Arab revolutionary Ahmed Ben Bella dies at 96

Ahmed Ben Bella, the first president of independent Algeria, and one of the great revolutionary figures of Arab nationalism, died on April 11 at age of 96.

In the worldwide upsurge of colonial peoples that marked the 1950s and 1960s, few uprisings had as much prestige and so electrified the world’s poor as the Algerian people’s 8-year armed struggle, which defeated French colonialism. Ben Bella’s government was seen as a symbol of internationalist solidarity, providing political support and also military training to freedom fighters in Latin America and Africa. He even invited African-American leader Malcolm X to join his government.

Ben Bella is also known for his leading role in the Pan-African and Non-Aligned Movements, and for bringing Algeria into the United Nation as an independent nation. While working very closely with socialist countries, and acknowledging their contributions to governments newly emerging from direct colonial control, Algeria did not aspire to implement socialism or break with the capitalist economic system.

Ben Bella served more than 24 years in prison. He was imprisoned by both the French colonial regime and the Algerian government that followed his. He remained active and outspoken all his life. At the time of his death he chaired the African Union's advisory group in charge of conflict prevention.

The truth about French colonialism

Imperialists claim that though the colonial period was harsh, it brought development to “backward” lands. This is pure myth. When France seized Algeria in 1830 the education level there was higher than in France itself. ("Modern Algeria, the Origins and Development of a Nation" by John Ruedy)

But that soon changed. In the 130 years of occupation, Paris dismantled Algerian social and economic life and left the country impoverished. Algeria was declared “part of France,” as 1.5 million French settlers took over the best lands, controlling farming and trade.

Led by the National Liberation Front, from 1954 to 1962, the entire Algerian population rose up, fighting heavily armed French troops with sticks, stones, homemade bombs and any weapons they could get.

France deployed a half-million troops against the people’s uprising. They bombed and strafed whole villages, leaving 3 million homeless. The French interred 2 million Algerians in concentration camps. By the time the French conceded defeat, some 1 million Algerians, or approximately 15 percent of the population, had been killed by the French.

This carnage didn't stop the worldwide imperialist press from siding with the French. The corporate media raised a racist frenzy against the Algerian liberation movement. This slander of the struggle of the oppressed continues today. The April 12 New York Times obituary of Ben Bella describes the Algerian fight for national liberation as a “war of massacre and mutilation, summary executions and rape.”

Algerian people’s victory resonates in U.S.

Oppressed people around the word, however, were not fooled by the corporate media. They cheered the hard-won victory in Algeria as a beacon of hope. Coming from the African continent, it struck an especially strong chord among oppressed people in the United States.

A precipitant factor in the U.S. Civil Rights movement was the anger and frustration of African-American soldiers returning from World War II to Jim Crow racism. Similarly, soldiers from French colonies who fought to liberate France from Nazi occupation were enraged when the newly “liberated” France tightened the screws on its colonies.

Ben Bella was part of a “colonial” (segregated) unit in the French army and a decorated soldier in World War II. However, in May 1945, as France celebrated Hitler’s defeat, French troops and settlers attacked Algerians protesting the cruelties of colonialism in the town of Setif. Thousands of Algerians were massacred. This was a turning point for Ben Bella, who left the French military and joined the national liberation fight.

Ben Bella was one of the nine members of the Committee of Algerian Revolutionaries that gave birth to the National Liberation Front. Arrested by the French occupiers in 1952, he escaped to Cairo, where a pan-Arab nationalist movement was on the rise under the government headed by Gamal Abel Nasser. Arrested again in 1956, he was jailed until 1962.

In 1963 Ben Bella became the first elected president of independent Algeria. The new Algerian government inherited a country where the fleeing French settlers had razed fields, destroyed food supplies, hospitals, factories and machinery.

Ben Bella began a sweeping land reform program. He called for elected workers to run the country’s farms and factories. The new government was strongly anti-imperialist, offering support to Cuba, Palestine, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Vietnam — all countries under the heaviest siege by imperialism.

Class character of new Algerian government

In Cuba, Vietnam and China the struggle had been led by a seasoned revolutionary working-class party that eliminated capitalism and imperialism root and branch, making a definitive break with the old order and embracing socialism. The fight in Algeria, in contrast, was led by a coalition of dedicated intellectuals based in the middle class. They shared no consistent ideology, and were divided into different organizations with sharp differences on how to govern after independence.

Many of these groups were against moving in a socialist direction. Others were alienated from the socialist camp because it did not support the Algerian liberation struggle until it was victorious. While the French Communist Party gave programmatic support for Algerian independence after 1958, its actions fell far short of its potential. Meanwhile the pressure from world imperialism on the new government remained relentless.

Ben Bella proved to be Algeria’s most progressive head of state before he was deposed in a coup in 1965. Successive governments slowly but steadily adopted positions less confrontational to imperialism, eventually conciliating on many fronts.

Ben Bella was placed under surveillance until 1980, and then went into exile in Switzerland. He continued to speak out against imperialism and to advocate unity in the Muslim and Arab world. In 1990 he returned to Algeria, with tens of thousands of people giving him a hero's welcome.

Ben Bella explains internationalist views

After Ben Bella died, many progressive media reprinted a 2006 interview the former leader of Algeria gave to writer Silvia Cattori. (www.salemnews.com, April 11) In it Ben Bella explains his internationalist views and comments on the current developments of that period. Excerpts follow:

“In Tunisia, in Morocco, in Vietnam, Algeria had become somewhat like the ‘mother of freedom struggles,’ to support them was thus for us a sacred mark. When someone came to ask us for help, it was sacred. We helped them, even if we had only meager means; we offered them arms, a little bit of money, and on occasion, men.”

With the participation of Che Guevara, who came to Algeria, “all the combatants who participated in the fight for freedom in South America came to Algeria; it’s from there that all those who fought left. We trained them, we arranged for the weapons to reach them, we created networks. Mr. Mandela and Mr. Amilcar Cabral themselves came to Algeria. It’s me who coached them; afterwards they returned to lead the fight for freedom in their countries.

“I am not a Marxist, but I place myself resolutely at the left. I am a Muslim Arab, in my actions oriented very much to the left, in my convictions. That is why, even if I don’t share the Marxist doctrine, I always found myself on the side of all the leftist movements in the world and Socialist countries like Cuba, China, the USSR that have led the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist fights. It’s with them that we have constituted a liberation front and brought our logistic support to armies to help their countries come out of colonialism and establish a national internal regime."

Regarding the current period, he said, “I myself, speaking as a man of the South, note that something has changed in the North. There are young people who say ‘enough.’ This perverse global system does not strike only the South but also the North.

"In the past we spoke of poverty, misery only in the South. Now there is a lot of misery in the North as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve the multinational corporations. Thus, deep from within this North there is now a movement, there is an entire generation of youth who want to act, who go out onto the streets, who protest."