A Million Uprooted

Capped on a craggy knuckle of Algerian mountains penetrable only by mule trains, the village of Beni Ouagag was once the home of 3,000 Moslems. Then the Algerian war began. The F.L.N. turned Beni Ouagag into a base camp. In retaliation, the French one day in 1957 bombed the little town off the map.

There are thousands of such deserted villages in Algeria today. Their roofless houses and empty streets symbolize the plight of the passive Moslem population caught in the middle of the war's crossfire. The result is a social upheaval in which more than a million Moslems have been uprooted--either fleeing bombs or evicted en masse from "forbidden zones" by French attempts to "sterilize" rebel-infested areas.

Where have the homeless gone? Two places mainly: 1) into Algerian cities to swell urban slums, or 2) into "regroup-ment centers" under French army supervision. In either place they make a mockery--or else a very distant promise--of De Gaulle's historic Constantine pledge last November to Algerian Moslems of eventual parity with French standards of living.

Nothing but Couscous. Confronted by people with medieval habits who refuse to use modern laundries or eat anything but pasty couscous, and who sometimes riot when social workers try to bathe their children, the French army's Sections Administratives Specialises officers have done surprisingly well in some spots with the 700,000 regrouped Moslems in their care. Thirty miles south of Algiers the S.A.S. have built from scratch the Village du Sahel. It has modern schools, electricity and running water, army-built stone-and-plaster houses and shops. Its men have found work locally as agricultural laborers or herdsmen. In showcase Sahel, the greatest fear is being turned out of the new town. Says one resettled Moslem: "Provided the army stays to run our schools and hospital, we will never go back."

But for every successful regrouped village there are at least three in which the Moslems are worse off than before. In some centers the villagers are resettled in tents ringed with barbed wire. Saharan nomads, used to constant roaming, waste away by the hundreds when cooped up in camps. The 400,000 Moslem refugees outside the regrouped camps drift into cities, and rapidly join the ragged, seldom-employed urban proletariat choking the slums.

"Now We Are Responsible." Alarmed by press accounts of shocking conditions in the regrouped centers, De Gaulle's delegate general in Algeria, Paul Delouvrier, has ordered a halt to further regrouping. Complains one French officer: "For years these people have been dying like flies. But nobody bothered to go have a look. Now that we have brought them down from the hills, we are responsible."

Delouvrier has also ordered a complete overhaul of the regroupment system, under the scrutiny of teams of doctors, engineers and agricultural experts. Last week, in an event unique in French clerical history, the heads of the French Protestant and Roman Catholic churches issued a joint appeal for French aid to Algerian D.P.s, as a helpless people entitled to aid--even while French soldiers make war on, and are killed by, other Algerians in the hills.

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