Houari Boumedienne

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1927? - 1978

First vice-president of Algeria, 1962; second president of Algeria, 1965 - 1978.

The son of a small farmer whose family originated in the Kabylia (Berber) region of Algeria, Houari Boumédienne was born Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharouba at Clauzel (now al-Hussainiya), a small village near Guelma in the Constantinois region of the country. As a young man, he spent his school years attending both Qurʾanic and French primary schools in Constantine and, at one point, a conservative madrasa, or religious school. After finishing his studies, he returned to his native village and became a teacher at the local school. Active early on in student politics, Boukharouba, as many of his generation, became interested in the growing nationalist sentiments and the emerging struggle against the French. His early involvement culminated in his participation in the 1945 Setif Revolt and, later, in the Algerian War of Independence (1954 - 1962). In the aftermath of the insurrection, he joined the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA; Algerian People's Party), headed for a short while by Messali al-Hadj. To avoid forced enlistment in the French army, Boukharouba left Algeria in 1952.

During his years in exile in Cairo, he attended al-Azhar, the famous Islamic university. Although he remained a secularist throughout his years in power, he adhered to a secularism that was always tempered by respect for the Islamic/Arab heritage that Algeria had experienced. He infiltrated back into Algeria in 1955 and joined the mujahidin (fighters) of Wilaya V (the Oranie region) where he assumed his nom de guerre - Houari Boumédienne - a name he would keep after the Algerian War of Independence. As an assistant to Abd al-Hafid Boussouf, commander of Wilaya V at the time - the best organized and disciplined of the military apparatus in the interior of Algeria - Boumédienne was put in charge of the Moroccan wing of the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN; National Liberation Army). He slowly rose to the top of the external army structure between 1957 and 1960 and became the chief of the western general staff in September 1958, then located in Oujda, Morocco, where most of the important army commanders of postindependence Algeria were gathered at one time or another.

In February 1960, he was again promoted - this time to chief of the united general staff, headquartered in Ghardimaou, Tunisia. His position as one of the most prominent officers and powerbrokers within the future Algerian army was confirmed in 1959 when Boumédienne was put in charge of a military court that prosecuted a number of ALN colonels in Tunisia who had plotted the overthrow of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA).

In time, however, Boumédienne himself grew disenchanted with the GPRA and resigned as the second round of the Evian agreements (the negotiations between France and representatives of the Algerian leadership) limped to a halt. Although Boumédienne cited disagreement with the Algerian participants at the Evian agreements on a number of issues, the real dispute centered on the power of the ALN versus the GPRA as independence grew nearer. At that point Boumédienne received the support of Ahmed Ben Bella, whose visibility, despite his incarceration in France, had steadily grown among Algerian participants in the struggle for independence. Ben Bella's help became crucial in 1961 and 1962 when Boumédienne wanted to remove a number of old-time revolutionaries and politicians from the GPRA. Boumédienne then returned to the provisional government, but the internal battle for power was far from settled and would resurface once independence was achieved.

After independence in 1962, Houari Boumédienne, as a key member of the Algerian military, became minister of defense and first vice-president of the republic under the presidency of Ben Bella. His primary task was to convert the internal and external units of the Algerian army that had emerged during the war of independence into a unified force. Disenchanted with the lack of direction of the newly independent government, faced with lingering internal political battles, and resentful of the foreign ideologues rather than local nationalists who helped determine Ben Bella's outlook on politics, Boumédienne deposed the first president of independent Algeria in June 1965 and assumed the presidency of the Council of the Revolution, the ruling body of the country, calling the coup a "historic rectification" of the Algerian revolution.

The 1965 coup, however, was not an indication of the personal power of the new president but reflected the political power of the armed forces whose independence Boumédienne had attempted to preserve. This would largely explain the collegial rule Boumédienne instituted after assuming power, a careful balancing act that he would be forced to maintain until his death.

Self-effacing, austere, pragmatic, and imbued with the ideals of the anticolonial struggle for which he had fought for almost two decades, Boumédienne after 1965 charted a political and economic future for his country that would slowly yield grudging admiration both abroad and at home. Its political and economic principles were described in detailed fashion in the 1976 national charter that became the guiding document for Algeria's socialist experiment.

The basis for his internal economic policies was a commitment to a socialist strategy that was simultaneously less draconian than that of his predecessor but still managed to put the Algerian state in charge of virtually all economic enterprises in the country. Boumédienne held the conviction that only coherent and centralized decision making would allow the country to overcome both the disastrous economic effects of the eight-year struggle for independence and the lingering factionalism within the country. Businesses were grouped into a number of state enterprises, forming the basis of what was called an "industrializing industry" strategy. This contained the notion that, with direct and consistent state intervention, Algeria would build a heavy industry base - fueled by the income from petroleum and natural gas - that would serve as a platform for creating intermediary and eventually consumer products. The ultimate aim, according to Boumédienne, was greater economic self-sufficiency.

In foreign policy, Boumédienne steered Algeria toward a policy of neutrality in international affairs while committing the country to increased solidarity with developing countries. Under Boumédienne, Algeria became one of the original sponsors of the New International Economic Order at the United Nations and remained one of the most vocal members of the nonaligned movement. Boumédienne's cautious approach in international politics paid off as Algeria became, in several instances, a valuable interlocutor in mediating conflicts, with a corps of skilled diplomatic representatives at its service. Internally, however, Boumédienne increasingly relied on a coalition of technical experts and professional military advisers, particularly after an attempted coup by a fellow officer, Colonel Tahar Zbiri, in 1967. The outcome was that the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN; National Liberation Front), the country's single party, lost much of the legitimacy and the mobilizing potential it had possessed. The long-term result of this increasingly technocratic/military alliance was a gradual loss of popular confidence in the single party and a further narrowing of the political base during the remainder of Boumédienne's tenure.

Boumédienne's economic strategy also was not as successful in the long run as he had hoped. The heavy state intervention had created an enormously inefficient public sector by the mid-1970s, exacerbated further by the easy borrowing privileges that Algeria enjoyed when oil prices rose after the Arab - Israel War (1973), and made worse by the one-party system where patronage and favoritism rather than personal capability provided criteria for recruitment. By the end of Boumédienne's life in December 1978, there was substantial disagreement over his economic strategy. This potential struggle had been kept in abeyance because of the personal respect Boumédienne enjoyed, and it reflected the crucial role he had played in Algeria's factional politics, which had never truly been resolved after independence.

After his death, the succession was not settled until 1980 at a special party congress but according to institutionalized procedures - a testimony in part to Boumédienne's political skills but also to the stranglehold the one-party system and the ALN, its most powerful defender, had on the country. The newly elected president, Chadli Bendjedid, abandoned his predecessor's economic strategy and embarked on a more market- and Western-oriented development that would have been anathema to Boumédienne and many of his advisers. Algerian socialism died along with its enigmatic second president.

Bibliography

Entelis, John. Algeria: The Revolution Institutionalized. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986.

Ruedy, John. Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of aNation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

— DIRK VANDEWALLE