Dusty Answer

The Algerian rebels last week answered Charles de Gaulle's proposal for cease-fire talks (TIME, Nov. 23) with a yes that was meant to be taken as no.

Summoning newsmen to a dingy press office on Tunis' Rue des Entrepreneurs, Rebel Press Spokesman Ahmed Boumendjel announced that his "government" was agreeable to negotiations with France "to discuss the conditions and applications" of the self-determination vote that De Gaulle has promised Algeria. The rebels even named their proposed representatives : five rebel officials headed by Mohammed ben Bella, 40, the bemedaled former French army sergeant who was the chief organizer of the Algerian revolt and the man most regarded as the villain by right-wing French settlers in Algeria.

Though phrased to sound like an acceptance, the rebel reply amounted to a rejection of De Gaulle's terms--which specified that the negotiations be confined to arrangements for a ceasefire, and should not include discussion of Algeria's political future. But what gave the rebel announcement an unmistakably smart-aleck flavor was that all five of the proposed rebel representatives have been in French prisons for more than three years; four of them, including Ben Bella himself, landed there in a celebrated coup in October 1956, when a Moroccan plane carrying them from Rabat to Tunis was diverted by the French and flown on by its French crewmen to Algiers.

De Gaulle, on tour in Alsace, rejected the rebel proposal with a curt aside in a speech, declaring that his offer had been directed "to those who fight, not those who are hors de combat.''

Why had the rebels chosen to give De Gaulle an answer they knew he could not accept? The likeliest explanation was that they were counting on a U.N. vote of condemnation against France when the General Assembly debates the Algerian question in the next few weeks, and recognized that their chances of getting one would be slim, unless they made at least a pretense of accepting De Gaulle's call for negotiations.

On another issue in the U.N. last week, the vote went badly for France. Led by the same Afro-Asian bloc that supports the Algerian rebels, the U.N. General Assembly--which has never condemned any previous nuclear tests--by a vote of 51 to 16 called upon France to abandon plans for exploding its first A-bomb in the Sahara some time next year. The U.S.. and Britain sided with France.

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