Adventurers, Go Home!

When Algeria's shadowy new regime finally found its voice last week, foreigners and Algerians alike could hardly believe their ears. Colonel Houari Boumedienne, the gaunt, fiery-eyed army commander who ousted Ahmed ben Bella last month, left no doubt of his aims or of his determination to achieve them. "Algeria," he proclaimed, "just wants to be Algeria."

In his first speech since the coup, Boumedienne explained to graduating students at a gendarmerie school that the nation would no longer dabble in international revolution and intrigue. Nor, he warned, would his government tolerate the "adventurers who intruded themselves into our country" during Ben Bella's three-year rule. "Algeria," said the austere colonel, "has no need to take lessons in socialism from outside."

Grilled Ambassador. Boumedienne's Algeria-for-Algerians theme could hardly have cheered a score of "liberation" movements that had found funds and asylum in Algeria while battling colonialism in "oppressed" lands from the Congo to the Canary Islands. To make sure that its message would not be lost on Moscow, the government gave the Soviet ambassador "friendly warning" that it would no longer provide a forum for Communist propaganda. The Algiers correspondent for France's Communist daily L'Humanite, which bitterly denounced the coup, was booted out of the country for "exaggerated" reporting. Police also closed the office of Prensa Latina, Cuba's news and propaganda agency. When Fidel Castro castigated "military despotism and counterrevolution" in Algeria, a Cuban embassy official was called in for a sharp dressing down. Just how, Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika inquired acidly, did Castro take power?

Boumedienne did not spare Egypt's President Nasser, Ben Bella's close friend and ally. Some 200 Egyptians working on the Afro-Asian Conference site were rounded up after last week's bomb explosion in the meeting hall. Egypt's ambassador was hauled from his auto by police and grilled for two hours. In other Arab capitals, Boumedienne started recruiting teachers to replace the 2,000 pro-Nasser Egyptian instructors in Algerian schools. "At least," said one impressed diplomat, "he's digging the cockroaches out of the woodwork."

Ravaged Economy. Reprisals were few and feeble. Egypt huffily recalled fleet units on their way to visit Algiers. The Moscow-dominated World Youth Festival, which had been scheduled for this month in Algiers, was moved elsewhere--to Boumedienne's apparent relief. After a week without rioting on Algerian streets, initially hostile Arab governments appeared ready to accept the new Revolutionary Council. The most favorable foreign reaction came from French officials who, after months of negotiating a formula for dividing Algeria's oil revenues, found the new government surprisingly cooperative.

Boumedienne could hardly afford to alienate the French, whose $260 million in grants and royalties this year are bankrupt Algeria's main hope of survival. Indeed, the colonel declared, his overriding aim is to rescue the ravaged economy and preserve the hard-won "gains of the disinherited working people" who fought for independence. As one official put it, not altogether happily, the government will pursue "Ben Bellism, without Ben Bella."

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