Ordeal Without End

At the big Colombes stadium outside Paris, President Rene Coty watched Toulouse beat Angers for the soccer championship of France. Just behind him in the presidential box, conspicuous in his red tarboosh and thick glasses, sat France's favorite Algerian, Ali Chekkal, 60-year-old lawyer and onetime vice president of the Algerian Assembly. When the French were summoned before the bar of the U.N. Assembly last February to defend their Algerian policies, they took along Ali Chekkal as a living, breathing testimonial to France's real popularity with Algeria's Moslems.

To Algeria's militant nationalists, this was high treason, and Ali Chekkal was warned that his days were numbered. He decided that it was wiser not to return to Algiers, settled in a Paris hotel under the eyes of a three-man bodyguard provided day and night by the French government.

The soccer game ended, and the crowd streamed for the exits. President Coty stepped into his car and departed. Behind him at the curb Ali Chekkal stood chatting with the director general of the Paris police. Unnoticed, a shabby young Algerian slipped up behind them. He put his hand in his jacket pocket and fired. Ali Chekkal staggered and fell. A retired policeman standing nearby grabbed the assassin by the hair and flung him to the ground before he could shoot again. But a few hours later Ali Chekkal was dead.

Honorary Murder. The murder was the most daring assassination yet achieved by the Algerians in their promised campaign to "carry the war to France itself." Most of the killings take place in the wretched Algerian quarters of French cities, where followers of the Cairo-backed National Liberation Front (FLN) fight Messali Hadj's older Algerian National Movement (MNA), and each terrorize fellow Algerians for contributing to the other. Chekkal's assassin, an unemployed plumber named Mohammed ben Sadok, admitted that he had been selected by the FLN for the honor of killing Chekkal.

All France was shocked. President Coty rushed to the hospital to bow before Chekkal's body; the funeral oration was delivered by Secretary of State for Algerian Affairs Marcel Champeix. While the Cairo radio crowed of a victory and urged terrorists on to greater efforts, police scoured the squalid Algerian quarters of Paris, hauled in 2,900 Moslems for questioning.

Vultures in the Villages. But the week's worst horror was still to come--from Algeria itself. Eighty miles southeast of Algiers, a patrol-plane pilot noticed huts burning in Kouir Mechta, a quiet, untroublesome stone-and-mud village where the French had always had a cordial welcome. The French dispatched a patrol from the nearest outpost 15 miles away. They found half a dozen dead men surrounded by hysterically screaming women, tearing their cheeks with their fingernails until the blood came. At dawn, said the women, 100 uniformed fellaghas had surrounded the village. They had seized the local policeman, cut off his hands, gouged out his eyes, then killed him and his five children. Then they rounded up every male over 15 and herded them off down the rocky ravine toward Kasba Mechta.

At Kasba Mechta, reported TIME Correspondent Edward Behr, who flew in by helicopter, vultures wheeled overhead, and the wail of women filled the air. Bodies sprawled in every hut. In the mosque lay 87 grotesquely tumbled bodies; the ground was black with blood and brains. In all, the French counted 302 corpses.

Only 15 men had survived by playing dead. They told a harrowing story. The fellaghas had brought in the men from other nearby villages, trussed them up and flung them into the shacks. At nightfall, they began a systematic slaughter. The men were forced out of the huts one by one and shot as they emerged. When this proved too slow, the rebels simply sprayed bullets into the dark interiors. Other fellaghas fell on the survivors with knives and axes, butchering them in a frenzy of blood.

Lesson Repeated. The French blamed the massacre on the feuding between the rival FLN and MNA, and claimed that the killings demonstrated what "general terror" would result if they withdrew. In angry reprisal, the French flung out a dragnet of troops, killed 169 rebels in 48 hours. But the FLN had made its bloody point: after Kasba Mechta, any village in Algeria will think twice before welcoming French patrols or refusing to contribute support and money to the FLN rebels. To make the lesson doubly plain, the FLN deliberately repeated the lesson with the men of two tiny communities near Oran, tortured and killed 36, wounded 28.

France's President Rene Coty, a schoolmaster's son from Normandy, is often seen but seldom heard. Unannounced and unexpected, Coty took to the radio in an unprecedented midnight broadcast from Paris. His voice shook with emotion as he said: "There is no Frenchman in all the world, there is not a man with a heart who was not overcome with pity and horror in learning of the massive atrocities. These abominations are not only the act of a few bandits. The killers continue to execute the orders of their chiefs, of the same chiefs who, only yesterday, via the antennas of a foreign radio, claimed the glory and honor of having treacherously caused the assassination in Paris of another Moslem, guilty of loving France. I ask all civilized peoples if the time has not come for them to refuse to listen to the agitators and the agents of this horrible terrorism that tramples all the laws of God and man."

It was an agonized cry in the long racking night of France's ordeal in Algeria--an ordeal France seems unable either to endure or to end.

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