São Paulo – The funeral of the former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella will take place next Friday (13th) I Algiers, according to the government news agency Algérie Presse Service (APS). Ben Bella, who led the country’s independence movement, died at age 96 last Wednesday (11th) after a long period of illness, according to the APS, which provided no details on the condition he had.
The body will be buried at Martyrs’ Square, in Algiers’ Alia Cemetery after Muslim noon prayer. The country’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has declared an eight-day mourning period.
Ben Bella was the first president of independent Algeria, from 1963 to 1965. The independence war against France lasted from 1954 to 1962. He was one of the leaders of the National Liberation Front (NLF), was arrested by the French in 1956 and was only freed when the conflict ended, in 1962.
In 1965, Ben Bella was overthrown in a coup d’etat orchestrated by his minister of Defence, Houari Boumedienne, and spent the 15 years that followed in home imprisonment. After he was released, in 1980, he fled to exile, and in France he established the Movement for Democracy in Algeria (MDA). The politician would only return permanently to his native country in 1990.
Since 2007, according to APS, Ben Bella was the president of the African Union’s Wise Men Committee.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
