Houari Boumédiène

His place of birth variously appear as Guelma, the village of Clauzel near Guelma, or Héliopolis, and his date of birth as 16 August 1925, 23 August 1927, or in most sources as 1932.

Houari Boumédiène (هواري بومدين; born Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukherouba; 23 August 1932 – 27 December 1978) was an Algerian military officer and politician who served as Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Algeria from 19 June 1965 until 12 December 1976 and thereafter as the second president of Algeria until his death in 1978.

Born in Guelma, he was educated at the Islamic Institute in Constantine.

His father said in a 1965 interview that his date of birth was 23 August 1932.

His birth name was Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukherouba, and his father was a penniless wheat-farmer and a strict Muslim who did not speak French.

According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, his family is Arabic-speaking and of Berber origins.

He was educated at a Quranic school in Guelma until he was 14, then an Arabic secondary school in Constantine.

In 1952, when France was conscripting Algerians to fight in the Indochina War, Boumédiène went to Cairo, where he studied at the Al-Azhar University.

It was there he first met Ahmed Ben Bella.

He joined the National Liberation Front in 1955 and adopted the nom de guerre Houari Boumediene.

He joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the Algerian War of Independence in 1955, adopting Houari Boumédiène as his nom-de-guerre (from Sidi Boumediène, the name of the patron saint of the city of Tlemcen in western Algeria, where he served as an officer during the war, and Sidi El Houari, the patron saint of nearby Oran).

He received the rank of colonel and in 1960 became the commander of the military wing of the FLN.

He reached the rank of colonel, then the highest rank in the FLN forces, and from 1960 he was chief of staff of the ALN, the FLN's military wing.

He was married to Anissa al-Mansali.

President Ahmed Ben Bella appointed him Minister of Defense in 1961.

In 1962, after a referendum, Algeria declared its independence, a move affirmed by the French government.

Boumédiène and Ahmed Ben Bella overthrew the provisional government of Benyoucef Benkhedda with support from the ALN in 1962.

Boumédiène headed a powerful military faction within the government and was made defence minister by the Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, whose ascent to power he had assisted as chief of staff.

Boumédiène was also appointed as Vice President of Algeria in September 1963.

He did not agree with Ben Bella's reforms, and later overthrew him in a bloodless coup in June 1965 and put him under house arrest.

He abolished the constitution and the parliament, and he himself was the chairman of the 27-member Revolutionary Council, the new institution that governed the state.

The members of the council were mostly from the army.

He grew increasingly distrustful of Ben Bella's erratic style of government and ideological puritanism, and in June 1965, Boumédiène seized power in a bloodless coup.

The country's constitution and political institutions were abolished, and he ruled through a Revolutionary Council of his own mostly military supporters.

Many of them had been his companions during the war years, when he was based around the Moroccan border town of Oujda, which caused analysts to speak of the "Oujda Group".

Initially he did not have much influence, but after a group of military officers attempted a coup and tried to overthrow him in 1967, he consolidated his power.

From the 1970s, a gradual restoration of parliamentarism and civil institutions in Algeria was initiated.

The oil industry was nationalized in 1971.

This process ended with the adoption of the new constitution in 1976.

The position of president was reinstated, and Boumediene took over after winning an election with 99.46 per cent of the votes.

He pursued Arab socialist and Pan-Arabist policies.

He was strongly opposed to Israel and offered logistic assistance to anti-colonial movements and freedom fighters across the Arab world and Africa.

From the beginning of 1978, Boumediene appeared less and less in public.

He died on December 27, 1978, after unsuccessful treatment for a rare form of blood cancer, Waldenström's macroglobulinemia.

His funeral was attended by two million mourners.

He was succeeded as president by Chadli Bendjedid.

Not much is known about Boumédiène's early life.

He remained Algeria's undisputed leader until his death in 1978.

One prominent member of this circle was Boumédiène's long-time foreign minister, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who served as Algeria's president from 1999 until 2019.

Initially, he was seen as potentially a weak leader, with no significant power base except inside the army, and it was not known to what extent he commanded the officer corps.