2-To Question Army Policy, Focus
By Jonathan C. Randal
Washington Post Foreign Service
ALGIERS—For many Algerians,
the most troubling fact about last
week’s
assassination
of
head
of
state Mohammed Boudiaf was that
the man identified as the apparent
assassin was a junior officer
in an
elite army
security
unit who had
Muslim “religious convictions.”
The report that an army officer
had
pulled the
trigger seemed
to
confirm recurring rumors here that
—
"
| the army, long consid-
ANALYSIS
erec*
t^ie regime's
ul-
timate bulwark against
chaos, was as subject as the rest of
society to the Islamic fundamental-
ist virus.
In
Algeria,
an
old saw
states,
“Other
countries
have
an
army;
here
the army
has
the
country.”
Officially,
that army, which
effec-
tively has run Algeria from behind
the scenes since independence 30
years
ago, was
silent when
con-
fronted with evidence of the seem-
ing penetration of its ranks by the
very fundamentalists
it has sworn
publicly to eradicate.
The
army
had
never
formally
named
the
fundamentalist
Islamic
Salvation Front as the enemy. But
in
January,
it
ousted
president
Chadli
Bendjedid
. to
prevent
the
front from winning
Algeria’s
first
free parliamentary elections. Then
it brought war hero Boudiaf back
from .self-imposed exile toJendJe-
,
MW
a "constitutional coup d’etat.”
Boudiaf
and
Defense
Minister
Khaled
Nezzar
later
banned
the
front, arrested its leaders and sent
thousands
of
militants
to
Sahara
detention camps.
Indeed,
only
two
days
before
Boudiaf’s assassination, the regime
had brought before
a
military
tri-
bunal the Islamic Salvation Front’s
top
leaders—Abbasi
Madani,
Ali
Belhadj and five others—on capital
charges of seeking to overthrow the
government and replace
it with an
Islamic republic in June 1991.
Conspiracy theories on Boudiaf’s
assassination soon emerged, laying
blame variously on mysterious mil-
itary and civilian power brokers or
alleged skullduggery by Bendjedid
and the discredited National Liber-
ation
Front,
which
monopolized
power until 1990.
Some accusations
also were
di-
rected at the army. Indeed, a senior
Algerian source said so many peo-
ple
“were
accusing
the
army
of
bringing
Boudiaf
back,
using him
and then getting rid of him” that the
government
set
up
an
impartial,
three-man panel of the
slain lead-
er's
associates
to
investigate
his
death and “convince the people [the
army] had nothing to do with it.”
In
dealing
with
the
succession,
Nezzar and his fellow generals, tra-
ditionally
shy
of
the
limelight,
brushed aside hard-line suggestions
that they impose an outright
mil-
itary regime by invoking the
ulti-
mate bulwark argument.
« insteadLthft wiJifAW-badiedcoK-,
who
is not expected to
fulfill Bou-'
diaf’s promise
of
“radical change”
for a people fed up with soaring in-
flation and unemployment, econom-
ic mismanagement
and
revolving-
door governments.
Kafi, however,
has the political connections capable
of initiating a national reconciliation
with the Islamic fundamentalists.
Even Nezzar has favored such a
dialogue,
according
to
key
diplo-
mats
and
political
observers,
de-
spite
his
call
a week ago
for
the
“eradicating” of fundamentalist ex-
tremists.
The generals are said to be con-
cerned about the army's cohesion.
They are mindful that younger of-
ficers are having second thoughts
about the yearlong state of emer-
gency decreed
in February, which
has cost the lives of some 100 sol-
diers and policemen.
The generals also know the re-
gime now
is more
beholden
than
ever to France, Italy, Spain and oth-
er
Western
governments,
which
have thrown good money after bad
in helping successive Algerian ad-
ministrations.
Even before Boudiaf’s assassina-
tion, foreign business
hesitated
to
make major investments because of
Algeria’s
political
instability and a
$24
billion foreign debt devouring
percent
of
foreign-exchange
earnings—which come from oil and
natural gas exports.
In such circumstances,
the
fun-
mate bulwark argument.
damentalists
have
everything
to
the Algerian veterans’ organization,
of Algeria’s social fabric.