'Red Menace' in Algeria

...Thus, Boumediene & Co...

...That Ben Bella got a Lenin Peace Prize and Boumediene gets Soviet aid only makes Algeria seem that much more worthwhile as a testament to French "independence...

...Boumediene clapped hostile local Communists in jail, politely warned the Soviet bloc diplomats not to meddle in Algeria's internal affairs, and vowed publicly to devote more attention to the crumbling economy...

...Not surprisingly, the Soviets kept their chagrin unofficial...

...It is quite possible that no regime can bring prosperity to Algeria, given its galloping birth rate and a Mediterranean distaste for Calvinist work habits...

...Cheered on by the French Communists in Paris, urban labor and student activists continue to be hostile to Boumediene's Armybacked coalition...

...Colonel Houari Boumediene, Vice President and Defense Minister, went to Moscow to get a $115 million Soviet aid pledge...

...Thus the Soviets are still in Algeria, not particularly popular with the average Moslem, but still there...

...as a "fascist junta," while the Prensa Latina man in Algiers was expelled for distributing copies of Castro's diatribe against the new regime...

...press-professed to see in Ben Bella a second Castro...

...Algerian press and radio polemics against "imperialism" in Vietnam, Santo Domingo, and Cuba, have not abated under Boumediene, and in the UN Algeria's verbiage is as "revolutionary" as ever...

...His plans to be host to the Communist-run Ninth World Youth Festival and to the $30 million "second Bandung," or Afro-Asian summit, roused little enthusiasm...

...The "Red Menace" is never exactly what it seems, even to the Reds...

...its small European-dominated Algerian subsidiary, though it contributed a few terrorists to the rebellion, was never allowed as a party to join the Moslem FLN...

...The faction-ridden left-wing Congolese rebels had proved less "revolutionary" than advertised...

...For their part, the Soviets have so far been careful not to challenge overtly France's dominant position in Algeria...

...Once Ben Bella was installed as premier in September 1962, the Soviets cheered his long-distance love affair with Castro (and the resultant strain in U.S.-Algerian relations...

...Thanks to the bitter struggle for independence (perhaps 17,000 French Army and 600,000 Moslem Algerian dead), the Algerians had great prestige in Africa and the Arab world when peace came in 1962...

...But the Soviet Central Committee also voiced "deep regret and anxiety" over Ben Bella's ban of the local Communist organization...

...Nonetheless the local Communists-and much of the U.S...

...Apparently governing Soviet policy through most of the 1954-62 Algerian War was an effort to split off successive French governments from NATO...

...De Gaulle's campaign against NATO is appreciated...

...The West European Communist press mourned Ben Bella's downfall, describing Boumediene and Co...

...estimate, there are now some 3,500 Soviet teachers, technicians, and military instructors (compared with 14,000 French counterparts) in Algeria...

...The Army remains Algeria's sole organized force (the FLN party still exists largely on posters...

...To me, this seems like wishful thinking of the same kind that brought Ben Bella the Lenin Peace Prize...

...Moreover, Moscow seems in no rush to supplant France as Algeria's chief market and source of aid ($200 million in 1965...

...In practical terms, therefore, Ben Bella's ouster has been less than a "victory for the West...

...provides food relief...

...In the week that followed the coup, nightly street demonstrations in Algiers led by Communist student leaders helped force postponement of the "second Bandung," from which Peking had vowed to exclude the Soviets...

...Puzzled, serious, dismayed, perhaps, but still there...

...Sovietprovided materiel, however obsolescent, continues to upgrade the 60,000-man Algerian Army-to the distress of Tunisia and Morocco...

...Yet the Soviets -disappointed in Ghana, Guinea and the Congo-have made a serious effort to retain influence in Algeria despite the downfall of Ben Bella...

...Nothing else, it is claimed, will sufficiently rouse the "masses" to deal successfully with the problems at hand...

...But even while Ben Bella, with Soviet encouragement, sought a bigger role in the tangled politics of the Third World, all was not going well at home...

...He had the Lenin Peace Prize, he was a widely-publicized Hero of the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev had boosted the aid pledge to $225 million...

...guerrilla veterans castigated his turbulent circle of Marxist advisors as Mohammedcome-Latelies to Algerian nationalism...

...Peter Braestrup was, until recently, the New York Times' chief correspondent in Algeria...

...In Algiers, Soviet bloc newsmen scoffed: "Boumediene can't last...

...While the old official "fraternity" between the FLN party and the Soviet bloc Communist parties has faded the government-to-government links have been re-enforced...

...There is no certainty, whether in Algeria, Indonesia, the Congo, or elsewhere, that the next nine months will seem as favorable for the "sinister forces of Western Imperialism" as the last...

...But the Communists had not earned a prominent seat at the victory banquet...

...The 47-year-old Algerian came home apparently seduced...

...Soviet obligations in Cuba, Egypt, and India are already burdensome enough...

...Abortive as it was, the Congo arms-lift showed how useful to the Soviets a complaisant Algeria could be...

...Despite the best efforts of some of the regime's more pragmatic economists Algeria has yet to pick up Washington's offer of an investment guarantee agreement and a new wheat program...

...Finally, after a month when the Moscow press had printed little about the regime except unflattering excerpts from L'Humanite, the Soviets publicly mentioned their "fraternal ties" to Algeria...

...Something "better" may indeed happen...

...The arrival of a dozen bewildered Bulgarian agronomists in an African capital is viewed as a Cold War catastrophe, a flying visit by Chou En Lai is portrayed as sure-fire Red seduction, and an Arab diatribe against "capitalist imperialism" is seen as a sign of satellization by the Soviet Union...

...But neither the Colonel nor his associates have shown that they have the charisma or the efficiency required to put the ramshackle house in order...

...Quite the contrary, in December, on his first trip outside Africa as chief of state, he went to Moscow...

...As Ben Bella contended first with Berber dissidence and then with Morocco on the border in the fall of 1963, the Soviets followed up token aid with something bigger...

...Just as the "Red Menace" has been over-invoked, so the latest round of African military coups has been hailed precipitately as not only "anti-Communist" but also "proWestern...

...The Soviet bloc thereafter stepped up scholarships, military training, and diplomatic support for the Algerians...

...But Algeria's potential as a friendly base of operations-given the right circumstances-makes logical the continued Soviet commitment, especially after disappointments in Ghana and Guinea...

...But he apparently received assurances that the Soviets would honor their earlier aid commitments-military and economic...

...French officials privately contend that the reluctant Boumediene is a "transition"-to what nobody knows...

...Once again, as in the case of Egypt, Moscow put its own strategic interests above those of a local Communist party...

...After independence, even while the Algerian Communists cautiously applauded Ahmed Ben Bella's rise to power, the Soviets hung back...

...have impressed Washington with their candor about Algeria's economic chaos...

...Not until 1960, long after Egypt's Nasser began to aid the Algerians, did Khrushchev give the two-year-old Algerian government-in-exile de facto recognition and openly send arms to Moroccobased rebel units...

...In the meantime, the Soviets have a discreet but growing "presence," a handy potential base for future African operations, and a propaganda platform-while the French pay most of the bills and the U.S...

...It was evident in mid-1963 that, as Claude Bucamp of Figaro put it, Ben Bella's impulsive Socialism was "a bad Arab translation of Karl Marx, annotated in French by Franz Kafka, and illustrated by Walt Disney...

...As is Soviet custom, the aid was not in cash but in reimbursable credits for Soviet goods and technical assistance...

...With its Sahara oil, its strategic location on the Western Mediterranean, its thrice-Texas size, Algeria is important economically to France, important strategically to the USSR, and thus, for better or worse, important to the State Department...

...THE RUSSIANS REMAIN 'Red Menace' in Algeria By Peter Braestrup Ever since Fidel Castro launched his fellow countrymen on the "glorious road to Socialism," it has been customary in Congress and much of the American press to view other hot, unruly nations in terms of "another Cuba...

...NONE OF THIS "anti-imperialism" dismays General de Gaulle, himself a self-styled champion of the Third World...

...In the end, on June 19, 1965, Colonel Boumediene moved against his old ally Ben Bella, the Lenin Prizewinner, with Soviet-built-tanks manned by Soviet-trained crews...

...Boumediene, while harsh toward local, pro-Ben Bella Communists, showed no signs of hostility toward the Soviet Union...

...A half-dozen Soviet Air Force AN-12 transports, bearing green-white-and-red Algerian markings, began an arms-lift from the Boufarik airdrome South of Algiers, via the Sudan, to the Congo's anti-Tshombe rebels...

...The French party, for domestic tactical reasons, had supported harsh measures by the Fourth Republic against the National Liberation Front (FLN) rebels as late as 1956...

...By U.S...

...The Army resented and came to fear Ben Bella's drive to curb its powers and its Cabinet influence...

...The link with Moscow seems to Algerian officials to be a valuable, if meager, alternative to complete dependence on France, whose aid may diminish after de Gaulle...

...But the case of Algeria, where Ahmed Ben Bella fell from glory last June 19, warrants only the most circumspect Western optimism...

...FrenchAlgerian "cooperation" aids his bid for sympathy among the world's hungry radicals...

...In late 1964, Ben Bella's ambitions to play a "revolutionary" role in Africa joined with a Soviet bid to outplay Peking with the subSahara radicals...

...The operation lasted several months, then was quietly dropped (as was a similar effort by Egypt...

...ordinary Algerians already complained about the costly hospitality given to an unending stream of foreign vips, ranging from French Communist leaders to the Communist-backed Committee on De-Nuclearization of the Mediterranean...

...Moreover, Ben Bella's Socialism, behind the slogans, had become a local synonym for chaos and corruption on the Indonesian or Ghanaian pattern...

...The Russians have not always looked with such favor on the Algerian nationalists...

...Relations with West Germany, broken by Ben Bella out of solidarity with Nasser last year, have yet to be re-established...

...In the spring of 1963, however, as Ben Bella began to let his "Socialist revolutionary" sentiments prevail, local Communist grumbling turned to cheers...

...Though nothing is sure in African or Arab or Asian politics, the Algerian experience would seem to show that even as the "Red Menace" was exaggerated in its heyday, so embarassments to the Reds can be exaggerated into "Western victories...

...He got no medals, no titles and no limousine from Khrushchev's prudent successors...

...practice a kind of hesitant "Ben Bellism without Ben Bella," the French CP openly supports the regime's clandestine foes, and the Soviet presence in Algeria grows stronger than ever...

...Some East European observers in Algiers predict that he will give way, sooner or later, to a more radical regime, more efficient than Ben Bella's, with Communists and their allies playing the chief role...

...Algeria, albeit reluctantly, was one of the few African nations to break relations with Britain over Rhodesia...

...Helpful as this support was to the Algerian cause, it came after too much equivocation to give Moscow an automatic hold on any post-independence regime...

...But it appears to suffice while Moscow waits for something better...

...Most important, Boumediene continues to respect the vital Gaullist interests in Algeria: nuclear test bases for the force de frappe and access to Sahara oil...

...Ben Bella received an Ilyushin-18 airliner and a bulletproof Zis around New Year's, and in the spring he journeyed to Moscow to review the annual May Day parade with Khrushchev from atop Lenin's Tomb...

...Khrushchev apparently believed what in 1963 briefly seemed plausible: Ben Bella was a bright new "influence" among the African radicals, popular with the Algerian "masses," and worth seducing, especially as a counter to Peking's ambitions on the continent...

...By November 1, 1964, when Boumediene paraded his Soviet-built T-54 tanks and MIG-21 fighters, Moscow's commitment to Algeria was financially its second largest in Africa, behind only its commitment to Egypt...

...and the Army leadership has been riven by factional feuds in the past and could be riven again...

...Ben Bella nationalized French-owned farms, factories, and beauty parlors, set up "Socialist pilot stores" to sell Bulgarian canned goods, and made Algiers a haven for quarreling African "liberation movements.' Amid Byzantine maneuvering and floods of French Left rhetoric, a handful of Communists, Trotskyites, and visionary Marxists, both French and Algerian, came to dominate the press, radio, student organizations, and what passed for economic planning...

...With an 85 per cent illiteracy rate, no widespread appreciation of Marx, and a historic taste for anarchy, Algeria's 11 million Moslems constitute a less than ideal base for the creation of a new Communist society...

...It will take a long time before Moscow's much-publicized $225 million purchase credits materialize into the promised irrigation projects, factories, and a steel mill at Bone...

...There was room in Algeria, Ben Bella had said, for only one party, the FLN...

...Neither they nor Ben Bella, though, dominated the Army, itself a "state within a state," and that eventually proved fatal to Ben Bella...

...Washington, Ben Bella's chief verbal target, was clearly pleased...

...This falls short of the local Communist expectations of "another Cuba" under Ben Bella...

...Boumediene & Co...

...Since Boumediene's Moscow visit, the Soviet press has revived its laudatory coverage of Algeria...