Word: algerians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...week long, an Algerian army band tootled discordantly through some 60 unfamiliar national anthems. Bureaucrats frantically cabled Paris to find out what had happened to 200 new Citroën limousines ordered for the great occasion. And Des Pins, a once tranquil seaside resort where the Algerian government insisted to the bitter end that the second Afro-Asian Conference would take place this week on schedule, looked like a manic blend of Hellzapoppin and The Last Days of Pompeii...
...because Ben Bella had been decked out with a Lenin Peace Prize. It hardly seemed decorous to embrace the new man too hastily, so Russia did nothing. China, desperately wanting the conference as a sounding board for anti-U.S. and anti-Russian blasts, ran the risk of alienating Algerian leftists and recognized the new government. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, while carefully pointing out that recognition was between states, not personalities, still withheld his blessing from the junta that had ousted his close friend and safest ally...
...predawn darkness last Saturday morning, truckloads of Algerian troops pulled up before President Ahmed ben Bella's white-walled hillside Villa Joly, overlooking the Mediterranean. The soldiers quickly pushed aside police bodyguards, hurried through the garden to the glass-paneled front door. There was a rough exchange in guttural Arabic, the sound of breaking glass, and a light snapped on in the President's upstairs bedroom. Ben Bella woke up to discover he was deposed and under arrest...
...Algerian people, they received the news of Ben Bella's fall with apathy. Men gathered in cafés to sip thick coffee and mint tea; stores and shops opened for business as usual. By afternoon, soldiers with submachine guns had turned back to the city's police the job of directing traffic, and Algiers dozed beneath a cloudless sky and enervating heat...
...sundown a crowd came briefly to life as people scrambled for the evening papers, which merely reprinted the communique broadcast by Radio Algiers. Some Western observers optimistically recalled that Boumedienne's Defense Ministry had been one of the few well-run departments of the Algerian government and thought that might augur well for the future. The only fact that had become really clear was that Houari Boumedienne, so long known as "Numéro un bis" in Algeria, had at last become...