A Protracted Crisis
The Struggle for Algeria.
by Joseph Kraft.
Doubleday. 263 pp. $4.50.
The Algerian war has passed its seventh anniversary and is approaching a savage climax. After vast concessions from France and minor ones from the nationalists of the FLN an agreed settlement seems more likely than ever before to be reached at the negotiating table, and less likely than ever to be applicable on the ground. For in the coastal cities where the European population lives, the last fragile hopes of an understanding between the communities are fast being submerged by a tidal wave of racial panic and hatred which has overwhelmed not only the regular authorities but the original instigators of violence themselves. In destroying l’Algérie française the FLN may find that they have achieved l’Algérie congolaise.
Today their leaders know that they can count on the support of the great majority of the Moslem population and that they will soon be ruling Algeria, or at least the greater part of the country. With these new perspectives have come new attitudes: the militant revolutionaries who displaced the old moderate leadership last August have subsequently tried hard to reassure the European minority, for unless most of the Europeans stay in Algeria for a long transitional period, the independence for which the FLN have fought so long will bring economic chaos and starvation in its wake. But the lesson has been learned very late, and the new leaders, though they are far more secure and self-assured than their predecessors, are unwilling or perhaps unable to offer the safeguards required to calm the fears of a minority exacerbated by seven years of terrorism, and are unable or perhaps unwilling to stop the terrorism itself.
On the other side the Secret Army Organization, the OAS, has won the allegiance of the great majority of the Europeans for the same reasons and by the same methods as their enemies won Moslem support. The menaced and panic-stricken minority see their most effective defenders in these extremists who today threaten and kill Europeans who have tried to maintain friendship with Moslems, just as the FLN for years threatened and killed Moslems who tried to maintain friendship with the French. And even the OAS’s instructions go unheeded by the teen-age lynch mobs of Oran and Bab-el-Oued, which the Secret Army has tried in vain to restrain. Having in their turn won the mass support of their own community, the European extremists are now busily destroying that community’s remaining chances—of survival in Algeria itself or of a friendly reception if they must escape to France.
In The Struggle for Algeria, Joseph Kraft has admirably described the conflict, and the situation out of which it grew. Half the book deals with the background: twenty-five—thirty pages each are devoted to the economy, social structure, and history of Algeria before the revolt; the politics of the European settlers; those of the Moslem nationalists; those of the French army; and those of the army’s political masters in Paris. Then the author gives a full narrative account of the handling of Algerian affairs in the last years of the Fourth Republic; the crisis of May 13, 1958, and the overthrow of the regime; the character and outlook of General de Gaulle and the evolution of his Algerian policy. A final chapter sets the local struggle against the world-wide background of the rise of the underdeveloped countries and explains all too convincingly why these have been and will remain a festering source of international trouble, and why in consequence the depolarization of political power in the world, the growth of new centers independent of Washington and Moscow, will damage rather than promote the chances of international stability.
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In comparison with another excellent study of the subject published simultaneously in England, by another journalist with long first-hand experience of North Africa (Mr. Edward Behr’s The Algerian Problem), Mr. Kraft devotes more space to factors external to Algeria itself but bearing on the question, more to the detailed story of events (notably the May 13 affair) but less to the pre-war background and to particular problems such as terrorism and torture, Communist influence, or the present economic state of the country. Written from very similar points of view, the two books supplement one another very conveniently. Any reviewer must however denounce Mr. Kraft’s publisher for the omission of an index, and an English sympathizer with Mr. Gaitskell must record his astonishment at the reference to Mendès-France’s attempt to reform a “monolithic disciplined party, like Labor in Britain.” But the slips are few and trivial, except for the statement that the French Parliament always leaned toward autonomy for Algeria rather than to “integration” of the rebellious province with France; the first Assembly of the Fifth Republic originally had an integrationist majority, and demonstrated the fact in January 1959, though nearly all the 200 Gaullist members obediently followed the General when he later set a different course.
In general Mr. Kraft is a thoroughly reliable as well as a fair-minded guide to this immensely complex problem He sympathizes with the FLN without being unjust to the French. He makes plain how ruthlessly and successfully the settler leaders sabotaged every attempt from Paris to win over moderate Moslem nationalists—yet he is aware of the strong undercurrent of violence in the nationalist movement and agrees with the settler view that any concession would quickly have become a springboard for new demands. He refers to the savage violence used by both sides, without laying special stress on it; he gives the army the credit it deserves for intentions which were often progressive, writing of the French officers engaged in rural administration that “while force was present, the dominant motive was social service”; but he also brings out the extraordinary ineptitude of men like the “highly-placed officer on General Salan’s staff” who told him, “After Napoleon nationalism swept Europe as it now sweeps Asia and Africa. But one man said No—Metternich; and for a hundred years, trouble ceased. Like Metternich, I say No.”
Frenchmen of the right—and of the left too—were long accustomed to claim that Algeria was part of France. The war, as Mr. Kraft says, has stood this old colonialist slogan on its head: “If anything, France has become Algeria.” That process has gone even further since he wrote; nowadays OAS supporters bomb the houses of their political opponents from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset. The Moslems to whom de Gaulle on coming to power promised the status of “first-class citizens” were last October “earnestly requested” by the Paris Prefect of Police to stay indoors after 8 P.M.; when they demonstrated in protest they were viciously repressed and maltreated by a police force never noted for gentleness but which had not hitherto gone in for murder. Fearful of driving the police force into the arms of the OAS, the government covered up—as it had formerly concealed misdeeds of the army for much the same reasons. For while nine-tenths of the French people favor peace in Algeria at almost any price, the remaining tenth, who have some support among the armed forces, are poised to overthrow the fragile structure of a state which President de Gaulle was supposed to have restored in its power and authority. “Except for details,” Mr. Kraft could write, “the struggle for Algeria was over.” Unhappily, one of the details still to be settled is the fate of democracy in France.
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