ALGERIA: Gilded Cage

Ben Bella lives

When France finally gave Algeria its independence in 1962 after an eight-year guerrilla struggle, Ahmed ben Bella, an exiled freedom fighter known to his countrymen as Aminedi (Invisible One), surfaced after almost six years in French jails and quickly assumed control of the new nation. Three years later he vanished again, deposed in a bloodless coup by his army chief, Houari Boumedienne.

Ben Bella is still invisible, but now he is living in enforced leisure under the careful eye of Boumedienne’s guards. The man Boumedienne regarded as an impossibly fuzzy-minded romantic who was leading Algeria to economic chaos is now 61 and, by all accounts, the very model of a prosperous bourgeois. Housed in comfortable, well-staffed villas, he is provided with every comfort. The amenities include French newspapers and the latest Georges Simenon detective stories, as well as at least one movie a week (his favorite, which he has seen eight times: a Jean Gabin-Sophia Loren film called Le Verdict). To keep him from settling in anywhere, however, the Boumedienne regime changes his location from time to time, secretly and without warning. Ben Bella is allowed visitors, but they are screened beforehand and taken to his home blindfolded.

One person who never comes to visit the former leader is Boumedienne himself. Why then does Algeria’s austere second President keep the fallen strongman alive? “A dead Ben Bella would endanger everything,” says one of the Invisible One’s friends. “He’s still a hero to a lot of people in this country. He lost out, but that’s no reason to kill him. This isn’t Uganda.” ∙