Ait Ahmed.. the resistance to colonialism and the rule of the military in Algeria

Algerian politician, one of the main faces in the national movement, and one of the most prominent leaders of the National Liberation Front during the war of liberation.

He collided with Ben Bella and took up arms against him. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death, then he was pardoned.

Birth and upbringing

Hussein Ait Ahmed was born on August 20, 1926 in Ain El Hammam, in the Wilayat of Tizi Ouzou, in the Kabylie region of Greater Kabylie, to a Berber family.

He was raised in a conservative family.

Education and Training

He received his secondary education in Tizi Ouzou, then in Ben Aknoun in Algiers, then completed his postgraduate studies in law in Switzerland, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Nancy in France.

Political experience

Ait Ahmed started political activity early, at the age of sixteen, he joined the Algerian People's Party.

He was one of the nine bombers of the Algerian revolution, as he was in charge of propaganda from the office of the National Liberation Front, and he was arrested in a plane in 1956 and stayed in prison until independence in 1962.

Then he became a member of the National Council of the Algerian Revolution, and of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, whose formation was announced in Cairo in 1958.

Ait Ahmed clashed with what he considered the authoritarian policy of former President Ahmed Ben Bella, to take up arms and enter the tribal areas, where he was arrested in 1964 and sentenced to death before he was granted a pardon.

He split from his comrades in the National Liberation Front, and established the Socialist Forces Front in September 1963, which led what was known as the Kabylie uprising, which lasted for several months, during which hundreds of people were killed. An agreement he was about to sign between him and President Ben Bella evaporated after he overthrew the leader Army Staff Houari Boumediene Ben Bella system.

He was arrested in 1966 and sentenced to death before he succeeded in the decision and settled in the Swiss city of Lausanne.

In 1989 he returned to Algeria at the end of the one-party rule that was followed by the so-called "democratic spring" and his party participated in the state elections in 1990 and then in the parliamentary elections in 1991, which the Islamic Salvation Front won before the army canceled the election results and the democratic process as a whole.

"Da Al-Hussein" - as some call him - attacked the decision to cancel it as a "coup" and demanded the continuation of the electoral process.

In July 1992, he went back into exile, weeks after the assassination of his mentor, President Mohamed Boudiaf, who had returned to Algeria from his exile in Morocco.

In 1995, during the black decade, he signed in Rome the Sant'Egidio Agreement with Algerian parties, including the Islamic Salvation Front, to demand the government start negotiations to end the wave of violence that hit the country at the time.

Ait Ahmed was one of those calling for the establishment of an international commission of inquiry into the massacres that took place in Algeria starting in 1996. He also called for getting rid of the crisis of political legitimacy that the Algerian regime suffers from.

In 1999, he ran for the presidential elections, but withdrew, along with five other candidates, denouncing "fraud" and leaving the arena for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Ait Ahmed stopped any political activity in 2012, after he did not hesitate to attack the army and what he calls the “political police” in his country.

In 2013, he announced his resignation from the party leadership, declaring to his party members that he still retains his convictions and enthusiasm, as it was at the beginning of his seventy-year struggle, "but I have to tell you that it is time for me to hand over the flag" to the younger generation.

Death

Hussein Ait Ahmed died on Wednesday, December 23, 2015 in Lausanne Hospital, Switzerland, at the age of 89, due to a terminal illness.