The Bloody Clouds

In a broadcast to the French nation last week. President Charles de Gaulle confidently promised that the Algerian problem "will be thoroughly resolved" by July 1. On that date, he predicted, the Moslem majority will vote for independence in the Algerian referendum and the French army will begin a gradual, three-year withdrawal. Thus France will be freed for a more active role in the world* and, De Gaulle implied, for the task of constitutional reform that would make a strong executive a permanent feature of French life. As for the "last bloody clouds" caused by the terrorism of the Secret Army Organization, they would soon disappear, together with the S.A.O. strategy of "assassination, theft and blackmail." Frenchmen, sickened by the seven-year war in Algeria and by the S.A.O.'s senseless brutality, could only hope that De Gaulle was right--even though the "bloody clouds" appeared to last longer than many political weather forecasters had predicted. If the battle was already lost for the S.A.O., it was not yet finally won for either De Gaulle or the F.L.N.

Fleeing Billions. In Algeria, De Gaulle's confident words were met by a new upsurge of S.A.O. hatred. His broadcast had scarcely ended when the S.A.O. launched a bazooka attack against Radio Algiers, and startled radio listeners heard screams and gunfire over the air waves. The one-week truce was abruptly broken by hit-and-run attacks on isolated Moslems.

S.A.O. terrorists planted phosphorus bombs in Algiers University, and European students cheered as their school burned to the ground, destroying a 600,000-volume library.

De Gaulle's Ministry of Finance disclosed that nearly $2 billion has fled Algeria for France within the past two years. Human beings were also in flight: the daily average of European refugees has soared from 3,000 to 8,000. This month alone, an estimated one-fourth of the million Europeans in Algeria will leave for France. They are being replaced by a slow influx of Moslem refugees returning from years of exile in neighboring Tunisia and Morocco with only a few sheep and goats and the ragged clothes on their backs. Most will come home to partially or totally destroyed villages, to weed-grown, untilled fields, and to the frail shelter of army tents.

Extraordinary Move. In Paris, right-wing Deputies in the National Assembly acted as if history were reversible. "We will never abandon the idea of Algerie Franc,aise!" cried Deputy Jean-Marie Le Pen. Despite the fact that De Gaulle has overwhelmingly won two national referendums on his Algeria policy, the rightists filed a motion of censure against the government, but were sharply defeated. Even as angry debate on the motion rang from the Assembly floor, news tickers clacked out word of an extraordinary move by ex-General Edmond Jouhaud, who was condemned to death last month by the same military tribunal that later spared the life of his S.A.O. boss, Raoul Salan.

In a letter to Salan, Jouhaud declared that he felt "duty bound to make known today what feelings the tragedy now taking place in Algeria inspires in me." He had fought with his comrades to keep Algeria French, but events have "taken a course which is irreversible," and now "independence is a practically accomplished fact which tolls the knell of all our hopes but which must be faced with realism." Jouhaud spoke of the heaviest responsibility of leadership: "When a chief sees that the battle is hopeless, when he feels everything has been tried to achieve victory and the demands of honor met, then comes for him a sorrowful, tragic moment when he must halt the fighting." With "death in my heart," Jouhaud asked "all those who have obeyed me to call it quits. The blind attacks against the Moslems must cease. Among those who fall in haphazard shootings are perhaps some former soldiers in the French army, perhaps our friends." He urged the S.A.O. "to seek a meeting ground with our enemies of yesterday that will allow the French to go on living with dignity" in Algeria.

Dependent Fate. Jouhaud wrote as a man facing execution. His final appeal for a new trial was refused by the French Supreme Court. Two lesser S.A.O. gunmen last week died before army firing squads in an old fort near Paris. Jouhaud can escape a similar death only through De Gaulle's clemency, but few considered the letter an attempt to save his skin. In any event, De Gaulle has let it be known that Jouhaud's fate is dependent upon "the higher interests" of France, which seems to mean that if his appeal quiets the terror in Algeria, he will be spared; if not, he will be shot.

* Ex-Gaullist Jacques Soustelle, once Governor General of Algeria and now in hiding, charges De Gaulle with being "the Kerensky of France," whose "dictatorship is international Commu nism's ace of trumps." In an article in the National Review, Soustelle calls Algerian inde pendence a Red triumph ("Algeria will inevi tably be Communist") and castigates De Gaulle as a "nationalist of the igth century" who is neither favorable nor hostile to Communism: it "simply doesn't interest him." What De Gaulle wants, says Soustelle, is to "play a role of lead ership apart from the Anglo-Saxons," and to this end he has abandoned France's overseas posses sions to concentrate on his dream of "European hegemony, isolationism and neutralism."

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