Algeria: At Least Not Chaos

“Believe me, it is not easy to resist the temptation to power,” said Algeria’s Premier Ahmed Ben Bella last week on the first anniversary of Algeria’s inde pendence. In the past year Ben Bella’s problem has not been so much to resist power as to keep it, along with a modicum of order. By and large he has done better than he or anyone else had a right to expect. In almost any other place, the country’s problems would be considered disastrous, but in Algeria they add up to stability of sorts.

A year ago, amid murder, rape, kidnaping and looting, Algeria was shaping up as another Congo. Warlords ruled supreme in the six wilayas (military zones), and a minor, three-day civil war cost 2,000 lives. The economy seemed near death and the flight of French settlers — out of 1,000,000 only about 100,000 remained — deprived the country of nearly all doctors, civil servants, teachers and technicians. Most observers expected either a harsh military dictatorship or total anarchy. Though Ben Bella is a dictator, he has so far managed to avoid both extremes and rules not so much as a doctrinaire socialist, which he once seemed to be, but as a pragmatic politician.

Tomatoes Are Cheaper. When he was inaugurated Premier last September, he discovered his principal aim of land reform was already an accomplished fact; Algerian peasants had spontaneously taken over the rich lands vacated by the French settlers. Ben Bella shrewdly legalized what the peasants had improvised. The peasants also showed wis dom: instead of breaking up the estates into uneconomic small plots, they decided to form management committees to run them as they were. Ben Bella, who has an almost mystical love of the peasant masses, is staking his future on this version of the collective farm. Each estate has a government-appointed director, but the committees are guaranteed the right of secret ballot and the privilege of dismissing the directors.

The showpiece of the new system is the 4,500-acre estate (wine, vegetables, citrus fruit) formerly owned by Henri Borgeaud, once the richest man in Algeria. After he fled to France last year, his 1,800 peasants and their families burned down the bidonville (shantytown) where they had huddled in squalor for generations, and moved into their former master’s dwellings. The wine presses and bottling machinery are in good order and ready to process the bumper grape harvest expected this month, although ex-Owner Borgeaud took the formula for his red wine with him to France and no one is quite sure how to achieve the same product. There are other problems; tomatoes, for instance, are being sold to farm workers for 1½¢ a lb. but cost 5¢ to produce. Unworried, the management committee has set up a school with five teachers, a volunteer fire department, a recreation center and a soccer team.

Algeria’s grimmest problems can be seen in the remote mountains, in such places as Amoura, a small village in the foothills of the Ouled Nail. The village itself was destroyed years ago by French bombers, and Amoura’s 2,500 people inhabit caves. They have no cattle and live mostly on vegetables, supplemented by grass. Amoura had never seen a doctor until last month when a U.S. physician arrived from Algiers’ Beni-Messous hospital, 170 miles away. One villager, who claims to be 105 years old, grumbled that “since the day I was born there has never been any hope, and I don’t expect any for my children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren.” But the government, with the help of various relief agencies, defiantly hopes to make Amoura a model village. A milk feeding station for children is already operating.

Refusing Owners. In the cities, Ben Bella so far has nationalized only a small number of minor industries, says he will not nationalize further “unless we are forced to, that is, unless owners refuse to keep their factories running.” Under a law passed last month, Algeria promises that no new foreign enterprise will be nationalized until it has completely amortized its investment, and if taken over, full compensation will be paid the investors. The government has not been swamped by offers from abroad, but a U.S. company has proposed building a fertilizer factory, Renault has already set up an assembly plant for small cars, and British and West German interests are considering investing in mines, steel and other heavy industry.

Relations with France are surprisingly close: 20,000 French technicians, their salaries paid by Paris, work in Algeria, and young Algerian government employees are being trained in France. Most Frenchmen, including De Gaulle, “have a conscience about Algeria,” and Paris has granted upwards of $400 million in aid. The U.S. last year supplied 300,000 tons of wheat, which fed 4,600,000 undernourished Algerians, and U.S. aid during the next fiscal year will come to about $40 million. The Communist bloc has so far offered only $12 million, mostly in loans, but last week a top-level Soviet economic mission arrived in Algeria for investigation and discussions. For the present, there seems little danger of the country’s slipping into Communism (the small Communist Party was outlawed last November).

Revolutionary Play. Ben Bella has probably jailed fewer people in his first year of power than most Afro-Asian revolutionary leaders. His opposition ranges from National Assembly Speaker Ferhat Abbas, who complains that socialism is coming too swiftly, to Marxist Theoretician Mohammed Boudiaf, who complains that socialism is not coming quickly enough. Boudiaf and three of his supporters have been under house arrest since June, and another opponent, Mohammed Khider, has been exiled. At one time Ben Bella seemed threatened by shadowy, ascetic Colonel Houari Boumedienne; as Defense Minister and army chief, he has so much power that he probably could take over. Apparently, he is content to work in the background, has kept the army loyal to Ben Bella.

In foreign affairs Ben Bella has given up the impractical vision of a united Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco). But as head of the only African nation so far to have fought a long, bloody war, if not to victory in the field, at least to independence, he seems to dream of leading all Africa—although there is considerable doubt as to how his near-bankrupt country could afford such a role. Still playing the revolutionary, Ben Bella has set up a training camp for 1,000 Angolan guerrillas who hope to drive the Portuguese colonialists from their homeland, and at a foreign ministers’ conference in Dakar last week, he rousingly urged the delegates to descend on the U.N. in mass for a last-ditch fight against Portugal and South Africa.

At the Pan-African Conference at Addis Ababa last May, Ben Bella remarked: “To free Africa, we must all be prepared to die a little.” Ben Bella’s people, sick of strife, would first like to live a little.