The Soccer War Read online

  His manner astonished me. I met him a few days after the coup and was prepared for someone characterized by the mannerisms of a despot. In fact, Boumedienne was shy, embarrassed. I was attending a reception at the People’s Palace. He bowed as low as a schoolboy to everyone. He did not know what to do with his hands, and his lack of social experience was obvious. After receiving the guests he sat in a chair against the wall and stared silently at an empty corner of the room. I do not know if he exchanged a single sentence with anyone in the course of the reception.

  I asked one of the correspondents accredited in Algiers: ‘Have any of you ever talked with Boumedienne?’ Nobody had. ‘He does not talk to anyone,’ he said. ‘He does not talk at all.’ Indeed, Boumedienne is tightly sealed, a hermetic character: if Boumedienne has to say a word, he does so with great effort, as if he were laying bricks. He prefers to answer in monosyllables or with a nod of his head. He seldom delivers a speech. In the past year, he had given one speech. He reads his speeches from a text. They are always short, made up of dry theses. They say that Boumedienne treats civilians warily, that he cannot stand diplomatic chit-chat or round-table talks.

  He comes across as a man who is always concentrating, absorbed by a particularly difficult and important idea. That is why he rarely smiles. He has none of a leader’s stagecraft: he does not stroke children on the head or raise his hands in the air when he speaks or push himself forward in any way. He does not worry about his image or his status as a celebrity. This is not a pose, but the way he is. He dresses neglectfully; his long trouser cuffs wrinkle over his shoes; his jacket is buttoned the wrong way. He does not dress in a white shirt and tie; he always wears some sort of polo shirt, or fatigues.

  He has one passion: the army; it is in his blood. He always howled when Ben Bella spent money on conferences and visits, because he wanted that money to go to the army. Boumedienne’s world consists of barracks, staff and a firing range. Boumedienne’s ambition is a political army, in the sense of the army-state. Saving the homeland: by means of the army. Development: by means of the army. Civilians never accomplish anything worthwhile; they mean demagogy and corruption; civilians always drag the country into a crisis. You need to have a few civilians in the government because the world does things that way, but only the army can keep the country on its feet, especially when the country is in a mess with factions eating at each other instead of thinking about the general good.

  Boumedienne first met Ben Bella in Cairo, in 1954. Boumedienne was nothing at the time; he was twenty-eight years old and teaching in an Arabic school. Ben Bella pulled Boumedienne into the liberation struggle. Later Boumedienne carried Ben Bella into power, and in exchange Ben Bella defended Boumedienne against a party leadership that wanted the army to be only an army, to keep its nose out of politics. For years they did each other favours. They appeared everywhere together: Ben Bella, the born leader, the man of the world, in front; and behind him, like a shadow, silent, unmoving: Boumedienne.

  Ben Bella and Boumedienne were two radically different characters, two entirely dissimilar mentalities. But each was indubitably an individual. Ben Bella had to get on Boumedienne’s nerves, while Boumedienne had to strike fear into Ben Bella.

  Boumedienne has a steely character. He is a man without hesitation, a revolutionary, an Arab nationalist, a spokesman for the Algerian fellah and the little man in the cities. Above all, Boumedienne will try to do something for these classes. They are the social elements to whose longings and ambitions the colonel is most sensitive and who make up ninety per cent of Algerian society.

  The most common response to the coup in Algeria was distaste. Ambition was at work here. Algerians regard themselves as aristocrats among the Arabs, as cultured Arabs: there might be coups in places like Iraq or Libya, but not in Algeria. The coup compromised Algeria in the eyes of the world, especially as it fell in the week before the second Afro-Asian conference.

  A coup here, with a couple of days to go before the conference. Unbelievable confusion broke out. There was no reliable information. The Revolutionary Council was acting underground, like the Mafia. Nobody knew where the council was located or who was on the council. There was no official authority. Various figures would put themselves forward as spokesmen for the new order, but nobody knew them. Who could tell—he might be a spokesman or he might be some crackpot. Rumours circulated through the city. Ben Bella is alive. Ben Bella is dead. The conference will come off. There isn’t going to be any conference. There’s going to be a demonstration. There’s going to be a revolt. Nasser is coming. Chou En-Lai is on his way. They’re all coming. Nobody’s coming. They’re arresting the communists. They’re arresting the Egyptians. They’re arresting everybody. It has already started. It starts today. It starts tomorrow. It will start in a week.

  A fearsome heatwave set in. People fainted in the streets. A rabid Ben Bella supporter told me: ‘The people will not rise. It’s too hot.’ He was right: the days were quiet and the demonstrations began at night. They went on for five evenings. Young people, boys from the street came out, full of enthusiasm, caught up in it, but they were not organized. Two, perhaps three thousand people took part in the largest demonstrations in Algiers. The army was mustered against them. This army knows crowd control like the rosary. And it has the most modern equipment to enforce it. By the sixth day the demonstrations were over and the army returned to the barracks.

  The young people apart, everything was quiet. The party was quiet; the labour unions were quiet; other organizations were quiet. People said that they were talking about what to do, that there was hesitation. The coup revealed the total fragmentation of society, the absence of cohesion, the absence of bonds, the total absence of organized force.

  Power lay on the side of the army. And the army was in control. The people of the left were pessimistic. They expected repression and slept, hidden in their homes. But the repression never came. Boumedienne did not lock up a single communist, a single leftist. The fear came from the fact that nobody in Algeria knows the army.

  Boumedienne is not concerned with convincing people. Boumedienne acts. People in Africa like a leader who speaks, explains, confides. Nasser confided to the crowd at a rally that his daughter was not going to university because she failed her exams. He spoke about this sorrowfully, like the father of a child who had not succeeded; he spoke to thousands of fathers with similar problems.

  The coup showed Algeria for what it is—a typical Third World country. On the bottom, there are the peasant masses on the eternal treadmill of poverty, in continual fear of a drought, praying constantly to Allah for the bowl of food that their barren land cannot supply them with. At the top, somewhere in the drawing rooms, someone is being locked up; someone has been overthrown. Two worlds—with no visible links between them.

  After the coup, the Revolutionary Council took control in Algeria, the élite of the army making up the majority of the council.

  There might have been a way to avoid the coup, which, as a tactical move, was extremely blunt. But it must be remembered that these were young people; by the standards of European politics, this is a youth organization. The average age of a Revolutionary Council member is somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-four. Boumedienne, at thirty-nine, is the senior member. Algerian politics is the domain of people in their twenties and thirties. All of politics. What’s more, these are Arabs, uncommonly proud people, sensitive on points of honour, hot-blooded, who will go after each other on the slightest pretext. ‘Ben Bella offended us’—this is reason enough to lock Ben Bella up. Many of these flukes and freaks of African politics have this background: politics are practised by inexperienced people who have not yet learned to foresee the irrevocable consequences of their decisions, who have not yet absorbed the seriousness and prudence of older political war-horses.

  On the African political stage, the army remains. Few in Algeria know what attitudes prevail in the army. There is something of the mafia about the army, and something of a
religious sect. The officers do not greet each other with salutes; they shake hands and kiss each other on both cheeks.

  People of various political orientations sit on the Revolutionary Council. Reactionaries and progressives, brought temporarily together by the fear of Ben Bella. There will be contention in this group, divisions and reclassifications will occur.

  Anything can still happen: a new conspiracy, a new coup, revolt within the army, an uprising in Kabylia. Boumedienne told Heikal: ‘The Algerian revolution is a revolution of surprises.’

  A DISPUTE OVER A JUDGE ENDS IN THE FALL OF A GOVERNMENT

  In November 1965 I was flying from Algiers to Accra. Along the way, the airplane landed in Conakry. The airport was filled with soldiers and police. I asked a man from Guinea what was going on. ‘They’ve uncovered a conspiracy against the republic,’ he said. ‘There was an attempt on Sekou Touré’s life. There have been arrests and resignations.’

  In Accra, three days later, President Nkrumah called a press conference about Rhodesia. To reach his office, you had to pass through three gates and three courtyards. Each courtyard was filled with soldiers and police. We were told to arrive an hour before the press conference began and were then left standing in a line. One by one, we were admitted to a room where there were two policemen who carried out body searches. During the search, a policeman found a mechanical pencil in the pocket of my jacket. I was ordered to take it apart. I did so. I was ordered to put it together. I put it together. Take it apart again. The policemen conferred: there was something funny about that pencil. I had taken on a new role, the role of suspect, not knowing what the verdict would be. Finally, one of the policemen asked: ‘Will you swear that this pencil cannot fire?’ I answered yes, I would swear. They allowed me to take it.

  Nkrumah looked tired. They say he is worn out and does not sleep well. In September, there were rumours in Accra that the army staff was forming a conspiracy, that the military might make a bid for power. At the end of September, Nkrumah removed the chief and assistant chief of the general staff, reorganized the ministry of defence and named himself commander-in-chief of the army. He received his marshal’s baton at a special ceremony.

  From Accra, I drove to Lagos in Nigeria. To get there, you cross through two small countries, Togo and Dahomey. Between Accra and the Ghanaian border, the road was closed six times and at each place there were army and police sentries standing in front of barriers, searching vehicles and inspecting documents.

  At the border between Ghana and Togo there was a large padlocked gate, and when I drove up, a policeman wandered around it for a considerable time, looking for the key. Against this fence two years ago, Silvanus Olympio, the president of Togo, was executed by a firing squad of several officers. The capital of Togo, Lomé, begins just beyond the gate. It is small, sandy, hot and beautiful, a beach city, and the sea can be felt everywhere. I listened to the radio news in the Hotel du Golf. The announcer read the first reports from Leopoldville about General Mobutu’s coup in the Congo. Mobutu had arrested President Kasavubu and named himself president for five years. The most characteristic thing about Mobutu’s speech was the precision of the decree that he would be president ‘for five years’.

  Nobody else would have anything to say about it.

  But Mobutu was right: here it takes one officer and a thousand soldiers to establish a force that has no competition. Who can oppose them? How many governing parties are there here that in the moment of truth can field a thousand people who are dedicated, idealistic and, most important, not quarrelling with each other?

  From Lomé to the border of Dahomey is fifty kilometres, a road runs beside the sea the whole way. Along the shore there is a fishing village, the longest village in the world, measuring more than a hundred kilometres in length, that begins in Ghana and ends in Dahomey. It was in Dahomey that I came across a coup by sheer accident.

  As I was driving into Cotonou, which constitutes half the capital of Dahomey (the other half, called Port Novo, is thirty kilometres down the road), I passed a car being driven by the AFP correspondent, Jacques Lamoureux, who started shouting at me: ‘Stop! Pull over! There’s a revolution here!’ Lamoureux was visibly elated, because Cotonou is a pretty little town but a boring one and its sole real attraction is the revolution, which occurs only once every few months.

  This time the president of the republic, Sourou Migan Apithy, was locked in a struggle with Justin Ahomadegbe, the vice-president and head of the government. Their dispute had started with an argument over which one of them had the right to appoint a judge to the Supreme Court. Each wanted to fill the position, as each had a large family among whom various positions continually had to be distributed.

  Little by little the argument between the president and the vice-president grew so heated that they had stopped talking to each other. They were in touch now only by correspondence, but even that was soon abandoned as well, since they returned again in the letters to the subject of the judge, and the name calling started all over. (Apithy showed me the letters later.)

  For several months the state had ceased to function; the cabinet had not met; the country was paralysed.

  Here we can see the mechanisms of African politics perfectly: Dahomey is a poor, underdeveloped country. To lift Dahomey out of poverty will require enormous effort, concentrated energy and education. But nobody is even working.

  For months the government and the party, the parliament, the army, everything has been engaged in this dispute over a judge. There is relentless debate over the judge; resolutions are passed, various compromises are discussed.

  I arrived in Cotonou on the day when both sides concluded that every legal argument had been exhausted and it was time to take concrete measures. Ahomadegbe struck first. He called a meeting of the politburo of the governing party, the PDD (Parti Démocratique Dahoméen), and the politburo voted to expel Apithy from the party and remove him from the presidency as ‘the only means of saving the unity of the Dahomeyan nation.’ That evening, Ahomadegbe went on the radio to say that history had given him responsibility for the fate of the Dahomeyan nation and, thus, he would take upon himself the duties of president. It looked therefore as if Ahomadegbe had won. But when we drove to Apithy’s headquarters in Porto Novo the next day, we found him wholly unconcerned. Apithy ate dinner, had a nap and then received us and stated that he had been elected president by the people and only the people could deprive him of that office.

  So Dahomey had two presidents, two heads of state.

  Such a situation cannot go on for long. Fortunately, someone had the sense to call a meeting of political activists—something like a party convention—who were summoned to Cotonou on Sunday. This was the national leadership: party bosses, members of parliament, labour and youth movement officials, wholesalers from the bazaar (an important political force), priests, witch-doctors and army officers. The meeting took place in the palace of the former president of Dahomey, Hubert Maga, who was overthrown by the army in 1963.

  The palace is famous.

  The building of it used up all of the funds that had been set aside for the three-year national development plan. Its huge gates are carved of pure gold. Snakes, also gold, twine around the marble columns in the main hall. The whole palace drips gold. Niches in the walls are inlaid with precious stones, and authentic Persian carpets cover the floors. During the confusion of 1963, when Colonel Christopher Soglo overthrew President Hubert Maga, the precious silver dishes that Maga had imported from Paris antique shops disappeared. Vice-President Ahomadegbe took it upon himself to investigate, and concluded publicly that Colonel Soglo’s wife had taken the silver. The government crisis that subsequently erupted was smoothed over somehow, but it was clear that if Soglo got involved now—decided to act—Ahomadegbe would have to lose.

  In any case, we went to the meeting.

  On the steps of the palace we met Soglo, now a general, who greeted us and stopped to talk. Soglo is a stocky, jovial, energetic man. He is
fifty-six. He served in the French army from 1931 as a career NCO. He was dressed simply, in an army shirt without insignia. He wore a green beret. Soglo did not carry a weapon, and neither did other officers, nor the paratroopers surrounding the palace. During the course of the military takeover that I was about to witness, I did not see a single armed soldier. This distinguished the present coup from that of October 1963, when the army used weapons: namely, the one mortar in the possession of the Dahomeyan army. When Soglo arrested Hubert Maga, the members of the cabinet, unsure about what was happening, barricaded themselves in a small building near the main square. Soglo himself then set up the mortar in front of the building (he was the only one in the army who knew how to operate it) and announced through a megaphone that if the cabinet did not resign by four in the afternoon, he would begin firing on the building. The cabinet decided unanimously to resign, which it communicated to Soglo through the window, and thus ended the political crisis of October 1963.

  Now Soglo stood with us on the stairs of the palace, in a good humour, conversing. He told us that he was completely unable to reconcile them—‘them’ meaning the self-proclaimed president and the one elected by the people. Later he added that he would ‘have to do something.’

  Just before the party convention opened, word went around that the witch-doctors had come out in support of Ahomadegbe. ‘Well, Apithy’s finished,’ opined the AFP correspondent, Jacques Lamoureux, who then sent a dispatch to Paris saying so. But we waited. The convention ended without an agreement later that afternoon, with the activists splitting into two camps, supporting different presidents. In the evening flyers were handed out, consisting of three sentences: ‘Down with Fascism! Down with Ahomadegbe! Long live the Army!’ That same evening, Ahomadegbe made a dramatic, single-handed attempt to arrest Apithy. He drove to Porto Novo, where Apithy resided. He then went to the gendarmerie barracks and demanded that the commander of the gendarmes, Major Jackson, arrest. Apithy. But the major told Ahomadegbe that he took orders from General Soglo; the two argued, then Ahomadegbe went back to Cotonou. The major must then have reported everything to General Soglo, because, by the time Ahomadegbe had returned, Soglo had decided to act at once.