The new Algerian president was the engineer of the leadership of his country before the Non-Aligned. But he was also purged from his own party for misusing public funds. And here, his two faces.

He has made good the refrain and has found a third opportunity, two decades after his name had been shuffled for the first time to head the major State of the Maghreb. A spoiled child of the independence, dressed in suits of the best French designers, pursued by a legend of revolutionary Don Juan and accusations of misuse of public funds, the new president of Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, was born in Morocco on March 2, 1937. His family had arrived at the then French protectorate from close-by Tlemcen, in the Algerian west. But barakah (luck) has not smiled at him in everything. His victory in the ballot box--he received 73 percent of the votes in the elections of last Thursday--has remained shadowed by the retirement of all the candidates of the opposition, who denounced en bloc the manipulation of the polls.

At the age of 28, he was the number two of the regime led by his mentor, President Houari Boumedienne, and he rubbed elbows with the world's greats, like the chief of diplomacy of an Algeria which led the movement of the countries of the Third World before the western powers. His co-partisans have taken charge of publicizing his role as heir of that legendary golden age, when the citizens believed they could live forever from the mana of oil without caring about the iron-strong single-party regime.

Boutef, as he is called by the majority of his compatriots, still maintains a child-like look in his blue eyes, of a grand little boy of short stature, barely 1.65 meters (about 5'5), to whom almost everything happens too quickly.

On completing his baccalaureate in 1956, with a French title and a diploma from the Qur'anic school, the war chose his destiny. The National Liberation Army (ALN), the Algerian independence resistence, called all the youth to join its ranks in the struggle for independence from France, which occupied its territory since 1830.

This time, the barakah wanted his boss in the front lines against the French colonial power to be named Mohamed Bujeruba, better known by his nom de guerre: Houari Boumedienne. Abdelkader, as Bouteflika was "baptized" in the maquis, seemed a bright lad and soon he was charged with the guerrilla accounts.

At the age of 21, he was already one of the main advisers of Boumedienne, who charged him later with the delicate mission of entering secretly into France in order to contact the historical leaders of the nationalist struggle, such as Ahmed Ben Bella or Mohamed Boudiaf, detained in the castle of Aulnoy. The negotiations of Evian, which gave way to the new Algeria was about to begin.

He came to form part in the so-called Ouijda Clan, the base of the Algerian resistance against France, that even today appears to control the country's destiny from the security services to what many observers link with profitable businesses of exports and with the control of oil profits, for which its nationalization, Bouteflika himself directly intervened in 1971.

When Algeria obtained independence in 1962, Bouteflika was only 25 years
old and was already a war veteran. Deputized by Tlemcen in the Constitutional Assembly as Minister of Youth, Sports, and Tourism, the little commandant of the South arrived--until last Thursday--to the apex of his career a year later, when he was named Foreign Minister, a responsibility that he would hold in time for over 15 years. President Ben Bella, who was on the verge of firing him in 1965 for not obeying his orders, paid with exile the audacity to attack a protégé of Boumedienne's, the new strong man of a monolithic Algeria.

It was then that he began to develop the strategy of Algeria as leader of the Third World at the head of the Movement of Non-Aligned countries. The high-minded diplomacy of Bouteflika depended on a barrel of petroleum priced at $40, while today it barely reaches $15. His greatest milestone was to place Boumedienne before the tribunal of speakers of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1973, where he gave a daring speech about the New World Economic Order. Bouteflika himself was elected unanimously as president of the U. N. Assembly during the session of the following year, at which he invited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to participate for the first time.

But the death of Boumedienne in December 1978, left him an orphan on the unstable epicenter of the Algerian power.

In charge of the eulogy at the presidential burial, he was one of the first victims of the witch hunt known as "deboumediennization." The services of military security, the firm nucleus of the power led then by Kasdi Merba, preferred to separate the protégé of the deceased president and delivered the top post of the State to the official of highest rank and longest seniority in all the Army--at the time, Chadli Benjedid.

An investigation by the Tribunal of Finances--then presided over by Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, who has been his main rival in this presidential election campaign--ruined his political career in 1983. Even though he was not found guilty, the alleged disappropriation of reserve funds of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the tune of some three million French francs (75 million pesetas on the current exchange), was extensively aired before the Algerian public opinion. He was excluded from the top echelon of the FLN, and he was even forced to vacate the luxurious official residence which he occupied in the high-class neighborhood of Algiers. During the recent campaign, many Algerians have received in their mailboxes photo-copies of the press releases of that period, with harsh accusations of corruption against Bouteflika.

And it came to pass, the desert crossing for the ex-minister of foreign affairs: the exile in France, Switzerland, and the Emirates of the Persian Gulf. He was not rehabilitated until the end of 1987, just before the popular revolt that shook the base of the regime born from independence and that broke loose a process of democratic reforms of which Bouteflika said he was in favor. Re-accepted into the FLN, the country entered the whirlwind of the 90s. After the destitution of Benjedid in 1992, and the cancellation of the Legislative elections that the Islamist group would have won, Bouteflika refused to join the group of President Boudiaf, who was assassinated shortly afterwards. When the Generals called him in 1994 to offer him the presidency of the republic during a
transitional period, he preferred to maintain himself on the fringe: his supposed dialogue with the FIS was discarded by the top army echelon.

The rebirth of Bouteflika occurred in September last year when President Liamine Zeroual, a retired general elected in 1995, threw in the towel and decided to shorten his term. The ex-minister of foreign affairs appeared now as "the consensus candidate," the favorite of the regime and the armed forces.

He is, without doubt, a leader with a past. But his detractors criticize that he is barely known by those 75 percent of Algerians who have yet not reached 25 years of age. They also finger the long silence that he has maintained during the blackest years of violence in Algeria, bloodied by more than 75,000 dead.

Between Voltaire and the Qur'an

Just as his thick mustache has grayed with time, Abdelaziz Bouteflika says that he, too, has changed. Not long ago, he told Le Monde that he feels particularly concerned with respect for human rights.

Cultured and a lover of classical music, he will as easily site in his discourses Voltaire or Rousseau as he will a verse from the Qur'an. The ancient refinement of the young minister, of the arrogant nationalist whom many envy his Dior suits, his luxurious train of life, and his excessive amorous adventures, appears to have softened through the sobriety of a 62-year-old president who covers himself in the desert with the humble mantle of the Bedouin.

In his interventions throughout the electoral campaign, national reconciliation has been the axis of his program. He came to announce, inclusively, that he was disposed to speak with the Islamist guerrillas if that would serve toward peace-making. His distancing from the "eradicator" sector of Islamists within the Algerian regime placed him in a good situation to face the dialogue with the head of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in exile.

Even though his margin of operation has been debilitated by his election in a vote questioned by the opposition and observed with concern from Paris to Washington, Bouteflika has in his favor the ample powers that the Algerian Constitution, amended with an authorized bias in 1996, granting the president of the Republic the ability to directly name a third of the members of the Nation's Council (higher chamber of parliament). Yet, he does not foresee for the time being to introduce changes: he will maintain the current government and will not dissolve Parliament.