To the Barricades Again

Nothing quite so symbolized the total violence of the Algerian revolution as the barricades of cobblestones and sandbags from which its bloodiest battles were fought against France. Last week the barricades were back again. Soldiers and police armed with submachine guns blocked all highways. Foreign diplomats and newsmen were ordered to keep off the roads and stay close to Algiers. Colonel Tahar Zbiri, the army chief of staff, was in hiding after attempting a coup, and with him had gone many of Algeria's top officers. Troops loyal to President Houari Boumediene combed the snow-covered mountain range where Zbiri was last seen, and the government ordered a nationwide manhunt for a list of civilian plotters that included Boumediene's Labor Minister Abdelaziz Zerdani. Flamboyant but Uneducated. Tensions between Boumediene and his army chief had been building ever since the two men combined their forces to overthrow the demagogic Ahmed ben Bella in June 1965. Zbiri, 37, a flamboyant but uneducated Berber tribesman who had fought against the French as a guerrilla chieftain, was a believer in the purity of the revolution and all its impossible promises of socialist equality and prosperity.

He distrusted the dour pragmatism of Boumediene, 42, who methodically dismantled the chaotic collective farms and factories set up by Ben Bella in favor of a system of state capitalism that at least forestalled the collapse of all production. His distrust grew to resentment as Boumediene filled his Cabinet with technocrats. The resentment turned to outright rebellion when the President began easing the old guerrilla chiefs out of their army commands and installing officers with solid professional military training in their places.

Last month, when Boumediene installed still another technocrat as head of his party, the National Liberation Front, and ordered the reorganization of the entire party structure, Zbiri could take no more. At the head of a column of troops and tanks, he set out from Orleansville, 105 miles southwest of Algiers, and began rolling toward the capital. He expected no resistance. Army cohorts in Algiers had promised to disrupt government communications, and he was counting on the support of Major Said Abid, commander of the First Military Region, who controlled the approaches to Algiers. There was one flaw in the plot: Boumediene's secret police knew its every detail. Forewarned, the President quickly crushed the coup, dispatching his own troops and planes to ambush the insurgent column near the old French colonial town of Blida.

Little Difference. The ease with which Boumediene put down the conspirators does not mean that his troubles are over. Zbiri, still at large, commands the loyalties of a good many of Algeria's military men. Also behind him are the country's Berber minority, the revolutionary zealots who despise Boumediene's practical technocrats and, in all probability, the 200,000 members of the Algerian General Workers Union, whose power Boumediene has systematically underminded.

Whatever the outcome, it should make little difference to the West. Zbiri may claim to be a purer revolutionary in Algeria's home affairs, but no one can outshine Boumediene as an international radical. It was Boumediene, hoping to replace Nasser as the leader of the Arab left, who flew to Moscow to blame the Kremlin for Israel's victory in the June war. If the Russians had not been afraid of tangling with the West, implied Boumediene, the Arabs obviously would have won the war.

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