Successful Mission

ALGERIA Successful Mission Shortly after 11 o'clock one morning last week, a gull-white Caravelle jet airliner accompanied by eight Mistral fighters in V formation came streaking in from the Mediterranean over the North African coast. A few minutes later at Maison-Blanche airport. Charles de Gaulle, clad in the undecorated suntan uniform of a brigadier general, stepped down onto the soil of Algeria--the first French Premier to show his face there since an Algiers mob greeted Socialist Guy Mollet with a shower of rotten tomatoes in February, 1956.

Before De Gaulle, as he well knew, lay a stern and pivotal mission. He hoped in time to end the Algerian Moslems' four-year-old war for independence. But first he had to end the threat of civil war posed by the insurgent French soldiers and settlers of Algeria. Only the day before, Leon Delbecque, dynamic leader of the rebel junta (TIME, June 9), his once boundless faith in De Gaulle shaken by his idol's failure to name a single insurgent leader to a government post, had appeared in Paris to warn the general that unless De Gaulle revamped his Cabinet, his trip to Algeria would end in disaster.

Sixty for Lunch. All along De Gaulle's hour-long route from the airport to the city of Algiers, thousands of Algerian French, urged on by cheerleaders, dutifully shouted "Vive De Gaulle!" But their loudest cheers were raised for Jacques Soustelle, right-wing firebrand, onetime Governor General of Algeria, who also rode in the procession. At De Gaulle's first stop in Algiers--to lay a cross of Lorraine wreath at the foot of the city's World War I memorial--beefy Jacques Soustelle, grinning with delighted embarrassment, was obliged to gesture his admirers to silence before De Gaulle could capture their attention. De Gaulle looked pained.

At lunch in De Gaulle's temporary headquarters--the Moorish Palais d'Etee, where Admiral Jean Darlan was assassinated 16 years ago--the insurgents stepped up their pressure. De Gaulle had expected 15 luncheon guests: instead, 60 self-confident members of the Algerian Committee of Public Safety showed up to urge the general to make Soustelle his Minister for Algeria. Then, in something audaciously close to an ultimatum, Paratroop General Jacques Massu spelled out what the insurgent leaders expected of De Gaulle:

When Massu had finished, De Gaulle courteously but firmly announced: "L'Al-geerie, c'est moi"--a characteristically grandiloquent phrase that turned out to mean he intended to act as his own Minister for Algeria, and to use pliable Five-Star General.* Raoul Salan. overall French commander in the area, as his deputy on the spot. Suavely De Gaulle added that Soustelle would soon be called to Paris "to take up the high position he deserves." As soon as the opportunity presented itself, France's new Premier took the insubordinate Massu aside, gave him an old-fashioned three-minute military chewing-out, concluding with the words: "Henceforth, my generals will be administrators, not politicians."

"I Have Understood." The hours that followed this initial display of firmness were critical ones. The men whom De Gaulle was trying to bring to heel had made one revolution and were quite capable of making another. They were also men who, for all their shouts of "Vive De Gaulle!" believed that they had brought him to power and had some claims to controlling him. A few hours later, when it came time for De Gaulle to address the people of Algiers from the now famous balcony of the Government General Building, two of his ministers who had come from Paris with him were nowhere to be found. Minister of State Louis Jac-quinot and Minister for the Sahara Max Lejeune had been decoyed from the general's side and confined in an isolated office under temporary guard. "Lejeune is lucky to be alive," snapped one member of the Public Safety Committee later. "If he had not come with De Gaulle, we would have executed him."

At this point, had De Gaulle tried to widen the breach, he might have lost the day. He was too clever for that. Having quickly taken the temperature of Algiers, De Gaulle (yet unaware of what had happened to his two ministers) proceeded to deliver a speech that contained whole phrases lifted from Massu's abortive ultimatum. De Gaulle's opening salvo was the simple, ringing statement: "I have understood you"--a fatherly offer of absolution for the civic misbehavior of the past weeks that sent the Algiers crowd into wild cheers. Then, playing to his audience, De Gaulle paid tribute to the "ardent, coherent and disciplined French army" and trumpeted the insurgents' slogan that "in all Algeria . . . there are only Frenchmen."

But along with these crowd-catching phrases, De Gaulle included a few jolts for the colons. He paid cautious tribute to Algeria's Moslem rebels for putting up a fight "that is courageous but that is cruel and fratricidal." And he bluntly spelled out what he meant by proclaiming the equality of French and Moslem Algerians: "This means a livelihood must be given to those who have not had it. This means that dignity must be granted to those whose dignity was contested." It also meant, added De Gaulle, dropping a political blockbuster, that "not later than three months hence" the 9,000,000 Moslems of Algeria would start to vote along with all other Frenchmen on a one-man-one-vote basis, would be entitled to elect "their representatives to the public powers as all other Frenchmen will do."

The Door of Reconciliation. From Cairo the high command of the F.L.N., the Algerian Moslem independence movement, angrily objected: "What we want is independence and nothing else . . ." As for Algeria's colons, whose overriding goal is the maintenance of European privilege in Algeria, De Gaulle's prescription was all unpalatable medicine, unless--as Soustelle proposed--Algeria's 9,000,000 Moslems were integrated into the population of France, adding perhaps 100 seats to the National Assembly and untold costs to the French taxpayers.

Not once did De Gaulle use the word integration. Instead, he seemed to foresee a "federal" relationship between France and its former overseas territories--a concept that he first expounded in rudimentary form at the French African conference in Brazzaville in 1944. Perhaps deliberately, in order to work out a system flexible enough to include sovereign states--Tunisia and Morocco--as well as possessions--Tahiti, Madagascar, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa--De Gaulle refused to go into detail.

Presumably De Gaulle's new "French community" would consist of a series of autonomous states, each with its own parliament and government, and capped by a federal parliament and government.

Given the reactionary mood of the Algerian "French"--a large percentage of whom are Spanish, Corsican or Italian by descent--this was a hard plan to proclaim at the moment. But in his three-day tour of Algeria's major cities, De Gaulle threw out plenty of hints to the Moslem population. In Constantine, "the cradle of the Algerian war," he made an open appeal to the men of the F.L.N., "to whom I throw wide the door of reconciliation" to participate in the prospective Algerian elections and thus, in effect, to win legal status as spokesmen for Algeria's Moslem majority. In Mostaganem, near Oran, he subtly made it clear that he was prepared to treat France and Algeria as separate entities: "With those [elected representatives] who come from here, we will examine all that must be done for the future of Algeria."

No Pushing Allowed. At the same time, De Gaulle never once lost sight of the immediate objective of his trip. Day by day, he and his aides maneuvered the French soldiers and settlers ever closer to renewed submission to Paris. When Leeon Delbecque, muttering that the insurgents "did not cross the Rubicon to go fishing," sought to make an inflammatory broadcast, a chastened General Massu refused to let Radio Algiers carry it. (Smiled one De Gaulle aide: "Poor Massu. He is not very clever. But he is beginning to understand.") A mass meeting to protest the makeup of the De Gaulle Cabinet was hastily called off when its organizer, Student Leader Pierre La-gaillarde, was threatened with jail.

And in Oran, shortly before his return to Paris, De Gaulle, in the presence of Soustelle, Delbecque and Massu, flatly ordered the insurrectionary Public Safety Committees to get out of politics. Said he: "Authority is in the hands of General Salan and his subordinates, and it must not be contested. You have no more revolutions to make because the revolution has been accomplished." In reply, the Algiers Public Safety Committee pledged itself to support De Gaulle "with out conditions and without reservations." As his jetliner carried him back to France, Charles de Gaulle was keenly aware that the men he left behind him, although outwardly submissive, were inwardly seething with disappointment and discontent. For weeks, perhaps months to come, the European population of Algeria would be restive and potentially dangerous. But it was a measure of De Gaulle's moral force and the success of his mission that not a single member of the Committee of Public Safety had dared to challenge the general's parting shot: "You must help De Gaulle, but you must not push him. He would not like that."

*De Gaulle himself wore only the two stars of a brigadier on his kepi, the same rank as Paratrooper Massu.

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