M. MOLLET'S DILEMMA
By DARSIE GILLIE
Paris
MMOLLET will have to jump the most • difficult hurdle of his Premiership now that Parliament is reassembled. He seeks new taxes to the tune of £150 million and must overcome the discontent provoked by cuts in expenditure amounting to £250 million. He will not even be able to assert that these painful operations guaran- tee a cure of the most serious danger, the foreign trade deficit, which is rapidly draining the country's foreign exchange reserves. He can, however, at least make play with the extension of the French overdraft with the European Payments Union to the value of 200 million dollars.
This financial problem is not primarily due to the Algerian war but to the rapid economic ex- pansion in the last five years of a country with a permanent shortage of its own supply of energy and therefore bound to import more and more heavily. But Algeria has prevented the financial and economic problem from having priority and has seriously aggravated it by increasing imports and diverting labour from productive employ- ment. M. Mollet has at least done something to relate the two problems by his recent statement on television, at Lille and finally at the Socialist National Council, declaring that France must show herself more resolute and more ready to hold out than the rebels. Prepared in fact to keep 400,000 men indefinitely in Algeria and to adapt her finances to this necessity.
• This does not only mean taxes. It will also very likely mean the poitponement of M. Billeres's important and indeed urgent educational pro- gramme. France may very soon find herself even more disastrously short of the engineers and chemists needed in the second half of this century than of energy. They are even harder to import.
M. Mollet can rely on the disciplined phalanx of 100 Socialist deputies, but the Right is bitterly dissatisfied about the new taxes, while the Govern- ment's wage austerity is not being welcomed by the working class. There have already been warn- ing strikes on the railways; the elementary school teachers have announced a staggered strike for next month; the shipyard workers at stormy St. Nazaire have once again made necessary a big concentration of police in their town. How can M. Mollet keep his deficit within the desired limits if wage increases force up his expenditure? No one expects him to pass by more than a narrow margin and if he secures it it will be due to Algeria.
This is paradoxical, for there is more bad news than good from beyond the Mediterranean. It seems a long time ago that the Government was hoping to hold at least local elections last Septem- ber. Today it is wise enough not to mention any date and has issued its threat to keep a huge army in Algeria for years if necessary. No doubt there is an element of bluff in this. The problem of keeping up the Algerian war is not just one of finding men and money. The next session of the UN Assembly will be very difficult; the French position in Tunisia and Morocco must deteriorate as long as there is no Algerian settlement, and there will be serious damage in other diplomatic sectors. But the rebels saw to it last week that the French jaw should be set.
Apart from military operations the terrorists have been at their odious work on a big scale. The ugliest incident was the murder of a Moslem reli- gious dignitary whose schoolmistress daughter had invited five French schoolmistresses to tea. The host, his brother, and two of the French- women and the country policeman were shot dead, the host's daughter and another French- woman wounded. A farmer's whole family (five people) was wiped out near Setif, while three women, all mothers of small children, as well as two men, were casually murdered in a rebel raid at Mascara. There were in all nearly forty terrorist murders between Thursday and Sunday. It is not surprising that M. Lacoste, the resident Minister in Algeria, should have told the Socialist National Council that recent attempts to contact the rebels had been barren. Clearly the rebel leaders do not want negotiations; they are as sure that they can wear out the French as M. Mollet is that he can wear them out.
These rebel crimes make all the more difficult but all the more important the effort of liberal- minded Frenchmen to prevent French soldiers or police from answering in kind. This is exactly what the rebel extremists want. Last week saw the first session of the Commission for the Safe- guard of Individual Rights and Liberties in Algeria promised by the Prime Minister more than a month ago. Its creation has been slow be- cause M. Lacoste had insisted it must not appear in any way to be a criticism of his administration and in consequence the body was so conceived that several of those invited to sit on it refused to serve. Almost the last name to be announced of those who did accept was that of Maitre Maurice Garcon, a great barrister and a tireless champion of judicial reform in metropolitan France. It was not surprising to learn therefore that the conditions of the Commission's work were to be a great deal better than had seemed likely. Though nominally attached to M. Lacoste's office in Algeria it is to have its own seat in the judicial atmosphere of Paris, where, incidentally, are also to be found many if not most of the potential witnesses—the returned conscripts and reservists who have made allegations about improper methods used in the course of the pacification. Each member of the Commission will individually investigate cases allotted to him. They will have free movement in Algeria. The Commission is invited to inform the Prime Minister what powers it needs. Maitre Maurice Garcon is to be its Secretary-General.
So far so good. M. Lacoste, who has shown an unusual gift for discouraging confidence in the Government's intentions to take effective meas- ures against abuses by his assumption that any such allegation is a personal affront, has rushed in to throw another spanner in the works. He chose the Socialist National Council, a party body,which sits without the presence of the press, as an occa- sion to declare that the allegation made by Profes- sor Peyr6ga, Dean of the Faculty of Law in Algeria, has proved to be false. This statement even appears in some papers as a charge of false witness.
The case of Professor Peyrdga is one of the most dramatic in the moral turmoil that the Algerian war has aroused. After hesitating for fifty days, he finally wrote to the Minister of National Defence last March to describe how he personally had witnessed the shooting by para- chutists of a young Moslem who had surrendered and was standing with his hands up. Professor Peyrega then described other cases reported to him into which he believed no sufficient inquiry had been made or of which he now finds it diffi- cult to helieve the official version. A copy of this letter sent to a friend of the Professor was pub- lished without his permission. He has since been hounded out of his office by his students (most of the Algiers students are Europeans) and by his colleagues of the Law Faculty, who refused to hear him in his own defence.
The incident of which he states he was an eye- witness is now in the hands of an investigating magistrate and is therefore sub juelice and would be an improper subject for M. Lacoste's com- ment. As reported in the Socialist Party bulletin (Le Populaire) he spoke as though he referred to it, though he may have meant the other cases referred to by Professor Peyrega. All those who wished to believe that nothing has gone wrong in Algeria are purring with satisfaction. The Commission for the Safeguard of Individual Rights and Liberties in Algeria just formed to investigate such cases must be somewhat sur- prised that this Minister, who has already grossly misinformed the Assembly on a similar subject without apologising for doing so, has made a statement on a subject which falls precisely within its sphere.
If it is in fact the intention of M. Lacoste to prosecute Professor Peyrdga for false witness (and the Professor has a high reputation for disinter- ested honesty), M. Lacoste might have found a more seemly occasion to announce it—and one that would have better promoted that judicial atmosphere which the best Frenchmen have been trying to promote not only in the interests of the unfortunate Algerians, Moslems and European alike, but also of France herself, whose internal political life is seriously threatened by the Algerian problem.
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