Hocine Ait Ahmed

A life for freedom

Hocine Aït-Ahmed, President of the Socialist Forces Front, (FFS) was born in August 1926. He is one of the nine revolutionary leaders who created the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954.  At 16 years of age, and while still a high-school student, he joined the Algerian People’s Party (PPA) and quickly became the youngest member of the Central committee. An advocate of armed struggle at a time when other Algerian nationalists were sold on reformism, he presented a decisive report to the Central committee on the shape and strategy of armed independence struggle in 1948.

During the PPA’s underground congress in Belcourt in 1947, he had already advocated for both the creation of a special organization in charge of the training of military officers and for a secret system to initiate and develop the armed struggle. Named to the leadership of the PPA, he was designated the head of the OS (the Special Organization) for two years, replacing Mohamed Belouizdad, who was suffering from tuberculosis.

He organized a hold-upof the Oran post office in March 1949, which enabled [the PPA] to seize an important sum of money used to finance the purchase of weapons needed to the launch the Revolution.  To escape the heavy penalties leveled against him when the colonial police uncovered the OS, he fled to Cairo where he became the spokesperson of the MTLD in anti-imperialist conferences.  He took the initiative, as a left-wing militant, to represent the PPA-MTLD at the first Asian Socialist Conference, held in Rangoon (Burma).  He led the Algerian delegation to the Euro-Asian Conference in Bandung in April 1955, and then to the UN General Assembly, which put the Algerian issue on its agenda in September of that year.  He also opened an FLN office in New York.

In 1956, Hocine Aït-Ahmed, along with Mohamed Boudiaf, Mohamed Khider, Ahmed Ben Bella and Mostefa Lacheref, was kidnapped when the colonial authorities hijacked the plane that was carrying them from Morocco to Tunis, where the Maghreb Peace Conference was to have been held.  As soon as he was released in 1962, Hocine Aït Ahmed became a member of both the National Council of the Algerian Revolution (CNRA) and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic and continuously denounced all attempts to prevent the construction ofa democratic Algerian state.  He has summed up his stance by saying that “the patriotism of today is democracy.”

Elected to the Constituent Assembly, he continued his fight for a free and happy Algeria and fought for freedom of speech and a multiparty system. The imposition of a Constitution developed outside of the Constituent Assembly led him to resign from this institution. He founded the FFS in September 1963 and, to guard against military interventions and police repression, he set up structures to welcome democratic activists.

Arrested in October 1964, he was condemned to death, then pardoned.  On June 16, 1965, after weeks of negotiations between the FFS and the FLN, a joint statement announced an agreement between the two parties. Houari Boumediène’s coup d’état three days later put an end to this effort to end single party rule.

On May 1,1966, Hocine Aït-Ahmed escaped from the El Harrach prison and fled Algeria.  He continued the fight for Algerian democracy, for the respect and promotion of human rights, and for Maghreb unity, from abroad. He stood up for the defense of individual freedoms against President Boumediène’s centralized socialist regime.  In December 16, 1985, Aït Ahmed and Ben Bella, on behalf of their respective parties, launched an appeal to the Algerian people for a democratic alternative and pluralism from London.

The upheaval of October 1988 made it possible for Hocine Aït Ahmed to return to his native land.  He continued his political fight there, demanding the dissolution of

National Assembly and the election of a Constituent Assembly.  An indefatigable defender of the people’s sovereignty, Hocine Aït-Ahmed unceasingly denounced the maneuvers used by the regime to remain in power, such as fake elections. Instead, Hocine Aït-Ahmed insisted upon a sovereign Constituent Assembly.

In January 1992, as the army rushed to cancel the legislative elections of December 1991, Aït-Ahmed called for the respect of the constitution and warned against “the danger of seeing guns overrule the ballot boxes.” History has proved him right.  Since then, he has called for the lifting of the state of emergency as well as the resumption of the democratic process.  In June 1992, he proposed a National Conference to Monitor the Transition, and then in 1993, a memorandum for a National Contract for democracy.  Refusing to support the approach of the regime, which preferred to sacrifice the nation rather than to permit Algerian citizens to take charge of their future, Hocine Aït-Ahmed left the country once again following the assassination of President Mohamed Boudiaf.  He continued his political fight from abroad by insisting on the need to work for peace.

In 1995 in Rome, Hocine Aït Ahmed signed, on behalf of his party, and with the representatives of six other political formations, a platform to bring an end the crisis and a return to peace.  The signatories of this platform, known as the National Contract, committed themselves to list of principles, the most important being: political alternance, freedom of worship, the primacy of legitimate laws over any law issued from assemblies that were not legitimately elected, the equality of all citizens without distinction, the use of peaceful means to reach power, and the condemnation of all violence.

On February 2, 1999 he again returned to Algeria.  His candidacy for the presidential election [of April 1999] was announced at the FFS Extraordinary Congress, held on the fifth of that same month. In March of that year, along with three other candidates, he asked that international observers be sent to supervise the conduct of the presidential election.  Although receiving a negative response from the President of the Republic, General Zéroual, he ran a dynamic electoral campaign focused on the necessity of dialogue and national reconciliation.

On the eve of the general election, representatives of the [presidential] candidates were denied access to the polling stations [for the military and nomadic vote] thus confirming the regime’s intention to engineer widespread fraud in favor of the military’s chosen candidate. At this point, Hocine Aït-Ahmed and five other candidates withdrew from the election, leaving the military’s chosen candidate alone in the race.  Two months later, these six ex-candidates met at the FFS headquarters in Algiers to sign the Manifesto of Democratic Freedoms.

Fluent in several languages, Hocine Aït-Ahmed received a Bachelor’s degree in Law and defended his doctoral thesis on human rights in the Charter and practice of the OAU in Nancy, France in 1975.   His unwavering commitment to democratic socialism has made him a rallying force for the opposition in Algeria.  A committed international socialist, he cuts a “patriarch of the left” figure, similar to Papandreou in Greece, who fought long and hard against military dictatorship. Unlike this latter, he has never held power. The respect that Aït-Ahmed enjoys comes from the causes that he has supported.   And although he has spent 30 of his 74 years in exile, he has lost none of his stature.