Word: bellas
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This time it was a struggle between Algerians. On one side stood President Ahmed ben Bella, whose Socialist dictatorship has so far brought his country little beyond unemployment and hunger. On the other side were 1,000,000 dissident Berbers, led by two of Ben Bella's wartime comrades whose ide ology is vague, but who oppose his ruthless power drive and his economically disastrous rule...
Sniping at Comrades. At first, Ben Bella pretended to ignore the rebellion. Casually he dropped in to visit an Algiers training school, where he sipped tea and played games with orphaned shoeshine boys learning a new trade. He tried to dispose of the dissidents with ridicule. One of the rebel leaders, Hocine Aït Ahmed, had spent much of the war in French prisons (with Ben Bella himself). Told that Aït Ahmed was now wearing an Algerian army uniform, Ben Bella laughed: "He never got a chance to wear it during the war. I hope he enjoys...
While sniping at his former comrades, Ben Bella launched a campaign to boost his own popularity. For the first time in seven months, war widows received their pensions. Large shipments of food, much of it donated by the U.S., were hastily trucked to the hungry countryside. Ben Bella seemed to think that he could rally the country against the rebels with promises of further nationalization. But the seizure of medium-sized French land holdings, whose owners had paid better wages than does the government, was far from popular, and no one seemed to think that Algeria's economic misery...
Reluctantly, Ben Bella postponed his scheduled trip to the U.N. General Assembly and openly threatened the rebels. "There will be no discussion with the criminals, no bargaining," he shouted. "They only understand the language of machine guns...
Sheepish Smile. Even as Ben Bella spoke, his army moved. A convoy of seven Soviet-made 85-mm. cannon, a batch of 37-mm. antiaircraft guns and two fresh battalions rolled along twisting roads into the mountain town of Tizi-Ouzou, on the edge of rebel-held territory. Encamped along the high ridges were the guerrillas. They were equipped with heavy machine guns and recoil less cannon, which they cleaned constantly when they were not listening to their transistor radios or posing for Western news photographers.* Indian-style signal fires on the mountain spread news of the government troops...