Word: boumendjel
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...over Charles de Gaulle's renewed and more generous offer of peace negotiations (TIME, June 27). At first they refused to fly in an official French plane. Then, taking passage in a Tunis Air DC-4, the rebels finally dispatched a three-man "advance guard" headed by Ahmed Boumendjel, 52, who is "Premier"' Ferhat Abbas' version of Jim Hagerty. When their plane finally landed at Orly (one engine conked out en route), the rebel delegates were hastily whisked off by helicopter to Melun, where Roger Moris, De Gaulle's Secretary of State for Algeria, was waiting...
...better personify the tragic ironies of the Algerian revolt than burly, jovial Ahmed Boumendjel. A onetime Paris lawyer and councilor of the French Union, Boumendjel has hundreds of friends among French politicians and journalists, to whom he is affectionately known as "Boum." A latecomer to the rebel cause, he joined Algeria's Front de Liberation Nationale only after his younger brother died during "interrogation" by French paratroopers in Algiers in 1956. Presumably, his mission would serve incidentally to give Boumendjel a chance to see his French wife and two teen-age daughters, whom he left behind in Paris when...
Summoning newsmen to a dingy press office on Tunis' Rue des Entrepreneurs, Rebel Press Spokesman Ahmed Boumendjel announced that his "government" was agreeable to negotiations with France "to discuss the conditions and applications" of the self-determination vote that De Gaulle has promised Algeria. The rebels even named their proposed representatives : five rebel officials headed by Mohammed ben Bella, 40, the bemedaled former French army sergeant who was the chief organizer of the Algerian revolt and the man most regarded as the villain by right-wing French settlers in Algeria...