ALGERIA: Successful Mission

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    The Door of Reconciliation. From Cairo the high command of the F.L.N., the Algerian Moslem independence movement, angrily objected: "What we want is independence and nothing else . . ." As for Algeria's colons, whose overriding goal is the maintenance of European privilege in Algeria, De Gaulle's prescription was all unpalatable medicine, unless—as Soustelle proposed—Algeria's 9,000,000 Moslems were integrated into the population of France, adding perhaps 100 seats to the National Assembly and untold costs to the French taxpayers.

    Not once did De Gaulle use the word integration. Instead, he seemed to foresee a "federal" relationship between France and its former overseas territories—a concept that he first expounded in rudimentary form at the French African conference in Brazzaville in 1944. Perhaps deliberately, in order to work out a system flexible enough to include sovereign states—Tunisia and Morocco—as well as possessions—Tahiti, Madagascar, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa—De Gaulle refused to go into detail.

    Presumably De Gaulle's new "French community" would consist of a series of autonomous states, each with its own parliament and government, and capped by a federal parliament and government.

    Given the reactionary mood of the Algerian "French"—a large percentage of whom are Spanish, Corsican or Italian by descent—this was a hard plan to proclaim at the moment. But in his three-day tour of Algeria's major cities, De Gaulle threw out plenty of hints to the Moslem population. In Constantine, "the cradle of the Algerian war," he made an open appeal to the men of the F.L.N., "to whom I throw wide the door of reconciliation" to participate in the prospective Algerian elections and thus, in effect, to win legal status as spokesmen for Algeria's Moslem majority. In Mostaganem, near Oran, he subtly made it clear that he was prepared to treat France and Algeria as separate entities: "With those [elected representatives] who come from here, we will examine all that must be done for the future of Algeria."

    No Pushing Allowed. At the same time, De Gaulle never once lost sight of the immediate objective of his trip. Day by day, he and his aides maneuvered the French soldiers and settlers ever closer to renewed submission to Paris. When Leéon Delbecque, muttering that the insurgents "did not cross the Rubicon to go fishing," sought to make an inflammatory broadcast, a chastened General Massu refused to let Radio Algiers carry it. (Smiled one De Gaulle aide: "Poor Massu. He is not very clever. But he is beginning to understand.") A mass meeting to protest the makeup of the De Gaulle Cabinet was hastily called off when its organizer, Student Leader Pierre La-gaillarde, was threatened with jail.

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