APPROVE CUBA'S STAND ON TEST-BAN PACT
The Ben Bella government was among the first to sign the Moscow- Washington "test-ban" pact. Algeria is especially sensitive to any further testing of nuclear weapons in view of France's program of developing her own stockpile. The de Gaulle government holds that the Evian agreement included permission to carry out tests on Algerian territory in the Sahara.
But the Ben Bella government also understands and sympathizes with: the stand of the Cubans in refusing to sign. This is expressed in the. following editorial which appeared in the. October 10 issue of the. Algerian daily, Le Peuple:
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The some one hundred countries that have signed the Moscow treaty certainly did not do this simply to ban carrying out nuclear tests! In truth, with only a few exceptions, most of these states have never had either the intention or the means to plunge into the adventure of atomic armament,
Instead, a great many of them had formally condemned nuclear tests before the adoption of the tripartite treaty.
In adhering to the Moscow treaty, the signatories themselves most often gave the real reason: to add a concrete contribution to the international détente which has begun, to give maximum impetus to this new turn in world history. It was above all adherence to the spirit of peaceful coexistence rather than a text, the letter of which concerns only the few members of the "atomic club."
It is therefore perfectly understandable that a country which is excluded from this coexistence, which is attacked almost daily by mer-cenaries and officially threatened on every occasion, refuses to trust a treaty the spirit of which is completely ignored so far as it is concerned, This is the case with Cuba,
The Guban government is not against the Moscow treaty in and of itself, On the contrary, it asks only that the improvement of inter-
alle national relations be concretized -~ Cuba wishes only to pursue her “socialist experiment in peace, and asks, as is her right, that others . “respect her existence and coexist with her. Then only could Havana. Logically sign the tripartite treaty.
“While waiting for this, the Cuban position provides matter for reflection. Peaceful coexistence, to be genuine, must not be established exclusively among the major capitals but must benefit the whole world. .In any case, this is what the hundred signatories of the Moscow treaty wished to underline by their gesture.- ,
GOOD CHOICE FOR PEACE PRIZE
In awarding the Nobel