRivING fast across the hot empty plain on which only the ruins of destroyed stone farmhouses showed that it had once been culti- vated, we saw suddenly a road block of some sort ahead. There were members of the French gendarmerie in their dark blue kepis and tropical khaki uniform in the road, and one of them was signalling us to stop.

'Qu'est-ce qu'il fair, ce con-la,' said the ALN Man in civilian clothes beside me. 'Ce con,' he repeated viciously in the only expression of aggressive anti-French feeling I heard in three days in South-East Algeria. His choice of term Of abuse seemed reasonable enough though, for everyone knew that even in this week before .1'ench sovereignty ended, French authority, except in the immediate vicinity of French Military installations, had ceased to exist. The Official authority was the force locale—the Moslem police force of the Provisional Execu- tive at Rocher Noir—and indeed one did actually see the force locale occasionally slouch- ing desultorily about the walls of Tebessa at night with steel helmets, rifles and a hangdog air as if they knew only too well that no one was going to take the slightest notice of them from the start. The ALN were the only authority that counted in this part of the country even last Week. The ALN, working in civilian clothes out- side their own military camps, were keeping order, running the local administration, exhum- ing bodies of slaughtered Arabs from mass graves they were now able to get at, even start- ing on the building of new villages. So what indeed was this con of a gendarme doing? We Put our ALN passes away and searched for French press cards, but before we could find them the gendarme had looked at our Tunis number plates, put his head in at the window and Said particularly conishly: `Ah, you're from Tunis, then?' To which we replied, 'Yes,' and he Waved us on.

The other person with us in the back of the car was a boy of about seventeen wearing a soft- peaked olive-green military cap and nursing a bundle. Somehow I had got the impression that he was a new recruit for the ALN camps in the Aures mountains for which we were heading. But when I asked him if this was so, he said he had already been in the ALN five years. 'How old were you when you went into the mountains?' `Twelve.' Were there any other boys of twelve there?' Many.'

He spoke very quietly, looking straight ahead all the time, and had taken no notice of the gendarme.

As we drove on towards the mountains the older ALN man reflected on the problem of all soldiers at the end of the war. .. I shan't find it easy to settle down in civilian life. You get used to the comradeship of fighting, especially in a war like ours. . . He spoke of long days spent motionless in dugouts on plains such as this, with French troops, tanks and aircraft all about them. 'Civilian life is less straight . . . comrades get dispersed. . .

We were driving into the hills now and a truck in the small convoy ahead was having diffi- culty in the heat and slowing us down. We halted for a moment near a gulley and I noticed an Arab civilian on his knees bowing and praying beside his sheep. Then another figure slowly approached him, a man in French uniform. Even now, a few days before independence, knowing something of what had been happening in Algeria for the past seven years, it was impos- sible to watch without a small sick feeling of apprehension. I reminded myself that the ALN themselves said that there had been no killings since the cease-fire, that we were close to the

area where the ALN were encamped in strength, that no Frenchman would surely dare. . . . The man in French uniform suddenly knelt down beside the Arab and started praying with him and before I could make sense of it we were driving on up round the hillside and the ALN man was pointing out a French fort just above us. He said it was empty but I thought I saw a figure in a watch-tower move against the sky- line. Then, round another bend, there was another French camp on the other side of the road, about fifty yards away. No flag was flying but large capital letters on a low building pro- claimed: 'BOU LEHRMANE HARKA NO. H,' and moving slowly across the compound towards the wire and the gate to look at us there came a number of heavily armed Moslem troops in French uniforms.

The whole atmosphere seemed somehow very strange. The faces and the gait of these men expressed a profound exhaustion, emotional as well as physical, a resignation almost, except that with it went a slow dignity unmarred by the motley nature of their uniforms. Almost every- one wore a different type of French uniform hat and some were unshaven. The strange soft tension increased when coming up close to us, • the troops, instead of asking what we were doing, simply shook hands silently—every single one of them with every single one of us.

'Harkis?' I asked the boy with us and he nodded. Harkis, Moslem troops in French service, waiting, I assumed, to make their peace with the ALN. This then was part of the atmos- phere of the Algeria of tomorrow. 'Do you think of them as traitors?' I asked the boy and he answered with the longest sentence he had uttered so far, and still looking straight ahead of him: 'I cannot think of the harkis in that way.'

As we drove on, the older ALN man put us right. They weren't harkis; they were the ALN themselves just moved into the camps the French had vacated. He ribbed the boy goodnaturedly for his mistake.

A long way further on and higher up where the valleys grew- greener, as if closer to the Mediterranean than the desert, we came to another ex-French fort and passed in through the gate under a banner in red lettering: Linelependance n'est qu'une. &ape La Revolution est noire but.

Some of the men who are going to carry ouf this Algerian Revolution were waiting for us politely. inside, a small group of officers in French paratroop uniforms, each shaking hands with a remarkable simple reverence for the act of friend- ship. We were in the headquarters of Wilaya No. 1.

No outward badges distinguished the officers. A quiet young man in a black beret, with the sensitive face of an intelligent student, sat down with us at a table in the open air and explained that there were rank badges—a system of stars— but that here everyone knew each other personally. He explained the ALN's organisa- tion: six Wilayas (or departmental areas) for Algeria, each divided into zones, a colonel in charge of each Wilaya with four commandants under him, one with special responsibility for military operations, another for intelligence, a third for political affairs and a fourth for supplies. It didn't take long to guess that he was the commandant for political affairs of Wilaya No. 1.

But as he talked of the war they had fought together one thought about it less and less as a political struggle and more and more in terms of what it had meant to and done to each one of them personally. He was twenty-four now and had been in the Aures for seven years, running away from the Lye& at Constantine where he had specialised in French and Arabic. Until the cease-fire three months before, he had never once slept under cover for all these seven years, and never once even in the same place two nights running. Every evening when darkness fell they would move through the forests and mountains to a new dug-in position lest the continuous patrols of French planes and helicopters had spotted them during the day. Often they would be spotted early and attacked. All day long they would fight back, a company of some hundred men or so or less, completely encircled by thousands of French troops, and attacked with napalm from the air. Then, when night fell, they would break out of the ring 'at whatever cost'— and here the operational commandant who was listening emphasised: 'At whatever cost'—to march through the night sometimes thirty or forty kilometres to new positions. (The French were afraid at night and they didn't know the forest and mountains as we did.')

But how, how, how? one continually wanted to ask and sometimes did. How did you endure all this? Flow are you able to be so quiet and dignified and normal, how are you really now? On the whole one settled for the more limited questions. 'How, for instance, did you deal with the napalm in such a situation?'

`We were always very well dug in. If you get napalm you must try and suffocate it—if it falls on your uniform you simply put earth on it and you'll be all right, if it falls on your skin of course it's a different matter.'

This gentle young man of twenty-four had been in more such accrochages—and embuscades too, of course—than he could possibly remember, the last one in February of this year. Pointing up the side of Mount Djelia to a scorched patch bare of trees where one would have thought it difficult to climb at all, let alone fight, he told of the accrochage that had taken place there and how they had broken out at night and next morning French paras had come and occupied their positions, hoping to trap them, but how the paras had been trapped in turn and massacred by the French planes mistaking them for ALN.

Later, without bombast, they took us into that heart of the Aures where the French had never been able' to establish themselves, and proudly but almost apologetically showed us a French T 28 fighter they had shot down with small-arms fire. On the way back we passed through the remains of an un-dug Roman city. 'You see, the French never cared for this country properly, but we shall excavate this place.'

For most of these seven years, thanks to the support of the population and a highly organised communications network, they had kept in touch with world events. They were embarrassed at having to tell us what they thought of Britain's attitude on Algeria in the UN; but they told us that in the British press only the Daily Telegraph was really hostile to them and they joked about our cameraman that 'he was a sort of Armstrong- Jones.'

Perhaps really their personal experiences and their political attitudes are not to be distin- guished. 'Revolution' has simply taken the place of `war'; and its objectives, as revealed in what they say and what their posters proclaim, are as yet as uncomplicated as those of war itself. Their posters define revolution simply as 'land for the peasants, work for the workers, decent homes for Algerian women, schools for the children and care for the sick: All questions of rival loyalties within the FLN are parried easily by : 'We are all together in fighting colonialism, or neo- colonialism, and in developing our people.' And although Wilaya No. 1 clearly admires Ben Bella, there in the mountains the general sense of common purpose seems very pure and strong and convincing.

Their whole approach to the future has been forged in their ordeal by war, and the mass of the Algerian people has shared this ordeal with them. Here in Algeria the masses and the dvohre political elite start much closer together than in any other Arab revolution. The ALN's attitude to the French, for instance, is far, far beyond any thought of vengeance, even almost beyond interest. For form's sake, out of respect for their own genuine lack of racial feeling, they say they want the French to stay, but 1 got the impression that they weren't really interested in the French any more and didn't care One way or the other. After all, they won their independence fighting against the French; they can, they seem to think, win their revolution at least without their support. And they mean it when they say they want to remain independent of Communism too.

So, straightforWardly, honestly, though pos- sibly naïvely, they face what they readily acknowledge as the tremendous tasks of the Algeria of tomorrow. Throughout history men who have proved themselves in the victories of ear' have been defeated by the more complex problems of peace. But one thing- is certain:- in the ALN's determined attempt to turn the victory of independence into a victorious revolution, an • Arab power, stronger and more significant than any the world has yet seen, is into being