Before Independence
Following election as a municipal councillor, Ben Bella became a founding member of an underground organization pledged to fight colonial rule, known as the Organisation Spéciale. This was the immediate predecessor of the National Liberation Front. Arrested in 1951 and sentenced to eight years imprisonment Ben Bella escaped from Blida prison, making his way to Tunisia and then Egypt.
At the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, Ben Bella was based in Cairo where he had become one of the nine members of the Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action which headed the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). He was arrested by the French in 1956, after his airplane had been controversially intercepted and brought to France, and released in 1962. His arrest led to the resignation of Alain Savary, opposed to Guy Mollet's policies. While in prison he was elected a vice-premier of the Algerian provisional government. When Abdel Nasser brought Ben Bella to speak for the first time to an Egyptian audience, he broke into tears because he could not speak standard Arabic. Like many Arab militants of the time, he would come to describe himself as a "Nasserist" and developed close ties to Egypt even before independence was achieved. Abdel Nasser's material, emotional and political support of the Algerian movement would come to cause him troubles, as it played a major role in France's choice to wage war on him during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Due to Pakistan's support for the cause of Algerian struggle for self-determination and independence, Ben Bella was given a Pakistani diplomatic passport to make his foreign travels possible in the face of the international manhunt for him undertaken by the French and their allies. Ben Bella also traveled on a Pakistani diplomatic passport during the years of his exile from Algeria in 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Ahmed Ben Bella
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