Algiers, once one of the most beautiful of cities, is becoming the ugliest. To the casual eye, there is no change. The square white houses still climb on each other's shoulders up to the wooded heights. In the Moslem quarter, the casbah's tunneled alleys are filled with turbaned men and neat-stepping donkeys burdened with panniers. Beneath the leafy shade of the Forum and along the Rue Michelet in the European district stroll some of the loveliest girls in the world, giggling and gossiping as if they were not a step away from a daily round of slaughter.
"They are born for pride and life," wrote Albert Camus of his fellow Algerians. He added somberly that in Algeria "everything is given to be taken away." Perhaps Camus was right. The Algerian cities last week were ravaged by death and disfiguration. The immediate cause, ironically enough, was the prospect that the grim, seven-year war in Algeria might end in a cease-fire now being negotiated between the French government and the Moslem F.L.N. rebels. According to Paris reports, an agreement is scheduled to be signed within a month—or possibly sooner. To most of Algeria's 1,000,000 Europeans, the prospect of an agreement meant only one thing: that Charles de Gaulle is handing over Algeria to its 9,000,000 infuriated Moslems, that the Europeans' homes, their livelihoods, perhaps their lives will be in the hands of the Moslems they have lorded it over for so long. To prevent this at all cost is the avowed aim of an ugly, desperate new force on the Algerian scene: the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète), an underground band of Europeans using the F.L.N.'s own terrorist methods. Lead er of the S.A.O. is not a European of Algeria but a Frenchman born in France —ex-General Raoul Salan, 62, white-haired veteran of a dozen of France's wars, now under sentence of death for treason to the Republic. So is most of his staff, a collection of renegade army officers dreaming of old flags and vanished glories, and of hard-boiled European settlers determined to hold on to their possessions and privileges in Algeria. They would not hesitate to destroy the present France to build the new France of their muddled dreams.
New Madness. Salan and his men intend to keep Algeria French, and threaten a bloody uprising either before or after peace is concluded. To succeed in the long run, Salan must not only crush the powerful Moslem F.L.N. (Front de Libération Nationale) but also bring down De Gaulle himself—tasks that seem far beyond his powers, particularly since his S.A.O. has not won any sizable support in Metropolitan France. But, even in failing, Salan can seriously endanger France by releasing mutiny in the embittered French army in Algeria, which would conceivably spread to barracks in Metropolitan France and trigger civil war between the right and left. Salan has already succeeded in jeopardizing France's role as a leading European power—and the Western alliance—by imperiling the Algerian settlement that France must have to survive.
The Algerian war used to be waged between the French army and Moslem rebels fighting for independence. It has cost the lives of 18,000 French soldiers and an estimated 360,000 Moslems. Two million more Moslems were herded by the French into vast "regroupment camps."