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.