Ahmed Ben Bella

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Ahmed Ben Bella (1950s)

Ahmed Ben Bella (born December 25, 1918 in Marnia in Algeria near the Moroccan-Algerian border; † April 11, 2012 in Algiers ; Arabic أحمد بن بلة, DMG Aḥmad b. Billa ) was an Algerian politician , fighter for independence and from 1962 to 1965 first president of his country.

Life

Ben Bella (right) after his arrest by the French army (1956)
Ben Bella with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara , Cuba 1962
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser , Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba and Ben Bella in 1963.

Ahmed Ben Bella was born in 1918 in a small village in western Algeria into a Sufi family along with six other siblings whose family roots were in Morocco . His father worked as a farmer and small trader. He went to school in Tlemcen and suffered from discrimination against Muslims by his Christian teacher. Under these circumstances, he dropped out of school. In 1936 he joined the French army . During the Code de l'indigénat, this step was one of the few opportunities for Muslim Algerians to achieve social advancement and was therefore common. After he was transferred to Marseille , he played there between 1939 and 1940 for the club Olympique Marseille football . Although it was his wish to become a professional footballer, he turned down the professional contract offered to him. He returned to his home village and helped his family on the farm there.

Ben Bella returned to France in 1943 and served in the French Army during World War II , initially in a Turkos infantry regiment . With this he took part in the Battle of Monte Cassino under General Juin in 1944 , then in the liberation of France and in the 1st French Army under General de Lattre de Tassigny in the Allied conquest of Germany. He was promoted to Sergeant Major in 1944 and was awarded the “ Médaille Militaire ” and the “Croix de Guerre” for bravery . However, he declined further promotion in protest against the Sétif massacre , the brutal suppression of an Algerian uprising in May 1945 by the French army.

After the end of the war, he returned to his native Marnia and took a position in local government. Here he was elected to the city council of his hometown. During this time he joined the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques des Messali Hadj , an organization related to the Parti du peuple algérien (PPA). When the French authorities confiscated his property in Marnia, Ben Bella went underground and fled to Algiers. Bella was not intimidated by the political persecution of the French. In Algiers he came into contact with Messali Hadj and became one of his "Young Turks". When Marcel-Edmond Naegelen became French governor-general in Algeria in 1948 , Ben Bella decided to go into consistent opposition to the occupation regime. In Algiers he was then involved in founding the organization Spéciale - OS. After a bank robbery in 1950 on the main post office in Oran , he was arrested and served a prison term. Two years later he managed to escape and went to Cairo .

In Egypt, Ben Bella made efforts to reorganize the Spéciale organization . In 1954 he met nine other Algerian resistance activists in Switzerland . The circle agreed on the establishment of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) (in German National Liberation Front ). On his return to Egypt he was involved in the procurement of arms in countries in the Middle East . When the FLN was set up, care was taken to ensure that Messeli Hadj's Mouvement national Algérien (MNA) members were not accepted. In 1956, Ben Bella escaped two attempted attacks.

In August 1956 he took part in the Soummam Congress, which decided the program of the national revolution. The FLN then took up the military fight against the French occupying forces, which expanded into the Algerian war. In the same year a meeting with the President of Tunisia Habib Bourguiba and the King Mohammed V of Morocco took place in Tunis to look for solutions to end the war in Algeria. Shortly afterwards, he flew to Rome to meet with French Prime Minister Guy Mollet for the purpose of peace negotiations. He was arrested by French agents on board a Moroccan aircraft and later imprisoned in France from 1956 to 1962.

During his imprisonment, he avoided confrontations that would have further divided the Algerian forces. He read a lot, dealt with numerous current issues and thus developed a political stance for the next few years. One result was the development of a program for a future government of Algeria. This included a consistent opposition to capitalism in all its forms, an agrarian reform, the nationalization of the means of production, the abolition of privileges and a return to the Arab and Islamic traditions. A coup on September 19, 1958 in Algeria led to the formation of the provisional government under Ferhat Abbas . In honor of his absence due to his imprisonment, Ben Bella was elected vice-chairman of the provisoire de la République algérienne (GPRA).

Intensive peace negotiations began with the French government in order to initiate peaceful internal development for Algeria. The talks on this in 1960 in Melun, in which Ben Bella was indirectly involved despite his imprisonment, failed because of the unyielding attitude of France. Only the talks that were resumed two years later in Evian brought success and the longed-for truce. Ultimately, they also resulted in the political prisoners being released. Ben Bella then returned to Algeria. In a referendum in July, 99.6% of the population voted for Algeria's independence. In the subsequent election Ben Bella was able to prevail against his competitor Benyoucef Ben Khedda. He became Algeria's first president. During the Algerian-Moroccan border war he was commander in chief of the Algerian army and was able to avoid an invasion by Moroccan troops . In the following power struggles, Ben Bella succeeded in enforcing the FLN as a socialist unity party. The National Assembly proclaimed the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria and in October the country joined the UN . At the beginning of 1963, Ben Bella announced the program of " Arab Socialism " and had a socialist constitution drawn up . The FNL was anchored in it as a unified party . In March he began nationalizing colonial property and large industrial companies. On September 8, Ben Bella was re-elected as head of state and government. When 97.5% of the population voted for the adoption of the new constitution, work began on building the necessary state structures. Unions were formed and the National Liberation Front aimed to strengthen these institutions. The following year, Ben Bella was re-elected General Secretary at the FLN's 1st Congress in April. The last units of the French occupiers left the country.

However, this development phase did not last long. A "national revolutionary council" led by Houari Boumedienne overthrew the elected government in a military coup on June 19, 1965. Ben Bella was arrested, placed in a secret prison, and the government reorganized. He lived under house arrest until 1982 and was only able to go into exile in Switzerland after it was lifted . In 1990 he was allowed to return to Algeria. Here he tried to bring the democratic movement of Algeria back to life. However, after holding democratic elections, the country was again plunged into civil war by military leaders. The elections were canceled and the Islam Salvation Front (FIS) party, the winner of the election, was banned. In the mid-1990s he resumed talks with other Algerian opposition leaders in Rome in order to end the civil war in the country. Overall, Ben Bella remained a critic of the existing system in Algeria during these years.

Ben Bella was elected President of the International Campaign Against Aggression on Iraq for many years . Contrary to the one-party system practiced in the country, he campaigned for democracy in Algeria in his final years. Until recently he was chairman of the African Union (AU) Wise Men’s Council , which aims to avoid armed conflicts or, if they have broken out, to resolve them.

On April 11, 2012, Ben Bella died in Algiers after a hospital stay at the age of 93. He was between 12 and 13 April laid out and was on April 13, buried at the Carré des Martyrs on the Al-Alia cemetery in Algiers. An eight-day state mourning was ordered. The Prime Ministers of Mauritania and Morocco and the Presidents of Sahrawi and Tunisia were present at his funeral .

Honors

family

Ben Bella had been married to journalist Zohra Sellami since 1971. The couple adopted two daughters, Mehdia and Nouria.

literature

Web links

Commons : Ahmed Ben Bella  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Some sources cite the year 1916. So that Ben Bella could finish school two years early and help his father on the farm, Ben Bella's father changed the year of birth from 1918 to 1916.
  2. ↑ Le Parisien: Ahmed Ben Bella, premier président de l'Algérie, est mort , accessed April 11, 2012
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Joburg Post Online: “Peace does not include a vendetta; there will be neither winners nor losers ”. - Ahmed Ben Bella . on www.joburgpost.co.za (English)
  4. ↑ www.om-passion.com
  5. ↑ Rudolf Fischer: Ferhat Abbas says: Cooperation. In: zeit.de. September 28, 1962, accessed December 8, 2014 .
  6. ↑ Thomas Hasel: Power Conflict in Algeria. Verlag Hans Schiler, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89930-190-0 , page 54.
  7. ↑ page on www.rulers.org
  8. ↑ Ahmed Ben Bella est mort ( French ) elwatan.com. April 11, 2012. Retrieved April 14, 2012.
  9. ↑ Article in Magharebia (Engl.)
  10. ↑ page on www.warheroes.ru
personal data
SURNAME Ben Bella, Ahmed
ALTERNATIVE NAMES أحمد بن بلة (Arabic)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Algerian politician and president
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Maghnia in what was then French Algeria
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 2012
Place of death Algiers