A Crash of Glass

In predawn darkness last Saturday morning, truckloads of Algerian troops pulled up before President Ahmed ben Bella's white-walled hillside Villa Joly, overlooking the Mediterranean. The soldiers quickly pushed aside police bodyguards, hurried through the garden to the glass-paneled front door. There was a rough exchange in guttural Arabic, the sound of breaking glass, and a light snapped on in the President's upstairs bedroom. Ben Bella woke up to discover he was deposed and under arrest.

General Cleanup. Only two days before in Oran, he had delivered a speech in which he confidently asserted that the nation was "more united than ever before." He had been looking forward to playing host next week to 3,000 delegates from some 60 nations at the second Afro-Asian Conference, and thousands of workers were laboring 24 hours a day on the construction of an 18,000-sq.-yd. meeting hall and on a general cleanup and trash-removal campaign in Algiers.

By morning, army tanks prowled the boulevards, and Radio Algiers began playing Arabic patriotic songs. Abruptly at noon it broke off the music to announce that the government had been taken over by a new Council of Revolution, led by the Defense Minister and army commander, Colonel Houari Boumedienne. The regime of "personal power" was over, said the announcer, and "Ben Bella would meet the fate reserved by history to all despots." A communique signed by Boumedienne charged Ben Bella with an arm-long list of faults: "bad management, waste of public funds, instability, demagogy, anarchy, lying, improvisation, mystification, threats, blackmail and uncertainty about tomorrow." In an aside to the Afro-Asian delegates, Boumedienne said the show would go on as planned but now it would not be "cynically exploited by one man for his personal ends to the detriment of the country's higher interests."

Stray Clemency. As coups go, Boumedienne's was impressively efficient and bloodless. Only at Hydra, in the suburban heights above Algiers, did the police put up a good fight. What baffled most observers was why Boumedienne acted when he did. Ben Bella ran a one-man show for nearly three years and ran it badly, but always with the strong support of Boumedienne and his 60,000-man army. It was Boumedienne who routed the guerrillas who seized Algiers to protest Ben Bella's overthrow of Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda. It was Boumedienne who crushed Colonel Mohammed Chaabani's desert insurrection and executed its leader. It was Boumedienne who managed the capture of Berber Rebel Leader Hocine Ait Ahmed. When the Berbers of Kabylia revolted in 1963, Boumedienne's troops took heavy losses in quelling the uprising.

Since the first of the year, Ben Bella had been making overtures to his enemies. Hocine Ait Ahmed was spared the death sentence in an effort to mollify Kabylia; Ferhat Abbas, the moderate first Premier of the provisional government, and five other political prisoners were released last week from detention deep in the Sahara and allowed their freedom. At the same time, Ben Bella was pressing for peace with exiled Algerian leaders who had been campaigning against him from the safety of France and Switzerland. In his Oran speech, Ben Bella called for "clemency to the strayed," and reportedly was ready to set some 8,000 prisoners at liberty.

Army Attachment. It may be that Boumedienne decided Ben Bella was getting soft. Other speculation on the cause of the coup centered on Foreign

Minister Abdel Aziz Bouteflika, a close ally of Boumedienne. It had been rumored in recent weeks that Ben Bella was about to drop Bouteflika. In any event Bouteflika emerged as an early spokesman for the new regime, reassuring France that Algeria would adhere to all of its treaty obligations and informing newsmen that Ben Bella was alive and would soon face trial for "high treason."

But there was no doubt that Boumedienne was top man in the coup. A sandy-haired bachelor who wears a straggly reddish mustache, Boumedienne is of peasant stock and comes from the mountains south of Bone. He attended both French and Islamic schools and spent at least two years at Egypt's Al Azhar University. He was a schoolteacher when the revolution against France began and, at 32, commanded all the guerrilla forces in western Algeria. In 1960 Boumedienne was given the task of forming a national army in the security of training camps in Morocco and Tunisia. "One has his attachments," says Boumedienne. "Mine is the army."

Boumedienne, like Ben Bella, is awash with imprecise Marxist ideas. He has always insisted that the government's first duty is to divide the land and redistribute the nation's wealth in favor of the peasants, arguing: "The peasant paid for the war and gave his all. We can't just give him slogans in return." But Ben Bella's bumbling efforts have wrecked Algeria's economy and agriculture. More than 30% of the work force is unemployed, and 3,000,000 Algerians are being kept alive by surplus U.S. wheat. France has been contributing outright aid of more than $200 million a year, and was currently negotiating a new Algerian oil deal with Ben Bella.

The Puzzles. Close friends of Boumedienne have always insisted that he is without political ambitions. It is possible that he will govern through a collegium of Algerian leaders or, as in so many Arab lands, through an administration of army officers. The French claim that Boumedienne received his military training in Moscow and Peking, but in foreign affairs he is unlikely to be more Communist-oriented than was Ben Bella. In fact, one of the many puzzling elements about the coup is that the political views of Boumedienne and Ben Bella were, until last week, considered identical.

As for the Algerian people, they received the news of Ben Bella's fall with apathy. Men gathered in cafes to sip thick coffee and mint tea; stores and shops opened for business as usual. By afternoon, soldiers with submachine guns had turned back to the city's police the job of directing traffic, and Algiers dozed beneath a cloudless sky and enervating heat.

At sundown a crowd came briefly to life as people scrambled for the evening papers, which merely reprinted the communique broadcast by Radio Algiers. Some Western observers optimistically recalled that Boumedienne's Defense Ministry had been one of the few well-run departments of the Algerian government and thought that might augur well for the future. The only fact that had become really clear was that Houari Boumedienne, so long known as "Numero un bis" in Algeria, had at last become "Numero un."

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