Anniversary of Boudiaf's assassination: the Algerian intelligence service's responsibility
This 29 June marks the 31st anniversary of the assassination of Algerian president Mohamed Boudiaf. More than thirty years have passed since his assassination, but the Algerian regime and the international media continue to hide the truth.
Following the landslide victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the first round of the December 1991 legislative elections, the army urged the regime to annul the second round. Thus began a senseless war created ad hoc by Algerian generals to safeguard the interests of an oligarchy that only dreamed of seizing power by any means necessary to impose its perverse and unacknowledged form of totalitarianism.
The book "Chronique des années de sang" (Chronicle of the years of blood) by Mohammed Samraoui, a former colonel in the Algerian army who defected in 1996 and since then has been living in political asylum in Germany, is probably one of the best testimonies on the assassination of Boudiaf and the nefarious role of the Algerian generals in the black decade. Samraoui (who was a high-ranking member of the secret services and took part in the coup d'état that deposed President Chadli Bendjedid in January 1992) recounts that his duties enabled him to gather decisive information on the murders committed by the authorities, but "the only ones who knew about all the liquidations were General Toufik, Smaïn Lamari and Larbi Belkheir, who were the masterminds".
Boudiaf's assassin was a GIS officer
To give legal cover to the coup d'état, on 12 January the High Security Council (HCS), an institution controlled by the army, "declared" that it was impossible to continue the electoral process. Two days later, the HCS decided that the state would be run for two years by a new body, the HCE (Haut Comité d'Etat), a political fiction created for the occasion and whose presidency was entrusted to Boudiaf, who returned to Algeria on 16 January (this date is no coincidence, as the second round was scheduled for 16 January 1992).
In fact, on 10 January 1992, Ali Haroun, on the orders of the generals, travelled to Morocco to meet Boudiaf and convince him to return to Algeria. Boudiaf, a founding member of the National Liberation Front (FLN), had founded the Socialist Revolution Party (PRS) after independence, but his opposition to Ben Bella forced him into exile in 1963. He spent 28 years in exile in France and then in Morocco, where he devoted himself to running his brick factory in Kénitra.
In any case, Boudiaf, who was supposed to guarantee the historical legitimacy of power, was not the puppet the generals wanted. That is why, on 29 June 1992, President Mohamed Boudiaf (who was not accompanied by any senior regime figures), during an official visit to Annaba, was assassinated in the Maison de la Culture by an officer from his bodyguard while giving a speech broadcast live on television.
Samraoui wrote in his book: "The assassin was an officer of the GIS (Groupement d'Intervention Spéciale, intervention unit of the Intelligence and Security Department, DRS), Second Lieutenant Lembarek Boumaarafi, known as Abdelhak. Second Lieutenant Lembarek Boumaarafi, known as Abdelhak, joined the President's protection team at the last minute, after having been received a few days earlier by Smaïn Lamari, head of the DCE (Counter-espionage Directorate, part of the DRS), at the Antar Centre. With a personal mission order signed by Major Belouiza Hamou, head of the GIF, he joined the rest of the group in Annaba on 27 June. After pulling the ring and throwing a grenade onto the stage to create a diversion, Boumaarafi emerged from behind the curtains and emptied his magazine into the president, the only victim. Taking advantage of the chaos and panic, the assassin got rid of his weapon before jumping over a two-metre high perimeter wall and taking refuge four hundred metres away in a neighbour's house, from where he telephoned the police and took himself prisoner".
Boumaarafi was never a FIS sympathiser
Samraoui explained that not a single one of the fifty-six members of the presidential guard had the presence of mind to react or neutralise the assassin: "The surprise effect does not explain everything, because if we can accept that the nearby guard, although hardened and trained for this type of situation, benefits from this excuse, what about the distant guard, the watchmen who guarded the outside of the building, the exits, the adjacent alleys, etc. Why didn't they intervene? How can we believe that Boumaarafi was able to leave the Maison de la Culture and walk four hundred metres without being disturbed, when in principle the entire surrounding area - what we call the security perimeter - was cordoned off by members of the security services? [...] I don't think there is a single Algerian who is not convinced that the perpetrators of this heinous act were indeed the military".
The official version and the media initially attributed this assassination to a "DRS officer sympathetic to the FIS", before correcting themselves and concluding that it was an "isolated act", but Samraoui specified that sub-lieutenant Lembarek Boumaarafi had never been a sympathiser of the FIS: "He acted in an orderly manner, obeying precise orders from the hierarchy, without his direct superior (commander Hamou) being informed of the operation. Moreover, the DRS propaganda, echoed in the newspapers of the time, passed Boumaarafi off as a "son of a harki". This is absolutely false: a son of a harki can never make a career in the army, and even less so in the secret services [...] I knew Boumaarafi personally, as he was part of the platoon of Captain Abdelkader Khémène, who was an old acquaintance of mine (he had been stationed at my side from 1980 to 1982, when he did his officer training in the 52nd battalion, then in the administration and support command battalion of the 50th infantry brigade): this former sergeant is now a colonel). I can therefore confirm that he is a competent officer who was deliberately marginalised [from January to June 1992, he was confined to guard duty, with a minimum salary and harassed by "fundamentalist groups", which were manipulated by the secret services] in order to condition him and turn him into a cold-blooded killer".
The role of Smaïn Lamari
An interesting fact is that the murder weapon, which Boumaarafi threw away after the assassination, was never found. However, Samraoui wonders: "How to explain this mysterious disappearance? Boumaarafi had shot the president in the back, but, according to reliable sources, at least one bullet had pierced his chest. Was there a second shooter? Why was an autopsy not carried out? And how to explain the shortcomings of the security arrangements? At least three agents of the Presidential Security Service (SSP) directly involved in protecting the president were not at their posts at the time of the tragedy". Furthermore, Samraoui wrote: "Consistent sources (the secretary of the Main Operations Centre, CPO, the driver Khaled, etc.) have revealed that Smaïn Lamari had received Boumaarafi at the Antar Centre the day before he left on his mission to Annaba (i.e. two days before the assassination). What was the nature of the meeting? Questioning Smaïn's role in the assassination of the president, Boumaarafi asked himself: "Could Boumaarafi have refused to receive an order from Smaïn? I had kept them in a drawer in my desk in Chateauneuf. However, on 11 June, I left on a mission to Pakistan, only to return on 27 June, two days before Mohamed Boudiaf's assassination. During my absence, the two grenades had disappeared; as I could not find any casualty reports, I deduced that they had been "stolen" by someone responsible. But who had access to my office if not my immediate boss, Smaïn Lamari? In fact, in July 1993, Captain Ahmed Chaker, who was my deputy in Chateauneuf, confirmed to me that he had taken them.
"What struck me was that, in its report, the Commission of Inquiry into the assassination of the president claimed that the grenade, which Boumaarafi had detonated before firing, had been kept by him since the Telemly operation, which is impossible because he had not been involved.... Since Boumaarafi had not participated in any anti-terrorist operation, and the men of the presidential protection force were never equipped with grenades, he had no way of obtaining them. So someone in a necessarily good position gave him the grenade he used in Annaba. Taking all these factors into account, I am convinced that it was Smaïn who gave him the grenades recovered in my office, probably two days before the attack.
Intimidation of the members of the National Commission of Inquiry
Many other facts confirm, if proof were needed, that "the assassination of the president was planned at the highest levels of power". For example, the attempts to intimidate the members of the "national commission of enquiry", which concluded that there had been "culpable negligence", while stating in its preliminary report of 26 July 1992: "The theory of an isolated action does not seem to us to be the most likely".
Samraoui explained: "On 10 July 1992, the lawyer Mohamed Ferhat, a member of the commission, was shot and wounded; and on 18 June 1994, Yousef Fathallah, a notary and human rights activist, also a member of the commission, was assassinated in his office in Algiers. His only fault was most probably his refusal to sign the investigation report, whose conclusions he did not agree with [...] He wanted the sanctions to be limited not only to the members of the GIS and the SSP present in Annaba on the day of the tragedy, but also to the main leaders of the security services. I also learned later that Fathallah was the only member of the commission of enquiry whom Boumaarafi trusted, to the point of sending him a personal letter shortly before his assassination".
Boumaarafi's support for the Moroccan Sahara
In his book, Samraoui finally explains why Boudiaf annoyed the military: "So Boudiaf's assassination was not the work of the Islamists. As I have already said, if he was killed, it was because he was in the way of the plans of the military leaders - the same ones who had brought him in - who had begun to attack him. The president had just relieved General Nourredine Benkortbi - a close friend of General Larbi Belkheir - of his duties as chief of protocol and was seriously considering cleaning up his entourage. In less than three months, he had dismissed three generals from the decision-making circle: Mohamed Lamari, commander of the ground forces, Hocine Benmaalem, head of the security affairs department of the presidency, and Noureddine Benkortbi, chief of protocol! These dismissals, the dispute with General Toufik (head of the Department of Intelligence and Security, DRS, from 1990 to 2015, whom he was planning to fire), the investigations into embezzlement he had launched, the change of government he was planning and the political party he wanted to create (the RPN, National Patriotic Rally, which failed as soon as Boudiaf was assassinated) : all this turned President Boudiaf into a man to be shot.... The "Janvierists", fearful of losing their privileges, therefore opted for the "strong method".
It is also worth noting Boudiaf's position on the Moroccan Sahara, opposed to that of the generals. Indeed, Boudiaf considered the Polisario Front to be a creation of the previous Algerian regimes and wanted to "distance himself definitively from the politics of agitation". In 2016, in an interview with the Algerian daily Echorouk, PNA general Khaled Nezzar himself, former Minister of Defence between 1990 and 1993 and responsible for crimes against humanity, declared that "Mohamed Boudiaf's support for the Moroccan status of the Sahara was the main cause of his assassination".
The cynicism of Smaïn and Nezzar
To demonstrate the low esteem in which the generals held Boudiaf, Samraoui quoted Smaïn's words in his funeral oration: "His only achievement was to die as a head of state". This cynicism was also shared by Khaled Nezzar, who told Samraoui in 1994: "Boudiaf was entitled to a state funeral, and that is already a lot for someone who sold tiles".
The assassination of the Algerian president would inaugurate a long list of liquidations of personalities: "Some of the most prominent were Kasdi Merbah, former head of government from 1988 to 1990 and former head of military security, Djillali Liabès, sociologist, Tahar Djaout, writer and journalist, Mohamed Boukhobza, sociologist, Djillali Belkhenchir, professor of paediatrics and vice-president and leader of the Algerian Committee against Torture, Said Mekbel, journalist and satirical columnist, Abdelhak Benhamouda, Algerian trade unionist..."
* Moroccan-Italian researcher and writer.