In all this period Ben Bella had come to depend increasingly on the support of Boumedienne and the army. With most of his rivals dead, in prison or in exile, by the eve of the Afro-Asian Conference of June 1965 Ben Bella looked at last secure. Then Boumedienne moved with the army which, ironically, had put Ben Bella in power and kept him there, and the tanks supplied by Ben Bella’s Soviet allies (who had but recently awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize). Though himself under sentence of death from Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed warned him “There’s going to be a coup against you.” Ben Bella was arrested, and Boumedienne took over the Government. The reasons given for Ben Bella’s removal were his excessive addiction to the “cult of the personality”, his “liquidation of revolutionary cadres”, his ideological confusion, his proneness to foreign (i.e. Eastern bloc) influences, and his improvidence with Algeria’s vital resources.

DEFINE: Clarifies the historical mechanism and stated justifications for the June 1965 Algerian coup.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1641