Algeria: A Way Out?

What was remarkable in Algiers last week was the absence of gunfire. Contrary to predictions, the trial of Raoul Salan, in which the S.A.O. leader's life had been spared, did not incite his followers to greater violence. For several days not a single Moslem was shot down in the streets by S.A.O. terrorists. The mortars that usually lobbed shells into the Casbah were silent. No booby-trapped autos exploded in the midst of Moslem crowds. Instead, there was the crackling of flames as the S.A.O. put to the torch the Europeans' own schools, public buildings and farms. The new policy was called Operation 1830, in memory of the year the French colonization of Algeria began. Its announced purpose: to reduce the country to the state in which the French found it more than a century ago. In fact, the scorched-earth policy seemed to be designed to force a kind of truce between the S.A.O. and Algeria's Moslems.

Real Dialogue. With S.A.O. permission, European labor leaders announced their eagerness to enter "into contact" with the F.L.N. The S.A.O. secret transmitter broke into regular radio programs with the statement: "Peace can return to this land only on condition that all those who consider Algeria as their real homeland agree among themselves." The S.A.O. announcer sneered that De Gaulle and France were no longer important since, after Algerian independence, they were "going away." The real dialogue should be between the S.A.O. and the F.L.N. as a means of "giving back to all Algerians a homeland, of bringing back fraternity and peace, and of making Algeria the foremost power of Africa."

The S.A.O. turnabout stems partly from the fact that the terrorists now hate De Gaulle even more than they hate the Moslems. But it is also a tacit admission that Algérie Française is dead, and that the S.A.O. terror campaign, which slew an average of 1,000 Moslems a month, failed of its major purpose—to incite a racial bloodbath in Algeria that would force the French army to defy De Gaulle and come in on the side of the Europeans.

It may also reflect a sharp difference of opinion within the S.A.O. itself. The S.A.O. leadership is largely composed of French-born ex-officers and extreme right-wing politicians to whom Algeria is only a weapon in their attempt to oust De Gaulle and capture power in France. The bulk of the S.A.O. rank-and-file sympathizers, however, are pieds-noirs who have always hoped somehow to remain in Algeria. Apparently they are finally recognizing that their hope can be realized only through a deal with the F.L.N.

Close Contacts. What at least some S.A.O. leaders now want is new guarantees for Europeans' safety and property, made directly to the S.A.O. rather than to the French government. Officially, the F.L.N. and the S.A.O. denied they were speaking to each other. But at the local level there were increasing contacts between the two communities. At week's end, in the Algiers suburb of Belcourt, 200 Europeans filed into a movie theater under the protection of Moslem militants to ask questions of an F.L.N. captain about their future under Moslem rule. When the meeting ended, with only a single dissent, the Europeans voted a motion of confidence "in the Algeria of tomorrow."