ALGERIA

What Is Reality?

In the Arab quarter of Oran, barefoot youngsters last week piped a bitter lament learned from their parents: "We fought for independence, we won it, we lost it two months later." In Algeria's fifth month of nationhood, their chant had almost become a national anthem.

The war-weary country has lost the European middle-class technicians and owners who were its biggest employers: all but 150,000 of 1,000,000 pieds-noirs have pulled out. Schools are closed because Algeria has lost 95% of its teachers. More than 2,000,000 Algerians, or half the labor force, have no jobs, and many of those who are still employed work only 20 to 25 hours a week. Only 40% of the nation's factories are still open; industrial production is down to 30%. The once busy waterfronts of Oran and Algiers are almost silent except when a passenger ship docks to haul another load of emigrants to France.

As for Premier Ahmed ben Bella, who clawed his way to power two months ago, his mystique has been badly tarnished by intraparty squabbles and by his international status seeking in Havana and points East. Ben Bella's latest excuse for his recent visit to Castro: "I would have failed in my duty if I had not gone to Cuba to learn about its experiences and avoid in my country the errors that have been made there."

Anti-Neocolonialism. There are plenty of errors to avoid. Ben Bella is finally tackling the problem of land reform, which he himself has often vowed is Algeria's most urgent goal. On a three-day tour of the barren, war-ravaged bled, he pledged redistribution of 3,750,000 acres of farm land that has been abandoned by departing Europeans. But the government so far has developed no agricultural policy or even devised a program for compensating European landowners. Around Setif, the peasants have simply appropriated many deserted farms; in other areas, local committees have taken them over. Rather than carve up big farms, Ben Bella announced that he will turn them into state-owned cooperatives, but rejected Soviet-style collectivization as alien to Algerian "civilization and psychology." Even so, the prospect did not cheer many peasants, whose deepest craving is for some land of their own.

Despite the fanfare that greets every aid shipment from the Communist bloc, Algeria is being kept alive by France, which is pumping $2,000,000 a day into its former colony. While French aid is to be drastically reduced after Jan. 1, France will continue to be Algeria's biggest market and capital source. Thus, what chiefly worries Western diplomats in Algiers is Ben Bella's contemptuous disregard for the Evian agreements that set the terms for France's withdrawal from Algeria. The Premier, who was still a prisoner of the French when the accord was drawn up, says vaguely that it needs to be revised, but simply ignores any of its provisions that seem inconvenient. Such gestures as his seizure of Algiers' ultramodern radio station, which the French planned to give to the nation, reflect the Premier's fear of being labeled a "neo-colonialist."

A Matter of Conscience. The French are far more deeply concerned by the regime's callous, wholesale violation of its pledge to take no reprisals against the harkis, as Algerians call the 100,000 Moslem auxiliaries who fought against the F.L.N. in the French army. "Without this guarantee," says an angry French diplomat, "there would have been no Evian agreements." Only 5,000 harkis emigrated to France after independence. But of those who remained, many thousands have been shipped off to forced labor camps. Some were put to work clearing minefields--by being forced to walk across them. Many others have been tortured, mutilated and thrown into jail along with their wives and children. As many as 10,000 may have been killed. The French, who have the harkis very much on their conscience, insist that relations with Algeria could founder if the regime continues to persecute them.

On the other hand, the Algerians are a shrewd, pragmatic people whose friendship for the West has survived the bitterness of war. Most Moslems seem to be aware that U.S. surplus food, though little publicized, is supplying three-quarters of the daily diet for 3,000,000 Algerians. As in other new African countries, the people are also discovering that Communist-bloc aid is mostly window dressing; since Khrushchev's hasty retreat from Cuba, they have become even more leary of Soviet attempts to make Ben Bella the Castro of Africa. Whatever the subject under discussion, Algerians often ask: "What is reality?" A government official in Algiers asked the question last week, but did not answer. Instead, he pointed at a map of France.

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