No Man's Land

In France's bloody conflict in Algeria, war correspondents are running not only the occupational hazard of shot and shell but a new kind of risk. Though 350,000 French troops are committed, and the hostilities have claimed some 50,000 deaths on both sides, France does not recognize the conflict as a war. Result: a legalistic no man's land in which reporters trying conscientiously to get the Algerian side of the story by meeting with fellagha leaders either in Paris or Algiers put themselves at the mercy of French security and treason laws.

Last September the French government arrested Robert Barrat, wartime resistance leader and stringer correspondent for the U.S. Catholic weekly Commonweal. For meeting Algerian leaders and writing sympathetic stories in France Observateur,

Barrat was charged with a strange offense: "Failure to denounce crimes compromising the security of the state." The French press raised such a protest that Barrat was released provisionally. Three months ago Newsweek's Paris Correspondent Benjamin Bradlee was arrested and ordered to leave France for a similar offense-though he never got closer to the rebels than a taxi ride in Algiers. This time the U.S. embassy protested, and the French suspended the expulsion order.

"Birth of a Nation." Last week the government cracked down again. The victim: seasoned, fortyish Newshen

Claude Gerard, a heroine of the resistance who fought alongside Robert Lacoste, now French Minister Resident in Algeria. Last month Reporter Gerard spent ten days with three rebel units in the Berber area and in western Constantine, made a forced march with them. Back in Paris, she wrote her story for the new Socialist weekly Demain, which generally backs Premier Guy Mollet's foreign policy but opposes him on Algeria. Staunchly anticolonialist, the story referred to the rebels throughout as "le Maquis"--a name synonymous in France with the glory of the undercover fight against the Nazis.

The government stayed mum. Then London's weekly Observer interviewed Reporter Gerard for two pro-Algerian columns. Said she: "I felt I was watching the birth of a nation. I love my own country too much to blame them for loving theirs." That touched off a French police raid on her home. They ransacked her files, put her through a daylong interrogation. At one point her interrogator demanded: "Where does liberalism end and treason begin?" Then she was charged with "attack against the external security of the state and the integrity of the territory" and put in jail to await a flight to Algeria to stand trial.

Protest of 100. Again the press protested. More than 100 editors and re- porters signed a protest denouncing the government for making a criminal offense of "the free exercise of the functions of a journalist." At week's end, with Claude Gerard still in the general women's prison of Paris, the government let it be known unofficially that she would not be sent to Algeria for trial. It appeared that Newshen Gerard would soon be free on the same provisional basis as Barrat, but the government still plainly held the threat of jail over any correspondent who displeases it in covering the war that is not a war.

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