Mohamed Boudiaf

**Mohamed Boudiaf** (June 23, 1919 - June 29, 1992) was an Algerian political leader and one of the founders of the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN) that led the Algerian War of Independence.

## Backstory

His education was cut short after primary school by poor health (tuberculosis) and his increasing activism in the nascent nationalist movement. A member of the nationalist Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) of Messali Hadj, he later joined the successor organization MTLD and its secret paramilitary wing, the Organisation Spéciale (OS).

Boudiaf was responsible for organizing the OS network in the Sétif region, storing arms, collecting funds and preparing guerrilla forces. He was sentenced in absentia to 10 years of prison by the French authorities, but avoided arrest.

In 1954, Boudiaf was a main leader of the Front de libération nationale, and emerged as an important member of the exiled leadership working from Cairo and Algeria's neighbouring countries.

In 1956, he was captured along with Ahmed Ben Bella and several other FLN leaders in a controversial aircraft hijacking by French forces, and imprisoned in France. While prisoner, he was symbolically elected minister in the FLN's government-in-exile, the GPRA, at its creation in 1958, and re-elected in 1960 and 1961. He was not released until immediately before the independence of Algeria in 1962.

On independence, internal conflict racked the FLN, which split into rival factions as French forces withdrew. The increasingly marginalized Boudiaf protested, and founded a clandestine opposition party, the PRS, which briefly revolted against the FLN's single-party government. Boudiaf was forced into exile, and settled in neighbouring Morocco.

In February 1992, after a 27-year exile, the military invited him back to become chairman of the High Council of State (HCE) of Algeria, a figurehead body for the military junta, following the annulment of the election results.

Publicly, he was presented as a leader exiled for too long to be tainted by the violence and corruption of Algeria's internal post-revolutionary politics, but the downside was that he was little known to most of the Algerian public. However, his calls for comprehensive reform and an end to military domination of politics instilled hope, and he quickly gained some popularity, even if many still associated him with the military clique that effectively ruled Algeria in his name.

Even as head of state, Boudiaf was completely dependent on the forces that had brought him to power, and his powers were circumscribed by the military and security establishment. In addition, the country continued to drift towards civil war, with increasing Islamist violence in the regions surrounding Algiers and brutal military countermeasures both escalating the situation. The political scene remained chaotic, the economy was fraying, and Boudiaf seemed unable to effectively carry out the reforms he had promised

## Events

On June 29, 1992, Boudiaf was giving a televised public speech at the opening of a cultural center in Annaba. The attack began with a grenade explosion on one side of the podium from where Boudiaf was giving his speech, which attracted the attention of Boudiaf and his bodyguards while another grenade was thrown under his chair.

The two blasts were followed by a gunman, dressed in the uniform of the elite police intervention unit, who emerged from behind Boudiaf and emptied his sub-machine gun into his back. He received three bullets, two in the head and one in his back.

The assassin, Lieutenant Lambarek Boumaarafi, was said to have acted as a lone gunman due to his Islamist sympathies.

## Aftermath

Boumaarafi was sentenced to death in a closed trial in 1995, but the sentence was not carried out.

The murder has, unsurprisingly, been subject to significant controversy and a major magnet for Algerian conspiracy theories, with many suggesting that Boudiaf was in fact assassinated by the military establishment responsible for the coup (and for his installment as HCE chairman).

Boumaarafi is still in prison, and in June 2007, his father says that he was not the assassin.