Algeria: Concern for Reform

One of Colonel Houari Boumedi enne’s first acts after he seized power in June was to denounce the schemes for Pan-African subversion, which had been so dear to his predecessor, Ah med Ben Bella — and which had proved so costly to Algeria. The gaunt new Premier has ended the fat subsidies handed out to the 22 foreign revolutionary movements based in Algiers, ordered exiles to stop their political activities or leave the country. As if to prove his good intentions last week, the government newspaper El Moudja-hid published long front-page tributes to Upper Volta and the Ivory Coast, two of the African countries whose moderation was anathema to Ben Bella. One of Boumedienne’s motives, of course, was to win support for the rescheduled Afro-Asia Summit Conference in Algiers, which was postponed two months ago when Ben Bella was toppled from power. The new target date now is Nov. 5, and Boumedienne is not at all sure how many African leaders will turn up. Last week his Foreign Minister, Abdel Aziz Bouteflika, was off on a recruiting tour of Africa’s west coast. One of his first visits would be to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, who could hardly be pleased by Algeria’s sudden embargo on exported subversion. In fact, the Boumedienne regime was drawing fire from leftists all over the revolutionary lot. In Paris the Communist newspaper L’Humanite published a manifesto calling on Algerians to organize themselves into “clandestine cells” to “fight against the stranglers of the republic.” To defend himself against leftist attacks, Boumedienne has gone out of his way to proclaim that Algeria is still “socialist” and “revolutionary.” But with his nation all but bankrupted by Ben Bella’s ambitious plots, he is vitally concerned with reform at home. Ignoring the howls of extremists, he has already pushed through a lucrative Sahara oil agreement with the French and granted oil exploration concessions to three U.S. companies. Even worse, he has opened a campaign to woo private foreign investors back to Algeria by guaranteeing their money against nationalization.