BOUMED IENNE LIQUIDATES POPULAR MILITIA
A spokesman .of the Boumedienne regime announced August 12 that the Algerian government planned to disband the 30,000=man popular militia set up by Ben Bella in 1963 to help combat the counterrevolutionary uprising in the Kabylie.
Two days later it was announced that the militia had already been disbanded. They were being merged into the army, gendarmes and other military or paramilitary bodies, a spokesman of the regime said. He added that the militia only served to "duplicate" the army's role and were an "illustration of the confusion" that marked the Ben Bella government.
The truth is that the popular militia were never developed and extended as they should have been. In face of Boumedienne'ts resistance to organizing a militia in the example set by the Cuban Revolution, Ben Bella permitted the promising beginning he had made in this direction to be circumscribed and reduced to a caricature, Thus Ben Bella failed to create a possible counter to the base which Boumedienne was developing in the army for his own purposes,
Boumedienne is now following up his coup d'état by systematically reducing all possible centers of resistance to the course he has in mind. The militia, feeble as it was, thus became one of his | targets.
Another sign of the rightist direction of the Boumedienne.. regime is its attitude toward the freedom movements throughout Africa
which have representatives in Algeria, Ben Bella followed a policy of helping them, Boumedienne appears to be following a policy of cutting them off, ,
Thus news of their activities and of their views is appearing with less and less frequency in the Algerian press.
"CONFESSION"