The Third Revolt

In the cool darkness before Sunday morning dawn, squads of paratroopers stealthily slipped through the streets of Algiers. One group ringed the ornate Moorish residence of France's delegate general in Algeria, Jean Morin, and unceremoniously took him prisoner in his bed. Also seized was Transport Minister Robert Buron, who happened to be visiting Algiers. Other paratroopers took prisoner the top military man in Algeria. General Fernand Gambiez, and occupied all the city's key buildings--post office, police and government offices. Shortly before 9 a.m., Radio Algiers announced the news to the stunned city: three paratroop regiments had taken over "all power" of government in defiance of Charles de Gaulle. Leaders of the coup were identified as four retired French generals, headed by former Chief of the Air Force General Maurice Challe, once De Gaulle's commander in Algeria.

Twice before in the last three years, uprisings in Algeria, tacitly encouraged by French army officers, have brought France to the edge of chaos and prevented any peace settlement in Algeria. The first revolt brought down the Fourth Republic and boosted Charles de Gaulle to power. The second, when barricades went up in the streets of Algiers 15 months ago, was designed to stop De Gaulle from negotiating for an independent Algeria. But last week's was no civilian uprising aided and abetted by soldiers. It was a mutiny in the army itself.

Sold Out. What triggered the mutiny was the realization that De Gaulle was about to sit down to talk with the very rebels that the French army had fought for more than six years, and now seemed ready to hand over to them an independent and prosperous Algeria. The desperate white settlers, who have exploded more than 100 bombs this month to protest the coming peace talks, were delirious with joy at the news of the revolt. They took to the streets in cheering crowds and drove about Algiers in their cars, sounding three short honks and two long ones on their horns, symbolizing the old ultra battle cry: Al-ge-rie Fran-c,aise. They scarcely cared that the army was not fighting primarily for the colons, whom it scorns, but for its own concept of army honor. Humiliated in World War II, defeated again at Dienbienphu, France's career soldiers are obsessed with proving that they can win a campaign in the field.

In Algeria, they think that they have the battle just about won--and De Gaulle, as they see it, plans to throw it all away.

Challe, 55, the leader of the revolt, is a brilliant and trusted soldier of France. He was De Gaulle's choice two years ago to replace General Raoul Salan, who was fired as Algerian commander for his right-wing insurrectionary sympathies with settlers. The "Challe Plan." under which crack army units were removed from fixed bases and sent freewheeling about Algeria in search of rebels, had been a smashing success: from a high of 100,000 guerrillas when he took over, the rebels are now down to 15,000. In retirement for the past three months, Challe apparently plotted his coup with Salan, who is in exile in Madrid, and three field commanders in Algeria. A squat, soft-spoken man, Challe arrived in Algiers only last week, and nobody gave his presence a thought--except the clutch of officers in on the coup.

In Paris, a stern and outraged De Gaulle moved quickly to contain the insurrection. He dispatched his Minister for Algeria, Louis Joxe, to the big naval base at Mers-el-Kebir with "full powers" to deal with the mutineers, and sent with him a new commander in chief for Algeria. General Jean Olie. The French Cabinet met and declared a "state of urgency," giving police prefects everywhere almost unlimited powers of arrest.

Affluent Look. In recent months, with the decline of terrorism, Algeria had taken on a look of affluence, even with the war on (see color pages). In sun-drenched Algiers, the bars and beaches have been crowded with free-spending French soldiers. The parking lot at the University of Algiers looked like the showroom of a sports-car dealer, and new apartment blocks were rising fast in well-to-do Hydra, a hilltop suburb of Algiers overlooking the sea. Adding to Algeria's bloom has been the discovery of oil in the Sahara.

In the desert at Edjele and Hassi Mes-saoud, well-paid, sun-blackened oilmen live in air-conditioned bungalows, splash about in swimming pools--and work in temperatures up to 130DEG. The 70 Saharan wells already producing are expected to pump 20 million tons of oil this year through two new pipelines to the coast. The $2 billion invested thus far, by a combination of French government and private capital, is expected to produce enough oil to meet all of France's needs by 1963.

Under the "Constantine Plan," so named after the Algerian city where De Gaulle announced it in 1958, in the hopes of convincing Algeria's predominantly Moslem population that their best hopes lay in a continued association with France, Paris is investing $600 million a year in Algeria for roads, schools, housing and industry. An effective battle against disease has made Algeria's population grow by a substantial 2.5% a year (lower-class Moslems call penicillin "the drug that helps make babies"), keeping the average income constant and low. But the coming of oil and the Constantine Plan had brought new hope.

How Red? In the eyes of the colons and the soldiers who had fought so long, handing over Algeria to the F.L.N. would mean the destruction of all they had worked and fought for.

They think that the F.L.N. is already hopelessly compromised with the Communists. Half of the rebellion's $80 million annual budget comes from Arab countries, but the other half comes from Communist China. F.L.N. leaders, from provisional "Premier" Ferhat Abbas on down, have been toasted in Peking, and hundreds of wounded rebels are currently recuperating in Czech and Soviet hospitals. Even the F.L.N. labor movement, though a member of the anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, will have sent 1,000 organizers behind the Iron Curtain for training by 1962. (The F.L.N. points out, justly, that it tried to send the labor leaders to Western countries first, and was rebuffed.)

The rebels have offered legal assurances of protecting white settler rights, but they seem to have designs on colon farm land that would conflict with such guarantees. Says Abdul Hand Boussouf, the secretive young (32) man generally rated the single most powerful leader in the F.L.N.'s inner councils: "The big estates will be broken up. I have a cousin with several thousand acres. They will be taken away from him. We want to make Algeria a country with totally different structures."

Final Call. The dissident generals who seized Algiers last week had only one answer to the prospects of an F.L.N. takeover: a fight to the bitter end. The generals promised to arrest and try "the individuals having participated directly in the attempt to abandon Algeria and the Sahara"--a charge that presumably could be brought against De Gaulle himself.

Late in the coup's first day, the army garrison at Oran elected to join General Challe, and the revolt was no longer confined to one city. Challe apparently could count on at least the tacit support of a majority of the 50,000 hard-bitten paratroopers in Algeria. Most of the rest of the 500,000-man army still seemed loyal to De Gaulle--as far as anyone could tell. All communications with the outside world were broken off, except for cryptic messages over Radio Algiers ("The palm tree is in the oasis") apparently meant for the right-wing underground in France. But the mutineers found small sympathy among mainland Frenchmen, who are heartily sick of the Algerian bloodshed and gave Charles de Gaulle an overwhelming mandate last January to negotiate a settlement on the basis of Algerian self-determination.

The mutiny was a bitter blow to 70-year-old De Gaulle. Happy enough three years ago to watch the ultras and the army defy the Fourth Republic and bring him back to power, he now faced his gravest threat from the very forces that had helped install him. In those three years, he had skillfully employed his enormous prestige to restore the army's loyalty and bring his nation to the recognition that a French Algeria was a lost dream. With the F.L.N. leaders ready to talk peace either in France or Switzerland next month, an end to the long, bloody ordeal of Algeria seemed at long last within his grasp.

Overnight, the Algiers mutiny threatened to wreck the work of years. For unless he could decisively and quickly crush General Challe's revolt, Algerian independence was not De Gaulle's to promise or deliver.

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