Ahmed Ben Bella

Ahmed Ben Bella (born December 25, 1918, Maghnia [Marnia], Algeria—died April 11, 2012, Algiers) was the principal leader of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) against France. He was also the first prime minister (1962–63) and first elected president (1963–65) of the Algerian republic, and he used those offices to steer his country toward a socialist economy.

Early life, French military service, and nationalist activities

Ben Bella was the son of a farmer and small businessman in Maghnia in the département of Oran. There he successfully completed his early studies at the French school and continued his education in the neighboring city of Tlemcen, where he first became aware of racial discrimination and also mingled with the fringes of the nationalist movement.

He was conscripted into the French army in 1937, served in World War II, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre (1940) and the Médaille Militaire (1944). On his return to Maghnia, Ben Bella resumed his nationalist activities, refusing to be intimidated by the French authorities’ confiscation of his farm. He left Maghnia, joined Messali Hadj’s underground movement, and soon became one of the “Young Turks” who, after the rigged election of Gov. Marcel-Edmond Naegelen (1948), considered illusory any hope of achieving independence democratically. With associates in Messali Hadj’s party, Ben Bella founded the Organisation Spéciale, a paramilitary organization whose aim was to take up arms as quickly as possible.

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Algeria: From Ben Bella to Boumedienne

After robbing the post office at Oran (1950) to obtain funds for the nationalist movement, Ben Bella was sentenced to prison, but he managed to escape after serving only two years of his term. He went underground again and moved to Egypt, where he was promised help by the revolutionary supporters of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Founding the National Liberation Front

In November 1954 Ben Bella and the Algerian émigré leaders resident in Egypt, who had met secretly in Switzerland with those leaders who were still living in Algeria, came to two major decisions: to create the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale [FLN]) and to order an armed insurrection against the French colonists.

Ben Bella played an important political role in the leadership of the FLN, simultaneously organizing the shipment of foreign arms to Algeria. In 1956 he escaped two attempts on his life, one at Cairo and the other at Tripoli, Libya. In the same year, he was arrested in Algiers by the French military authorities while in the process of negotiating peace terms with the French Prime Minister Guy Mollet.

His imprisonment (1956–62) kept him dissociated from those errors of military conduct committed by the FLN, and, when he was freed after the Évian agreements with France were signed in 1962, his reputation was intact.

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Leader of independent Algeria

The situation in independent Algeria was chaotic. The leaders of the FLN had formed a conservative provisional government (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), while the party’s congress at Tripoli had elected a socialist-oriented government at the end of the war. It was this latter “Bureau Politique” that Ben Bella ran.

The intervention on his behalf by Col. Houari Boumedienne, chief of the Army of National Liberation (Armée de Libération Nationale [ALN]), assured both the success of the Bureau Politique and of Ben Bella, who was elected unopposed and with an immense majority to the presidency of the Algerian republic in 1963.

Ben Bella reestablished order in a country disorganized both by the massive departure of French colonists and by the clashes of armed groups. He created a state out of nothing and set aside one-quarter of the budget for national education. Above all else, he inaugurated, under the title autogestion, a series of major agrarian reforms, including the nationalization—but not the direct state control—of the former colonists’ huge farms.

Ben Bella allied himself with the anti-Zionist Arab states and developed cultural and economic relations with France. He also extricated the country from an important border dispute with Morocco.

Ben Bella’s method of government pleased the Algerian people, but the effects of his policies were not always as beneficial as his generous intentions. Through lack of either time, political lucidity, or planning, Ben Bella governed from day to day in a series of improvised acts, some of which—like his appeal to Algerian women to donate their jewelry to the state—were more spectacular than useful. Ben Bella was unable to restore the FLN, nor was he able to win for it that popular support that would have helped to keep Boumedienne in check.

Downfall and later life

On June 19, 1965, Ben Bella was deposed in a coup led by Boumedienne, who installed himself as president; Ben Bella was detained and had little contact with the outside world for 14 years. Following the death of Boumedienne in 1978, restrictions on Ben Bella were eased in July 1979, though he remained under house arrest. On October 30, 1980, he was freed. He spent 10 years in exile, returning to Algeria in 1990.

Ben Bella reentered the political arena soon after his return. He led the Movement for Democracy in Algeria (Mouvement pour la Démocratie en Algérie), a moderate Islamist opposition party he had founded in 1984 while in exile, in the first round of the country’s abortive 1991 parliamentary elections. The party was among several banned in 1997.

When was Ahmed Ben Bella born?

Ahmed Ben Bella’s birth year has been variously identified as 1916 or 1918. In his 1967 biography of Ben Bella, Robert Merle, who interviewed him multiple times, cites Ben Bella explaining that while he was born on December 25, 1918, his father falsified his civil status by adding two years to his son’s age because he was too young to take the certificat d’études. One unintended consequence of this change was Ben Bella’s early conscription in 1937, instead of 1939. As Ben Bella jokes in Merle’s biography: “There is nothing so persistent as an administrative error; even now I sometimes read in biographical notes, issued officially by my own government, that I was born in 1916.”

Several of Ben Bella’s obituaries also mention that he took his certificat d’études early to work on his father’s farm. However, he pursued his education beyond the certificat d’études.