Flames of Violence

Looking at the struggles in Algeria, in Cyprus and in Lebanon, where the flames of violence danced high, headline writers and editorial writers and TV commentators, out of weary habit born of a decade of cold war, tended to reduce all these struggles to a single, naked question: Who's winning, the West or the Russians?

They saw that the Cyprus quarrel was rending the eastern end of the NATO alliance; they worried whether the Algerian and Lebanese rebellions would drive the whole Moslem world into neutralism or worse. But though these problems affected the balance of power between Russia and the U.S., they all predated the cold war, which was not even a dominant issue in the eyes of the people most concerned. In each case, today's rioters and peacemakers were the heirs of a contest of over 2,000 years for the possession of every fought-over foot of the Mediterranean littoral. Items:

Algeria has been a bone of contention between European and Middle Eastern peoples ever since the Romans seized mastery of North Africa from the onetime Phoenician colony of Carthage. Vandals, Byzantines and Arabs have all contributed to the blood that is being shed in Algeria, and though it is frequently described as a straight-out colonial issue, the Algerian rebellion is, in fact, a civil war between Algeria's 9,000,000 Moslems and 1,000,000 Europeans, some of whom are not mere immigrant settlers but descend from families that have lived in North Africa for a century.

Cyprus has been ruled in turn by Rome, Byzantium, Richard the Lion-Hearted, the French Lusignans, Venice, Ottoman Turkey and Britain. Though they have lived side by side since 1571, the island's Greek majority and Turkish minority have never blended, and when the Greek Cypriots in 1955 took the fateful decision to impose union with Greece by violence, it was perhaps inevitable that the Turkish Cypriots in turn would defend their position by the same means.

Lebanon, inhabited by members of ten Christian sects and three kinds of Moslems, is a living museum recalling virtually all the peoples that have ever dominated the Near East. When they won independence from France in 1946, the polyglot, polyracial Lebanese established a prosperous state whose stability depended on meticulous division of political offices among the major religious groups.

What was happening in Lebanon last week, as in Algeria and Cyprus, was a reflection of the fact that fragile, painfully constructed accommodations between peoples of violently differing faiths and ethnic backgrounds had come to the verge of breakdown. In its own selfish interests,

Western diplomacy had to do its best to restore these old accommodations or to find acceptable new ones, while men on all sides cried, "Either you are for me or against me." For those who would like to reduce politics to tidy simplicities, it might be tempting to equate Lebanon's Christians with the West and its Moslems with Nasser and to conclude that the West must throw its weight on the side of Christian dominance. But forcing nations to choose between two stark alternatives--whether the West v. Russia or

Christian v. Moslem--raises the unpleasant possibility that, in the end, the choice will go the wrong way. Aggravating differences and widening breaches these days rarely helps the West.

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