Dance of Death

On a calm, sunny afternoon in Algiers the terrace cafes were filled with shirt-sleeved aperitif drinkers, and families lingered in the palm-shaded parks. At the Casino de la Corniche, perched on a cliff overlooking the blue Mediterranean, teenagers danced to the rhythms of Lucky Starways and his orchestra. In a nightmare of sudden sight and sound--a shattering blast, the music stopped in midflight, the thunder of a heavy explosion --the peaceful picture was erased. It was a time bomb under the orchestra platform. In a flash the tea danqe became a scene of death and destruction. And Algiers for days afterward a city of vengeful violence and riot.

Bandleader Starways, Singer Carmen Ramos and six others were killed outright. Among the 70 injured was a 19-year-old girl who had both legs blown off. Far into the night, ambulances sped back and forth to the hospitals, their sirens wailing in the deathlike silence of the curfewed city. Coming at the end of a week of Moslem rebel terror that had already taken the lives of 16 Europeans and wounded more than 150, the outrage at the Casino de la Corniche was more than most French could stand.

To the Casbah. Hot-tempered students and war veterans ordered a general protest strike. Roaming the city in small commando units, some on motor scooters with girl friends behind, they forced shopkeepers out of stores, stopped buses and trolleys, ordering passengers to descend, poured into post offices, telling employees to quit or be beaten up. Police looked on. The riot fever reached its peak following the burial of Singer Carmen Ramos. Some 1,500 teen-agers started back to town after the ceremony, shouting "Algeria is French!"--"Death to the Assassins!" Joined by other Europeans--gangs of poor Italians and Spaniards from the working-class district of Bab el Oued and members of the locally recruited Territorial army--they surged through Algiers streets toward the Casbah. Coolly checking window stickers of parked cars, they passed over those with European names, overturned and burned cars bearing Moslem names. They smashed Moslem shops, tore up the seats and ripped down the screen in a Moslem cinema, burned open market stalls. One crowd of boys and girls invaded a butcher's shop, and with a meathook taken from it, hacked a Moslem to death in a nearby street.

Without Orders. Most Moslems went into hiding. But one Moslem truck driver, accelerating to get away, knocked down and killed a European woman. The mob dragged the driver out of his cab, beat him senseless. A soldier killed him with a long burst from his submachine gun. On the city's seafront boulevard the mob halted traffic, permitted European cars to pass, then spotted a red-capped Moslem atop a beer truck. Dragging him down, they battered him to death with beer bottles, were about to loot the truck when they discovered that the driver was French. Apologizing, they reloaded some beer cases and let him drive away.

Another truck appeared with three Moslem occupants. Two escaped to safety behind a group of French parachutists observing the scene. The third, unable to get out of the driver's cab quickly enough, was battered to death.

A French Ford came down the boulevard bearing four Moslems: two men, a woman and a child. The young Europeans invited the woman and child out. Then they dragged out the two men, beat them to death, and threw the bodies over the sea wall to the rocks 40 feet below. Then they lifted the Ford and dropped it over the cliff after them. Police, stoically watching this performance, brushed aside a protest by foreign newsmen that they stop the slaughter, said: "We haven't received orders." A French paratroop major who tried to intervene was slapped in the face by a uniformed Territorial private. Dazed and humiliated, the officer stumbled away, muttering: "Are these people worth saving?"

Helpless Minister. There were Frenchmen in Algiers who risked their lives to save Moslems. During one struggle, a middleaged, bespectacled Frenchman broke through a crowd of young hoodlums, put his arm around a bleeding Moslem, and amid jeers and threats led him away. In the center of the city another crowd, storming through the streets, was stopped by a paratroop colonel. "Our fight here must be dignified and worthy!" shouted the colonel. "Go home quietly." The crowd cheered him, broke into the Marseillaise, then went on rioting. Sitting in his office in the gleaming white government building, Minister Resident Robert Lacoste read the reports of mob violence, called in the leaders of veterans' groups to urge them to halt rioters in the streets. But for all his anger and bitterness, Lacoste was helpless. Early in the evening, fatigue finally dissipated the mobs.

Next day many French reacted with shame and revulsion. Embarrassed officials announced five Moslems killed (a low estimate), 200 Europeans arrested. Even the Algiers press^ which has long campaigned for an all-out fight against the rebel Moslems, found the rioting excessive. Said Echo d'Alger: "The boys who rioted were playing the rebels' game." In Paris, Figaro editorialized: "We are left speechless." But the students and veterans who had led the rioting were neither speechless nor ashamed. In a joint statement they proclaimed: "People of Algiers, once again you have displayed in a striking fashion your anger at too many unpunished crimes, and your determination to remain French on French soil."

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