World: SOLDIER IN WAITING

IN the two, ill-starred months of Algeria’s independence, it has become plain that the only effective power in the country is not wielded by Ahmed ben Bella and his Politburo. It lies in the fragile, nicotine-stained hands of Colonel Houari Boumedienne. 37, the brooding ascetic who is unchallenged leader of the nation’s disciplined, 45,000-man “regular” army.

It was Boumedienne who ousted ex-Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda last summer and backed the more “revolutionary” Ben Bella in his place. Last week Boumedienne kept Ben Bella in power by routing the rebellious forces that held Algiers in defiance of the Politburo. And if Ben Bella topples, as many Algerians expect him to, it will almost certainly be the result of yet another coup by Boumedienne’s increasingly restive army.

∙

The high-strung, hawk-beaked colonel looks less like a kingmaker than a Left Bank cafe intellectual. His cadaverous frame quivers with nervous energy as he chomps on an ever-present cigarette or chain-gulps black coffee. A bachelor who has been too engrossed in the revolution to see his parents for twelve years, Boumedienne has wispy, sandy hair, a straggly, reddish mustache, and small, grey-blue eyes that seldom kindle save on the occasions when he expounds his dogmatic, curiously naive ideas about Algeria’s future. Though probably one of the best educated of the top Algerian leaders, he uncritically accepts such Communist canards as the notion that other NATO nations supported France during the seven-year war against Algeria’s freedom fighting. With no apparent thought for the problems involved, he insists that drastic agrarian reform and redistribution of wealth are the first essential responsibilities of Algeria’s government. Argues Boumedienne: “It is unacceptable—impossible—that the land should remain in the hands of the few while the majority live in misery. The peasant paid for the war and gave his all. We can’t just give him slogans in return.”

Boumedienne, who was born in Guelma, 40 miles south of Bone, is himself the son of a landless peasant. He managed nonetheless to attend both French and Islamic schools, spent at least two years at Egypt’s al-Azhar University. According to French dossiers, he attended military schools in Russia and Red China. Boumedienne will neither affirm nor deny the charge. “He hates talking about the past.” explains a friend. “He would like to imagine that he began life in 1954— the year the rebellion started.”

Boumedienne learned to kill as an urban terrorist and later as a guerrilla in the mountains. At 32 he commanded all the rebel forces in western Algeria. He admits only one regret: the war’s fratricidal purges in which, says he, “I had to send thousands of comrades to their deaths.” He adds coolly: “Some were killed by the French, others by internal strife.” ∙ In 1960 Boumedienne was given the task of “forming a national army” in the security of training camps in Morocco and Tunisia. He carefully built and husbanded a crack fighting force equipped with Communist-bloc weapons and indoctrinated with Marxist ideas. “It’s the best group that ever was,” he brags. He kept his units in fighting trim with diversionary attacks on the French army’s fortified defense lines across the border, but his troops took no part in the bitter war in Algeria itself. Thus the army’s losses were trifling compared with those of the guerrilla fighters in the Algerian wilayas. Boumedienne is detested by wilaya leaders, who say that he starved them of sorely needed weapons that were lavished on his private troops. “One has one’s attachments.” Boumedienne answers. “Mine is the army.” With stubborn idealism that is ironically reminiscent of many French officers, Boumedienne asserts that the comradeship of the army “transcends even the national interest.”

What is abundantly clear is that few, if any, Algerian leaders would now attempt to clip Boumedienne’s wings, as Benkhedda tried to do. Ben Bella, whom the colonel has known and supported since 1952, has more reason to fear that his government will not be able to rebuild Algeria’s shattered economy or redistribute its land fast enough to please his impatient chief of staff. In that case, the next time Boumedienne marches, it will probably be to rivet army rule on Algeria. Boumedienne has often remarked that “the army is the spearhead of the revolution”—and he alone wields the spear.