ALGERIA: The Final Secret

A leader leads no more

For Algerian President Houari Boumedienne, secrecy was a lifelong obsession. Born Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharouba, he borrowed a nom de guerre from an Algerian village during the revolution against France and kept it ever since. If his movements were mysterious, so was the way in Boumedienne which he ran his country for 13 years. Last week the mystery continued as Boumedienne, 53, with a blood clot on the brain, lay near death in an Algiers hospital.

While a team of 40 doctors from eight nations, including the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sought to remove the clot, one prognosis already seemed clear. The tall, austere Algerian leader will rule no longer. An era in which Boumedienne thrust stability on a fledging country and brought it eminence is ending. No successor has been groomed, and Boumedienne’s demise could lead to a power struggle. Some observers believe that the two factions in the nine-man Council of the Revolution, one led by dapper Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 41, the other by Colonel Mohammed Salah Yahiaoui, 46, head of the National Liberation Front, Algeria’s only political party, could work out an amicable succession.

Whoever follows will lead a fairly healthy nation, but he will confront serious problems as well. Boumedienne used oil revenues and international loans to build a modern society and revive the flagging Arab culture he had come from. A socialist and revolutionary ideologue who turned to Moscow for military assistance, the pragmatic Boumedienne also looked west for markets and technology. The U.S. has become Algeria’s principal trading partner, buying oil and, more important, natural gas, while providing factories for consumer goods and training to teach Algerians to run the new facilities.

But lately Algeria has borrowed to the point that even interest payments on its $6 billion debt are a concern. Too many of the new industries require only a small labor force, providing little help for unemployed young Algerians. Agriculture is inefficient. Boumedienne also involved the country in a fractious feud with Morocco and Mauritania over the future of the former Spanish Sahara.

Another unhappy legacy with which Boumedienne’s successor must deal is a generally flaccid population. Boumedienne had the charisma of a stone, and after 13 years of his constant calls for sacrifice, many among Algeria’s 18 million have turned off and tuned out.