ESTRATEGIAS DE MARKETING

leadership of this unit was under a French officer, Abdel-Hamid Latrach, who gave most of the high positions of the ministry to his French Officer colleagues. These were especially powerful positions, and hence this group became the second most powerful after the President. He sent his mostly French Officers to military education centres overseas, including France, Yugoslavia, Russia and the USA, and built up strong international military relationships in the process. In our interview, Chouchane mentioned the names of some of those who are still in positions of power in Algeria today, including Arbi Belkhir, Guenaizia Abdelmalek and Mohammed Touati. A few of them have retired after being granted amnesty,388 including Nezzar and Lammari. President Bouteflika gave them protection against charges from any court

386 _{The use of the term “clandestine power” in this sentence refers to the illegitimate power that French Officers} exercised with Boumédiène, taking high positions in the military, and subsequently seizing control of key political positions until they became the most powerful group in the Algerian regime.

387 _{Chouchane A., personal Interview, London, July 2009; Samraoui, M., personal interview, Auckland(12} December 2007); Mohammed Samraoui, Chroniques des années de sang (Paris: Denoël, 2003).

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in the country and thus protected them from being charged for any of their crimes against the Algerian people.

However, the French Officers ultimately failed despite the high positions that they reached in the period of Boumédiène. Both Chouchane and Brahimi note that they specifically failed in their competition with the SM, which was led by legitimate revolutionaries. Their failure affected the election of a new president after the death of Boumédiène in 1978. In effect, there were three candidates from the revolutionaries of the General Staff, L’état major, in this competition for the presidency: Bouteflika, who had worked with Boumédiène in the Western bases, and Bendjedid and Mohammed Salah Yahyaoui, who were from the Eastern bases, Ghardimaou. These candidates had no ties with the French Officers, but were not antagonistic to them. The French Officers, initiating a pattern that they were to follow repeatedly in later years, established a set of shared interests with these presidential candidates. They were duly rewarded with new positions. From these new positions the French Officers fostered changes in the country’s power base through the repeated use of extreme violence against Algerians and their legitimate leadership. They thus came to dominate the military, politics and administration. By 1990, the Minister of Defence was Nezzar, the head of Etat Major General was General Abdelmalik Gnaizia, the head of the land forces was their colleague Lammari and the General Security of the National Ministry of Defence was Mustapha Chelloufi. All of these men were colleagues from French military schools.389 They were now, in effect, the French Officers in power. The leader of the SM was not a French officer, however, and was in a lower position and as such was under their control. The French Officers systematically prevented the SM leader from rising in his position, so that no ‘outsider’ would be in a position to challenge them. They thus used President Bendjedid, who had taken up the presidency after Boumédiène.

President Bendjedid knew about the French Officers and their project, but he apparently thought that he was consititutionally protected by his position, and by his revolutionary legitimacy: he had been one of the earliest revolutionaries to join the FLN internally and the ALN in the Eastern bases. But he became vulnerable when he accepted their plan to weaken the SM and to remove from it the only officer who knew their secrets. Their plan was to cast the SM as an illegal organisation, and a danger to Algeria because of its extra-constitutional status and operation. They knew that the SM had been created by Boumédiène to protect him from them as well as from his enemies among the revolutionaries.

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They wanted to remove this organisation from the control of the president so that it would not repeat the situation that had transpired under Boumédiène, and had been repeated with Bendjedid. Later they created another security intelligent service, which became a tool in their hands to control the military, politicians, the economy and society.390

Bendjedid evinced greater self-confidence because of his background and his constitutional position. However, because they provided him with a daily stream of (albeit often wrong) information, Bendjedid increasingly trusted the French Officers, eventually appointing them to most of the senior leadership positions in the country. They became closer to him and attached themselves to him socially. When they turned against him and against democracy in a bloody coup d’état in the early 1990s, he was justifiably shocked. They allowed him to resign his position or be killed, initiating a pattern that they followed with his colleague, Boudiaf.391

In conclusion, the French Officers have been central to the Algerian crisis, from independence until the present. Their role in the major human rights violations and the systematic violence was initiated during the Boumédiène period, when few of them had the legitimacy to lead the country. After the death of Boumédiène in 1978, the French Officers come to dominate the Algerian military institutions and most of society.