Mohamed Boudiaf

The assassin, Lieutenant Lambarek Boumaarafi, was said to have acted as a lone gunman due to his Islamist sympathies. He was sentenced to death in a closed trial in 1995, but the sentence was not carried out. The murder has, unsurprisingly, been subject to significant controversy and a major magnet for Algerian conspiracy theories, with many suggesting that Boudiaf was in fact assassinated by the military establishment responsible for the coup (and for his installment as HCE chairman). These theories have centered on the fact that Boudiaf had recently initiated a drive against the corruption of the Algerian regime, and stripped several important military officials of their posts.

In February 1992, after a 27-year exile in Kenitra, 15 miles north of Morocco's capital Rabat, the military invited him back to become chairman of the High Council of State (HCE) of Algeria, a figurehead body for the military junta, following the annulment of the election results (see Algerian Civil War). He quickly accepted, and was instantly signed into the post. Publicly, he was presented as a leader exiled for too long to be tainted by the violence and corruption of Algeria's internal post-revolutionary politics, but the downside was that he was little known to most of the Algerian public. However, his calls for comprehensive reform and an end to military domination of politics instilled hope, and he quickly gained some popularity, even if many still associated him with the military clique that effectively ruled Algeria in his name.

On June 29, 1992, Boudiaf's term as HCE chairman was cut short when he was assassinated by a bodyguard during a televised public speech at the opening of a cultural center in Annaba, on his first visit outside Algiers as head of state. The murder caused intense shock in Algeria, and remains a moment of iconic importance in the country's modern history. Boudiaf himself has gained considerably in political stature after his death, and is now referred to by many political commentators as a martyr for Algeria, with many arguing that he could have been the country's savior.

The increasingly marginalized Boudiaf protested these developments, and founded a clandestine opposition party, the PRS, which briefly revolted against the FLN's single-party government. Boudiaf was forced into exile, and settled in neighbouring Morocco. After Colonel Boumédiène's coup d'état in 1965, Boudiaf remained in opposition, as he did under his successor, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid (in power 1979-92). His PRS group remained intermittently active in its opposition towards the government, but for all intents and purposes, Boudiaf had ceased to be a force of any stature in Algerian politics early on after his exile.

When Messali decided to dissolve the OS, his rivals combined with stalwarts of the guerrilla strategy to form the CRUA, a breakout committee designed to lay the groundwork for revolutionary war. Boudiaf was among them, after falling out with Messali, whom he accused of authoritarian tendencies. The CRUA - PPA/MTLD rivalry quickly spiralled towards violence, and would continue during the Algerian War until the PPA/MTLD (then reorganized as the Mouvement national algérien, MNA) was largely destroyed. In July 1954, the CRUA-aligned Boudiaf survived an assassination attempt by his former comrades-in-arms, wounded and left for dead on an Algiers sidewalk.

The CRUA re-emerged as the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, which began a nationwide armed insurrection against France on November 1, 1954. Boudiaf was by this time a main leader of the movement, and emerged as an important member of the exiled leadership working from Cairo and Algeria's neighbouring countries. In 1956, he was captured along with Ahmed Ben Bella and several other FLN leaders in a controversial aircraft hijacking by French forces, and imprisoned in France. While prisoner, he was symbolically elected minister in the FLN's government-in-exile, the GPRA, at its creation in 1958, and re-elected in 1960 and 1961. Additionally, he was named one of the Vice Presidents. He was not released until immediately before the independence of Algeria in 1962, after a brutal eight-year war that had cost between 350,000 and 1.5 million lives.

Mohamed Boudiaf (23 June 1919 – 29 June 1992, Arabic: محمد بوضياف‎; ALA-LC: Muḥammad Bū-Ḍiyāf), also called Si Tayeb el Watani, was an Algerian political leader and one of the founders of the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN) that led the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). Boudiaf was exiled soon after Algerian independence, and did not go back to Algeria for 27 years. He returned in 1992 to accept a position of Chairman of the High Council of State, but was assassinated four months later.