Ahmed Ben Bella

Ahmed Ben Bella was an Algerian revolutionary and statesman who led the country to independence from France and served as its first elected president from 1963 to 1965. Born on December 25, 1916, in Maghnia near the Moroccan border, he grew up in a poor peasant family and was educated in French colonial schools.

Drafted into the French Army in 1937, he won the Croix de Guerre fighting in Italy during the Second World War, where the contrast between French liberation rhetoric and continued colonial subjugation at home radicalized him. He joined the Algerian People's Party and then the secretive Special Organization, planning armed struggle. Captured for a 1949 Oran post office robbery to fund the cause, he escaped from Blida prison in 1952.

Operating from Cairo, he was a founding leader of the Front de Libération Nationale that launched the Algerian War on November 1, 1954. In October 1956 French intelligence intercepted his Moroccan-chartered plane en route from Rabat to Tunis, and he spent the next five and a half years in French detention. The 1962 Évian Accords granted Algerian independence; he was released and elected president in September 1963.

His socialist, pan-Arab program of land redistribution and worker self-management alienated the army. On June 19, 1965, his defense minister Houari Boumédiène overthrew him in a coup and held him under house arrest until 1980. He spent a decade in Swiss exile before returning to Algeria in 1990 to found a small opposition party. He died in Algiers on April 11, 2012.

The name Ahmed is Arabic, meaning most praiseworthy, a superlative form related to Mohammed. He bore the masculine form.