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Unlike De Gaulle, the men in the Cairo apartment building had no legal mandate from the Algerian people. Most of them, in fact, had little in common with the hopeless, half-starved Moslem peasants who make up the mass of Algeria's population. Some were the sons and brothers of French army officers. Nearly all were French-educated, and only two out of 14 could speak really good Arabic. The oldest of them, a warm, voluble man with grey eyes, looked and acted like a French provincial schoolteacher. He was perhaps the most reluctant rebel of modern times, a man who once wrote: "If I had discovered the Algerian nation I would be a nationalist . . . But I would not die for an Algerian fatherland because that fatherland does not exist. I could not find it. I questioned history; I questioned the living and the dead. I searched through the cemeteries; nobody spoke to me of it. You cannot build something on the wind."
Today, less than three decades since he wrote those words, Ferhat Abbas, 58, is Premier of the self-proclaimed Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic—an organization which in the name of Algerian nationalism wages merciless war on France. Dirty and cruel, the Algerian rebellion is a war of torture and treachery, of ambush and sabotage. In the four years since it began, it has claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 Moslem civilians, and for the past two years French army dead have been running about 900 a month. To keep Algeria French, the Paris government is currently spending $2,400,-000 a day, has recalled 800,000 reservists to tours of active duty, winked at atrocities worthy of Hitler's SS, severely strained the NATO alliance, and collapsed the Fourth French Republic. Unchecked, the war could also kill the Fifth Republic, and turn all North Africa against the West.
To the outsider, Algeria scarcely seems worth such blood, treasure and agony. Save for a narrow belt along the Mediterranean coast, it is a barren land, dominated by harsh mountains and sterile desert. Because of the nationwide water shortage—Algeria's third biggest river is only three feet wide along much of its course—only one-tenth of the country's 500 million acres are cultivated. With enormous investment and years of effort, the oil of the disputed Sahara may one day provide a reliable source of industrial energy. Otherwise, Algeria has virtually no energy resources.
Greed and mismanagement as well as nature's niggardliness have contributed to Algeria's poverty. Once famed (along with Tunisia) as "the granary of Rome," Algeria was successively fought over—and despoiled—by the Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards and Ottomans. By the beginning of the igth century, the country's once-flourishing agriculture had all but disappeared, and even the piracy on which her Barbary ports had battened for two centuries had ceased to pay off. The Deys of Algiers, who nominally ruled all Algeria on behalf of the Turkish Sultan, actually controlled about one-fifth of it. Inland, Algeria's original inhabitants—the Caucasian Berbers converted to Mo-hammedism—lived according to their ®wn rough laws and customs.