Revolt in Algeria

Through the Paris censorship trickled news of a bloody insurrection in Algeria. Since May 8, fierce Kabyle tribesmen* had stabbed or beaten to death a hundred French officials and wealthy colons (landowners who exploit native farm labor) in the mountainous district of Little Kabylia. The Europeans had picked up their guns, banded together and held off the Kabyles as best they could until police and regular troops arrived.

The Colonial Government proclaimed martial law in Little Kabylia, sent out punitive columns of Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese and Moroccan troops. Artillery and aircraft smashed native villages. The new Algerian nationalist party, Amis du Manifeste ("Friends of the Manifesto"), was outlawed, its leaders arrested. The old Parti Populaire Algerien, whose slogan is "Algeria for the Algerians," was carefully watched.

In Paris General Charles de Gaulle's Cabinet hastily drafted plans to remove the causes of revolt, chiefly hunger. Algeria's 8,000,000 people are near the famine line. A succession of bad harvests, coupled with a wartime lack of imports, has reduced Algerian rations to 500 calories a day, only a third of what a Frenchman gets. In Little Kabylia whole villages were abandoned by a desperate population Streaming toward the cities. Fields were torn up in a desperate forage for edible roots.

The strangest victim of the revolt was the Algerian Communist Party. Like the French Communist Party last spring (TIME, Feb. 12), the Algerian Communists suddenly abandoned their traditional anti-imperialism, took a stand against the natives (presumably, Communists want to keep intact the French Empire which they may one day rule). Furious Algerian nationalists retaliated by killing one local Communist Party secretary and beating up other Communists.

* The Kabyles are a branch of the Berbers, the indigenous white race of North Africa. The Arabs conquered them in the 7th Century.

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