Ahmed Ben Bella was a revolutionary leader and the first president of independent Algeria, a central figure in his country's long and bloody war of liberation from French colonial rule. Born in French Algeria, he served with distinction in the French army during the Second World War, earning decorations, before turning against the colonial system that denied his fellow Algerians equality and independence.
In the early 1950s Ben Bella became one of the founders of the National Liberation Front, the FLN, which in 1954 launched the armed uprising against France that would become one of the most savage anti-colonial wars of the century. He emerged as a prominent leader of the revolt, but in 1956 the French intercepted his aircraft and imprisoned him, and he spent much of the war behind bars in France.
Algeria finally won its independence in 1962, after a struggle that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and Ben Bella, freed and triumphant, became the new nation's first prime minister and then president. He pursued a socialist program of land reform and nationalization and cultivated a leading role among the non-aligned and revolutionary nations of the developing world.
His rule was short-lived. In 1965 he was overthrown in a coup by his former comrade-in-arms, the defense minister Houari Boumédiène, and held under house arrest for many years. Released long afterward, Ben Bella lived into old age as an elder statesman of Algerian nationalism, dying in 2012.