President Bouteflika announced some liberalisation measures after riots over the price of food in January in which five people died. But protests have continued. A man tried to set himself alight during a protest outside Algeria’s Employment Ministry for “a decent job for every Algerian” and unemployment benefit equal to half the minimum wage. The protest was organised by a group called the National Committee for the Rights of the Unemployed.
The government has banned a rally planned for Saturday 12 February called by the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD: no relation to the Tunisian RCD), the more right-wing of the two mainly-Berber-based opposition parties, and an umbrella group of which it is part, the National Coordination for Change and Democracy (CNCD), set up at a meeting on 21 January 2011.
CNCD also includes a grouping of independent unions in the public services, the Syndicat national autonome des personnels de l’administration publique (SNAPAP), set up in the 1990s. SNAPAP is under constant pressure from the authorities and a number of its leading figures were recently detained.
The Algerian Socialist Workers Party (PST), not an offshoot of the British SWP but an affiliate of the Fourth International, participated at the meeting that set up the CNCD but, like the more left-wing mainly-Berber-based opposition party, FFS, PST has not joined CNCD and is not formally supporting the demonstration on 12 February.
They complain that CNCD does not want to raise social demands.
"The social question, that of jobs, housing and the high cost of living, is at the heart of the revolt and is once again prioritised by the desperate young people who try to burn themselves alive. Action must be taken to join the democratic dimension and the social question".
Links
Many external sources on Algeria are in French. These include the International Support Committee for Independent Algerian Unions (CISA), based in France: http://www.cisa-solidaritesyndicats-algerie.org/. Algeria Watch has pages in English although these are not as up-to-date as its French content: http://www.algeria-watch.org/index_en.htm. FFS: www.ffs-dz.com. PST: membres.multimania.fr/pstdz/.
Algeria: background
Algeria has a population of 35 million. One in 10 lives in the capital, Algiers.
France invaded and slowly colonised Algeria from 1830 onwards. Algeria was made an integral part of France, although only people of European descent had full citizenship, with the right to vote.
Algeria won independence through a bitter war from 1954 to 1962 that killed perhaps one million Algerians. The main force for independence was the National Liberation Front (FLN).
After independence, the FLN regime, calling itself socialist, embarked on modernisation - for example, literacy improved from 10 to 60 per cent - but was authoritarian and relied heavily on oil revenues.
A younger generation that had not experienced the civil war became disgruntled at high unemployment. By the 1980s there were several competing groups of opposition to one-party FLN rule.
Mass protests caused the government to concede multi-party elections in 1991. The first round was won by the Islamist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The military stepped in, cancelled the second round and banned the FIS. In the next 10 years, a brutal civil war saw 160,000 killed, and included massacres of whole villages by the Armed Islamic Group. By 2002 the war had ground to a conclusion with the Algerian military firmly in the saddle.
The current president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, was chosen by the army (though formally elected in 1999, 2004, and 2009) and presides over a formally democratic but repressive state.
Algeria is the biggest Arab state by area; parts of it far from the capital are not fully under government control, and a small number of radical Islamist groups are based there.
99% of the population is Muslim (overwhelmingly Sunni); the first language of about 15% of the population is Berber (now recognised as a national language) rather than Arabic. Only one per cent of the population now is of European origin; in 1962 it was 15%. Most of the settlers fled to France before or shortly after independence.
There is a big Algerian diaspora, notably in France; at least 1.5 million Algerians or their children live there.
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