Houari Boumédiène[a] (Arabic: هواري بومدين, romanized: Hawwārī Būmadyan; born Mohammed ben Brahim Boukherouba;[b] 23 August 1932 – 27 December 1978) was an Algerian military officer and politician who was the second head of state of independent Algeria from 1965 until his death in 1978.

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

[3] His birth name was Mohammed ben Brahim Boukherouba, and his father was a penniless wheat-farmer and was an Arab and strict Muslim who did not speak French.

[3] 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).

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

[7] 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.

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.

[8] Economically, Boumédiène turned away from Ben Bella's focus on rural Algeria and experiments in socialist cooperative businesses (l'autogestion).

[10] In the 1970s, along with the expansion of state industry and oil nationalization, Boumédiène declared a series of socialist revolutions, and strengthened the leftist aspect of his administration.

This was preceded by a period of relatively open debate on the merits of the government-backed proposal, although the constitution itself was then adopted in a state-controlled referendum with no major changes.

This structure remained largely unchanged until the late 1980s, when political pluralism was introduced and the FLN lost its role as dominant single party.

[11] Boumédiène pursued a policy of non-alignment, maintaining good relations with both the communist bloc and the capitalist nations, and promoting third-world cooperation.

He offered logistic assistance to anti-colonial movements and other militant groups across Africa and the Arab world, including the PLO, ANC, SWAPO and other nations.

The heightened Moroccan-Algerian rivalry and the still unsolved Western Sahara question became a defining feature of Algerian foreign policy ever since and remains so today.

After lingering in a coma for 39 days, he died in Algiers of a rare blood disease, Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, following unsuccessful treatment in Moscow.

Rumors about his being assassinated or poisoned have surfaced occasionally in Algerian politics,[citation needed] especially after two other participants of the 1975 Algiers Agreement events — the Shah (d. 1980) and his Minister of Court Asadollah Alam (d. 1978) — also died of cancers around the same time.

Despite their differences over the Camp David Accords, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat paid tribute to Boumédiène and said he received the news of his death "with sorrow and sadness" and sent a delegation to attend the funeral.

[1] PLO leader Yasser Arafat attended the funeral with the second in command of his Fatah guerrilla organization, Abu Iyad, who had built close relations with Boumédiène.

[18] US President Jimmy Carter expressed deep regret and said that Boumédiène "played an outstanding role in Algeria's long struggle for independence.