Algerian Bloodshed

Every year for the past three years, almost as regularly as the seasons, the time comes for France to be summoned before the bar of the U.N. over Algeria. Every year some hapless people die in Algeria to dramatize what the debate is about. Last week, as the two embattled sides prepared their briefs. Premier Guy Mollet conferred worriedly in Paris on a new "declaration of intent," and Algerian nationalists staged a wave of terrorism to prove that France was far from having the situation in hand.

The kill and counter-kill began when a nationalist assassin walked into the dining room of the Franco-Moslem club in downtown Algiers on Christmas Day, shot and seriously wounded Mohammed Ait Ali, council president of the Algiers department, and one of the few remaining Arab politicians who dare to show sympathy for the French. Three days later, in broad daylight on Algiers' busy and fashionable Rue Michelet, a nationalist gunman killed 74-year-old Amedee Froger, president of the Federation of Algerian Mayors and a militant leader of the French colons.

Mad Mob. French mourners at the Froger funeral became a mob when a bomb, set to explode when the mourners were gathered around the graveside, went off prematurely. The mob surged through the streets, 10,000 strong, smashing windows, overturning vehicles, yanking Moslems from their cars and lynching them, jeering at the U.S. consulate near the funeral church and spitting on its walls. The Moslems retaliated. Bombs exploded in four churches during Sunday services. On New Year's Day a bomb exploded in Algiers' swankiest hotel. Others were tossed at cafes all over Algeria; cyclists were machine-gunned on the road. The one-day total: 13 killed, 23 wounded. Next day, after a local train was derailed east of Oran, rescuers found the bodies of six Europeans in the wreckage; two of the women had been raped and disemboweled.

Parisian Shakedown. The contagion of violence reached to Paris itself. There the supporters of Messali Hadj's Algerian National Movement and those of the National Liberation Front formerly directed by Cairo-based leaders such as the captured Mohammed ben Bella, feuded like Chicago-style gangs over the privilege of shaking down the city's 80,000 Algerians for contributions. One Algerian objected that he did not want to take sides; his body was fished out of the Seine a few days later. Cafe owners who contributed to the National Liberation Front had their stocks smashed by Hadj supporters. In 1956, 86 Algerians were murdered in this bitter civil war in Paris, and the rival gangs celebrated New Year's Day with a fusillade that killed six more.

Algeria's Minister Resident Robert Lacoste hurried back to Paris for consultations. His policy of reform--dissolving the old French-dominated municipal councils with a view to new elections--had proved a flop. No Arab was willing to present himself as a candidate, and the colons viewed any concession as a threat. Chief French worry was that the new terrorism might arouse the colons to savage retaliation before the U.N. debate. Said Lacoste: "Keeping cool is becoming an act of heroism."

But France was in no mood to be reproached by its vociferous Arab critics at the U.N. The will of the French people, growled Lacoste, would not be thwarted by "nations having attained only a rudimentary level of civilization."

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