Algeria: The Haik Trick

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In his special cell at Algiers' Maison Carrée, Berber Chieftain Hocine Aït Ahmed, 38, jailed since October 1964 for his campaign to overthrow ex-President Ahmed ben Bella, received special treatment. He got better rations than other prisoners, family and friends were allowed to drop in and chat, Wife Djainila could stay overnight, and negotiators from Strongman Colonel Houari Boumedienne stopped by to ask if Aït Ahmed wouldn't agree to support the new regime. All to no avail. One night last week, when Djamila, other relatives, and neighbors trooped homeward, the group also included an extra, heavily cloaked figure in a Moslem woman's head-to-foot white haik. Friendly guards looked the other way. Before Boumedienne got the word several hours later, Aït Ahmed had been whisked to the coast ten miles away and put on a yacht bound for Europe.

Algerians greeted news of the break out with the apathy that seems to dominate the whole country nowadays.

Sighed one of Aït Ahmed's own fiery Berbers in mountainous Kabylia: "We just don't give a damn any more. All we want is work, and there isn't any here." Nonetheless, the Boumedienne government was worried, well aware that Aït Ahmed will probably surface in Paris, join forces there with Mohammed Boudiaf and Mohammed Khider, two other exiled members of Algeria's "Historic Nine" leaders of the liberation battle, and from abroad remind Algerians how little Boumedienne has done to better their dreary lot since he seized power eleven months ago. Additional guards were slapped on the prison headquarters 25 miles southwest of Algiers, where Ben Bella sits in jail. "This one won't get out," barked a prison official—uneasily.