Rebels With a Cause

Primed with information about the political consciousness of Latin American students, two Algerian student leaders arrived from Lima, Peru, in New York last week for a tour of six American campuses. Mesuwud Aitchalal and Chaib Taleb, the President and Vice-President of the Algerian National Union of Students (UGEMA) were in the U.S. with a double purpose: to propagandize for Algerian independence and to learn first-hand of the strangly parochial and non-political nature of American student life.

The five-day tour took Aitchalal and Taleb to South-western University, Le Moyne, an all-Negro college in Memphis, the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago. Sponsored by NSA groups on each campus, they spoke in French to sparse audiences comprised mainly of foreign students, Africans, and French majors anxious to show their facility by painfully framing their questions in ungrammatical French. I shared the podium with them as translator.

They came at a bad time. Exams had absorbed the attention of all but self-styled student leader types, and "internationally-minded" undergraduates anxious to demonstrate that they were not land-locked intellectually in the green campuses of the middle west. Those who did attend the meetings heard M. Aitchalal, a small, wiry-mustached man, who speaks with passion, but not violence, about a cause to which he is entirely committed.

Briefly, his commitment is to find moral and, more especially, monetary support for Algerian students, who have been chased from the University of Algiers, deprived of French Government scholarships in France, persecuted, arrested, and forced underground. The Student Union headquarters is now in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its proselytizing leaders are totally dependent upon NSA, WUS, and other student organization funds. This has been the case since 1954, when the Algerian student community declared its unanimous support of the nationalist insurrection.

Since the suffocation of academic life is only one aspect of the military and political squeeze which France has put on Algeria, the solution to the student problem rests upon the result of the Algerian war. To M. Aitchalal's mind, there are only two possibilities. The total extermination of the Algerian people, of whom 500,000 mainly civilians, have already been killed, or truce and negotiations, based on France's public recognition of the independence and equality of Algeria.

Reluctant to answer directly to questions about their relation to the Arab countries of the middle east, and cagey about the prospect of accepting Red China's arms, the two Algerians showed themselves students of politics, diplomacy, and intrigue. They were asked the same cautious questions on each campus, questions about the governmental and disciplinary structure of a post-war Algeria; fears about reprisals against the colonials, and about possible Communist influence in the Algerian freedom front. When their own turn came to ask questions, the Algerians showed their awareness of American affairs. They were disturbed mainly by the proviso placed on the National Defense Education Act scholarships; by the paralyzing effect of the Communist bogey on progressive organizations; and mainly by the moribund quality of student political activity. They saw in the American student a great potential power to demonstrate, to march, and to make a substantial political gesture gone to waste.

The two Algerians realized that American students live in an atmosphere of political and social equilibrium, and that no life-or-death issue rises between them and their books. Yet the very recognition of our advantages should, they felt, produce a sense of moral responsibility. As two rebels with a cause, they saw no lack of issues for the American student. Far from wanting idealistic American undergraduates to grab shotguns and set sail for Algeria, they could only ask repeatedly why we remained inert before such a problem as integration. With this issue at stake, how, M. Aitchalal asked, can a campus be torn over the question of making a jacket and tie compulsory at dinner?

In one cluttered apartment in Chicago, with a guitar artistically suspended on the wall, a balding graduate student proudly produced his newest acquisition--a recording of genuine Algerian rebel songs taped on the spot in the cave and mountain hide-outs of the partisans. Aitchalal and Taleb listened nostalgically for a few moments--but not for long. They had more important things to do.