Ben Bella played an important role during the Algerian war of independence against France, leading the FLN, organizing the shipment of foreign weapons and coordinating political strategy from Cairo.

He encountered political conflict during his presidency, and was faced with border clashes in the Sand War with Morocco in 1963 and a failed rebellion by the Socialist Forces Front against his regime in 1963–1964.

Disturbed by the animus against Muslims expressed by his European teacher, he began chafing against imperialism and colonialism and criticized the domination of French cultural influence over Algeria.

In Italy, he was decorated for bravery demonstrated at the Battle of Monte Cassino, during which he dragged a wounded commissioned officer to safety, assuming control of his battalion.

[11] For this, he was promoted to the rank of warrant officer and received the Médaille militaire, the highest decoration of the Free French forces, directly from Charles de Gaulle.

The fallout from the Sétif uprising shocked Ben Bella and his Algerian companions, as they realized that France would not recognize their claim to equal treatment despite their wartime service.

Together with Messali Hadj and his party, he helped to found the Organisation Spéciale (OS), a paramilitary organization whose strategic aim was to take up arms against the French colonial regime as quickly as possible.

He was in charge of organizing the wilayas (regional military sections of the FLN) and supplying weapons to insurgents and getting financial support from friendly Arab countries.

[14] On 4 April 1949, Ben Bella led a robbery of the central post office in Oran to gain funds for the organization, obtaining 3 million francs which he used to buy weapons.

[15] He escaped soon afterwards in 1952 by cutting through his prison window bars with a knife that had been smuggled into jail in a loaf of bread, making his way to Tunisia and then to Egypt, reaching Cairo by 1952 where he was granted sanctuary by the president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Ben Bella played an important role during the war, leading the FLN, organizing the shipment of foreign weapons and coordinating political strategy.

[18] Ben Bella and his associates were responsible for developing a system of bases and routes for providing the National Liberation Army (ALN) in Algeria with weapons, ammunition and other supplies.

Once the French occupation of Tunisia and Morocco ended in 1956, Ben Bella and his associates established a system of camps in both countries for training men and sending them into Algeria.

[19] Ben Bella felt excluded from the Soummam conference on 20 August 1956, and thus rejected it for its "secularism", the decision to integrate the European minority in independent Algeria, and the misrepresentation of delegates.

That same year, while in his hotel in Tripoli, a pied noir gunman with links to French intelligence called Jean David entered his room and fired, wounding but not killing him.

His arrest earlier had led to the resignation of Alain Savary, who was opposed to Guy Mollet's policies; as a prisoner during the height of the FLN terror campaign, he remained relatively untarnished by his association with the organization.

Nasser's material, moral and political support of the Algerian movement became a source of geopolitical trouble for Egypt, as it played a major role in France's decision to wage war against him during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

[22] Due to Pakistan's support for the FLN, Ben Bella had been given a Pakistani diplomatic passport to make his foreign travels possible in the face of an international manhunt co-ordinated by the French and their allies.

This led to several disputes among his rivals in the FLN, which were quickly suppressed by Ben Bella's rapidly growing number of supporters, most notably within the armed forces, whose chief was Houari Boumédiènne.

In his words, the "Tripoli program remained a dead letter, and independence and revolution made no sense, as long as Algerian soil was in hands of the big landowners".

[28] Nevertheless, this action presented no problem to the Algerian people: the constitution was approved and, on 15 September 1963, Ben Bella was elected president of the country, unopposed and with an immense majority.

After stabilizing the country, he embarked on a series of initially popular but chaotically handled land reforms for the benefit of landless farmers, and increasingly turned to socialist rhetoric.

His policy of autogestion, or self-management, was adopted after Algerian peasants seized former French lands and was inspired by Marxist Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito.

In international relations, he had to maintain connections with the former colonial master France, and also accepted economic aid from both the US and the Soviet Union, as each sought to move his regime into its orbit and into opposition to the other.

The Association of the Algerian Ulema claimed that the "state Islam" that Ben Bella wanted to achieve was not an application of true Muslim values, but rather an attempt to please the population.