THE TURN IN ALGERIA

IT was a bustling Saturday evening in downtown Algiers, and as the Rue d'Isly swirled with last minute shoppers, there was a sharp explosion. When the smoke lifted, there lay underneath a shattered car all that was left of a 16-year-old Moslem who had held on to his grenade too long. Unnoticed among the curious crowd that gathered, a soberly dressed, respectable-looking, middle-aged Frenchwoman quickly bent down and picked up one of the dead terrorist's severed fingers. Putting it in her handbag, she snapped the clasp and slipped away.

There is still hatred in Algeria, but increasingly it is the isolated, furtive exception of the Frenchwoman rather than the general fever that prevailed before De Gaulle stepped in a year ago. Two years ago the explosion in the Rue d'Isly would have brought the paratroopers out in force, perhaps led to dozens of arrests, or might have set European mobs to rioting against Moslems in reprisal for terrorist outrages. But last month, an hour after the grenade blast, the crowds on the Rue d'Isly were as thick as ever; most Europeans looked upon the wreckage and passed by, as if it had simply been a ghastly accident. And this changed attitude is not all on the European side. A month before, a terrorist was spotted before he could explode a bomb in a crowded square; he fled with a mob in hot pursuit, and was caught and nearly killed as people banged his skull against a wall. Remarkably, most of the mob were Moslems.

"Les Affaires." "Papa's Algeria is finished," said Charles de Gaulle recently. The changes that began with De Gaulle's social and economic promises to the Moslems, and with an improved military situation, are visible everywhere, reports TIME Correspondent Edward Behr, who first went to Algeria on assignment in 1952, and has returned often since. The barbed wire has come down. No longer is everyone frisked before entering any cinema, shop or hotel.

Army patrols still make periodic rounds, and Moslem taxi drivers must have their passengers fill out special destination forms if they are to be taken outside the city limits. But in Algiers' dark, conspiratorial bistros, the talk these days is more likely to be about "les affaires" than assassinations. De Gaulle has made the army his chief economic arm in raising Moslem living standards, and fat army contracts for roads and schools--plus Saharan oil investments--have spread a new prosperity across Algeria.

Algiers, Bone, Oran and the villages on the oil route to Hassi Messaoud are booming. From Algiers to Bordj-bou-Arreridj (a town in an area where the rebels are still active), the highway thunders with big trucks carrying pipeline equipment. A year ago, from Palestro onward--the rebel zone--the same road was almost deserted. The astonishing thing now is that mingling with the steady stream of trucks are families, both European and Moslem, in private cars, ignoring the charred remains of a car by the roadside and taking in stride the signs warning motorists not to stop and that the road is closed after 6:30 at night.

Flags of Convenience. For more than four long, strife-torn years, Algeria had little local politics. But there have been three elections under De Gaulle, and as a result the majority of mayors across Algeria are now Moslem, Algiers itself (pop. 500,000) has a Moslem mayor, and Moslems increasingly are taking over administrative posts. The bar of Algiers' Aletti Hotel today resembles a smoking room of the National Assembly in Paris; politicians and lobbyists outnumber hotel guests 3 to 1, and talk about their problems with surprising openness. One Moslem municipal councilor, who won election on the Gaullist right-wing U.N.R. ticket, says: "Do not be fooled by our labels; they are really flags of convenience. The threat of arrest still hangs over us. But we say what we feel."

In the tough back country, French hopes of creating a new Moslem spirit rise with each convert they win away from the rebel F.L.N.; no longer is Moslem support of the French confined to the docile, despised beni-oui-ouis (yes men). One village mayor switched sides abruptly after the brutal 1957 Melouza massacre by the F.L.N. Another convert was hardy Mohammed ben Chickh, only a year ago top sergeant in a crack F.L.N. commando outfit. Last September he rode into a French army post on a mule, explained he had grown disillusioned with the war. "We've got to put an end to this," he says, "because only then can we start building a new Algeria and recover our dignity."

Letters to the Rebels. There is irony--and a tribute to De Gaulle's astuteness--in the fact that the French army, which was talking revolt against the government in Paris a year ago, has been entrusted with the political task of winning the Gaullist peace. Though France's military activity is greater than ever before, the army officers for the most part execute De Gaulle's fraternization policies faithfully. Many now direct their hatred at those who in the days of "Papa's Algeria" created the conditions that provoked the rebellion: the big absentee landlords; the inefficient officials who allowed the predatory caids to rule as they pleased; the illiterate smalltime clerks, policemen and tradesmen who lorded it over the Moslems, despising, humiliating and at the same time fearing them.

In Setif, the army mess recently invited more Moslems than Europeans to a tea, and warned Europeans that if they did not mix with the Moslem guests, "only one conclusion could be drawn"--that fraternization was a myth. One French captain wrote a dozen letters to local rebels, promising them amnesty if they left the F.L.N. to resume normal lives in their villages. Several replied in almost friendly fashion, one saying that he wanted to wait and see what came of De Gaulle's forthcoming meeting with the King of Morocco. That meeting, if it takes place, would imply high-level Moslem approval of recent French progress--civil as well as military--in Algeria. But another replied, symbolizing the many Algerians yet to be won over: "You are not fit to serve as the recipient for the excrement of our liberation army."

Essential to French success in Algeria is destroying the F.L.N.'s prestige. The recent rebel decision to "increase mobility" by cutting down the size of its units was widely interpreted in Algeria as a sign that the F.L.N. was in trouble. F.L.N. Colonel Si Nasser retorted that "however determined [French] operational forces may be, they must first make contact with us and force us to fight." The French point happily to the defensive tone of "force us to fight." In an effort to isolate the rebels, the French have increased their artillery firepower along the Tunisian border to the point where it is almost impossible for the rebels to get supplies and men across without enormous losses.

So many times did previous French officials overoptimistically declare that the war was in its "last quarter-hour" that now, when optimism is plainly more justified, it is more soberly put. But time is proving De Gaulle's greatest ally in Algeria. Faced with increasing military pressure and declining Moslem support, the F.L.N. seems uncertain whether to respond with heightened terrorism or to try political persuasion of its own. With fanfare this week, the rebels released a young Frenchwoman, Marie-Jose Serio, whose mother had made a direct appeal to the F.L.N.'s sense of humanity. But at the same time, they shot dead a captured Moslem whose sister-in-law, Rebahi Khebtani, is one of the three new Moslem women Deputies in the French Assembly. She was unaware of the shooting as she rose in the Assembly in Paris that evening, but her personal tragedy made her remarks all the more eloquent of the change in Algeria: "A year ago I still wore the veil. It is true that thousands of us joined the maquis, and others helped them. But it was because there had been a series of faked elections, because the Moslems lacked everything: schools, hospitals, maternity centers. It was Papa's Algeria, with its parade of corruptions. I am one of those who never despaired in France, in De Gaulle who restored our confidence . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.