Word: casbah
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Startling as a shout, the silent casbah sprang to life last week, and its outburst basically altered the nature and changed the pace of the long-drawn-out agony known by the bleak title of "the Algerian problem...
Flagged Spires. Suddenly, the Moslems' long restraint snapped. Screaming like men who have been too long silent, Moslem mobs flooded the narrow lanes of the casbah. From under thin mattresses and floor boards came hundreds of forbidden flags of the F.L.N. rebels-green-and-white banners bearing a red crescent and star. In bright green paint, slogans were splashed on any and every convenlent wall: "The F.L.N. Forever," "Long Live Ferhat Abbas," "Long Live Moslem Algeria...
...Europeans were stunned. Ever since 1957, when paratroops brutally suppressed the F.L.N. terrorists in the cities, Moslem city dwellers have practiced attentisme, a zombielike acceptance of every indignity just to stay alive. The advocates of a French Algeria argued that the casbah really wanted association with France but was intimidated into silence for fear of the F.L.N. Attentisme (wait-and-see-ism) virtually disappeared last week in the explosive espousal of the F.L.N. The extremist Front de l'Algérie Française had claimed the support of 500,000 Moslems-if they ever existed, they have...
...rebels. The French army has confined 11,000 Algerians in concentration camps, forced 1,500,000 men, women and children into "regroupment centers" whose squalor is unmatched even by the Arab refugee camps on Israel's borders. When a French radio reporter toured Algiers' casbah last week seeking reaction to the rebel decision to try negotiations, the few Moslems who would talk at all would say only that they were for peace...
Algiers still has its beggars, and seven out of every ten Casbah residents have tuberculosis. What makes the city bustle is its newly moneyed middle class, mostly of French, Corsican, Italian or Spanish descent, though many Arabs have done well too. But there is little of the raffish night life of the typical boom town; Algiers' one luxury nightclub is half empty on week nights. "The Algerian businessman," said one French official, "may keep a rakish sports car and luxurious villa on the Riviera, but in Algiers he's middle class, respectable, and rather mean...