The Hard Road to Peace
From DARSIE GILLIE
PARIS
TN describing the present situation in France and 'Algeria you cannot help floundering about in moral commonplaces—such as that the way back from violence to peace is extraordinarily difficult, as is also the return to the reign of law. In Oran, for instance, there is a hideous daily rhythm. In the morning individual Moslem terrorists deliber- ately murder, or attempt to murder, in the street one or two Europeans chosen at random; in the afternoon the 'young lions,' as the patriotic European teddy-boys are called, carry out two or three 'rat-hunts' in which Moslems passing through the part of the town where Europeans predominate are beaten up or killed. Either side can describe their action as revenge. While the exhibition of beastliness seems greater on the European side, since more people are involved and the public acquiesce, on the Moslem side there is certainly a more precisely defined respon- sibility, for some person or small group of per- sons deliberately restarts the grim cycle. Is this the FLN's idea of continuing the war on the French until negotiations actually start? Or is a faction within the FLN trying to prevent a,peace negotiation?
In Paris the FLN did stage last week a peaceful mass demonstration, which caught the police sufficiently by surprise to get within a short dis- tance of the Opera, as well as into the Boulevard St. Michel. To muster something between twenty and thirty thousand demonstrators, from a popu- lation of at most a hundred and fifty thousand scattered through Paris itself and round the huge suburban circumference, is a considerable feat. It gave the Parisians a shock---and also the police, who have had forty-nine of their members killed since 1956 (twenty-five of them this year) by the organisation that set the demonstration going. It is not surprising that they were tough in breaking up the demonstration, but by the time that they had broken it up, capturing eleven thousand five hundred prisoners in one night, meeting with no gun-fire and finding no weapons to speak of, they might have noticed that it was a peaceful demon- stration, however illegal. They do not seem to have done so. Police batons got a lot of unneces- sary wear and tear that night.
The Government, however, rashly announced that it would repatriate the demonstrators to their native villages and then that it would immediately repatriate one thousand five hundred. Five hun- dred were, in fact, repatriated within forty-eight hours. The prisoners were moved about from sports stadium to exhibition hall and two-thirds of them released after nights without sleeping accommodation of any kind and little attention to the injured. The Minister of the Interior, M. Frey, who ten days earlier had imposed an 8.30 curfew on all Algerians in the Paris area, de-. fended the police and himself on the ground that the lives of policemen had to be protected. The press, having justifiably thought that the demon- stration was dangerous on the night that it occurred, went on calling it dangerous when this fear had been disproved. When the police announced that there might be an even more dangerous procession on Friday, this time with women and children placed in front, with the cowardly intention of preventing them from dealing with thugs behind, several newspapers continued to use the word 'cowardly' after the demonstration had proved to be one of women and children only in small, rather pathetic, groups who were collected by the police and placed in welfare centres for the day But by that time an increasing number of Frenchmen had noted that to declare most Algerians honest and quiet workers victimised by a handful of terrorists and at the same time to treat the whole community as if they had no civic rights and could only be kept Li order by arresting them and then knocking them about, was an evil paradox.
But why was the Government so tolerant of police excesses on such a spectacular occasion? The Government is undoubtedly frightened that the police might in certain circumstances easily predictable prove disloyal, not disloyal in the sense that they would join a putsch but in the sense, that they might not obey all orders to act against the friends and supp, ..-tzrs of those making a putsch—probably not in France but,in Algeria. Both police and army have proved un- reliable instruments in these last years. What s9rt of danger the OAS hopes to constitute in Algeria, or elsewhere, is still obscure. M. Jacques Fauvet has suggested in the Monde that their hope is to seize Algiers and Oran, declaring that they will not obstruct the army in its operations against the rebels; to entrench themselves in these two coastal towns and their neighbourhoods, while defying the Government to spill French blood in order to turn them out again. The OAS would thus hope to create a position in which the Algerian Europeans could weigh heavily in any peace settlement. The scheme would be a better one than either the barricades insurrection of January, 1960, or the military mutiny of April, 1961, because it provides for the co-operation of the Europeans and the disaffected amongst the soldiers, and because it has a more limited objec- tive. The role of the OAS's supporters in France would then be to obtain acceptance of the fait accompli in Algiers as an alternative to civil war.
But after all that has gone before. it would probably not succeed. President de Gaulle would never bow to such dictation and most of metro- politan France would back him in not doing so. Such a putsch might none the less do an immense amount of damage to the prospects and manner of the peace, to the French army and to the structure of France. In such a moment the French Government would need to rely absolutely on the police force.
But if this reliance is to be purchased by giving the police a free hand with the Algerians in France it would indeed be costly. A good settle- ment must make it possible for at least half the l?uropeans to stay in Algeria, and the Algerian + orkers to stay in France. The three to four iundred thousand Algerian immigrants keep alive about two million people in their native villages by sending their wages home. To inter- rupt this flow of supplies would create so grim a crisis in Algeria as to make bloody dictatorship the only possible form of government.
The biggest problem in the negotiations is how to fit the Europeans of Algeria into a rather crudely socialised regime, which will almost cer- tainly accompany independence. The behaviour of the French police towards the Algerians in France fits, alas, into a pattern of expulsion of the great majority of them—and therefore a similar expulsion from the other side. The resulting situation would not only make extremely difficult any form of Franco-Algerian co-operation, but also endanger Franco-African co-operation on a much larger scale, undermine the moderate governments of Tunisia and Morocco, and even those of Senegal and the Ivory Coast.
By the time this appears we will know what sort of contribution to a solution Mr. Ben Khedda will have made in his speech. It may well be that last week's demonstration in Paris was intended as a forerunner of that planned by the rebels for November 1 in Algeria and which the rebel Minister of Information has already declared will not be aimed at the Europeans. The rebel government has already declared its inten- tion of associating itself to a greater extent with the masses—rather, that is, than relying on a guerrilla army and small conspiratorial groups. It would be a natural evolution on the way to becoming the government of Algeria in Algeria recognised by the whole world. The Algerian nationalists already began to come out into the open in the street demonstrations of last Decem- ber. This association with the people need not mean an increase of violence, and might even mean a reduction of it. But how fit into such a process the continued murders in Oran?
Previous page
