Ahmed Ben Bella

Ahmed Ben Bella was born in Maghnia, French Algeria, on the twenty-fifth of December 1916, of Moroccan parentage. He served in the French army during the Second World War — earning the Croix de Guerre for action against the Wehrmacht at Monte Cassino — and on his return to Algeria joined the nationalist movement.

He co-founded the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954 and led its external armed wing throughout the Algerian War of Independence, the longest and most brutal anti-colonial war fought by France. He was captured by the French in 1956 after his airliner was forced down — an act in clear violation of international law — and held in French prisons for the next six years. He continued to direct the FLN from confinement. The war cost between three hundred and fifty thousand and one and a half million Algerian lives, depending on the source. France conceded independence on the fifth of July 1962.

Ben Bella became the first President of independent Algeria on the twenty-seventh of September 1963. He nationalized French-owned land and industry, pursued a doctrine of Arab and African socialism, and hosted the second Asian-African Conference at Algiers — the conference that brought Ernesto Guevara and Malcolm X to Algiers in 1964 and 1965 respectively. Algiers became, in his three years, the political capital of the Third World revolutionary movement.

He was deposed by his own defense minister Houari Boumédiène on the nineteenth of June 1965 and held under house arrest for fifteen years. Released in 1980, he lived in exile in Switzerland and France for another decade, returned to Algeria in 1990, and died there on the eleventh of April 2012, age ninety-five.

He is honored here as the founder of the second Algerian Republic and the host of revolutionary Algiers.