ARMED REBELLION IN ALGERIA
PARIS, Oct. 8 -- The forces that have taken up arms against_ the Ben Bella government are singularly reticent about specifying their economic and social aims. Violence of language is offered as a substitute for program. The epithets thrown at Ben Bella include "dictator," "fascist," a "Batista," and "worse than the French."
Like the Cuban counterrevolutionists they speak much -- and very vaguely -- about "democracy" in general. Like their Cuban counterparts who seek the downfall of Castro, they accuse Ben Bella of "betraying the revolution."
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Through such propaganda, the counterrevolution seeks to take advantage in Algeria as it did in Cuba:of the absence of the formal institutions of bourgeois democracy and the concentration of power in a single figure. (That this concentration of power is dangerous and a sign of weakness in the Revolution is apparent to every revolutionary Marxist.) The reluctance of the leaders of the armed rebellion to speak about specific aims makes their cause highly suspect. However, a few indications available in the press here do indicate enough to show more positively what a deadly cGanger they represent for the Algerian Revolution.
On September 25, the day that the call went out for open armed rebellion, a French reporter Jean-Frangois Steiner happened to be in Tizi-Ouzou, the capital of Kabylie where the leaders of the counterrevolution staged a mess rally. Steiner claims. that he had received a tip in Algiers that something would be up; thus he was the only reporter of the outside press to be present.
With the exclusive pictures which his photographer took, the weekly Candide claimed a Scoop. Candide happens to be a rightwing Gaullist sheet which is far from reliable. However no denials from Tizi-Ouzou have been issued up to now on what Steiner reported.
‘Mourad Oussedik, an attorney, was one of the main speakers, He claimed that abstentions in the September 15 election had showed the Algerian people voted no "to the oriental despotism and its neo-fascist instruments."
Calling the government a "police state" that had broken the unions and all national organizations, he declared the government to be "illegal."
He appealed for the use of “all means" to bring it down and ‘ordered the followers of the "Front of Socialist Forces" for which he was speaking to go into "decisive battle."
Steiner was granted an interview with Hocine Ait Ahmed, who is considered to be the principal political figure of this grouping. Ait Ahmed denied that his movement is particularly Kabyle or confined to Kabylie. If the insurrection broke out there, "it is because we have received a mandate to unleash and animate the struggle against the government as we did during the previous war."
Ait Ahmed boasted that the "Front of Socialist Forces" is everywhere in Algeria. The desertion of the Katiba (a company of soldiers) in the Medea region, on the eve of the elections, was a political act. The guerrillas of Orleansvillais and the Aurés are in touch with us."
Asked how far they intend to go, Ait Ahmed responded, "Up to the fall of Ben Bella and his regime of terror."
By all means?"
"By all means."
In response to a specific question on what kind of democracy he envisages for Algeria, Ait Ahmed replied:
"No other country in the world suffered as much as ours to defeat an enemy who was also a brother. So why do you want us to copy other countries which we don't resemble? Algeria is unique: economically underdeveloped, she is nevertheless an evolved, Lastern country that was Westernized for a hundred and thirty years. Her war of independence was carried out ina : terrible way against a brother country. Don't forget that independence was an alternative solution after the failure, long ago, of integration. That's Algeria. That's why she must invent an original cemocracy, which, while being genuine, will not hobble the revolution." .
In this entire evasive reply not a word is said about the development of workers democracy on the basis of the self-management committees already established under Ben Bella. Instead a thinly veiled appeal is made for sympathy from the "brother" against whom the Algerians had to fight for independence.
This pitch is even clearer in the following passages on the kind of relations Ait Ahmed envisages with France:
"Algeria must be politically independent of France, but the Evian agreement must be respected in both spirit and letter. First of all, because the agreement is a good one, next because one's word is'a sacred thing. It is because Ben bella perjured himself that we are fighting him. It is because he perjured himself that. his regime is bankrupt.
"His dishonesty plunged him into a course from which he has no way out. After having broken the popular enthusiasm following independence, he was obliged, to maintain himself, to resort to. demnagogy. Thus it was that he betrayed France and his friends. He could not keep the promises he made, so he was condemned to reinforce the police regime."
On the nationalizations undertaken by Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed was reported to have said: "Algeria must carry out the revolution, but the nationalizations provided for in the Evian agreement must be the result of frank and valid negotiations with France. We must end the unilateral acts of the present regime in which the 'nationalizations,' in quotation marks, are nothing but spoliations."
The attempt to maintain a "revolutionary" and even "socialist" mask conflicts with the evident need of this spokesman of the "Front of Socialist Forces" inside Algeria to indicate his . real aims to forces outside Algeria that have no need for such a. mask. His message is nonetheless clear enough, as is the sympathetic handling which Candide gives to the armed rebellion.
Another repellent note, repeatedly sounded in the propaganda of the Cuban counterrevolutionists, stood out prominently in a "proclamation" issued by Ait Ahmed and Mohand Ou El Hadj:
"The Algerian Communists know that Algeria is sinking into. chaos. They count on disintegration. They are helping Ben Bella only to use him later." (Le Figaro October 7.) -
Ait Ahmed claims that he stands for socialism. It is a most questionable variety as may be gathered from the following declaration:
"Ben Bella's error was to believe he could repeat the October Revolution. But Algeria is not Russia. What he wants, him, is Stalinism. As for me, I am for socialism, but by stages and without reducing the country to unemployment." (Paris-presse l'intransigeant October CS.)
Mohand Ou El Hadj also displays.a."socialism" that. leans. . heavily in the direction displayed by the former neocolonialist government, the GPRA, which was ousted last year and replaced by _the Ben Bella government. "Mr. Ferhat Abbas, who was president of the GPRA and then president of the National Assembly, is treated like a traitor today because he dared criticize the Constitution." (Le Monde October 8.)
The colonel said this in explaining why he was prepared to "shed blood" if “obliged to" in trying to overthrow Ben Bella.
BRITISH