The Final Phase

FRANCE The Final Phase Over a nationwide radio-television broadcast, French Premier Guy Mollet last week made public his long-awaited "declaration of intentions" toward revolt-torn Algeria. It was sadly anticlimactic. Mollet's intentions are almost identical to his intentions of a year ago: Algeria could have free elections once the rebels had agreed to a ceasefire, but she could not have independence. "This declaration," rasped an angry Arab spokesman, "contains no. new element and offers no opportunity for an eventual peaceful settlement."

As a matter of practical politics, harried Socialist Guy Mollet could scarcely afford to offer the Algerians anything new. Trapped between Algerian terrorists and diehard French imperialists, Mollet had little room for maneuver. Last week the news leaked out that the French government had arrested dashing Brigadier General Jacques Faure, assistant commander of the Algiers area, aboard a French train and sentenced him to 30 days' close confinement in the fortress of La Courneuve outside Paris because of his unconcealed conviction that "in moments of great national crisis [soldiers] must not hesitate to seize power."

Sickened by successive retreats from Indo-China, Morocco and Tunisia, and enraged by the withdrawal from Port Said, many among the professional officers of the 500,000 French troops in Algeria appeared determined that the French army must not be involved in yet another retreat from empire. Should Mollet show signs of giving in to Algerian demands for independence, much of the army might well support Algeria's reactionary French colons in open defiance of the government.

Mollet had actually restated his intentions largely for its effect on the U.N., whose Afro-Asian members have once again called for a General Assembly debate on Algeria. For the first time, the French have agreed to let the matter be debated. But, reiterated the Premier, Algeria is a French domestic problem, and "I must ask the U.N. not to interfere." Quai d'Orsay officials privately warned American correspondents that if the U.S. votes for any resolution recognizing U.N. authority to intervene in Algeria it would seriously jeopardize Franco-American friendship.

Any U.N. action on Algeria, argued the French, would touch off a roaring, full-scale revolution that would bathe all of Algeria in blood. Algeria, however, was already pretty thoroughly bathed in blood --18,000 Algerians and more than 3,000 Frenchmen have been killed this year. Last week French Resident Minister Robert Lacoste concentrated both civil and military police powers in the Algiers area in the tough hands of Brigadier General Jacques Massu, who commanded French paratroops in the Suez invasion. "The battle for Algeria," proclaimed Lacoste, "has reached its final phase."

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