Algeria: A Crash of Glass

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In predawn darkness last Saturday morning, truckloads of Algerian troops pulled up before President Ahmed ben Bella's white-walled hillside Villa Joly, overlooking the Mediterranean. The soldiers quickly pushed aside police bodyguards, hurried through the garden to the glass-paneled front door. There was a rough exchange in guttural Arabic, the sound of breaking glass, and a light snapped on in the President's upstairs bedroom. Ben Bella woke up to discover he was deposed and under arrest.

General Cleanup. Only two days before in Oran, he had delivered a speech in which he confidently asserted that the nation was "more united than ever before." He had been looking forward to playing host next week to 3,000 delegates from some 60 nations at the second Afro-Asian Conference, and thousands of workers were laboring 24 hours a day on the construction of an 18,000-sq.-yd. meeting hall and on a general cleanup and trash-removal campaign in Algiers.

By morning, army tanks prowled the boulevards, and Radio Algiers began playing Arabic patriotic songs. Abruptly at noon it broke off the music to announce that the government had been taken over by a new Council of Revolution, led by the Defense Minister and army commander, Colonel Houari Boumedienne. The regime of "personal power" was over, said the announcer, and "Ben Bella would meet the fate reserved by history to all despots." A communique signed by Boumedienne charged Ben Bella with an arm-long list of faults: "bad management, waste of public funds, instability, demagogy, anarchy, lying, improvisation, mystification, threats, blackmail and uncertainty about tomorrow." In an aside to the Afro-Asian delegates, Boumedienne said the show would go on as planned but now it would not be "cynically exploited by one man for his personal ends to the detriment of the country's higher interests."

Stray Clemency. As coups go, Boumedienne's was impressively efficient and bloodless. Only at Hydra, in the suburban heights above Algiers, did the police put up a good fight. What baffled most observers was why Boumedienne acted when he did. Ben Bella ran a one-man show for nearly three years and ran it badly, but always with the strong support of Boumedienne and his 60,000-man army. It was Boumedienne who routed the guerrillas who seized Algiers to protest Ben Bella's overthrow of Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda. It was Boumedienne who crushed Colonel Mohammed Chaabani's desert insurrection and executed its leader. It was Boumedienne who managed the capture of Berber Rebel Leader Hocine Ait Ahmed. When the Berbers of Kabylia revolted in 1963, Boumedienne's troops took heavy losses in quelling the uprising.