Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria's first President dies

[Sheilbh]

Ahmed Ben Bella
Ahmed Ben Bella, the former President of Algeria, who has died aged 93, was decorated by De Gaulle for his heroism in the Second World War; having helped liberate France, however, he became one of its most wanted men as he led a brutal struggle to topple the colonial power in his native land.


Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965 Photo: AFP/GETTY
6:37PM BST 12 Apr 2012

On several occasions he escaped the assassin's bomb or bullet. Marked out by the French military as "intelligent and dangerous" in 1945, Ben Bella fought off a squad of killers sent to his home town of Marnia, near Algeria's border with Morocco, shortly after the war. Later, in exile in Cairo, a parcel intended for him exploded in a taxi (Ben Bella had refused to accept it). In Libya, a French assassin shot and wounded him — only to be caught and killed himself.

Finally, in October 1956, France took the dramatic step of seizing a civilian airliner, on which Ben Bella and other leaders of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) were travelling to Tunis. The French General Paul Aussaresses later wrote that the plan had initially been to shoot down the DC-3, an outrage that was aborted only when it was discovered that the pilots and crew were French. Instead the aircraft was forced to land in Algiers, and Ben Bella was taken to Paris and locked up. The arrest "was a mistake", Gen Aussaresses recalled another officer saying: "We intended to kill him."

But the tide of violence by no means flowed only in one direction. The FLN's campaign spread terror through French colonists, known as pieds noirs, and the French military response comprised tactics, including torture, that would haunt the nation when revealed 25 years later. As Ben Bella began his spell in French custody, the two warring sides turned the kasbah of Algiers into a battleground (the vicious struggle there would later be notably captured in the film The Battle of Algiers). But it was not for five more years, until the Evian talks of 1962, in which Ben Bella took part, that Algeria was ushered towards independence.

Ahmed Ben Bella was born in Marnia, one of the five sons of a farmer. Some doubt remains about his date of birth, with suggestions that his father modified the initially given date of December 25 1918 to show that Ahmed was born in 1916. This allowed the boy to leave school early and help out on the farm. It also meant he was called up prematurely, in 1937.

A fine athlete, Ben Bella made a natural soldier, and in the run-up to the Second World War was based in Marseilles. There his talents on the football pitch might have secured him a professional contract. He manned an anti-aircraft post during the German invasion of 1940, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Rather than remain in Marseilles and play football, he returned to Algeria to fight with the Free French. He was noted for his bravery on the battlefield and in 1944, at Monte Cassino, dragged his wounded CO to safety in the face of enemy fire and assumed control of his battalion. For this action that he was awarded the Médaille Militaire. De Gaulle kissed him on both cheeks when presenting the medal.

The turning point in Ben Bella's life came in 1945 when, as Europeans celebrated victory on May 8, an anti-colonial protest march in Sétif, 200 miles east of Algiers, turned violent. Dozens of French settlers were killed.

Retribution was swift and brutal. Vigilante groups exacted revenge alongside French soldiers, and the death toll was estimated at 5,000-10,000. For Muslim Algerian troops returning home from the war to help liberate France, the effect was dramatic. Ben Bella ended his army career and pledged himself to a new cause – the independence of his homeland.

This change of direction was viewed with alarm by the colonial authorities, and it is likely that they dispatched the team of killers to end Ben Bella's political career before it started. Ben Bella saw off his assailants with a pistol and joined the nascent FLN.

In 1949 he robbed a post office to secure funding for the organisation, but was eventually caught and sentenced to a lengthy jail term. He escaped almost immediately, putting a file smuggled to him inside a loaf of bread to good use on the bars of his cell. He fled to Cairo, where he began to organise the FLN's supply of arms, once declaring that he would accept guns from any source, "even the Devil himself". The organisation's terror campaign began on November 1 1954. He would not return to Algeria until the independence agreement of 1962.

Having been away so long, he was a somewhat unknown quantity to many Algerians, and was known as "the invisible one". But as the former rebels jockeyed for power Ben Bella managed to secure the prime ministership.

In 1963, under a new constitution, he was elected president. His crucial ally in these manoeuvrings was Houari Boumedienne, a senior military leader from the war of independence whom Ben Bella named defence minister.

Ben Bella promised to transform Algeria into a non-aligned secular socialist republic. But his Marxist experiments in collective farming were disastrous and, as hundreds of thousands of the ruling French settlers left the country, the economy went into freefall. Within a year Ben Bella had been forced to execute the leader of an unsuccessful coup, Mohamed Chabani. But it was Boumedienne who posed the real threat.

The plotting was barely concealed. According to one story, Ben Bella once jokingly introduced Boumedienne at an official lunch as "the man who is plotting to overthrow me". Leaning in to Boumedienne, Ben Bella followed up with: "How are your intrigues going?" Boumedienne reportedly replied: "Very well, thank you."

Soldiers leading the putsch duly moved into position at dawn on June 19 1965. Boumedienne remained in control until his death in 1978, and Ben Bella was placed under strict house arrest until 1980. He was held in complete isolation, living virtually in solitary confinement until his mother, fearing for his life, engineered an arranged marriage with a young woman revolutionary, Zebra Sellami. She married Ben Bella in absentia in 1971 in her parents' home.

On her wedding night, she was whisked to his prison in a blacked-out car to begin her married life there, occasionally being allowed to visit her parents under heavy guard. In 1973 she was taken to hospital, where she suffered a miscarriage, but when she rejoined her husband she was carrying a day-old abandoned baby girl. Later, while still in captivity, they adopted a handicapped child.

After Boumedienne's death the incoming president, Benjedid Chadli, freed Ben Bella on condition that he went into exile. He and his family lived in Spain and Switzerland, where he gathered an entourage of exiled compatriots and international sympathisers.

In September 1990, Ben Bella, a slim, upright and youthful figure in his early seventies, set off on his political comeback. He arrived in Algiers in a ferry boat from Barcelona — his first stop on his way into exile — to compete with 28 other parties in general elections set for June 1991. In a country where 70 per cent of the population was aged under 30, Ben Bella was comparatively unknown. He was, however, still able to draw thousands on to the streets with his fiery rhetoric. And he had a new message for Algerians.

An outspoken ally of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Ben Bella exhorted them to join up in their hundreds and thousands to fight for the man who had invaded Kuwait. "The Arab-Islamic people are in danger," he shouted. "The entire West is against us." But his hopes of a political comeback were crushed in the poll.

As Algeria entered into a spell of grotesque bloodletting in the 1990s, with the army and Islamic militants battling for control of the country, Ben Bella criticised both parties. He signed the Rome Accords of 1995 to negotiate an end to the civil war, but the fighting continued regardless.

He remained a political firebrand into his 80s. In 2003, ahead of the American-led invasion of Iraq, he visited Saddam Hussein in Baghdad ("He is a calm person. He controls his feelings," noted Ben Bella) and called for Vietnam-style peace protests to stop the war. By this time some were referring to him as an "Arab Fidel Castro".
Ahmed Ben Bella, born December 25 1918, died April 11 2012

Interesting figure.  Extraordinary what the response to Setif did.  It does make you wonder if Algeria was doomed the second moves were made to independence.

[The Brain]

RIP Liberace.