A00006 - Burhan Dogancay, Artist Inspired by Urban Walls

Burhan Dogancay, Artist Inspired by Urban Walls, Dies at 83

Murad Sezer/Reuters

Burhan Dogancay in May 2012.

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: January 20, 2013

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

Burhan Dogancay, a Turkish-born artist considered one of his country’s first internationally recognized abstract painters, died on Wednesday in Istanbul. He was 83.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesartsfor arts and entertainment news.

Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters and Editors

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

• Go to Event Listings »

The cause was cancer, his wife, Angela, said.

Mr. Dogancay, who divided his time between homes in Istanbul and New York, was the first contemporary Turkish artist to have his work included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In a country commonly defined as the cultural international date line between the Middle East and the West, Mr. Dogancay was best known for his artwork on the subject of walls. Old urban walls covered in graffiti and posters interested him most. The more cluttered, weathered and layered by generations of human announcements, the better.

He traveled for years collecting wall images from more than 500 cities to make the paintings and collages he presented at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris in 1982 in a one-man exhibition titled “Walls That Whisper, Shout and Sing.”

“The walls I am drawn to have been worked on by nature and by human beings, so that they provide a mirror of their respective neighborhoods,” he once said in an interview. “They are speaking walls.” He added: “Wall messages are constantly changing, new ones replacing old ones, old ones covered up or distorted by the elements. The whole human experience has been reflected on walls, beginning with cave drawings.”

Mr. Dogancay produced some 4,000 paintings, many of them abstract collages in three dimensions like “Ribbon Mania,” a 1982 piece acquired by the Met in 2011.

His work has been exhibited in more than 70 museums, including the British Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Levent Calikoglu, the chief curator of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, said in an e-mail on Thursday that Mr. Dogancay’s art drew from the many cultural traditions — European, Middle Eastern, American, ancient and modern — that intersect in contemporary Turkey. In Mr. Dogancay’s work, he said, New York subway walls and the walls of the most remote Turkish village speak to a common humanity.

Born on Sept. 11, 1929, in Istanbul, Burhan Cahit Dogancay was the first of three children of Adil and Hediye Dogancay, both members of Western-educated middle-class families. His father, an army officer and noted watercolorist, was his first art instructor.

Despite Westernizing influences in Turkey and the establishment of a democratic, secular government in 1923 after centuries of Ottoman rule, the country’s art remained fairly untouched by modernism during Mr. Dogancay’s childhood. Museums, which were state run, displayed mainly traditional or representational art. Mr. Dogancay told interviewers that he did not see his first Impressionist or Expressionist painting, or a Picasso, until 1950, when he graduated from the University of Ankara and left for Paris.

He went there to study economics at the University of Paris; but from 1950 to 1955, when he received his doctorate, he took art courses and began painting in his spare time. He was director of the Turkish republic’s tourism office in New York in 1962 when he decided to become an artist full time. Within two years he had his first show in Manhattan.

His wall motif was inspired by the streets of New York, he said. “At first I was primarily interested in the decayed, deteriorated surface of walls,” he wrote in a 2009 book of his work. But in the kaleidoscope of posters and graffiti competing to be seen on the walls of the city, above and below ground, he began to recognize a kind of archaeological depth, he said. It revealed “the testimonials of human beings expressing and communicating” their history.

In the 1980s, his interest in walls led Mr. Dogancay to photograph skyscrapers under construction in Midtown Manhattan. Friendships he developed with ironworkers made it possible for him to photograph their restoration work on the Brooklyn Bridge. His pictures, many of which required climbing the bridge’s cables to dizzying heights, were published in his 1999 book, “Bridge of Dreams: The Rebirth of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

In addition to his wife, Mr. Dogancay is survived by two sisters, Ayten and Tulin.

In an interview last year with the online journal Artlifemagazine, Mr. Dogancay was asked how urban walls had changed since the 1960s and ’70s, when many of the posters and leaflets festooning them carried messages of political protest. “Walls are clean now, because there is social media and computers,” he said, adding, “The youth are not as angry as they were.”

A00005 - Omar Suleiman, Powerful Egypt Spy Chief

Omar Suleiman, Powerful Egypt Spy Chief, Dies at 76

By ROD NORDLAND

Published: July 19, 2012

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

CAIRO — Omar Suleiman, the once-powerful head of Egypt’s intelligence service who represented the old government’s last attempt to hold on to power, died on Thursday at an American hospital, according to the state-owned Middle East News Agency. He was 76.

Enlarge This Image

Nasser Nasser/Associated Press

Omar Suleiman in 2009.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesworldfor international breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

There had been no public reports that Mr. Suleiman was ailing or that he had gone to the United States for medical care, so the news of his death came as a surprise. Reuters said he died suddenly while undergoing a medical examination. Al Ahram, the state-owned newspaper in Egypt, said he died at a hospital in Cleveland. No cause was given.

That he died in the United States was, to his Egyptian critics, emblematic of his close ties with the C.I.A., which he had helped as it established the practice ofextraordinary rendition: sending terrorism suspects to foreign countries to be interrogated and, its critics say, tortured.

When the C.I.A. asked Mr. Suleiman if he could provide a DNA sample from a brother of the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, Mr. Suleiman offered to send the agency the brother’s entire arm, according to Ron Suskind, who has written extensively about antiterrorism efforts.

Mr. Suleiman’s supporters, however, saw him as a pillar of the old order who might have served as a buffer between military rule on the one hand and dominance by Islamist groups on the other.

In 18 years as the head of the General Intelligence Service, better known as the Mukhabarat, Mr. Suleiman became, in the view of many, the most powerful spymaster in the Middle East. He was often referred to as President Hosni Mubarak’s “black box.” His insistence that the Egyptian leader use an armored car during a visit to Ethiopia in 1995 is said to have saved Mr. Mubarak from an assassin’s bullet.

As Mr. Mubarak was buffeted by months of street protests and calls for his resignation, he turned to Mr. Suleiman to lead negotiations with his critics. He later charged him with a last-ditch effort to reorganize the government, appointing him to the long-vacant post of vice president. The move was widely ridiculed by revolutionaries, and 13 days later, on Feb. 11, 2011, it was Mr. Suleiman who announced that Mr. Mubarak was standing down and handing over interim power to the military. Another figure took over the Mukhabarat.

Mr. Suleiman was the first head of the intelligence service whose identity became publicly known. He played a crucial role in Egyptian diplomatic efforts to forge a reconciliation between Palestinians from Hamas and from Fatah, although releases of diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks showed that he had worked with the Israelis to try to deny Hamas its electoral victory in Gaza. Mr. Suleiman viewed the organization as an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian party he had helped ban from participating in national politics until its victory in this year’s presidential election.

“I think a lot of secrets will die with him,” said Nabil Fahmy, a former Egyptian ambassador to the United States. “He had a unique ability of being in a very sensitive, often controversial position as head of intelligence but at the same time preserving the respect of people toward him. He was a professional.”

Mr. Suskind, who wrote about American antiterrorism efforts in his 2006 book “The One Percent Doctrine,” had a more trenchant view. “Suleiman was our go-to guy for ugly extralegal actions — like torture and renditions — that we wanted done, but without U.S. fingerprints on them,” Mr. Suskind said in a telephone interview. “His legacy represents the ongoing costs of these ‘dark side’ engagements for the U.S. — a loss of our honest broker’s credibility at a time it could be so valuable in shaping and guiding the democratic springtime in the region.”

Mr. Suleiman’s deep involvement in the C.I.A.’s program of extraordinary rendition implicated him in allegations of torture. The first known case of rendition, that of Talaat Fouad Qassem, was to Egypt in 1995, according to Omar Ashour, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Doha Center. Mr. Suleiman’s intelligence agency was also accused of involvement in the torture of dissidents.

His public speeches during the Tahrir Square revolution, denouncing protesters as agents of foreign governments and claiming that Egypt was not ready for democracy, eroded his public support. At the same time, many moderate Egyptians looked to Mr. Suleiman, and later to Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, as an alternative to Islamist leadership.

“For pro-revolution and pro-change Egyptians, he was the brains behind Mubarak’s regime survival and a brutal torturer-murderer,” Mr. Ashour said. “For pro-Mubarak, he is a source of stability in the country and a bulwark against Islamist advance.”

Mr. Suleiman’s death came at a symbolic moment. Mr. Mubarak was returned to prison this week after being held in the relative comfort of a military hospital, and Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new president and a former leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, met on Thursday with Khaled Meshal, the top political leader of Hamas.

Mr. Suleiman was born on July 2, 1936, in Qena, a city in Upper Egypt. He graduated from Egypt’s military academy and, like Mr. Mubarak, received training in the Soviet Union. He studied political science at Cairo University and at Ain Shams University in Cairo.

As a former lieutenant general in the Egyptian military, he would be entitled to burial with military honors. But some critics in Cairo were already arguing against that. It would put Egypt’s new president in an awkward position, since he would be expected to attend.

“He is entitled to have a military funeral by law, and I respect that, but I don’t think that he deserves it,” said Hisham Kassem, a publisher and a political analyst. “This is a man who basically spent 18 years making sure Egypt does not move to the road of democracy.”

Kareem Fahim and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 20, 2012

Earlier versions of this obituary misstated part of the title of a 2006 book by Ron Suskind about American antiterrorism efforts. It is “The One Percent Doctrine,” not “The One Percent Solution.”   

A00004 - Abdel al-Megrahi, Libyan convicted in Lockerbie bombing

Abdel al-Megrahi, at 60; Libyan convicted in Lockerbie bombing

By Robert D. McFadden

 |  NEW YORK TIMES   

  MAY 21, 2012

GREG BOS/REUTERS

Rescue personnel carried a body from the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

• REPRINTS
• E-MAIL

  Share via e-mail

  TO

  ADD A MESSAGE

  YOUR E-MAIL
• SHARE 
  • FACEBOOK
  • GOOGLE+
  • LINKEDIN
  • REDDIT
  • TWITTER

NEW YORK - Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, died in Libya, family members said Sunday, nearly three years after Scotland released him on humanitarian grounds, citing evidence that he was near death with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 60.

The death of Mr. Megrahi, who always said he was innocent, foreclosed a fuller accounting of his role, and perhaps that of the Libyan government under Moammar Khadafy, in the midair explosion of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans, about 30 of whom had New England ties.

MANOOCHER DEGHATI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Mr. Megrahi, whom Libya initially refused to extradite, was escorted by officers in Tripoli in 1992.

Mr. Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer who worked undercover at Libya’s national airline, was found guilty in 2001 of orchestrating the bombing and sentenced to life in prison, with a 27-year minimum. But eight years later, after doctors said he probably would die within three months, he was freed under a Scottish law providing for compassionate release of prisoners with terminal illnesses.

Cheering crowds greeted his return to Libya, escorted by Khadafy’s son, Seif al-Islam, in a grim propaganda coup. But his release infuriated many families of the bombing victims, touched off angry protests in Britain and the United States, and was condemned by President Obama and other Western leaders, including Britain’s Conservative opposition after Gordon Brown, then the prime minister, waffled.

Critics charged that Mr. Megrahi’s release had been a part of Libyan oil and gas deals with Britain. A British Cabinet official admitted that he and the prime minister had discussed Mr. Megrahi with Khadafy’s son at a European economic conference, but denied there had been any deal for his release.

The enigmatic Mr. Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist, but defended by many Libyans and even some world leaders as a victim of injustice.

After treatment at Tripoli’s most advanced cancer center, Mr. Megrahi lived with his family at a villa in Tripoli at the government’s expense. As civil war engulfed Libya in 2011, Western calls for his return to prison increased, especially after Khadafy was overthrown and later killed by revolutionary forces.

Tripoli’s new leaders refused to return him, but amid international pressures signaled a willingness to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie case, still unresolved after nearly a quarter-century of struggle among nations and investigations that spanned the globe, touching on Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians, and Libyans.

The enigmatic Mr. Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist, but defended by many Libyans and even some world leaders as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps, and flawed evidence.

Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was born in Tripoli but little is known in the West of his early life. Besides speaking his native Arabic, he had a good command of English. In 1971, he studied in Cardiff, Wales, for nine months, then made four or five trips each to the United States and Britain in the late 1970s.

Mr. Megrahi and his wife, Aisha, were married in 1982 and had four sons and a daughter.

His first cousin was Sa’id Rashid, a senior officer of Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat, the Libyan intelligence service, and a member of Khadafy’s inner circle. Mr. Megrahi was also a senior intelligence officer and director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Tripoli.

US intelligence officials said he became chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines as a cover for his secret work as a military procurer, enabling him to travel widely, often using aliases and false passports. As tensions between the United States and Libya mounted in the 1980s, prosecutors said, Mr. Megrahi was enlisted for an act of terrorism.

It was to be the worst in British history and a devastating strike against America. On Dec. 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747 carrying 243 passengers and 16 crew members, took off from Heathrow Airport bound for New York. Little more than a half-hour later, cruising at 31,000 feet above southern Scotland, the plane exploded. All 259 people aboard and 11 on the ground were killed.

The terrorists apparently intended the aircraft to fall into the sea. But because it took off late, victims and debris fell on land. Recovered evidence showed that the plane had been blown up by Semtex plastic and a Swiss timing device of a kind sold to the Libyan military. The bomb had been hidden in a cassette player and placed in a brown suitcase, with clothing that was traced to a merchant in Malta. While they had no direct proof, investigators believed the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Pan Am 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.

After a three-year investigation, Mr. Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted for mass murder in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion. Mr. Megrahi lived under guard and worked as a teacher. Negotiations led by Nelson Mandela produced a compromise in 1999 - the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.

The trial lasted 85 days. No witness connected the suspects directly to the bomb. But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified Mr. Megrahi as the buyer, although he seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.

The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.

Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that Mr. Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase, and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.

On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found Mr. Megrahi guilty but acquitted Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete, and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that “there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt’’ of Mr. Megrahi. Much of the evidence, however, was later challenged as unreliable.

It emerged that Gauci had failed repeatedly to identify Mr. Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his picture in a magazine and being shown the same picture in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

Investigators said Bollier, whom even the court called “untruthful and unreliable,’’ had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued. In 2007, Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer, and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for explosives residue, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight also was cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.

Hans Koechler, a UN observer, called the trial “a spectacular miscarriage of justice,’’ words echoed by Mandela. Many legal experts, authors, and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling Mr. Megrahi a scapegoat for a regime long identified with terrorism.

While denying involvement, Libya paid $2.7 billion to the victims’ families in 2003 in a bid to end years of diplomatic isolation.

Mr. Megrahi began serving his sentence at Barlinnie Prison near Glasgow, where toilets were buckets in the cells. He was moved in 2005 to the smaller, more humane Greenock Prison in Inverclyde.

His first appeal was rejected in 2002. He dropped a second to clear his repatriation to Libya. Doctors diagnosed his advanced cancer in 2008. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill released him on Aug. 20, 2009, and he flew home to a welcome that coincided with 40th anniversary celebrations of the Khadafy revolution.

A00003 - Ahmed Ben Bella, Revolutionary Who Led Algeria

Ahmed Ben Bella, Revolutionary Who Led Algeria After Independence, Dies at 93

By JOSEPH R. GREGORY

Published: April 11, 2012

• RECOMMEND
• TWITTER
• LINKEDIN
• SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• SHARE

Ahmed Ben Bella, a farmer’s son who fought for France in World War II, turned against it in the brutal struggle for Algerian independence and rose to become Algeria’s first elected president, has died at his home in Algiers, the capital. He was 93.

Enlarge This Image

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Ben Bella in 1965, the year he was deposed.

Related

• Times Topic: Algeria

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesworldfor international breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

Enlarge This Image

Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ahmed Ben Bella in 2010.

The state news agency announced his death on Wednesday morning.

Tall, athletic, handsome and charismatic, Mr. Ben Bella was known for his quick mind, courage and political cunning, traits that became tools of survival in a turbulent life. He faced heavy combat in wartime France and Italy, escaped French assassination attempts as well as a prison, then survived the murderous intrigues of political rivals as he struggled to impose socialism on his sprawling, divided country in the anarchy that followed independence in 1962.

On June 19, 1965, after less than three years as prime minister and president, he was ousted in a coup led by an old ally. He spent the next 14 years in confinement and never again held power. But he remained a powerful voice for the third world amid the conflicts of the cold war and the unrest within the Arab world over Israel, Iraq and radical Islam.

“My life is a life of combat,” he told an interviewer in his last years. “It is a combat that started for me at the age of 16. I’m 90 years old now, and my motivation hasn’t changed; it’s the same fervor that drives me.”

Ahmed Ben Bella was born on Dec. 25, 1918, in Marnia, a small town in the mountains of western Algeria, to a family with Moroccan roots. His father, a Sufi Muslim, supported his five sons and two daughters by farming and small-time trade. The oldest brother died from wounds received in World War I; two other brothers died from illness, and another went to France and disappeared in the mayhem of the Nazi victory in 1940.

Mr. Ben Bella chafed at colonialism from an early age — he recalled a run-in with a racist secondary school teacher — and complained of France’s cultural influence. “We think in Arabic, but we talk in French,” he said.

His education was truncated when his father officially changed the year of Ahmed’s birth to 1916 so that he could return to work on the farm. The move had unintended consequences: Ahmed was conscripted in 1937, two years ahead of his class.

He took to soldiering as readily as he had taken to soccer back home. He was promoted to sergeant and won celebrity as a soccer star in Marseille, France, where his regiment was based. In command of an antiaircraft section during the German invasion of 1940, he kept to his post, firing away as others fled, as waves of Stuka dive bombers pounded the city’s port. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

After the city’s surrender, he declined an offer to play professional soccer and returned to Algeria, where he joined a Moroccan regiment fighting with the Free French. Through 1944 he fought his way up the Italian boot, winning battlefield citations, including one for recovering three abandoned machine guns in the face of German tanks. Gen. Charles de Gaulle personally awarded him the Médal Militaire, the highest decoration of the Free French forces, kissing him, in the French military tradition, on both cheeks.

On May 8, 1945, as France celebrated the Nazis’ capitulation, a protest march in the Algerian town of Sétif against the cruelties of colonialism, made worse by wartime shortages, exploded into five days of rape and killing. More than 100 Europeans were killed.

The retaliation was merciless. An official report put the Algerian death toll at under 1,500; anticolonialists put it in the tens of thousands.

The brutality shocked Mr. Ben Bella. He refused an officer’s commission, returned to Marnia and entered local politics. The authorities, learning that he had joined an opposition movement, sent armed assailants to his farm to assassinate him. In a shootout, Mr. Ben Bella, wielding a semiautomatic pistol, wounded one.

The attackers fled, but Mr. Ben Bella was forced into hiding. He joined the resistance movement that was to become the Front de Libération Nationale.

In 1949, Mr. Ben Bella helped rob a post office in Oran, Algeria. Tracked down, he was sentenced to a long stint in the Blida prison. In 1952, with the aid of a file hidden in a loaf of bread, he broke out and went to Cairo, where he became one of the liberation movement’s nine top leaders.

On Nov. 1, 1954, as the French celebrated All Saints’ Day, the rebels struck, beginning a war of massacre and mutilation, summary executions and rape. Terrorists exploded bombs in busy nightclubs and shot down passers-by on crowded streets. French officers who had once fought the Nazis had Algerian prisoners tortured and shot.

Mr. Ben Bella spent most of the war outside Algeria, organizing clandestine arms shipments and coordinating political strategy. His life was in the shadows, but the French knew who he was.

In 1956, he refused to accept a package delivered to his Cairo hotel by a taxi driver. The bomb exploded as the taxi drove away, killing the driver. Later that year, in Tripoli, Libya, Mr. Ben Bella was waiting at his hotel when a French gunman entered his darkened room, fired and wounded him. The assailant, fleeing, was killed by guards at the Libyan border.

That October, Mr. Ben Bella and other rebel leaders boarded a Moroccan airline’s DC-3 flight from Rabat, Morocco, to Tunis to take part in a Northern Africa summit conference. The French Army, acting without approval from Paris, radioed the pilot, who was French, with instructions to land in Algiers. There the passengers were seized by French troops.

Gen. Paul Aussaresses wrote in his memoir, “The Battle for the Casbah” (2002), that the Army had originally ordered fighter planes to shoot the plane down but called them off at the last minute when it was discovered that the DC-3’s pilot and crew were French. Mr. Ben Bella’s arrest “was a mistake,” General Aussaresses recalled a senior officer as saying. “We intended to kill him.”

The incident, widely publicized, brought Mr. Ben Bella new prominence. Held in France for the next five and a half years, he was treated by the government as a valuable asset in a potential peace deal and kept in moderate comfort. Free to read, he completed his education, absorbing the idealistic socialism of the French left. In 1961, as serious peace talks began, he was in an excellent position to negotiate independence with the war-weary French.

The independence agreement was signed in Évian-les-Bains, France, in 1962, and Mr. Ben Bella returned to Algeria, where power was up for grabs. He suppressed the Communists, outmaneuvered his rivals and used his new post as prime minister to push through a constitution. In September 1963, running unopposed and supported by Col. Houari Boumedienne, chief of the Army of National Liberation, he was elected president.

“I am the sole hope of Algeria,” Mr. Ben Bella declared as he set out to forge a socialist state. Pledging that the new Algeria would “serve as a beacon” to the third world, he took to wearing a simple blue Mao jacket and issuing pronouncements like “Castro is my brother, Nasser is my teacher, Tito is my example.”

Still, he was shrewd enough to maintain ties with the West. A deal with de Gaulle’s government brought $200 million a year in aid, allowing France access to Algerian oil and the right to nuclear and missile tests in the Sahara. He accepted aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union.

But his efforts to push through agrarian and educational reforms foundered. A plan to have elected workers run the country’s farms and factories proved impractical, as did an appeal to Algeria’s women to donate their jewelry to the state.

“Ben Bella always wanted his teammates to pass the ball so that he could score,” a former schoolmate recalled. “He was the same in politics.”

As his profile grew overseas, his domestic base eroded. In May 1964, a bomb exploded in front of his official residence in Algiers. In June, violence flared between dissidents in the Kabilya region and the government. In July, Col. Mohamed Chabani led the Sahara regional army in a revolt that ended quickly with his capture and secret execution. Though Mr. Ben Bella had promised “a revolution without gallows,” other potential rivals were jailed.

On June 19, 1965, Mr. Ben Bella was deposed in a coup led by Colonel Boumedienne, his former comrade in arms. Mr. Ben Bella was thrown in an underground prison, where he was held for eight months. Taken to an isolated villa in Birtouta, outside of Algiers, he was kept under house arrest for 14 years.

Though a prisoner, Mr. Ben Bella was allowed a private life. In 1971, his aging mother arranged for him to marry Zohra Sellami, a 26-year-old Algerian journalist. The couple adopted two children. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

Colonel Boumedienne died in 1978, and in 1980 Mr. Ben Bella was allowed to go into exile in Lausanne, Switzerland. He returned to Algeria in the 1990s and took part in efforts to end civil strife there. He was present when protests erupted in 2010 in the first weeks of what became known as the Arab Spring.

Even in old age he remained a vocal observer of international affairs, opposing America’s wars against Iraq and the rise of global capitalism. Although he was critical of radical Islamists, calling their movement misguided, he remained a fervent Muslim, telling an interviewer that the Koran had been his comfort during long years of captivity.

“I am,” he said, “Muslim first, Arab second and then Algerian.”