'1 By DANIEL ZWERDLING MY TRAIN pulled into the Algiers station at 11:30 p.m. just below the Square Port Said .and I thought I was in Paris.. Even in the dark, sit- ting in an all night cafe under 19th century globe lamps and manicured trees, I could see the long shopping columnades like on Paris' Rivoli; above them, apartments with iron grille balconies stretching toward the beaches, past the, classy hotels and the center of town, past the villas and the Parc de la Liberte which Andre Gide called "the most beautiful park in the world" The boy who pulls the levers on the cafe espresso machine told me that the Algiers casbah was only a hun- dred- yards away. Have you seen the movie, The Battle of Algiers? I was scared by the dark, explosive pos- sibilities of this revolutionary Arab city. l SoI;slept two hours on a stone bench in the Third Arrondissement of the Algiers gendarmerie (I figured these cops were socialists), and then sat until dawn in the cafe, listening to the espresso boy babble about Arab women (they're untouchable), war, truth, and John Ford. When the sun rose I walked to to the tiers Daniel Zwerdling, Daily Magazine Editor in 1970-71, currently writes for the New Republic. This is the third in a series of five articles he is writing for The Daily on con- temporary life in North Africa and the Middle East. the center of Algiers and understood why the French struggled to possess it. If you can imagine Paris: Shrink the city to one-fifth its real size, turn the fetid Seine into a warm, sweep- ing blue Mediterranean bay, bleach everything breathless white. Then, lift this new Paris in your palm and nestle it gently at the foot of North Africa's hills. That's Algiers. THE ALGERIANS fought for eight years, from 1954 to 1962, to seize control of their own country from the French, but the French character is so indelibly stamped on the nation that Algeria looks more French than Arab. Even in the countryside-from the moment I crossed into Algeria from the Moroccan border town of Oujda, which struggles like a stub- born plant in the burning hills and dying earth of eastern Morocco, I knew it was a different world. The townspeople wear robes, yes, but the architecture . . . the tidy houses with their shutters and iron grill work, the green parks with stumpy trees, the old churches, the French town halls presiding masterfully on the town square, all look like the red tiled vil- lages of Provence in southern France. But the French influence slaps your face hardest in Algiers, the paradox of the revolution. Here is the tradi- tional Arab casbah, which nourished the most heroic acts of the revolu- tion, side by side with the Colonial French quarter which must symbo- lize the savage French resistance. From the buttery Parisian croissants' in the patisseries to the avant garde theater, Cahiers du Cinema, Algiers is France. I joined young men and women wearing styled bellbottoms and lace shirts, strolling on the long, elegant boulevards: We looked at new fa- shions from the House of Dior, drank imported beers in expensive cafes, or fruit juice concoctions at the Milk Bar. Just as Paris has Le Printemps, the aristocrat of department stores, Algiers has Les Galleries Algeriennes where shoppers buy imported goods (mostly French) on four tiers with sculpted mahogany balconies. RUT I ALSO wanted to see the source of the revolution-the casbah. More than any other period of the revolution, the 1957 Battle of Algiers, between the FLN terrorists and the French paratroopers, pro- claimed to the world the inevitable bloody fruits of colonialism. I left the French quarter one afternoon, climb- ed long steps which lead to the en- trance of the casbah on the hillside above the bay, and peeked inside. I walked cautiously up a few alleys, far enough to lose myself in the intricate, claustrophobic maze which hid the terrorists and swallowed the enemy. You can't find your way unless you were born and raised here. The houses, two and three stories of thick casbsh white plaster, are glued side to side, topple over each other; sometimes the houses on opposite sides of the alleys join together above the door- ways, forming a continuous roof which turns the casbah into a sort of vast, enclosed structure with tunnels. The French whisper: Don't go into the casbah. I met a young Algerian who befriended and protected me. "The French are not disliked," Ah- med said. "But they don't enter the casbah. They're afraid. The Arabs in the casbah don't hate them, but they remember." He showed me the ruins of the house which French para- troopers blew to bits, killing the revo- lutionary hero Ali La Pointe and his wife and little boy. Remember the movie? Two adjacent houses were also destroyed. Now a large hole gapes suddenly from a dense row of houses. The community never cleared the rubble, in reverence for the brothers and sisters who died there. Ahmed took me to the roof of his grandmother's house, and I saw that the whole casbah is a vast plain of white rooftops. Terrorists hopped from roof to roof, as on giant steps, to evade the French soldiers search- ing for them in the alleys below. AHMED REMEMBERS the revolu- tion. His father can't work; he suffers chronic nervous fatigue and stomach ailments: French police ar- rested and imprisoned and tortured him three times, during their periodic sweeps which netted 60 percent of the casbah's men. Ahmed's brother-in- law was an FLN terrorist at 16, which means he first murdered a French cop to pass initiation rites. He also was arrested, and tortured. "He wakes every few nights, screaming in his dreams," says Ah- med. "He relives his tortures." Other men in the casbah eat with their left hands-an Arab taboo, but their right hands were chopped off. Has the Algerian revolution worked? Few people agree. The news- I 4 * iri$gun Baiti Eighty-one years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan 420 Maynard St, Ann Arbor, Mich. News Phone: 764-0552 Editoriats printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints paprs bulge with revolution and so- cialis: New indutries under con- st ructon, w o m e n ' s emancipation (cet ym women still wear the ve and traitional Arab roles), all e t rehrenes to the im- . ir gessors and - is c rt (t which don't ng accounts of the Apolo suce roaram), and fervent arte abt dm ments in the -~r -o~d Tbcco shop carry Tr--Mth hu tey also display e- Debry, and }FTHlE NATION is movIng, it's mov- ing ca utiouslv. The Algerian leaders dn't want anyone to shake their fracile society. Think of the SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1971 NIGHT EDITOR: CARLA RAPOPORT :m. ,: Alternative HE RISING COST of tuition is a very real problem facing students at vir- tually every college and university throughout -the land. Attempts to cope with the problem range from standard- ized financial aid for especially needy students to innovative "graduated" and "deferred" tuition programs. Yet the'University, obviously the prime candidate for adopting a plan to alle- viate its own tuition problem, has man- aged. to come up with nothing more substantive than several years of con- secutive hikes in both in-state and out- of-state tuition. Each institution must analyze its pe- culiar position and develop a method that best copes with the problem. What works for one college or university might not work for another. However, the Uni- versity is in sad enough financial shape that it could well afford to devote more time and effort to the examination. of alternative methods of dealing with the tuition problem. A variety of " plans have been develop- ed by institutions around the country with many more in the works. YALE UNIVERSITY, for example, has instituted a plan of deferred tuition, which requires the students themselves to bear more of the cost of- their educa- tion-but at' a time in the future when they are -in a better :position to do so. Under the Yale plan, . the student agrees to repay a long-term loan with a specified amount of his future income. At Yale, this amounts to a rebate of .4 per cent of post-graduate income for every $1,000 borrowed. - itorial Staff ROBERT KRAFTOwITZ Editor JIM BEATTIE DAVE CHUDWIN Executive Editor -Managing.Editor STEVE XOP AN-Editorlax Page Editor RICK PERTLOFF . .:A-:0cl.ate "Editorial, Page Editor PAT MAHONEY-...Assistant Editorial Page Editor LARRY LEMlP1l?'r; k-. -~ Associate Managing Editor YNN WEINER-Associate Managing Editor NITA CRONE-. - ..........-Arts Editor 1M IRWIN-Associate Arts Editor ROBERT-CONROW---------........Books Editor JANET FR;Y--------------------Personnel Director JIM JUDKH! -- -Photograr'-v Editor NIGHT EDITORS: Pat Bluer, Rose Sue Berstein, Lindsay Chaney -MarK Dillen, Sara Fitzgerald, Tamny :Jacobs, - AIa-n enhoff, Arthur Lerner, Hes- ter Puling, Canrl Rapoport, Robert Schreiner, WE.Schrock, Gt Sprung. COPY EDITORG: Ltia D:eeban, Chris Parke, Gene Robinson, Paul Trav , DAY EDTORS: Robert Barkin, Jan Benedetti, Mary Xramer. John Mitchell, Hannah Morrison, Beth . berfeider. Tony Schwartz, Gloria Jane Smith, Cha;rIs stein, Ted SteinI Marcia Zoslaw. ASSISTANT NIiGHr EDITORS: Steve Brummel, Dave I Buritcnn,- Jaiet Gordon, Judy Ruskin, Lynn Sheehan, Sue Stephenson, Karen Tinklenberg. BlI,(ss Staff A , 1 F S STOREY, Business Manager RICHARD RADCLIFFE-Advertising Manager tuition plans Tiny Beloit College - President Flem- ing's Alma Mater - has a graduated plan, which assesses several different tuition rates, scaled according to the in- dividual student's family income. Another plan is a sweeping proposal presently in the Ohio legislature, which involves the state assuming the full cost of the schooling for all of the 182,000 students in the state's four-year public universities.- After graduation, once the student's income reaches the $7,000 level, he or she would begin to repay the state. For one reason or another, University officials find all of the above plans im- practical for its own use. The Yale plan supposedly would fail to get off the ground at the University. Fi- nancial officials say that it is only the large endowment of a private school such as Yale that can enable; an institution to borrow enough money to support the tre- mendous costs of getting the deferred plan off the ground. But while the University's endowment is not as large as Yale's, its resources are easily sufficient enough to support a de- ferred tuition program, albeit perhaps on a lesser scale at the outset. ADMINISTRATORS CITE that the Bel- oit plan, while theoretically possible, would be impractical due to several fac- tors. First, they cite that the State Legis- lature pressured Michigan State into cancelling a similar plan a few years ago, because irate well-to-do citizens com- plained that a graduated plan relying on family income effectively taxed them twice - once by the state and again by the University. Secondly, Beloit has a problem of under-enrollment which is not present here. Thus, Beloit can increase its funds simply through an absolute in- crease in enrollment, which the Univer- sity cannot do. The most strenuous objections are to the Ohio plan, because University offi- cials say it places the total burden of the educational costs on the student. This might be true in essence, but prac- tically speaking, many college students would probably rather pay all of the cost of their education at a time when they can afford it, if it would permit them the time to pursue their education now. The University should press the legislature to consider such a program. Even if one accepts that none of the above plans can be effectively implement- ed here, the University owes it to both its present and future students and their families to try harder to come up with a tuition plan that will cope with rising costs. T SEEMS THE UNIVERSITY could make a major contribution on a- national tensions: from colonialism to inde- pendence, from underdevelopment to development, from feudalism to so- cialism, from traditional Arab society to modern liberated society. If anybody can shake the country, the youth will, and the government is handig them nwith iron tongs. LonY hair is tabo Durin the sum- mer months you'll see fashionably long hair in the cafes of Algiers, but during the school year, especially in small towns, men must cud their hair short. 1ere's what happens to a longhair: Your school expels you, the police arrest you and shave a cross on top of your head. The government censors the press and the cinema heavily. Any explicit scenes with drugs or sex won't nass the borders. Easy Rider never made it. That's not the stuff of revo- lution, When I looked at the nosh villas on the hillsids above Algiers, I asked whether there was any revolution at all. But my friend Ahmed said, "In Aleeria revolution does not mean we don't have any rich; it means we don't have any poor." I saw much poverty in the countryside, and in mountas and was unconvinced. But I'm teling you only vignettes of eria. not a detled analysis. A HMED REMINDED ME: "The French inaded and -destroyed our country in the i'. After more than a century of 'colonialism, in which the broke our spirits and bodies, now we are free, but for only a few year. You Americans have my problems," med said. "And you have been independent for two hundred years." . 2 rainbow bridge -..Ycaa.Yt° ..y..... .., _.,... .. ._._ . ... _..,, . E36:..L.. _ u .._,_.. __-,. .... ...<< .. -r. ., ,..ar., L . , - - r. .. , y - Toward a revolutionary c I I l s Ci y & n s inela J l 3Mi t! I JACKSON PRISON - I don't mean to keep stalling you off on what I set out to talk 'about in this series of columns, but it's important to me to try to lay a foundation for what I want to say about our immediate situ- ation here in Ann Arbor, and I came across another document you probably haven't seen before which might help you under- stand where I'm coming from. This column is taken from a statement written by my com- rade Pun Plamondon, who is be- ing kept from his work and his people in Ann Arbor by the fed- eral government in their peni- tentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana. It starts with the quote I left off with last time: "A community is a compre- hensive collection of institu- tions that will deliver our whole lives, provided that we can reach most of our goals within it. It serves us and we create it in order to carry out our desires." In building a "comprehensive collection of institutions that will deliver our whole lives," as Huey P. Newton says, we must base our work on the concrete needs of the people; the institutions we create must serve us and fulfill our needs and desires. what are the concrete needs and desires of the people of the Rainbow colony? But first: Who are the neonnle of the Rainbow w stern, post-industrial, post- Euro-Amerikan Rainbow People. We aren't "white," or Euro- Amerikan, people-our parents represent the last generation of western people, and their death- ly culture will die with them. We have entered a new stage in hu- man history, the Rainbow Era, and our first historical task as a new people is to bring an end to the old order once and for all, so the whole of humanity will be free to develop its human poten- tial as high as it can. Our rain- bow culture is the harbinger of the New Age, and the cultural revolution we are experiencing now is a powerful weapon of the social revolution which will put we've adapted many elemens including post - industri e nology, from the Euroiaria culture. Our political . teachers are Marx and Engels, Crary Hore. Mao, Huey P. Newton, Zapota, Lenin, Kim Il Sung, Bobby 'eale Nkrumah, Fidel, Sitting Lull. Ho Chi Minh, John Coltrane, Che Guevara. We are a raino ple with a rainbow culture we live in a rainbow o-ny We are a colony becn e we are controlled and ep by forces foreign to our ple, our 'culture and our c munities. The peo:h rainbow colony share in ' of the economic weh .. ral remices our raw materials. e ar e expited through our cinen To rnany eople, this eskpl Pn of or culture, which we cal "oestc imnenialisa S not sem vey important, it is ef mar importanoc. ecs o st-industrial tech- -yv, beause of automtIon a cy etics, people will 'oon e atd from long grueling rs of meaninsless work qnd theinusrial control cul re ho goes with ii. AS l'E-OPLE GET more and moe "free time' "culture will play an increasingly central role in their common life; they will be fre to develop their human- ity, as Marx and Engels pre- .ted a hundred years ago, "The history c-f humanity is that of a entinuail progression from the realm of necessity to the realm of fi-"cdom'