Word: biares
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...Algerian hosts. Cleaver had been welcomed as a revolutionary hero in 1969, after jumping bail and evading arrest on charges arising from a 1968 Panther shootout in Oakland, Calif. The government of President Houari Boumedienne set him up in a white stucco villa in the diplomatic suburb of El Biar and granted him an allowance of $500 a month. Cleaver adorned the villa with two brass plaques, each engraved with a leaping black panther. The inscription announced that the building was the headquarters of the international section of the Black Panther Party...
Sweeping over a sandy escarpment called "God's Dyke" on the Rann's northern lip, a brigade of Pakistani infantry crushed an Indian army outpost at Biar Bet, also occupied a ruined mud-walled fort called Kanjarkot in what India insists is its own territory. India and Pakistan each claimed to have inflicted at least 300 casualties on the other, and Indian Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, looking far tougher than his frail figure indicates, threatened to invade the Pakistani side of the Rann. Both nations began talking of general mobilization...
Meanwhile the killing continued. Last week Colonel Jean Leroy's anti-S.A.O. commando unit was nearly wiped out in its hideaway villa at El Biar on the heights above Algiers. Leroy made the bureaucratic mistake of ordering typewriters from a supply house. When the crates arrived, they contained an unexpected item-a 20-lb. dynamite bomb which exploded ten minutes after arrival, reducing the villa to four shattered Moorish pillars and a pile of rubble. The blast reportedly killed 18 of Leroy's men and four S.A.O. prisoners in the cellar...
Though it summons up the fictional nightmares of a Kafka or a Koestler, this episode is a matter of cold-sweat fact. It was the first session in an ordeal by torture undergone by French Communist Journalist Henri Alleg, 37, at an "interrogation" center at El Biar, in suburban Algiers, during June and July 1957. His torturers: paratroopers of the French army's 10th Division-later rebels against the Republic-to whom the use of torture has apparently come to be regarded as a "necessary" weapon against the Algerian nationalists...
...painful identification that the reader feels with Alleg cannot blot out the nagging realization that, as a Communist, Alleg himself has been a consenting party to the same tortures and to a degradation of man that, for its wholesale scale, dwarfs the war-begotten atrocities of El Biar. But nothing can justify the use of torture by any nation passing as civilized. Henri Alleg's ordeal is a parable that mirrors the failure of France's Algerian policy. Just as Whitman found a blade of grass sufficient to stagger an army of atheists...
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