Ben Bellism

Algeria's Premier Ahmed ben Bella is moving ever closer to complete one-man rule. Last week venerable, ailing ex-Premier Ferhat Abbas, 63, quit his post as Speaker of the Assembly and handed out a 15-page critique of the government. He was chiefly upset because Ben Bella keeps ignoring the Assembly, even read the country's new, strongly centralized constitution to a meeting of his own followers at an Algiers movie theater before submitting it to the Deputies. Asked Abbas: "Why should we agree to a constitution that has been prostituted in a cinema?" Abbas conceded that Ben Bella's regime is not going Communist but warned that "we do seem to be heading toward a fascist dictatorship."

Though Ben Bella remarks acidly that "revolutions are not made without prisons," Ben Bellism is not fascism. Critic Abbas was blasted as a "bourgeois spokesman for privilege" by government-run newspapers and drummed out of the National Liberation Front, which he once headed. But he was permitted to retire quietly to his villa in Kouba, outside Algiers, thereby joining the ranks of Ben Bella's other muffled but unharmed opponents, such as Mohammed Boudiaf, who is under house arrest, and ex-Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda, who has quit politics to resume his career as a druggist.

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