NYT > Algeria
NYT > Algeria
Updated: Feb. 22, 2011
Algeria is the second-largest country in Africa, with over four-fifths of its territory covered by the Sahara desert. The country has a population of 35 million people mainly located near the northern coast.
The country won its independence from France in 1962 in a war that began in 1954. Estimates of the war’s death toll vary but run as high as more than one million Algerians.
Algeria’s government has operated under a state of emergency for nearly two decades. Its battle with Islamic militants reached a peak in a brutal civil war in the 1990s, in which more than 100,000 people were killed. That conflict began after the military-backed government canceled elections that an Islamist party appeared poised to win.
On Feb. 12, 2011, riot police officers stifled a protest in Algeria’s capital, Algiers, by hundreds of people voicing the same demands for change that helped topple autocratic governments in Egypt and Tunisia in the previous month.
Yet even as North African neighbors have erupted, the oil-producing giant of Algeria has kept a sullen calm in the wake of the February protest, with the regional upheaval, so far, not catching on.
The government has promised concessions, accelerating vows to lift a years-old state of emergency and speaking of new jobs and housing.
Discontent with the government is real. Five died in riots in January 2011, and hundreds of small protests throughout the country punctuated all of 2010. The repression, youth unemployment and large-scale corruption that provoked uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt exist here, too.
Conditions are ripe for revolt. But the upheavals in neighboring countries are unlikely to be immediately repeated in this vast desert nation, four times the size of France, say analysts and some political figures. The scars of a decade of civil war are still too fresh.
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The government is awash in oil money — Algeria has Africa’s third-largest proven reserves — and is adept at distributing it to dull discontent: wages for civil servants have risen 34 percent recently, according to the International Monetary Fund. The ailing president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, is a holdover from the earliest days of independence but is considered a mere figurehead for aging military officers who hold real power but whose precise identities are considered opaque.
Opposition parties with long memories of compromises made during the decade of Islamist insurgency distrust one another and appear uninterested, for the moment, in coalescing around a common set of grievances.
The turnout at the Feb. 12 demonstration was estimated at no more than a few thousand, vastly outnumbered by the police.
Demonstrators that day chanted “Bouteflika out!” referring to Mr. Bouteflika, who has ruled Algeria with a tough hand since 1999. The government of Mr. Bouteflika — he was re-elected to a third term with a widely derided 90 percent of votes in 2009 — is not popular, according to analysts, but neither is the opposition.
For now, the street protests appear to be the expression of a minority, even among those who oppose the government. In particular, the political party leading the movement, the Rally for Culture and Democracy, is distrusted for having backed the army’s campaign against the Islamists in the 1990s.
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