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.