Word: sakiet
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...years French governments fought jealously to keep Britain and the U.S. from "meddling" in France's North African sphere of interest. But the thesis that whatever happens in North Africa is purely a French concern was blown sky-high in the bombing of Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef (TIME, Feb. 17), and with the outraged Tunisians openly talking of war, even the French themselves could no longer maintain it. It was not over France's protest but at French invitation that the U.S. and Britain last week agreed to use their "good offices" toward settling the French quarrel with Tunisia...
...support the rebel cause. In Paris U.S. Ambassador Amory Houghton urged moderation on Felix Gaillard, and in Tunis Ambassador Lewis Jones did the same with Bourguiba. At week's end Secretary John Foster Dulles, who had summoned French Ambassador Herve Alphand to his home the day after the Sakiet bombing, prepared to interrupt a long-planned vacation to take personal charge of U.S. efforts to ease the crisis...
Slowly tempers cooled. In Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba relaxed his blockade of French bases enough to permit the entry of civilian trucks carrying food. In Paris, too, there were second thoughts. From the start Foreign Minister Pineau had been privately dismayed by the attack on Sakiet. (When U.S. Columnist Joseph Alsop quoted him as calling the bombing "a sad error," Pineau at first flatly denied the quote, then admitted, "I may have said a few imprudent words" which Alsop had "distorted...
Under sharp questioning from the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Committee, Pineau finally admitted that neither the Cabinet nor Robert Lacoste, France's Minister Resident in Algeria, had known in advance of the decision to attack Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef. Neither, apparently, had General Raoul Salan, the luckless Indo-China veteran who commands French forces in Algeria. The murderous blow that earned France worldwide obloquy had been ordered by a local air force officer, reportedly a colonel, on the strength of an imprecise government directive authorizing retaliatory attack on Algerian rebel concentrations in the immediate frontier areas bordering...
...French fear, would open the way to international "interference" in the Algerian rebellion-the Gaillard government announced that it was now willing to accept "the good offices" of the U.S. in settling the dispute. Even more important psychologically, Gaillard and his Cabinet tacitly admitted France's guilt at Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef by offering to pay damages to civilian victims of the bombing...