The . Chill of Isolation By DARSIE GILLIE THE ten days
that, at the time of s. writing, have passed since French bombs fell on the Tunisian fron- tier township of Sakiet have taken Paris through a whole gamut of emotions. The dust has fallen a little and it is already difficult to recover the first im- pressions. The violence of the world's reaction, the sudden chill of isolation that surrounded France, matched the first horror-struck surprise of many Frenchmen with a sense that now was a moment when national solidarity must come first. The result was the grotesque spectacle of a disapproving Parliament giving a large vote of confidence to a government most of whose members no less bitterly disapproved of an action taken without their being informed of it even when it was done. 'You cannot both deplore and cover this action,' cried one of the few deputies who spoke out. The Government showed that you could. It could even be promising indemnification in Washington and trying to pretend it had no such intention in Paris for fear of losing fifty votes on the Right.
There was one point on which M. Gaillard was right when at last he spoke (after three days' silence), though not in quite the sense he meant. The bombardment was the logical result of what had gone before. He meant the natural answer to the facilities accorded to the rebels on the Tuni- sian side of the frontier. During the Christmas and New Year optimism, when the return of peace, through the complete defeat of the rebels, was just round the corner, these (very real) facilities were officially the only obstacle to a cease fire. When this optimism shrank as we settled into 1958, they were still the main reason for our disappointment, and for the renewed tale of bloodshed beyond the Mediterranean. It seemed only natural that a blow should be struck across a frontier which only obstructed movement in one direction. The blow was struck and suddenly everything looked very different. There was the horrible reminder that rebels were not an isolated mischief but part of a human background; that in the North African conflict, be it war or pacification, military objec- tives could not be isolated from civilian context; that schools are still used for children as well as, Paris perhaps, more combative purposes; that there are still market days and people congregated in mar- kets. This all became horribly apparent when the military machine thrust out of the nightmare mists of Algeria into the relative daylight of Tunisia.
The virtue of the tragic incident has been to shake the assumptions within which French policy has been moving and French opinion approving it. The first is that the frontiers of Morocco and Tunisia separate these countries from the exten- sion of France which is Algeria, no less sharply than the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine and the Channel separate metropolitan France from her European neighbours. Even in Europe the French conception of the national State does not abso- lutely fit the facts. In North Africa the separation between Algerian and Tunisian is superficial, while that between the African and European de- partments of France is terrifyingly real, though public speeches and laws are made on the reverse assumption. In fact the greater the pressure achieved by the French military machine on the rebellion, the greater the inevitable solidarity be- tween Tunisian and Algerian. The French con- tention that the frontier should be a frontier is reasonable by European standards, quite unrealis- tic by those of the Maghreb. There is at all events no obvious difference in principle between French assistance given by air and sea to Israel in 1956 and the facilities given to the Algerian rebels by Tunisians in 1958.
No less unrealistic was the failure to see the nature of the impact of the French military machine on Algeria itself. The army has done a great deal there that is not military. French sol- diers have done practically everything except act as wet-nurses. But this does not alter the fact that the army is primarily an instrument of force and that force hurts. Immenie ingenuity has been em- ployed in trying to think out ways of isolating the military impact so that it only falls on the adver- sary. But there is no way of isolating the adversary even when he wears uniform (as is increasingly the case) from the country which produced and sup- ports him. The practical man, be he professional soldier or reservist, officer or private, cannot in fact carry out his duties without smiting civilian as well as combatant rebel and `attentiste.' The claim that only the guilty terrorist was ever tor- Lured has long ago broken down. In fact the army when fighting has necessarily undone the work of the army when (in the strict sense) pacifying. Logical military thought must lead to such an action as the bombardment of Sakiet. But it is so much more evident what this means when the bombs are dropped half a mile across the frontier !
These two illusions which the Sakiet incident has cracked have not disappeared and their main- tenance is still the concern not only of the Govern- ment but of all Frenchmen who have made a deep emotional investment in Algeria—or for that matter a material one. They have persuaded themselves that their sons are serving a good and useful cause and cannot suddenly acknowledge that this is not true; that there are more, not fewer, acts of terrorism in the fourth year of con- flict than in the first, stronger rebel bands and less hope of peace.
Though the Sakiet :incident has not changed the Government's determination to keep Algeria a part of France or, on the surface at least, re- duced the support for this policy, it has altered the political landscape in many ways. It has ex- hibited more clearly than before the automatism of the local, especially military, authorities, attempting to apply an impossible policy in cir- cumstances so different from those of Paris that they do not even find a bombing raid on neigh- bouring territory worth reporting to the capital. It has sharply reminded Frenchmen• that they have fellow-countrymen in-Tunisia (and therefore in Morocco) as well as in Algeria, and more im- portant still that the problems of the three terri- tories cannot be solved separately. It has suddenly demonstrated the unreliability of Algiers com- muniqués. It has exhibited the distaste of the world for the enforcement of French policy in Algeria at such a heavy cost. No Minister and no military commander comes well out of the story. France is suddenly forced to defend positions in Tunisia (notably Bizerta) which had seemed un- questionably secure. She suddenly needs the good offices of her allies to talk to a government with which she had previously enjoyed an unquestioned if quarrelsome intimacy. An international intru- sion into Algeria itself has to be repulsed as an immediate danger.
At the same time the strength and the deter- mination of French Right-wing nationalism has been revealed—and the danger of a France psychologically isolated from the world. How is it that the debate behind closed doors in the Foreign Affairs Commission should have evi- dently been so superior to that in the full Assem- bly? Why should this nation that has prided itself on the universality of its judgments be so defen- sive? Algeria is being claimed as the key to France's greatness. It is threatening her with isolation and morally dwarfing her stature.
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