The Reform That Failed

Few areas of arid Algeria have prospered more under French rule than the heavily populated coastal zone called the Kabylia, which lies between the cities of Algiers and Philippeville. Six months ago, however, France lost control of the Kabylia to bands of Algerian rebels, who took over the towns and even collected their own taxes.

The initial rebel successes have diminished since the French moved 400,000 soldiers into Algeria. Mobile, hard-hitting French columns inflicted heavy losses on rebel formations and slowly drove them deep into the high plateaus that lie behind Algeria's coastal regions. By the beginning of summer, the rebels were losing their enthusiasm for open combat, and in the Kabylia alone 250 villages once again "rallied to France." With the military campaign going so well, the French government decided it was time to try the second phase of Premier Guy Mollet's policy for pacifying Algeria--the "parallel" program of political and economic reform. As their pilot project, which they christened Operation Esperance (Operation Hope), authorities expropriated from a French landholding company a 600-acre farm near the Kabylia town of Saint Lucien and announced that 16 Moslem fellahin would be given ownership of the land they had worked as sharecroppers. The French also proclaimed free local elections in the Kabylia.

Algeria's rebels, beaten in open combat, decided on a parallel program of their own. They "atomized" their bands and resorted to hit-and-run terrorism--assassination, small-scale ambushes, and intimidation, mostly carried out at night and out of reach of French forces. Last week, the night before the land distribution was to take place at Saint Lucien, a small group of rebels sneaked into town.

Next morning four of the 16 fellahin who had agreed to accept land from the French were dead, and the remaining twelve had decided to withdraw their applications. France's Algerian Minister Resident Robert LaCoste sadly canceled the Saint Lucien land distribution and postponed elections in the Kabylia.

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