The Soccer War

ALGERIA HIDES ITS FACE

Ahmed Ben Bella, the president of Algeria, was overthrown on 16 June 1965. It happened during the night-time changing of the guard, just after two o’clock in the morning. Ben Bella lived on the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, about half-way between the stifling, overcrowded centre of Algiers and the exclusive villa quarter known as Hydra. His house, though it bears the lovely name Villa Joly, was not particularly distinguished, just as the presidential offices were, while elegant, hardly grand. Those invited to Ben Bella’s home remember that he would always have to open the gate himself with a key and, being absent-minded, was always having to look everywhere for it. Ben Bella was forty-six and lived alone.

Ben Bella was modest, uncommonly honest and scrupulous about material affairs. He drove a Peugeot 404, a car that in other African countries would be driven by no one more senior than a department head. This was not a calculated modesty. The president always had an inborn, natural disregard for worldly goods. He ate at odd hours, on the run, and his clothes could never have been described as fine. These were simply things he did not care about.

Although forty-six, Ben Bella seemed much more youthful — physically and mentally. He was, as we might say, an example of the eternal youth. When I saw Ben Bella in Addis Ababa in 1963, I would have said he was thirty-six, thirty-seven. He had thick black hair that grew low on his forehead and a strongly expressive face, a masculine face, young, with fair skin. I was always struck by the infantile aspect of that face, an aspect that suggested boyish caprice, whimsy. In fact, Ben Bella had an uneven nature. Everything about him was fluid, uncoordinated, contradictory. He was a seething element, electrified, one that could not be confined. In an instant, Ben Bella might easily jump from one mood to another. He was impulsive, gusty, swept by passions. He would get impatient, and that impatience finished him. When excited, he would let words fly, unchecked, unconsidered, and then make irrational decisions that he would have to disown the next morning. ‘Ben Bella put the leadership in a situation,’ one of his close associates said later, ‘where nobody knew what to hold on to.’ His behaviour reflected the traits of his character. From prison he developed a peculiar habit of relaxation; he could sit for hours without moving, with his face of absolute stone, not a single muscle stirring. The effect was eerie. Suddenly, he would come to life, become ecstatic, gesticulate violently as he spoke, until, exhausted and smiling, he then calmed down again. The terrific stress of his life must have destroyed his internal harmony.

Ben Bella’s character riveted the attention; it was fascinating.

Soccer was his passion. He loved to watch it and played it himself. Often, between meetings, he would drive to a soccer pitch and kick a ball around. In these impromptu matches, Ben Bella’s closest companion was another enthusiastic soccer player, the foreign minister and one of the leading organizers of the plot against Ben Bella: Abdel Azis Buteflika.

Technically, the coup against Ben Bella was carried out with an absolutely flawless precision. The conditions were ideal: Villa Joly lay near Colonel Houari Boumedienne’s house, and near the Villa Artur, where Buteflika lived, and above all near the gendarmerie barracks, the general staff headquarters, where the plot was thrashed out. Ben Bella lived alone, surrounded by the houses of the very people who would later throw him into a dungeon. This was a drama that was literally played out in the backyard.

Ben Bella’s house was watched by police and soldiers. At just after two in the morning, as the sentries went off-duty, they would have seen that the commander of the next shift was Tahar Zbiri, the chief of staff of the Algerian People’s Army. Zbiri, the son of peasants, was a born military talent, a classic guerrilla type, who as a partisan commander in the liberation war distinguished himself by his unbelievable bravery and his splendid tactical thinking. After the liberation, Zbiri was marginalized by the élite of Boumedienne’s army, and Ben Bella, guided by a foreboding — of which he may not even have been conscious — that Boumedienne might one day turn against him, raised Zbiri to chief of the general staff, believing apparently that in the event of a showdown with Boumedienne, Ben Bella could put Zbiri at the head of the army.

Yet it was Tahar Zbiri who, on the night of 19 June, led the operation. Several general staff officers took part, all wearing helmets and fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. They entered the Villa Joly. A pair of juggernauts, T-54 tanks, clanked along the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt.

The first thing Ben Bella must have seen when he woke was the rifle barrels pointed at him and then the massive but graceful silhouette of his friend, the hero of the liberation war — Zbiri, in whom the president had invested such great political hopes.

There are four different versions about what happened next; they are all journalistic invention. The only thing we can assume is that Ben Bella was led out of his bedroom. The rest is rumour.

Literally nothing, in fact, is known.

Ben Bella is said to have been killed. To have been wounded. To be alive. To have been not wounded, but ill. Everything is reported, since nothing is known. One version has him on a ship anchored off Algiers. That version is confuted by a report that they are holding Ben Bella in the Sahara, at an army base. According to another view, he is still staying at the Villa Joly, which has a certain logic in that it would allow Boumedienne to keep Ben Bella under close observation. Boumedienne could be meeting with Ben Bella right now and negotiating.

Everything is possible, since nothing is known.

The most common version is the official one: that Ben Bella is in Algeria and being well treated. It might even be true.

Ben Bella was the leader of Algeria for three years.

Algeria is unique; at every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts. Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.

Algeria is in that group of African countries where European colonialism lasted a long time. The French ruled Algeria for 132 years. Only the Portuguese in Angola and in Mozambique, and the Afrikaaners and English in South Africa, have had a longer colonial tenure. Algeria will bear the mark left by French colonial hegemony for decades. It has crippled and deformed Algeria — more so than in most of the other independent African countries — and in this deformation European settlers have played a major role. They always do. In assessing the devastation, what matters is not only the length of the colonial period, but, perhaps above all, the number of settlers: only South Africa has more. Around 1.2 million Europeans settled in Algeria, equal to the number of European settlers in all the twenty-six countries of tropical Africa combined. Settlers made up one tenth of the Algerian population.

There is another important factor: Algeria’s geographical position. Of all the African colonies, Algeria lay closest to its colonial metropolis. Today, it takes two hours to fly from Algiers to Paris, two hours that are not only a fact of communication but also a symbol of the bond between France and Algeria: one that the French developed over a period of 132 years and which neither the liberation war nor independence has severed. What’s more, Algeria today is, as the statistics reveal, more closely bound (and not only economically) to its former colonial metropolis than any other independent country of Africa.

An image characteristic of a colonial country is the modern automated electronics factory, and beyond its walls are caverns inhabited by people who still use wooden hoes. ‘Look what beautiful highways we’ve built for them,’ say the colonialists. Indeed: but along those highways lie villages where people have yet to emerge from the palaeolithic age.

That is what you see in Algeria.

People who love France will rave about Algiers. It is a French city through and through, and even the Arab district of the Casbah has a French esprit. This is not Africa; it is Lyon, Marseille. International shop windows, sublime French cuisine, enchanting bistros. The contrivances of Parisian fashion reach here in a day, like the Parisian press and Parisian gossip.

But forty kilometres from Algiers, from this Paris of Africa, the stone age begins. After half an hour’s drive I feel that I am back in Africa. Sixty kilometres from Algeria begin villages where to this day the people do not know the potter’s wheel. The original Kabyle pots are formed by hand. And a new contrast: in this primitive Kabylia where they believe that washing children causes agonized death, I found a hospital where a Polish doctor who had just arrived from Kraków on a contract told me: ‘They have an operating room here beyond my wildest dreams, with technical miracles I could never have imagined. I don’t even know how to work these gadgets.’

A journey into the depths of Algeria is a journey in time, withdrawing into remote epochs that continue to exist here, still present, surrounded by the parched steppe or sands of the Sahara.

Nine tenths of Algeria is Sahara.

The Algerian Sahara is famous for the French atomic research centre at Reggane, for the first oil fields and for the stones of Tassilli where the oldest frescoes in the world have been preserved. At the town of Insalah in the Algerian Sahara the largest slave market in the world existed until recently: Ben Bella closed it, dividing the land and date palms of the slave traders among the slaves. Today Insalah is the only place in the world ruled by the slave class, known as the haratin (beasts of burden). Thus did Ben Bella make the dream of Spartacus come true.

Colonialism fosters social chasms, and the fissures still run through Algerian society. Colonial policy elevates a class of ‘cultured’ and ‘reliable’ natives while pushing the rest of society down on a stratum of poverty and ignorance. The bureaucrats, the bourgeois and the intelligentsia are cut off, all clearly and undemocratically raised above the rest of society. They have modelled themselves on the French, have adopted their way of living and, to a large degree, of thinking. Their habitat is the city, the desk vacated by the Frenchman, the café. Every Algerian politician is here from reactionaries to communists, united by their lifestyle, not their politics. The people who run Algeria’s political and administrative machine have been recruited from these circles. A command of French is a condition for entry and these people are fluent in French. One more common characteristic: their isolation from the country. One thing these people are certainly not doing: they are not filling in the chasm between Algiers and Algeria. That is not their job; they do not think about it, mainly because they do not know the country: they live in Algiers, but they do not live in Algeria. ‘It is striking,’ someone told me in conversation, ‘that these people are generally strangers to Algeria. Nobody here knows the countryside. Ben Bella took a slight interest in the villages, but nobody else.’ And the villages are eighty per cent of Algeria.

The war in Algeria lasted seven and a half years and, with China’s and Vietnam’s, was one of the biggest wars of liberation of the last twenty years. The Algerian people showed the highest proof of their heroism, endurance and patriotism.

The war ended in defeat for France.

But Algeria paid a high price for their victory. It is still paying.

One tenth of the Algerian population — more than a million people — died in the war. The killed, the murdered, and the napalmed go by the name of chuhada—the martyred.

The French worked enormous destruction upon Algeria. Eight thousand villages were levelled, and millions were left without a roof over their head. Thousands of acres of forest, which shielded the soil from erosion, were burned. The cattle that provided half the peasantry with its livelihood were killed off (only three million head of cattle out of seven million survived). The fellah bore the brunt of the war.

The war caused huge migrations. Three million Algerians were driven from their villages and confined to reservations or resettled in the isolated regions. Four hundred thousand Algerians found themselves in prison or interned. Three hundred thousand fled to Tunisia and Morocco. At the same time, throughout the whole war, people from the villages — where repression hit hardest — fled to the cities, where, today, thirty per cent of the Algerian population now lives. Most of them have no jobs, but they do not want to go back to the villages, or they cannot return because the villages no longer exist.

Beyond the human and material losses, however, the traces of the war persist in the social consciousness. These are living traces, both positive and negative. Positive: because Algeria emerged from the war as a country of independent social and political ambitions, as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial country. Negative: because divisions arose in Algerian society paralysing it.

This had never been a homogeneous society. It consisted — and still consists — of a mix of ethnic groups, religious sects, social classes, tribes and clans: a rich and complex mosaic. The war introduced a certain order, drew the majority of Algerians into the struggle for a common goal; but as soon as the war ended, Algerian society began to disintegrate anew. But meanwhile, the war had added a new division: on one side, those who took part in the war: on the other side, those who served the French. And among those who took part were those who fought within the country and those who fought outside its borders.

Guerrillas fought inside the country. Three hundred thousand Algerians are estimated to have taken a direct part in the guerrilla war. They are the ones who shed the most blood. At the same time, the French were recruiting Algerians into its army and administration: their hands in the struggle against the rebels. The dividing line often ran through a single village, through a single family. (‘Tujji does not contain one family,’ writes Jules Roy about an Algerian town in his book The War in Algeria, ‘which would not have been split and which would not have had to come to terms with both the FLN [Front de Libération National] and the French army … In a certain family one man joined the rebels and another is in the French army … Why is he in the service of the French? Because there he receives a chunk of bread and a soldier’s pay … Will these divisions vanish when peace comes? The army believes not, believes that on the contrary they will deepen … Is there any way not to share these fears? In Tujji, thirty men serve in the French army and every evening they lie in ambush for their guerrilla brothers.’) The memory of who did what in the war remains alive in Algeria today. Today members of the Algerian professional class come from among the former collaborators, because only they had the opportunity to gain qualifications. Today they make up the administrative cadre: what’s more, even though many of them are engaged in quiet but systematic sabotage, the government has also been forced to take them back into the army. During the conflict with Morocco, Algeria was losing because of the weakness of its support staff and finally concluded that it had to utilize the collaborators because they are the experts.

There is a third group: the emigrants — those who spent the war in French prisons (like Ben Bella) and those who served in the Algerian army that was formed in Morocco and Tunisia (like Boumedienne).

Algeria gained its independence during a profound crisis among members of the guerrilla movement: they had been bled dry, decimated, beaten back into the depths of the country, into the most desolate and inaccessible wasteland. They were being scattered. In the meantime, across the border in Tunisia and Morocco, a strong, expertly organized, excellently armed, well trained, solidly provisioned young Algerian army was forming. And as the guerrillas took a step towards seizing power, they found that the army had already rolled into Algeria with armoured columns and was enforcing a new order. From that moment in the summer of 1962 the border army has decided, still decides, and will continue to decide everything in Algeria.

From that moment too, the political activists, the whole élite that governs and the whole apparatus that administers will fall into three factions, three groups: emigrants, guerrilla veterans and collaborators.

This is the country that Ben Bella took over in 1962. He began under conditions that were not auspicious, the very same conditions that would determine his eventual defeat.

The country was weakened by the war, battered, particularly its villages, which were devastated. A million French colonists had fled in haste, and the country’s own population was only starting to drift back from exile, from reservations, from the camps. The farms stood abandoned; the factories were idle. There was no organized administration, and members of a professional class were scarce, a technical cadre non-existent. Unemployment: universal. And, more than anything else, the society was exhausted, starved. It wanted peace; it wanted to eat. Even today, you can still feel clearly that this society is tired.

Ben Bella took power in a country that may be the most difficult land to govern in Africa. When he began, he was alone. A few months before, he had been in prison, having spent years in isolation. He arrived without a staff or troops. Most of the active politicians opposed him, blocked him; he was without a devoted and powerful party of his own. There was only one force from which Ben Bella could hope for backing in his struggle for power: the army, the masterful, confident border army of Boumedienne.

The essential feature of this army was that it was inactive. While the war was being fought inside Algeria, Boumedienne’s army was unable to reach it because the army couldn’t cross the network of impenetrable barriers along the border controlled by Tunisia and Algeria. Blocked in this way, Boumedienne’s army became increasingly political, its political activity compensating for its inability to act militarily. In fact, all along, Boumedienne’s soldiers trained on the revolutionary model, the soldier-political with a rifle in one hand and an agitprop manual in the other. The old guard of politicians gathered around the Algerian Provisional Government and FLN had seen the dangers for a long time: the old politicians, fearing the army, looked for ways to clip its wings, and on 2 July 1962, three days before Algerian independence, the Provisional Government decided to remove Boumedienne and the officers closest to him, who sit today on the Revolutionary Council. But Boumedienne was not about to be unseated. He came out openly against the old politicians. And Ben Bella too, whom the old politicians had refused to admit to power, stood against them. Logic led to Ben Bella allying with Boumedienne. Neither could do without the other. Ben Bella was a name, also at odds with the Provisional Government; he knew how to speak; he backed the idea of a politicized army. The politicized army, the only unified Algerian force at the end of the war, pushed Ben Bella into power. Only the army’s candidate had a chance to take power. Only Ben Bella.

So it happened.

But at the same time, Ben Bella had from the beginning stepped into a snare: the army would be watching; the army knew that finally it could do whatever it wanted.

I want to defend Ben Bella just as I am going to defend Boumedienne. Ben Bella was not the ‘demon’ that the nervous, demagogic communiqué of 19 June accused him of being, no more than Boumedienne is the ‘reactionary’ that L’Unita wrote about. Both are victims of the same drama that every Third World politician lives through if he is honest, if he is a patriot. This was the drama of Lumumba and Nehru; it is the drama of Nyerere and Sekou Touré. The essence of the drama lies in the terrible material resistance that each one encounters on taking his first, second and third steps up the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and begins to do it and then sees, after a month, after a year, after three years, that it just isn’t happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness, the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists, the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink. Progress comes with great difficulty along such a road. The politician begins to push too hard. He looks for a way out through dictatorship. The dictatorship then fathers an opposition. The opposition organizes a coup.

And the cycle begins anew.

Three years of Ben Bella’s government.

The opposition accuses him of doing little.

Who says?

The balance sheet of his government has its indisputable credits: Ben Bella brought order to a country emerging from war; he got Algeria moving: the state apparatus, the economy, education, normal life. He turned over to the workers plantations and factories that the colonists had abandoned. Each time he nationalized an enterprise, it was an act of bravery. He prevented the civil war that was threatening the country and would have plunged it into a long decline. He prepared a programme of agricultural reform which changed the lives of several hundred thousand Algerian workers. He conferred on Algeria the prestige of becoming a leading country in the Third World, wanting Algeria to be the bridge between Europe and Africa. He opened Africa and the Arab world to the European left and to Communist parties. He was an active spokesman in the fight against colonialism.

Orthodoxy, fanaticism, did not burden Ben Bella’s view of the world, which was open, receptive, tolerant, even if sometimes insufficiently discriminating. In his youth, Ben Bella had been a student of no ideological school and had joined the movement only because he wanted a free Algeria. He fought and was imprisoned. When he took power, his views seemed right wing, but then moved left, an unmistakable evolution, but an evolution that proceeded not from intellectual operations but rather somehow from his instincts, through practical politics. They say that Ben Bella’s socialism was sentimental: they say that Ben Bella ‘had his heart on the left,’ that he simply liked socialism. Ben Bella tried to create the conditions in which youth could develop, to free the fellah from the tyranny of the magnates, to free slaves, to fight for the rights of women: Algerian women despaired when they heard that Ben Bella had been removed; they dressed in mourning. (One told me: ‘He wanted to create a life for women. Now the men will lock us back up in the home.’)

Ben Bella’s socialism was brave and original. In simple terms, it was a socialist economy with the Islamic superstructure left undisturbed. The opposition accused him of talking too much and doing too little. They said that Ben Bella’s socialism was verbal.

How much time does the president of Algeria devote to fighting the opposition?

Ben Bella had a running battle with the opposition. Instead of developing his programme, he had to deal with his enemies. The situation is typically Algerian. Somebody is always plotting, and the constant threat of a coup paralyses the government. Take the year 1963. In April Ben Bella removes Khider, the general secretary of the FLN, because Khider has been organizing an opposition to him. In June he arrests Budiafy for conspiring against the government. In July the Kabyle leader Ait Ahmed announces that he has declared an open war against the government. In August Ben Bella removes Ferhat Abbas, the leader of the National Assembly, because Abbas opposes the party. In September he removes Rabeh Bitat for opposition activity; the same month he also removes Colonel el-Haji for organizing an uprising in Kabylia. In October and November there is a major rebellion among the Kabyle, who constitute nearly a fifth of the Algerian population. These are only the affairs that made headlines; how many conspiracies were nipped in the bud? How many small-time seditionists were there? In Algeria, nothing ever ends in a discussion. Political discipline is lacking, and the ability to think in terms of the good of the state is unknown. For that, you need years, whole generations.

Everything that occurs here is ideological, but the ideology is fluid, undefined, because this is not capitalism, which nobody espouses, and it is not socialism, which is known in only a cursory way, and it is not yet an Islamic orthodoxy. Some new quality is being born, and it is not yet expressed in any doctrine; everyone understands it in his own way. The Algerian mentality is full of clutter, contradictions and collages of the most fantastic incongruities. Political contentions are tortuous, as political opponents, operating without clear conceptions, can neither understand each other nor define their own positions. Their battles are fought on the ground of personal antagonism and old quarrels.

Nevertheless Ben Bella, with the members of the opposition gradually finding themselves behind bars or choosing to emigrate, seems to be picking his way skilfully through the labyrinth. Ben Bella thinks he is standing on solid ground.

Ben Bella is not standing on solid ground.

What was happening in Algeria just before the coup?

Things were not going well.

There were the problems that still needed to be solved: the millions of unemployed, the rural poverty, the confusion in the private sector, the lack of expertise, the gap between what the government said it would do for the country and its actual state, the deficit. Ben Bella could not solve these problems, and it was hard to see who would; it was hard to see when they could be solved.

Economic stagnation, internal disappointments, bureaucratic inertia, and the immobility of the masses always push Third World politicians in one of two directions: they become dictators or else they escalate their activities abroad, enlarge their foreign policy.

Ben Bella tried to make up for his domestic failures with a foreign policy that enhanced his prestige in the world. His policies attracted more and more of his time, more and more of his passion. He enjoyed visits and round table discussions. He could be captivating; people fell under the spell of his personal charm. His ambitions were great. He thought about supporting the rebels in Angola and Mozambique; he trained South African guerrillas. He invited members of the World Youth Festival to Algiers. He made the capital the site for the second Afro-Asian conference. They say that he supervised the preparations personally, refusing to share them with anyone. Before the conference he was conducting wide-ranging correspondence with heads of state: he invited Chou En-Lai for a visit in June. He would set out on a visit to de Gaulle in July. Algeria became the pivotal Third World state, but the cost of its status — above all, the financial cost — was staggering. It ate up millions of dollars for which the country had a crying need.

Gradually, the gap between Ben Bella’s domestic and foreign policies grew wider. The contrast deepened: Algeria had earned an international reputation as a revolutionary state; its policies were brave, decisive and dynamic; it had become a haven for the struggling and the oppressed of the world; it was an example for the non-European continents, a model, bright and entrancing: while at home, the country was stagnating; the unemployed filled the squares of every city; there was no investment; illiteracy ruled, bureaucracy, reaction, fanaticism ran riot; intrigues absorbed the attention of the government.

This gap between foreign and domestic politics, typical of many Third World countries, never lasts for long. The country, even if of the politician’s making, always drags him back down to earth. The country cannot carry the burden of these policies. It cannot afford to; and it has no interest in them.

Two reasons confirmed the decision to go ahead with the coup: Ben Bella’s style of governing and his preparations for a showdown with Boumedienne.

Like every autocrat, Ben Bella gradually dispensed with people who thought independently and were prepared to defend their views, but, equally, could not respect and would not listen to those who remained. He dominated them; they were inferior. He paid less and less attention to those around him. He grew intolerant. He shouted at them. He no longer summoned them to help him make decisions. He summoned them to inform them of the decisions he had made. ‘Today I’ve decided that so-and-so,’ was how he would open politburo meetings. The principles of the court were at work, pushing the leader into a state of isolation. He held centre stage but held it alone. The Villa Joly gradually became empty. Ben Bella even lost touch with his old friends. He had no time for them, or they got on his nerves. If someone called on him to offer advice, Ben Bella would explode, ring for his bodyguards, and order them to arrest the caller. People began to stay out of his way, for fear of crossing him. He was a man of moods: he would easily fly into a rage and then he would sulk. He would get all wound up and stop thinking about what he was saying. Shortly before the coup he screamed at a cabinet meeting, ‘I’m finished with all of you!’

He was indeed finished with them.

He no longer trusted anyone. People were either plotting or carrying out sabotage. One day he introduced Boumedienne to an Egyptian journalist with the words, ‘This is the man who is preparing the conspiracy against me.’ And he asked: ‘How are the intrigues coming along?’ ‘Quite well, thank you,’ Boumedienne replied.

He concentrated more and more power in his own hands. He was president of the republic and general secretary of the party. He also began taking over ministries. He decided who would be a member of the politburo, who would be a member of the central committee, who would join the government and sit in parliament. ‘He decided everything,’ Buteflika later assured the journalists.

His was a complicated, many-layered personality, for, at the same time, he was trying to assure everyone that he liked them. He talked with each faction and made promises to each. In the morning he met with the leftists and made promises he could not keep; in the afternoon he met with the right wing and made more promises that he could not keep. People stopped believing him. The mutual suspicion grew, increasing the tension.

He played, he improvised. He was a great improviser, a tactician. But no clear strategic thinking guided his tactics. In these tactics there were no plans, there was only juggling.

Nobody could tell him anything. He was uncritical towards himself. He believed in his own strength, in his own star, in his own popularity. He had a good press — until the last minute he had a very good press. Writing anything bad about Ben Bella counted as a lapse of taste. Journalists liked him. He received them enthusiastically. He was so sure of himself that he felt the moment had come to deal with his main opponent, the very force that had carried him into power, that for three years had stood not so much behind him as beside him — the army. He did not know, he did not sense, the hopelessness of the struggle on which he was about to embark. The army was more than those in uniform: it was also those who had been in uniform, launching their careers. Half of the government, the central committee, the parliament, was army — present or past, émigré or guerrilla. The majority of Ben Bella’s people belonged not to Ben Bella; they belonged to Boumedienne.

Ben Bella began by creating units of a people’s militia, a counter-balance, he believed, to the influence of the army. It would not work. Next, while Boumedienne was in Moscow, Ben Bella named Tahar Zbiri chief of the general staff, a move to which Boumedienne would never have agreed: Zbiri was not army; Zbiri had been a guerrilla.

They say that by the beginning of June the atmosphere had become unbearable, that Ben Bella was obviously preparing a purge. And then he himself declared his intentions.

A week before the coup, on Saturday 12 June, Ben Bella called for a politburo meeting the following Saturday, 19 June. Its agenda would be the following:

1. Changes in the cabinet.

2. Changes in the army command.

3. The liquidation of the military opposition.

Boumedienne was not present — he had already split irrevocably with Ben Bella — but half of the members of the politburo were Boumedienne’s people anyway.

After this meeting, Ben Bella boarded an airplane and left for a week in Oran, leaving behind in Algiers everyone he had threatened.

Nobody knew who was to be dismissed. Everyone discreetly examined his conscience. Everyone felt uncertain, and the uncertainty united them. In Ben Bella’s absence, discussions continued about whether to carry out the coup. Might it not be enough to just threaten a coup?

On Friday 18 June, a few hours before the coup, Ben Bella addressed a rally in Oran. He told the rally that ‘Algeria is united as never before,’ that all rumours of divisions in the government are nonsense, hostile propaganda. Afterwards he went to a soccer match — he never missed a match — and then he returned to Algeria in the late evening. Someone apparently telephoned him, requesting an emergency cabinet meeting. He answered that he was tired and was going to bed. At two in the morning he was awakened by his friend, Colonel Tahar Zbiri, who was wearing a helmet and holding an automatic.

Ben Bella disappeared without a trace.

The organizer of the coup was the first vice-premier, the minister of national defence, a member of the politburo of the FLN, a member of the Algerian National Assembly, the commander of the national people’s army, and a former teacher of Arabic literature, Houari Boumedienne (born Bukharuba Mohammed). He was a colonel because the Algerian army, like all people’s or revolutionary armies, has no rank of general or marshal. Officers’ insignia are very modest, and the uniforms of privates and officers do not differ in the cut or the quality of the material.

Boumedienne is not photogenic (and, what’s worse, the newspapers that dislike him retouch his face to give him a predatory cast), but in the flesh, he makes a likeable impression. He is of medium height, very slim, with a long, almost ascetic face, sunken cheeks and prominent jaws. His eyes, in deep sockets, are brown, mobile and uncommonly penetrating. Boumedienne does not look like an Arab. He has long, dark wavy hair and a close-cropped moustache rusty with the nicotine from his chain-smoking.

His manner astonished me. I met him a few days after the coup and was prepared for someone characterized by the mannerisms of a despot. In fact, Boumedienne was shy, embarrassed. I was attending a reception at the People’s Palace. He bowed as low as a schoolboy to everyone. He did not know what to do with his hands, and his lack of social experience was obvious. After receiving the guests he sat in a chair against the wall and stared silently at an empty corner of the room. I do not know if he exchanged a single sentence with anyone in the course of the reception.

I asked one of the correspondents accredited in Algiers: ‘Have any of you ever talked with Boumedienne?’ Nobody had. ‘He does not talk to anyone,’ he said. ‘He does not talk at all.’ Indeed, Boumedienne is tightly sealed, a hermetic character: if Boumedienne has to say a word, he does so with great effort, as if he were laying bricks. He prefers to answer in monosyllables or with a nod of his head. He seldom delivers a speech. In the past year, he had given one speech. He reads his speeches from a text. They are always short, made up of dry theses. They say that Boumedienne treats civilians warily, that he cannot stand diplomatic chit-chat or round-table talks.

He comes across as a man who is always concentrating, absorbed by a particularly difficult and important idea. That is why he rarely smiles. He has none of a leader’s stagecraft: he does not stroke children on the head or raise his hands in the air when he speaks or push himself forward in any way. He does not worry about his image or his status as a celebrity. This is not a pose, but the way he is. He dresses neglectfully; his long trouser cuffs wrinkle over his shoes; his jacket is buttoned the wrong way. He does not dress in a white shirt and tie; he always wears some sort of polo shirt, or fatigues.

He has one passion: the army; it is in his blood. He always howled when Ben Bella spent money on conferences and visits, because he wanted that money to go to the army. Boumedienne’s world consists of barracks, staff and a firing range. Boumedienne’s ambition is a political army, in the sense of the army-state. Saving the homeland: by means of the army. Development: by means of the army. Civilians never accomplish anything worthwhile; they mean demagogy and corruption; civilians always drag the country into a crisis. You need to have a few civilians in the government because the world does things that way, but only the army can keep the country on its feet, especially when the country is in a mess with factions eating at each other instead of thinking about the general good.

Boumedienne first met Ben Bella in Cairo, in 1954. Boumedienne was nothing at the time; he was twenty-eight years old and teaching in an Arabic school. Ben Bella pulled Boumedienne into the liberation struggle. Later Boumedienne carried Ben Bella into power, and in exchange Ben Bella defended Boumedienne against a party leadership that wanted the army to be only an army, to keep its nose out of politics. For years they did each other favours. They appeared everywhere together: Ben Bella, the born leader, the man of the world, in front; and behind him, like a shadow, silent, unmoving: Boumedienne.

Ben Bella and Boumedienne were two radically different characters, two entirely dissimilar mentalities. But each was indubitably an individual. Ben Bella had to get on Boumedienne’s nerves, while Boumedienne had to strike fear into Ben Bella.

Boumedienne has a steely character. He is a man without hesitation, a revolutionary, an Arab nationalist, a spokesman for the Algerian fellah and the little man in the cities. Above all, Boumedienne will try to do something for these classes. They are the social elements to whose longings and ambitions the colonel is most sensitive and who make up ninety per cent of Algerian society.

The most common response to the coup in Algeria was distaste. Ambition was at work here. Algerians regard themselves as aristocrats among the Arabs, as cultured Arabs: there might be coups in places like Iraq or Libya, but not in Algeria. The coup compromised Algeria in the eyes of the world, especially as it fell in the week before the second Afro-Asian conference.

A coup here, with a couple of days to go before the conference. Unbelievable confusion broke out. There was no reliable information. The Revolutionary Council was acting underground, like the Mafia. Nobody knew where the council was located or who was on the council. There was no official authority. Various figures would put themselves forward as spokesmen for the new order, but nobody knew them. Who could tell — he might be a spokesman or he might be some crackpot. Rumours circulated through the city. Ben Bella is alive. Ben Bella is dead. The conference will come off. There isn’t going to be any conference. There’s going to be a demonstration. There’s going to be a revolt. Nasser is coming. Chou En-Lai is on his way. They’re all coming. Nobody’s coming. They’re arresting the communists. They’re arresting the Egyptians. They’re arresting everybody. It has already started. It starts today. It starts tomorrow. It will start in a week.

A fearsome heatwave set in. People fainted in the streets. A rabid Ben Bella supporter told me: ‘The people will not rise. It’s too hot.’ He was right: the days were quiet and the demonstrations began at night. They went on for five evenings. Young people, boys from the street came out, full of enthusiasm, caught up in it, but they were not organized. Two, perhaps three thousand people took part in the largest demonstrations in Algiers. The army was mustered against them. This army knows crowd control like the rosary. And it has the most modern equipment to enforce it. By the sixth day the demonstrations were over and the army returned to the barracks.

The young people apart, everything was quiet. The party was quiet; the labour unions were quiet; other organizations were quiet. People said that they were talking about what to do, that there was hesitation. The coup revealed the total fragmentation of society, the absence of cohesion, the absence of bonds, the total absence of organized force.

Power lay on the side of the army. And the army was in control. The people of the left were pessimistic. They expected repression and slept, hidden in their homes. But the repression never came. Boumedienne did not lock up a single communist, a single leftist. The fear came from the fact that nobody in Algeria knows the army.

Boumedienne is not concerned with convincing people. Boumedienne acts. People in Africa like a leader who speaks, explains, confides. Nasser confided to the crowd at a rally that his daughter was not going to university because she failed her exams. He spoke about this sorrowfully, like the father of a child who had not succeeded; he spoke to thousands of fathers with similar problems.

The coup showed Algeria for what it is — a typical Third World country. On the bottom, there are the peasant masses on the eternal treadmill of poverty, in continual fear of a drought, praying constantly to Allah for the bowl of food that their barren land cannot supply them with. At the top, somewhere in the drawing rooms, someone is being locked up; someone has been overthrown. Two worlds — with no visible links between them.

After the coup, the Revolutionary Council took control in Algeria, the élite of the army making up the majority of the council.

There might have been a way to avoid the coup, which, as a tactical move, was extremely blunt. But it must be remembered that these were young people; by the standards of European politics, this is a youth organization. The average age of a Revolutionary Council member is somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-four. Boumedienne, at thirty-nine, is the senior member. Algerian politics is the domain of people in their twenties and thirties. All of politics. What’s more, these are Arabs, uncommonly proud people, sensitive on points of honour, hot-blooded, who will go after each other on the slightest pretext. ‘Ben Bella offended us’—this is reason enough to lock Ben Bella up. Many of these flukes and freaks of African politics have this background: politics are practised by inexperienced people who have not yet learned to foresee the irrevocable consequences of their decisions, who have not yet absorbed the seriousness and prudence of older political war-horses.

On the African political stage, the army remains. Few in Algeria know what attitudes prevail in the army. There is something of the mafia about the army, and something of a religious sect. The officers do not greet each other with salutes; they shake hands and kiss each other on both cheeks.

People of various political orientations sit on the Revolutionary Council. Reactionaries and progressives, brought temporarily together by the fear of Ben Bella. There will be contention in this group, divisions and reclassifications will occur.

Anything can still happen: a new conspiracy, a new coup, revolt within the army, an uprising in Kabylia. Boumedienne told Heikal: ‘The Algerian revolution is a revolution of surprises.’