Near Miss

Emerging from his weekly Cabinet meeting in Algiers' Palais du Gouvernement, Algerian President Houari Bou-mediene climbed into his black Citroen to go to lunch with Minister of State Rabat Bitat. As the car began to roll down the Esplanade de 1'Afrique, a child stepped forward with a petition.

Boumediene had the car stopped and gracefully accepted it. The Citroen had scarcely begun to move again when its windows were suddenly shattered by a burst of machine-gun fire. The bullets missed their target: Boumediene, Bitat and the driver took only superficial cuts from the flying glass. As the car sped away from the scene, security police gunned down and killed two of the assassins.

Boumediene has a host of enemies, who disagree with the direction in which he has taken Algeria's revolution since he overthrew Ahmed ben Bella in 1965.

His most dangerous enemy is Colonel Tahar Zbiri, who was chief of staff until December, when he led an abortive coup to overthrow Boumediene. Still at large, Zbiri is a socialist zealot who resented the President's efforts to save Algeria's floundering economy by replacing revolutionaries with technocrats. Algeria's labor unionists are also at odds with Boumediene: they consider him not Marxist enough and blame him for an unemployment of 5,000,000, nearly half the work force. The small Algerian middle class hates Boumediene for dispossessing it from its once privileged position. And then, of course, there are Algeria's political exiles.

Which of the President's foes tried to cut him down last week? At week's end Boumediene's government apparently had still not found out, since it conveniently placed the blame on "international imperialism and its lackeys."

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