Ahmed Ben Bella
Ahmed Ben Bella was the first president of independent Algeria and was deposed by his own defence minister. Born in Maghnia in 1916 to a peasant family, he was a talented footballer and was conscripted into the French army, serving in Italy at Monte Cassino, where he was decorated for bravery and personally awarded a medal by de Gaulle. He returned to find nothing changed. The massacres at Sétif and Guelma in May 1945, in which French forces and settlers killed thousands of Algerians during victory celebrations, turned him to armed politics. He joined the clandestine Organisation Spéciale, was involved in the 1949 robbery of the Oran post office to fund it, was captured, and escaped from prison in 1952 by filing through the bars. He was one of the nine founders of the FLN, which launched the war of independence on 1 November 1954, and directed external operations from Cairo. In October 1956 the French air force intercepted a Moroccan aircraft carrying him and three other leaders and forced it to land in Algiers — an act of piracy that made him a symbol. He spent the rest of the war, nearly six years, in French prisons. Independence came in July 1962 after a war that killed several hundred thousand. Ben Bella took power with the support of Houari Boumédiène's army, sidelining the negotiators. He nationalised settler land, introduced self-management of farms and factories, and made Algeria a centre of third-world and liberation politics, hosting Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela. Boumédiène deposed him in June 1965 and held him in detention for fifteen years. He returned in 1990 and died in 2012.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 2012 CE
- Nationality: Algerian
- Roles: head_of_state, revolutionary
