COLUMN ONE : Algerians Confront Freedom : Perestroika has replaced one-party rule. Fundamentalists have mobilized. The nation is in turmoil on the eve of free-for-all elections.

Atop the white stucco walls and red tile roofs of this aging seaside city, they squat like spaceships, their sleek metal frames probing the blue Mediterranean sky from out of high-rise apartment buildings and the ancient recesses of the Casbah.

For modern Algerians, the parabolic antennas that have sprouted on rooftops by the thousands are a way of nurturing the former French colony’s lifeline to the mother ship and the rest of the modern Western world. French television, and all its seedy love stories, scantily clad women, nighttime talk shows and sultry booze ads, is now catalogued in Algiers’ leading weekly magazine.

For the guardians of Algeria’s Arab identity, who remember the blood spilled in this country’s fierce war of independence from France and who are struggling to re-emphasize its native Arabic language and Islamic values, the parabolas have another name: les antennes diaboliques , or antennas of the devil.

Almost as fast as young Algerians can put them up--at $1,150 apiece, even at black-market currency rates--stealthy packs of Muslim purists, climbing rooftops by night, have severed the lines.

The parabola debate reflects the turmoil boiling all over Algeria in the wake of the most dramatic political reforms anywhere in the Arab world.

With socialist regimes tumbling across Eastern Europe, Algeria--the historic patron of revolutionary movements and one of the few socialist countries in the Arab world--has in the last year plunged headlong into perestroika , with a distinctly Middle Eastern cast.

By legalizing an Islamic political party, the budding democracy in Algeria has opened the way to a tough new movement that Arab leaders fear could give Muslim fundamentalists their most important political foothold yet in the Arab world. Many Algerians also fear it could present a more insidious threat than 27 years of one-party rule.

Since independence in 1962, Algeria had been dominated by a single ruling party, and it was sinking under a cumbersome state-owned economy that was producing at less than a third of its capacity. Then, in little over a year, it legalized 23 political parties, adopted a new constitution, opened the door to limited foreign investment and asked hundreds of major state industries to begin turning a profit.

Algerians are almost dazed at the pace. Newspapers representing everyone from the newly legalized Communists to the Berbers have sprung up all over Algiers, many of them grabbed from deliverymen on the street and sold out before they can reach the newsstands.

A feminist organization was formed but was later taken over by Trotskyites, and two new groups have since emerged. A group claiming to represent Libyan Col. Moammar Kadafi’s ideas took out papers for party status.

Hundreds of thousands of activists have thronged through the streets in more than half a dozen major political rallies. Strikes, suddenly legalized, have been called at the rate of one every few weeks. Often, it’s not known exactly what new union called the strike. Sometimes the strikers wait several days to announce their demands.

On Tuesday nights, the capital nearly empties as Algerians crowd around their television sets to watch the new weekly “Face the Press”--a spirited free-for-all among newly legalized politicians somewhere between the U.S. “Meet the Press” and the Morton Downey show.

“For 27 years, there was really no political participation of the people,” said James Coffman, an American researcher studying the reforms. “All of a sudden, it’s opened up. People don’t know what to do with it. Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

President Chadli Bendjedid was already pushing his ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) toward some reforms when an outbreak of bloody riots in October, 1988, left little doubt that the economy was near collapse.

With the oil-price slump that hit in 1986, Algeria had lost 25% of its hard currency earnings, and the tailspin only got tighter. Beef now costs $20 a kilo (about $9 per pound), bananas about the same; butter, flour, coffee and oil are almost impossible to find. Most usable manufactured goods are exported out of the country.

Looming over all is a demographic nightmare that shows no signs of abating. Unemployment averages about 26%. Already, 57% of Algerians are under age 25, one of the highest rates in the world.

Families in parts of Algiers live seven to a room. And all over the city--in the coffee shops and at bus stops, along the pedestrian mall downtown and outside the hotels--stand the grim-faced reminders of a country whose citizens have become redundant: a generation of young men known as hittistes, or “wall people.” They are named for their habit of passing their days standing absently along storefronts with no place to go and nothing to do.

“There’s almost a lost generation here,” one Western diplomat said. “You’ve got people in that age group who have practically no hope of getting a job. If they get married, they won’t have a flat of their own. Their chances of giving their children the same kind of educational opportunity they had are minimal.”

Added another diplomat: “It’s scary when you have all those young people around with nothing to do and no hope. It’s awful when the majority of your young people, all they want to talk about is getting the hell out.”

Many, by the tens of thousands, have sought refuge in the mosques and inspiration in the charismatic holy men who have suddenly become Algeria’s most visible politicians.

Some analysts predict that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) could easily win 35% or more of the vote in the June 12 municipal elections, Algeria’s first since independence. Most also believe the FIS will be the only serious challenger to the ruling party.

After the earthquake that shook parts of Algeria last year, it was the FIS, in trucks emblazoned with the front’s logo, that got food and supplies to the countryside first.

The party also mobilized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in December, busing them into Algiers from across the nation, for a march to celebrate “the honor of the Algerian woman.” It was a counterprotest to an earlier march by feminists alarmed at the FIS’ proposal to solve unemployment by taking women out of the work force and paying them to stay home.

Several similar demonstrations and counterdemonstrations ensued, most recently a march for “true democracy” among opponents of both the FIS and FLN that drew tens of thousands of demonstrators last Thursday.

Abbasi Madani, the soft-spoken, bearded university professor who heads the FIS and acts as its spiritual mentor, claims as the party’s membership the 3 million Algerians who pray at the mosques each Friday.

Madani has become something of a hero to the thousands of young men who have begun growing beards and adopting militant Muslim slogans, turning out at rallies and bowing to pray en masse in what has come to be known among Algerian skeptics as the “Allahu Akhbar wave.”

When Algeria emerged victorious in the Africa Cup soccer finals in Algiers in March, thousands of young soccer fans began marching through the streets chanting “The people are with Abbasi Madani!”

But then, said several spectators, the chant changed, to “We want devise (foreign currency)!” and, finally, “We want women!”

“The FIS can change a lot of things,” Haywan Yardra, 18, said one recent afternoon. Yardra and several of his friends were playing soccer in the narrow, twisting alleys of the historic Casbah, the ball bouncing crazily from wall to wall and around a corner before someone ambled down to retrieve it.

“It’s the FIS who will put things in order, put things right. The FLN won’t change anything. Only the FIS. Abbasi Madani,” Yardra declared.

Further down the alley, the sound of the bouncing ball became more distant, and an eerie silence descended over the late afternoon. Suddenly, from the darkened recess of an open door, a voice crept out, starting out as a groan and ending in a long, slow wail, all in only two words: “Abbaaaaaaaaaaasi Madaaaaaaaaniiii. . . .”

The fundamentalists are adamant about transforming Algeria from one of the most French-influenced countries in Northern Africa back to its Arab and Islamic roots.

Already, classical Arabic is the language of instruction in all the elementary and most of the secondary schools, and the number of women wearing the hijab head covering in public has increased dramatically in the last several months.

Algerian women in Western dress have been assaulted on the streets. Last year, in Ouargla, several hundred miles south of Algiers, religious fanatics burned down the house of a divorced woman whose lifestyle they claimed was loose, killing one of her children.

Fundamentalists also closed down a restaurant during the recent Muslim fasting month of Ramadan for serving alcoholic beverages to Western tourists during lunch. And in what appeared to be a makeshift attempt to enforce their version of Islamic law, a crowd caught a thief in Algiers recently and attempted to tear his hand off in a car door.

At the airport in Algiers on the first day of Ramadan, a bearded young man walked up to a young Algerian woman, pulled a cigarette out of her mouth and stamped it on the floor. “Respect yourself,” he admonished, “and respect the people around you.”

Westernized Algerians have started asking themselves whether they might have opened a Pandora’s box when they opened the way for political reforms.

“We’re being bypassed,” sighed one middle-aged crepe shop owner in downtown Algiers whose education was in French and whose first love is French cuisine. On a recent afternoon, he turned up Elvis Presley on the tape player, poured himself an espresso and complained that he and others like him have been left behind.

“I’m a Muslim. I believe,” he said. “We’re Muslims here. One tries to be good. But we don’t want the fundamentalists to tell us what to do. We think some of them are crazy. They’re not open to new ways. They’re not open to new ideas or to the outside.”

At that point, with Elvis, he broke into a low roar: “Been too lonely too long!” Then, grinning, he went on: “You know, since independence, we’ve had one party. It was a dictatorial party, but they gave us money. The price of oil was high, people had money, people didn’t really care.

“But now there’s no money. The price of oil has dropped. We’re in an economic crisis. People are unemployed. And now, people are resentful.”

Feminist leader Khalida Messaoudi blames the FLN’s longtime rule for producing a generation of people who could not think for themselves.

“During 27 years, it was forbidden to express oneself. It was forbidden to think about anything,” Messaoudi said. “Much worse, it was not only forbidden, but they organized in schools and universities a whole process which formed a citizen who didn’t think, who didn’t know how to explain things, who was poor--not poor in his stomach but in his head.”

She continued, “I have a brother-in-law who was the product of such an education. Engineer. He was taught in French. He couldn’t . . . write two sentences in French correctly. He couldn’t tell me, either in French or in classical Arabic, how an appliance worked.

“This man one day became a very good Muslim, and all of a sudden he began to speak classical Arabic well and to express himself. I was there, fascinated. I was asking myself, ‘What is going on in his mind?’ It was the first time he could impose on others.”

Hocine Ait-Ahmed, a hero of the revolution who returned only last year after years in exile, speaks Arabic, French and his native Berber dialect in his public appearances as part of a campaign to maintain Algeria’s cultural plurality. He and his party are boycotting the June 12 elections. They complain that there was not enough time to organize and that the FLN still maintains too much control over the electoral process.

The Algerian government for years has encouraged the Islamic trend as a way of controlling democratic impulses among opposition groups perceived to be a more serious threat, and the result is it has backfired, Ait-Ahmed said in a recent interview.

“I don’t believe now this trend can solve our problems,” he said. “They can destroy things. They can bring about violence in the streets, but they have to come up with real solutions to our problems, and that I fear they cannot do. They can destroy but not build up, and of course they may content themselves with destroying. . . .

“My fear,” he said, “is this trend will be developing unless other possibilities of democracy, of denunciation, of free speech, are given possibilities to act. Democracy is not something which can be bestowed by the government. It must be gained by a daily fight.”