Houari Boumediene

Houari Boumediene deposed Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965 and ruled Algeria until his death in 1978, turning the country into the loudest voice of the non-aligned world. He was born Mohamed Boukharouba near Guelma, studied at the Zitouna in Tunis and at al-Azhar in Cairo, and took a nom de guerre during the war of independence, in which he commanded the external army based in Morocco and Tunisia - the force that had been kept out of the fighting inside Algeria and was therefore intact in 1962. That army put Ben Bella in power and removed him three years later. As president he nationalised the French oil and gas interests in 1971, using Sonatrach as the instrument, and pursued heavy industry on a Soviet model financed by hydrocarbons, which built steel and petrochemical plants and left agriculture neglected. He addressed the United Nations in 1974 to demand a New International Economic Order, and hosted the 1973 Non-Aligned summit in Algiers; Algeria under him supported the ANC, the PLO and the Polisario Front, and Algiers was where liberation movements kept offices. His support for Western Sahara's independence produced a rupture with Morocco after the Green March of 1975 that has kept the border closed for most of the time since. Domestically he ran a one-party state with no elected assembly until 1977 and Arabised the schools and administration, a policy whose effects on a French-educated elite and on Berber speakers were felt long afterwards. He died of a rare blood disease at forty-six, and the industrial model he built could not survive the oil price collapse of the 1980s that helped bring on the crisis of 1988 and the civil war that followed. He was buried at El Alia after a funeral attended by heads of state from across the non-aligned world. Algiers airport carries his name. His successor Chadli Bendjedid began unwinding the economic model within a few years.

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