Boumedienne seized power from Ben Bella in a 1965 army coup.
Evidence
In all this period Ben Bella had come to depend increasingly on the support of Boumedienne and the army. With most of his rivals dead, in prison or in exile, by the eve of the Afro-Asian Conference of June 1965 Ben Bella looked at last secure. Then Boumedienne moved with the army which, ironically, had put Ben Bella in power and kept him there, and the tanks supplied by Ben Bella’s Soviet allies (who had but recently awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize). Though himself under sentence of death from Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed warned him “There’s going to be a coup against you.” Ben Bella was arrested, and Boumedienne took over the Government. The reasons given for Ben Bella’s removal were his excessive addiction to the “cult of the personality”, his “liquidation of revolutionary cadres”, his ideological confusion, his proneness to foreign (i.e. Eastern bloc) influences, and his improvidence with Algeria’s vital resources. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1641
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The Ben Bella hijacking sealed off any negotiated end to the war. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 490; De Gaulle transferred Ben Bella to Napoleon’s island of exile — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 972
Related
- The Ben Bella hijacking sealed off any negotiated end to the war. (similarity 0.88)
- The Ben Bella kidnapping may mark the French army’s first self-directed political coup (similarity 0.83)
- Suez and the Ben Bella affair destroyed Mollet’s Algerian policy. (similarity 0.82)
- De Gaulle transferred Ben Bella to Napoleon’s island of exile (similarity 0.82)
- Mollet lacked the political strength to release Ben Bella as peace negotiators. (similarity 0.81)
- Ben Bella’s abduction derailed a promising Maghreb peace initiative (similarity 0.79)
- The Ben Bella hijacking backfired by pushing Tunisia and Morocco firmly behind the FLN. (similarity 0.79)
- Ben Bella spent most of his life in prisons, French and Algerian (similarity 0.78)