HIBAPRESS – Shafiq Anuri
After 28 years of living in voluntary exile in Morocco, where he spent his time raising chickens and managing a brick factory, Mohamed Boudiaf suddenly found himself on a private plane taking him back to Algeria as President of the State. He returned to his country to find it as he had left it in 1964: an open struggle for power, and networks of influence competing to control the levers of the state.
A President from Outside of Time
Boudiaf's long absence from politics made him almost absent from the Algerian scene. When he returned, he only knew a few of the officials, generals, and officers who had come to hold the reins of power. The man seemed as if he was a traveler who had suddenly returned from another time to a political system in which the balance of power and faces had changed.
A President of the State Wanted..
Boudiaf's return, nicknamed "Si Tayeb Al-Watani"; which was his nom de guerre during the liberation revolution, came in the context of a severe political crisis. Algeria had entered a constitutional vacuum after the resignation of Chadli Benjedid, who refused the army's pressure to cancel the results of the legislative elections won by the Islamic Salvation Front.
In the midst of the constitutional vacuum crisis that shook Algeria, Ahmed Ghozali, the Prime Minister, Lakhdar Brahimi, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arabi Belkheir, the Minister of Interior, and Khaled Nezzar, the Minister of Defense, met to search for a formula to run the country.
"The supervisors of running the affairs of the country," as the newspaper "Al-Shorouk" called them in an article published on the anniversary of Boudiaf's assassination in 2016, agreed to establish a collective presidential body called the High Council of State, headed by Boudiaf, and with the membership of Khaled Nezzar, Ali Kafi, Ali Haroun, and Tejani Heddam.
The task of convincing the "absent man"
Boudiaf did not know anything about this decision, as he was busy with his personal affairs in the city of Kenitra. To convince him to return, the "supervisors of running Algeria" commissioned his old friend Ali Haroun to travel to Morocco to meet him.
Haroun went to the city of Kenitra, where Boudiaf was living a quiet life far from politics, and told him that Algeria was on the verge of entering a "civil war, and that sedition was inevitable," and despite his initial rejection, Haroun's insistence pushed "Si Tayeb" to reconsider, especially as the matter related to a "national duty" to "save Algeria from the unknown."
Return after 28 years
On January 15, 1992, Boudiaf arrived in Algeria after an effective absence of 28 years. He was received at the airport by the Minister of Defense, Khaled Nezzar, the Minister of Interior, Arabi Belkheir, and the Prime Minister, Ahmed Ghozali, in addition to the members of the High Council of State Ali Kafi, Tejani Heddam, and a number of official figures.
In the airport square, Boudiaf made a statement in which he said that he had come to save Algeria. After moving to the Republican Palace, he addressed the people, stressing that he would put an end to corruption and bribery, and would fight the corrupt within the system, and work to achieve social justice, calling on the Algerians to assist him in performing his mission.
Confronting the Islamists, and loyalty to the army
Boudiaf quickly became involved in the ongoing political conflict, and participated in a campaign to confront the Islamic Salvation Front, which won the legislative elections. According to researcher Yahya Abu Zakaria, Boudiaf, in his speeches, mocked the party that was demanding respect for the legitimacy of the ballot boxes that had given it victory.
Due to his ignorance of the structure of the system and the balance of power, Boudiaf made a protocol error when he visited the Ministry of Defense, where he was received by Khaled Nezzar and the rest of the generals, noting that the army is constitutionally subordinate to the President, which required the military institution to go to the Presidential Palace to pledge allegiance, not the opposite.
Discovering the System from Within and the War on the “Mafia”
At first, Boudiaf seemed in harmony with the vision of the military establishment, and stated more than once that he was determined to eliminate Islamic fundamentalism, and also defended the cancellation of the electoral path, considering that it was necessary to protect Algeria from slipping into chaos. But his contact with the system and its men soon revealed to him complexities he did not expect.
Over time, Boudiaf began to change the tone of his speech. After his contact with the centers of influence within the state, he began to talk about a "mafia" that controls the arteries of Algerian politics and economy. According to researcher Abu Zakaria, Boudiaf was deceived in many files, before he discovered that later, and began to attack the “mafia.”
A sense of conspiracy, and orders are issued from France
Boudiaf felt, over time, that there was a conspiracy surrounding him, which he confided to his friend Mohamed Yazid, the director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Algeria and one of the leaders of the revolution, who came out after the assassination of “Si Tayeb” with explicit accusations against the “Algerian mafia” for standing behind his murder.
Boudiaf's statements reached the point of saying that the political decision in Algeria is not made entirely within it. According to the aforementioned Algerian writer, “Si Tayeb” stated that: “Algeria is run based on orders it receives via fax from the Elysée in Paris.”
Heavy corruption files
Boudiaf began to repeat the term "mafia" in his speeches, calling on the Algerian people to fight it because, according to him, "it holds the reins in Algeria's politics and economy." He held these networks responsible for the deterioration that the country had experienced since Chadli Benjedid came to power in 1979.
Boudiaf focused, in an unprecedented way, on those networks that, according to him, gnawed at the economy, impoverished the people, and embezzled millions of dollars. He was constantly promising the Algerians to cleanse the system of these "viruses" that continued to run the government, as he described it, with a remote control.
Scandals known to everyone
Abu Zakaria recounts that Boudiaf did not need to mention the names of this "mafia" explicitly, because their symbols were known to many Algerians, as news of their wealth and their assets in Europe and America, and their luxurious villas inside Algeria in light of the housing crisis, was a daily topic in cafes and among the youth.
At first, many believed that Boudiaf was maneuvering to absorb popular anger, but the president had already begun to take practical steps, as he ordered the military to imprison General Mustafa Belloucif in the military prison in the Blida region because he embezzled money from the Ministry of Defense, and presented to General Mohamed El-Amari four thousand files related to the identity of embezzlers of 26 billion dollars and the brokers who exhausted the Algerian economy.
The tragic end
The Algerian writer Yahya Abu Zakaria believes that this confrontation was the beginning of the end, as he says that the generals "wanted to feed on Boudiaf before he had dinner with them," so the result was his assassination, to gain, in the era of independence, the testimony he sought in the era of colonialism, concluding that Si Tayeb was killed, and his file was closed, and his killers are still making the political decision in Algeria!
