Houari Boumédiène (born Mohammed ben Brahim Boukharouba; 23 August 1932 – 27 December 1978) was an Algerian military officer, revolutionary, and politician who was the second head of state of independent Algeria from 1965 until his death in 1978. He served as Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Algeria from 19 June 1965 until 12 December 1976 and thereafter as president of Algeria until his death. At age 32, Boumédiène remains the youngest person to serve as head of state of Algeria.
Born in Guelma, Boumédiène was educated at the Islamic Institute in Constantine. In 1955, he joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) and adopted the nom de guerre Houari Boumédiène. By 1960, he had risen through the organization's ranks to become the commander of the FLN's military wing. After the FLN's victory over the French in the Algerian War of Independence in 1962, Boumédiène became the Minister of Defense in Algeria's new government.
In June 1965, Boumédiène overthrew President Ben Bella in a bloodless coup before proceeding to abolish Algeria's parliament along with its constitution and ultimately becoming the country's acting head of state. In the 1970s, Boumédiène initiated a gradual restoration of parliamentarism and civil institutions in Algeria. This process ended with the adoption of the new constitution in 1976. The presidency was reinstated, and Boumédiène emerged as the sole candidate in an election later that year, winning with 99.46 per cent of the votes. Subsequently, he pursued Arab socialist and Pan-Arabist policies. He was also strongly opposed to Israel and offered logistic assistance to anti-colonial movements and freedom fighters across the Arab world and Africa.
From the beginning of 1978, Boumédiène appeared less and less in public. He died on December 27, 1978, after unsuccessful treatment for a rare form of blood cancer, Waldenström's macroglobulinemia. His funeral was attended by two million mourners. He was succeeded as president by Chadli Bendjedid.
Early life and War of Independence
Not much is known about Boumédiène's early life. His place of birth variously appear as Guelma, the nearby village of Clauzel, or Héliopolis, and his date of birth as 16 August 1925, 23 August 1927, or (in most sources) as 1932. His father said in a 1965 interview that his date of birth was 23 August 1932. His birth name was Mohammed ben Brahim Boukherouba, and his father was a penniless wheat-farmer and was an Arab and strict Muslim who did not speak French. According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, his family is Arabic-speaking and of Berber origins. He was educated at a Quranic school in Guelma until he was 14, then an Arabic secondary school in Constantine.
In 1952, when France was recruiting Algerians to fight in the Indochina War, Boumédiène went to Cairo, where he studied at the Al-Azhar University. It was there he first met Ahmed Ben Bella. He joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the Algerian War of Independence in 1955, adopting Houari Boumédiène as his nom-de-guerre (from Sidi Boumediène, the name of the patron saint of the city of Tlemcen in western Algeria, where he served as an officer during the war, and Sidi El Houari, the patron saint of nearby Oran). He reached the rank of colonel, then the highest rank in the FLN forces, and from 1960 he was chief of staff of the ALN, the FLN's military wing. In 1973, he married Anissa el-Mansali, a lawyer.
In 1962, after a referendum, Algeria declared its independence, a move affirmed by the French government. Boumédiène and Ahmed Ben Bella overthrew the provisional government of Benyoucef Benkhedda with support from the ALN in 1962. Boumédiène headed a powerful military faction within the government and was made defence minister by the Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, whose ascent to power he had assisted as chief of staff. Boumédiène was also appointed as Vice President of Algeria in September 1963. He grew increasingly distrustful of Ben Bella's erratic style of government and ideological puritanism, and in June 1965, Boumédiène seized power in a bloodless coup.
The country's constitution and political institutions were abolished, and he ruled through a Revolutionary Council of his own mostly military supporters. Many of them had been his companions during the war years, when he was based around the Moroccan border town of Oujda, which caused analysts to speak of the "Oujda Group". One prominent member of this circle was Boumédiène's long-time foreign minister, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who served as Algeria's president from 1999 until 2019. Initially, he was seen as potentially a weak leader, with no significant power base except inside the army, and it was not known to what extent he commanded the officer corps. He remained Algeria's undisputed leader until his death in 1978. No significant internal challenges emerged from inside the government after the 1967 coup attempt. After the coup, he insisted on collective rule.
Economically, Boumédiène turned away from Ben Bella's focus on rural Algeria and experiments in socialist cooperative businesses (l'autogestion). Instead, he opted for a more systematic and planned programme of state-driven industrialization. Algeria had virtually no advanced production at the time, but in 1971 Boumédiène nationalized the Algerian oil industry, increasing government revenue tremendously (and sparking intense protest from the French government). He then put the soaring oil and gas resources—enhanced by the oil price shock of 1973—into building heavy industry, hoping to make Algeria the Maghreb's industrial centre. His years in power were in fact marked by a reliable and consistent economic growth, but after his death, in the 1980s, the drop in oil prices and increasingly evident inefficiency of the country's state-run industries prompted a change in policy towards gradual economical liberalization. Boumédiène imposed Arab socialism as the state ideology and declared Islam the state religion. He was a strong supporter of Arabization and was more assertive than Ben Bella in Arabizing Algeria, especially between 1970 and 1977, and declared 1971 the year of Arabization.
In the 1970s, along with the expansion of state industry and oil nationalization, Boumédiène declared a series of socialist revolutions, and strengthened the leftist aspect of his administration. A side-effect of this was the rapprochement with the hitherto suppressed remnants of the Algerian Communist Party (the PAGS), whose members were now co-opted into the government, where it gained some limited intellectual influence, although without formal legalization of their party. Algeria formally remained a single-party state under the FLN.
Political stability reigned, however, as attempts at challenging the state were generally nipped in the bud. As chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Boumédiène and his associates ruled by decree. During the 1970s, constitutional rule was gradually reinstated and civilian political institutions were restored and reorganized. Efforts were made to revive activity within the FLN, and state institutions were reestablished systematically, starting with local assemblies and moving up through regional assemblies to the national level, with the election of a parliament. The process culminated with the adoption of a constitution (1976) that laid down Algeria's political structure. This was preceded by a period of relatively open debate on the merits of the government-backed proposal, although the constitution itself was then adopted in a state-controlled referendum with no major changes. The constitution reintroduced the office of president. As the leader of the FLN, Boumédiène was the sole candidate for president, and was confirmed in office in a December referendum.
At the time of his death, later that year, the political and constitutional order in Algeria was virtually entirely of FLN design. This structure remained largely unchanged until the late 1980s, when political pluralism was introduced and the FLN lost its role as dominant single party. (Many basic aspects of this system and the Boumédiène-era constitution are still in place.) However, throughout Boumédiène's era, the military remained the dominant force in the country's politics, and military influence permeated civilian institutions such as the FLN, parliament and government, undercutting the constitutionalization of the country's politics. Intense financial or political rivalries between military and political factions persisted, and was kept in check and prevented from destabilizing the government mainly by Boumédiène's overwhelming personal dominance of both the civilian and military sphere.