Word: algerians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Only the most legalistic Frenchman could argue last week that the Algerian rebellion was a strictly domestic problem. Morocco's Mohammed V conferred with Secretary Dulles about it in Washington, the U.N. debated it in New York, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan went to Paris to reassure Premier Félix Gaillard of British backing (but refused to pledge that Britain under no circumstances would supply more arms to Tunisia...
Biggest storm blew up not over the loi-cadre itself but over Pierre Mendès-France's plea that France could not afford to wave off Tunisian-Moroccan offers to mediate a settlement with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Mendès was howled down. He managed to finish only after his bitter political enemy Georges Bidault shouted: "If Mendès-France has not the right to speak here, then no one has the right to reply...
...abolished the old system, which weighted voting in favor of "non-Moslems" (French), and replaced it with universal suffrage. This was qualified by a system of proportional representation that would assure Frenchmen of some seats even in areas where their vote is very small. After two years, an all-Algerian Assembly with power over all but defense and diplomatic matters would be chosen by the territorial assemblies...
...they have undertaken the destruction of other parties in the purest totalitarian tradition. In the interior of the country the bands fight at gunpoint over control of the sectors that bring in the fattest dividends in pillage and gunrunning. In the first ten months of 1957 alone, about 600 Algerian Moslems have been killed in France and more than 2.000 wounded, victims of other Algerian Moslems. [In Algeria itself] between Nov. 1, 1954 and Nov. 1, 1957, the rebels murdered 8,429 civilians, of whom 310 were women and 120 children. This tragic picture includes 1,126 European victims...
...needs no prodding from any one at all; as you well know, of the 272 deputies who voted against the Loi Cadre, 159 did so because they felt it too weak. France is ready to conduct elections under the aegis of the United Nations; the F.L.N. is not. The Algerian war, for the mass of the French population, is not a colonialist war. The war in Algeria is not between colonialists and anti-colonialists; it is between partisans of gradual independence, and extremists, largely interested in exterminating one another as at Melouzza, extremists who are every ounce as narrow-minded...