Riots erupt in Algeria over social housing

A mark of scenes to come. 
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52 People injured when protesters clash with police in Bodj Bou Arreridj over allocation of subsidised housing.

Middle East Online

Shortage as more than 26,000 people are seeking social housing ALGIERS - People angry over the allocation of subsidised housing have clashed with police in a town east of the Algerian capital, leaving 52 people injured, an AFP correspondent said on Wednesday. Rioters sacked the mayor's office in Bodj Bou Arreridj, 230 kilometres (145 miles) from the capital, and partly blocked a motorway, causing tailbacks. Forty-three demonstrators and nine police were being treated in hospital on Wednesday, a day after the protests broke out when a list of 935 people being allocated social housing was published. The demonstrators gathered in front of the prefecture with banners that read: "We demand our right to housing" and "Down with corruption and favouritism." Riot police responded with tear gas to disperse them. "We published a list of beneficiaries for 935 homes, which people have a right to contest. But there are demonstrations because there are more than 26,000 people seeking social housing," local official Mamoun Belmouhou said. He said the authorities had already received 3,000 complaints. The publication of housing allocations often results in violence in Algeria, which has a serious shortage. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika promised to build more than one million homes under a 2010-2014 development plan, but construction is slow and complaints of corruption are numerous. Source: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=57239

Remembering Black October

In October 1988, Algeria witnessed a major upheaval that may well be considered the first case of what has become known as the “Arab Spring”. Immense demonstrations filled the streets, with young and old, protesting for numerous reasons, all of which contributed to increasing social despair: rising prices in basic goods, population increase, living standards deteriorating rapidly, food, water and electricity shortages, widespread unemployment, especially among youths who felt that the benefits of a cautious liberalization had passed them by; at that point, fifty-seven percent of Algeria’s population of 23 million was under 21. In addition, disenchantment with the political system in place, characterised by growing corruption, lead to calls for the democratization of a corrupt, autocratic, and inward-looking regime. A regime, run by the military-dominated Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) party, that had held power since Algeria’s independence in 1962. The Algerian people demanded change.

The protests were violently repressed, with the army opening fire and killing some 500 to 800 people, torturing and arresting thousands. Nevertheless, the demonstrations proved effective in spite of this violent oppression. The  FLN’s reputation  of ‘fighting for freedom and resistance’ against the French colonialists was damaged beyond repair. In order to save the regime, President (and army officer) Chadli Benjedid  embarked on a series of political and economic reforms that brought about the downfall of the single-party system  and widened political participation. His new policies included lifting restrictions on freedom of expression, association and organization. As a result, several independent national and regional newspapers as well as diverse civil-society organizations were established. These reforms demonstrated a turning point in independent Algerian history, with many preparing themselves for the road to democratic rule. However, this promising political liberalization process was tragically short-lived when it became evident that the Islamic Salvation Front/Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) was about to achieve a sweeping victory following the first round of elections in December 1991 (which were won by the FIS at around 84% of seats) , consequently invalidated by the military-dominated High Security Council.

Although Algeria has yet to join the rising tides of revolution in the Arab world, out of sheer terror masterminded by the corrupt regime, it is no longer a matter of whether Algeria is immune to the Arab Spring, but a matter of when the Algerian people will rise up again and end this rule once and for all.

The Ugly Truth About Algeria

John R. Schindler | July 10, 2012

Despite not really being in the news, Algeria still appears in the Western media intermittently. As the Maghreb’s last dictatorship, the recent wave of regime change and democratization has passed this important country by, at least so far. Algeria is the key state in Northwest Africa—by virtue of its size, position, natural wealth and regional influence—yet has missed out on the trend that has overtaken so much of the Arab world for the past two years. It remains notable that Algeria’s bloody civil war, which began twenty years ago, never really ended. And now with the help of Al Qaeda, the conflict may be spreading across the Sahel region.

Events in Algeria have long been underreported in the U.S. and Western media (with the exception of France), and there is a general lack of understanding of what ails the country. Certainly the terrible fratricide there in the 1990s got little coverage in Western media, despite the fact that it probably claimed twice as many lives as the Bosnian conflict, which ran concurrently and received nonstop Western attention.

Algeria’s nightmare years of 1993–1997 were a focus of the international human-rights community, which correctly pointed out that the conduct of the government was hardly better than that of Islamist terrorists trying to take over the country. But since 9/11, the Algerian narrative has been subsumed into the West’s counterterrorism effort, to the extent it is reported at all. Enormous poverty, inequality, and the regime’s rapacious and brutal conduct get little attention from Western experts, who seem more interested in speculating about potential Al Qaeda attacks in the Maghreb.

The Real Story

The official story is straightforward. Two decades ago, the military-led junta, which had governed the country since independence from France in 1962, cancelled a democratic election that likely would have brought Islamists to power, and mujahidin took up arms against the secular regime. By 1993, the supremely violent Armed Islamic Group (GIA) emerged as the implacable foe of the regime and the local Al Qaeda affiliate. Although GIA was not the only Islamist resistance group in the country, it was unquestionably the bloodiest. It conducted brutal attacks not just in Algeria but in Europe as well, including a wave of bombings in Paris in the summer of 1995, remembered by terrorism gurus as Al Qaeda’s first attacks on the West. Failing to achieve victory, GIA fell into mass murder, slaughtering Algerian civilians by the hundreds, causing Al Qaeda to break ties with the group in early 1997. Largely killed off by the Algerian security forces, by 1998 the remnants of GIA had coalesced into the GSPC, a far smaller group which posed no serious threat to the regime and spent most of its time on kidnappings and robberies.

In 2006, after almost a decade hiatus, Al Qaeda reinitiated Algerian mujahidin into its ranks, renaming the local franchise Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). While AQIM has been more active in terrorism than the GSPC, it also seems more like an armed gang than a bona fide jihadist group. Over the last few years, AQIM’s reach has extended across the Maghreb and into the Sahel, leading some jihad-watchers to posit that it constitutes a threat to the region, a view shared by many in the U.S. government.

While this account is not entirely inaccurate, it leaves out so many important details as to be essentially false. Above all, it omits the role of the Algerian regime in counterterrorism, which has been effective at defeating the jihad even though its methods would make most Westerners shudder. The lead agency in the fight against the Algerian mujahidin has been the country’s military intelligence service, the feared DRS. With a reputation for ruthlessness and efficiency second to none in the Arab world, the DRS is arguably the world’s most effective intelligence service when it comes to fighting Al Qaeda; it is also probably the most cold-blooded. The DRS can be considered the backbone of the military-led junta. General Mohamed Mediene has headed the DRS since 1990, making him the longest-serving intelligence boss in world history—and few doubt that he is the most powerful man in the country.

Trained by the KGB and schooled in the hard fight for independence, Algerian spies have used tactics against homegrown extremists reminiscent of a sinister B-grade movie. Several high-ranking DRS officers have explained what they did to defeat the mujahidin, including violating human rights on an industrial scale, but hardly anyone outside France seems to have noticed.

Simply put, GIA was the creation of the DRS; using proven Soviet methods of penetration and provocation, the agency assembled it to discredit the extremists. Much of GIA’s leadership consisted of DRS agents, who drove the group into the dead end of mass murder, a ruthless tactic that thoroughly discredited GIA Islamists among nearly all Algerians. Most of its major operations were the handiwork of the DRS, including the 1995 wave of bombings in France. Some of the most notorious massacres of civilians were perpetrated by military special units masquerading as mujahidin, or by GIA squads under DRS control. Having driven GIA into the ground by the late 1990s, DRS has continued to infiltrate and influence Islamist groups in the country. To what extent the local Al Qaeda affiliate is secretly controlled by the military—as GIA and GSPC were—is an open question, but its recent record suggests that DRS influence over any Algerian extremist group is considerable.

U.S. Intel Failure?

These realities, understood by Algerians, are little known in the West, particularly in the United States. While French senior officials have hinted they have been wise to DRS games for many years, a similar understanding seems altogether lacking in the Pentagon or the U.S. intelligence community, which have partnered with Algeria in the fight against Al Qaeda since the 1990s. Whether they really are ignorant or simply do not want to know the sordid details is an open and important question.

To be fair to those inside the Beltway, outside “terrorism experts” are just as credulous about Algeria’s “official story,” and an entire subindustry has arisen in recent years that seeks to explain Algeria and its violent homegrown jihad without any reference to basic realities inside the country.

Yet Algeria’s neighbors, who fear the country’s outsized influence in Northwest Africa, are appropriately skeptical of the Algiers-created narrative that portrays AQIM as a major threat to regional stability. They reject the idea that extremists can be combated only by greater Algerian involvement in regional affairs that is implicitly supported by the United States. African officials are known to drop unsubtle hints that AQIM is not quite what it seems to be and ought to be viewed within the broader context of Algerian foreign policy. In one of the rare cases where such doubts were aired openly, Mali’s head of state security, who is charged with keeping Algerian mujahidin out of his country, told the press in June 2009 that “at the heart of AQIM is the DRS.” Shortly thereafter, he was shot dead at home by “unknown gunmen.”

U.S. interest in the Sahel has only grown in recent years, roughly in tandem with the alleged rise of AQIM in the region. It is no coincidence that the U.S. Army is aligning a combat brigade with U.S. Africa Command—which heretofore has had no combat units permanently assigned to it—and the Pentagon’s interest in the region is rising fast. “Terrorist elements around the world go to the areas they think has the least resistance,” explained army chief of staff General Ray Odierno, “and right now, you could argue that’s Africa.”

While Al Qaeda unquestionably has a great deal of interest in the Maghreb, and would surely like to see the Algerian junta fall and be replaced by a Salafi regime bent on rebuilding the imaginary caliphate, the chances of this outcome are virtually nil. DRS methods, plus the usual extremist tone-deafness, have successfully soured the vast majority of Algerians on the jihadist message. While most Algerians want an end to what they simply call le pouvoir (“the power”), the corrupt military elite that has run the country since France left in 1962, few pine for any sort of Islamist dictatorship.

Unsolved Mystery

Last weekend, Algeria celebrated fifty years of independence. But for most Algerians, buffeted by poverty, instability, corruption and war, there is little to celebrate. Mid-May parliamentary elections resulted in a surprising win for the junta, leading to accusations of fraud as well as despair for those hoping for change via the ballot box. It is clear that the military has no intention to bowing to any sort of peaceful regime change, but infighting among the elite may undo the system. When the junta falls, as someday it surely will, the change will rock those who have waged Algeria’s dirty war against terrorism. The effects on the junta’s foreign supporters, who have turned a blind eye to massive human-rights abuses in the name of counterterrorism, will be serious too.

It is time for the U.S. government to follow the lead of human-rights groups: Washington should start asking important questions about what Algiers has really been up to since 1992, and to what extent the junta and the DRS have been engaged in mass repression and state terrorism under the guise of fighting Al Qaeda—all possibly with U.S. assistance. The saga of Algeria over the last twenty years constitutes “one big murder mystery,” said one of the few writers in the Anglosphere to take notice. It’s time to get to the bottom of it.

John R. Schindler is professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College as well as chair of the Partnership for Peace’s Combating Terrorism Working Group. He is a former counterintelligence officer with the National Security Agency. The views expressed here are entirely his own.

Source: http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-ugly-truth-about-algeria-7146?page=2

Algerian blogger faces jail for inciting protests

The Algerian prosecutor general filed a complaint with the Algiers court against young blogger Tareq Memari for inciting violence and calling for mass protests. Memari was arrested shortly thereafter. 

Memari, who could face up to three years in jail if found guilty, had posted a video on You Tube right before the recent parliamentary elections. In the video, Memari addressed Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and complained of the rising rates of unemployment amongst the youth. He told the president that he is boycotting the elections and called upon Algerian youth to do the youths. 

Memari then got out his voting card and burnt it in front of the camera ─ an act which drove the prosecutor general to ask for his arrest.

"Yes, I destroyed electoral placards and burned my voter's card... I opted to do that rather than immolate myself," the young blogger told the state prosecutor last month.

According to Amin Sidhom, coordinator of the Lawyers’ Network for the Defense of Human Rights and Memari’s lawyer, the accusations leveled at his client are all fabricated and his client’s actions are a normal reaction to government policies.

“Because citizens’ freedom is repressed and they are deprived of voicing their opinions through regular media, they resort to online means like what Memari did when he addressed the president from You Tube,”.

The action of burning the voting card, Sidhom added, is not punishable by law.

“This is his own card and he has the right to do with it as he pleases. Plus, what he did was a symbolic action to voice his discontent.”

Memari also faces charges for tearing down election posters which, Sidhom noted, does not imply insulting any government institution like the complaint claims.

“This does not even insult the Elections Commission.”

As for calling upon Algerians to protest, Sidhom pointed out that this is only a charge in “uncivilized” countries.
“In all civilized countries, citizens have the right to protest and cannot be prosecuted for doing so.”

The verdict in the case is expected on June 27.

Critics of last month's election say the ruling National Liberation Front's victory was never in doubt.

Other contenders in the election were widely seen as bogus parties recently founded to create an illusion of democracy or older parties co-opted by the regime.

Many Algerians opted to boycott the vote as a way of protesting the status quo in the oil-rich north African nation at a time when the Arab Spring was bringing sweeping political change to other countries in the region.

Official election results put the turnout at 43 percent, a figure that opposition parties and experts argued was grossly inflated.

An Algerian court last month sentenced a Yemeni Salafist imam to six months in jail, a $1,300 fine and a 10-year ban on visiting Algeria for having issued a religious edict urging voters to boycott the election.

Algeria is Opec’s new über hawk

By Javier Blas, Commodities Editor

Iran and Venezuela shoulder the moniker of the price hawks at the Opec oil cartel, but in their shadow, Algeria is emerging as the über hawk.

Ahead of Thursday’s meeting, Youcef Yousfi, the Algerian oil minister, warned that “Opec faces a real risk”, suggesting the country is in favour of a production cut.Algeria’s growing hawkish voice is important because it is giving firepower to the other countries calling for higher oil prices at Opec. Take the acrimonious collapse of the cartel’s meeting in June 2011. The disagreement was largely blamed on Iran, but in fact it was the north African country which led the opposition against Saudi Arabia’s call to lift production to lower oil prices.

Algeria’s interests used to be aligned to that of Saudi Arabia. The change in its position is due to two main factors: first, after a decade of rapid increase in oil production, output is now falling; second, higher prices are needed to shore up Algeria’s deteriorating financial situation.

During the last decade, Algeria was one of the main stars of the Opec oil cartel, raising its output steadily – so much so it often violated the group’s self-imposed production limits.

The country pumped 800,000 barrels a day in early 2000. Following large investments by state-owned Sonatrach and foreign companies, oil output rose until it peaked at 1.4m b/d in early 2008. Since then it has fallen back to 1.1m b/d, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency.

Algerian oil production has been paralysed following the corruption scandal at Sonatrach in January 2010, which cost the jobs of almost all the company’s upper management, including its chief executive. Soon afterwards, Chakib Khelil, one of Opec’s most respected policy makers, was ousted as Algeria’s oil minister after more than a decade in the post.

“Bureaucratic delays within Sonatrach appear to have become entrenched as new management grapples with institutional inertia, which is further delaying long-planned expansion projects,” the IEA said in a recent report.

Algeria made things worse after it changed the provisions of its contracts with international oil companies, triggering complaints of “uncompetitive contract terms”. The country’s last three rounds of exploration contracts have attracted lacklustre interest from international companies. As a result, the IEA believes Algeria’s maximum oil production capacity would continue declining until at least 2016.

Worse still for the country, the kind of oil it produces is no longer in high demand, leading to lower prices compared to other streams. During the last decade, refiners bid up Saharan Blend, the main export grade of the country, because its low sulphur content made it attractive to produce environmentally friendly fuels such as gasoline. The stream sold at premiums as high as $3 a barrel over Brent in 2008. But the increase in US shale oil production and the closure of refiners in the Atlantic has led to a big rise in supplies of crude oil of similar quality. Thus, Saharan Blend is selling now at its biggest discount to Brent in at least a decade, trading $2.10 a barrel below Brent.

After years of rising public spending, exacerbated by the Arab Spring, the International Monetary Fund has warned that Algeria’s financial outlook has “seriously weakened”. The IMF believes that oil prices would need to rise to $100 a barrel to balance the budget – excluding salary back payments. This is more than double the $44 a barrel in 2006.

Last year, Algeria registered the second biggest budgetary deficit among oil producers in the Middle East and north Africa with a shortage equal to 3.6 per cent of its GDP. Only Yemen, with a deficit of 4.4 per cent of its GDP, fared worse.

The rise in the budgetary break-even oil price has prompted Algeria to break away from its old allies, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and to defend prices alongside fellow-hawks Venezuela and Iran.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bfd38c02-b559-11e1-ab92-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xzmMnL2j

Algeria: The revolution that never was

Does 'progressive leadership' or something more complex and sinister explain why Algeria's 'Spring' never materialised?

The 'Arab Spring' of 2011 brought down autocratic governments across North Africa and the Middle East. But, despite widespread street protests that initially threatened to spark a Tunisian or Egyptian style revolt, an expected uprising in Algeria failed to materialise. President Abdelazziz Bouteflika's regime - often accused of being one of the most repressive in the region - promised modest political reform and managed to hold onto power. Earlier this month it claimed to have delivered on these promises when parliamentary elections were held, in which the ruling National Liberation Front (or FLN) won an overwhelming majority of the votes. Although opposition groups were quick to deride the poll as a sham and to accuse the government of manipulating the results, European and American observers called the poll a step toward democracy. So what has been going on in Algeria for the last year? Did it genuinely, as the government would claim, avoid the upheaval that swept through the rest of North Africa last year because of the Bouteflika regime's 'progressive leadership'? Or has something darker and more complex been going on - a story that opponents and human rights activists say has more to do with a wary population traumatised by the country's violent past and living in fear of its secret police?  People & Power wanted to find out, but getting into Algeria is difficult - not least because Al Jazeera has been denied official access to the country since 2004. Nevertheless, when our requests for journalist visas were ignored, our filmmakers managed to get in unofficially and were able to work discreetly. Producer Caroline Pare describes what they found. Producer's view In the capital Algiers at least, life seemed freer and more lively than we expected. The shops and cafes were full and, superficially at least, this did not seem to be a place on the cusp of revolution. It felt like a country coming out of something very bad and now quite determinedly making the best of a difficult situation. Why did the expected uprising fail to materialise in Algeria?[EPA] But when we began meeting human rights activists, we got a much better sense of what ordinary Algerians are up against and what they really think. To start with, the military and intelligence people, the DRS, are omnipresent, so meetings had to be arranged surreptitiously. On one occasion, for example, a contact identified himself at a street corner by using pre-arranged code words. Then he asked us to follow him very discreetly and at a distance to the Metro, past the police and the surveillance cameras, onto a train and out to his tiny apartment in the suburbs. Only when safely behind closed doors did he feel able to speak freely about the repression and the many economic problems the country faces - a housing crisis, rocketing unemployment and spiralling food prices. He told us things were so bad that desperate young people were burning themselves alive. There were around 130 self-immolations in Algeria last year. Indeed just before the election in the seaside town of Jijel, a 25-year-old man, Hamza Rechak, set himself on fire, in despair at having been prevented by police from selling cosmetics from his small stall and then at being taunted by them. His death caused outrage in the town and sparked a riot as young men attacked the police station in fury. Other Algerians told us that theirs was actually the first country to have an 'Arab Spring'. In 1988, the people took to the streets and forced the government to hold a free and fair election. After the first round of voting it became apparent that the opposition Islamic FIS party was set to win. But it was not to be because the military intervened. The country turned in on itself and entered a 'dark decade' of bloody violence that saw an estimated 200,000 people killed. To this day it casts a fearful shadow. The chaos enabled the DRS to get a stranglehold on the country and the body politic that democracy activists say persists to this day. So the elections that were held this month do not seem to have much credibility among voters. Indeed we heard from various political analysts before the election that they could predict the turnout - based on what the government required to make the process acceptable in international eyes - and sure enough they were pretty close to the 43 per cent officially announced. The governing party won overwhelmingly. In Algeria, we are told, everything is preordained by the powerful shadow state, the DRS. And it does not brook criticism. Algeria is a country rich in oil and gas reserves, earning it perhaps $200bn each year. But there are few jobs in the oil industry for Algerians and unemployment and poverty are real problems. Youth unemployment is at over 40 per cent. The level of desperation on the ground is such that discontent boils up into street protests on a daily basis - we were told that there were 40,000 such protests last year alone against housing, food prices, police corruption etc. Yet Algerians have not yet turned to outright revolution. We began to understand why when talking to people about the 'dark decade' and the terrors they lived through that still traumatise their lives. To put it simply, people are scared. We spoke to families whose loved ones were killed or vanished during those years. As many as 20,000 of these 'disappeared' are still being sought by their families, according to a group called SOS Disparu that supports families looking for their loved ones. They introduced us to one woman whose husband was snatched from their doorstep 18 years ago. She has heard nothing officially of him since then, despite writing and visiting all the government offices she could think of. The only information came from fellow detainees who tell her he was probably horrendously tortured. All these years later the memory of her husband still moves her to tears. Will all this change? We were taken to see Dr Salah-Eddine Sidhoum, an orthopaedic surgeon and one of Algeria's most respected opposition figures. As we sat in his study, the TV in the corner was showing a live broadcast of the funeral of Algeria's first post-independence president. We asked Sidhoum why the events that shook the rest of the Arab world in 2011 seemed to have passed his country by. His response was emphatic. "Algeria is not an exception," he said. "The revolution will come here in Algeria sooner or later - it's just a question of time." http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2012/05/2012516145457232336.html

Algeria elections look good abroad, bad at home

The Associated Press

Thursday, May 24, 2012 | 3:39 a.m.

Algeria overturned the Arab Spring's revolutionary narrative with elections that bolstered the longtime ruling party and dashed Islamists' hopes of gaining power. The vote did something else, too: It burnished Algeria's democratic image with Western allies who rely on it to fight terrorism and supply natural gas.

Few people turned out to vote in last week's elections, and the result did little to boost Algerian rulers' legitimacy at home. But analysts say Algeria needed to hold elections to show it was at least somewhat democratic in the midst of a region-wide push for greater freedoms.

"Algeria has satisfactory relations with Washington and Paris," said Hugh Roberts, an expert on the country at Boston's Tufts University. "It needs to do well enough (with reform) not to embarrass its Western partners, and that's what it's done."

In contrast to the uprisings and game-changing elections that have taken place elsewhere in North Africa over the past year, the political system in Algeria has been remarkably stable, if not stagnant.

The regularly scheduled parliamentary elections produced a win for the ruling party, the National Liberation Front that won independence from the French in 1962, giving it the most seats since Algeria began experimenting with multiparty politics in 1990.

The results have prompted outraged cries of fraud from opposition groups across the Algerian political spectrum, including Islamists parties, which did uniformly poorly. And that further lowers popular confidence in a political system wracked by apathy.

Still, the contests have received moderate praise internationally. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called them a "welcome step" and noted especially that thanks to new election rules, nearly a third of the 462-person parliament is female.

The European Union, in a statement, called it a "step forward in the reform process" that would consolidate democracy. The reviews haven't been exactly glowing, but the overall outcome represents a welcome break from the usual Algerian news about attacks by al-Qaida terrorists or labor unrest.

As protests broke out across the Arab world in 2011, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced a series of reforms and promised free elections this year.

For the first time ever, the Algerian government even invited in international observers, including a 150-person team from the EU. The European mission said the elections took place in an "atmosphere of general calm and order," though it did not describe them as free and fair.

The decision to hold elections were clearly in response to European and American expectations for reform in the region, explained Antonin Tisseron in a piece for the French Institute of International Relations written just before the vote.

Clinton visited Algiers during a North Africa tour in February, and her message "was unambiguous about this desire of Washington to focus on relations with countries that are clearly committed to the path of democratic reforms," he noted.

Clinton's brief stopover of a few hours in Algiers was in marked contrast to praise-filled overnight stays in neighboring Tunisia and Morocco, which held elections last year that brought Islamists to power.

The importance to Europe of a stable and somewhat politically palatable Algerian regime cannot be underestimated.

Algeria has enormous natural gas reserves and sends nearly all of its exports to the European Union by boat and underwater pipeline. It supplies the EU with a fifth of its gas needs and is the third largest source after Russia and Norway.

Washington and Europe value Algiers' cooperation in fighting terrorism, especially in the sprawling desert wastes of the Sahara, where a branch of al-Qaida has become deeply enmeshed in local smuggling networks and is targeting foreigners.

Compared to poorer African nations to the south, Algeria's military is widely seen as the best equipped to take on al-Qaida.

In the aftermath of the elections, however, there have been warnings of renewed instability in Algeria, which plunged into a decade-long civil war in 1992 after the military stepped in and cancelled elections an Islamist party was poised to win. At least 200,000 people are believed to have died during that time.

Charismatic Islamist politician Abdallah Djaballah said Sunday in an interview that the only option now was a Tunisian-style popular uprising. His deputy later said he was misquoted.

"The regime, which has refused all change through the ballot boxes, has opened the door to other possibilities, including the kind of change that took place in our neighbors," the deputy, Lakhdar Ben Khelouf, told The Associated Press.

Since the May 10 elections, small protests by different groups calling for greater benefits and salaries have started up again, including retirees calling for higher pensions and health workers wanting better working conditions.

Like the monarchies in the Gulf, Algeria has been freely spending its hydrocarbon wealth to keep a lid on dissent, allowing it to keep from implementing real changes as long as the price of oil stays high.

"The people don't want to go back to a period of turbulence," said Hafid Chafik Kadri, a vice president of the commission that oversaw the elections. "Many people will say better to have the FLN (the ruling party) we know that wants stability rather than parties we don't know."

Kadri's commission, composed of representatives of the different political parties, has said the process of counting and collating of votes the night of the election was riddled with irregularities. He warned that the overwhelming win by parties linked to the state will quash any lingering interest Algerians have in politics.

The new parliament, which has a 62-percent majority with the ruling party and a sister party filled with pro-regime figures, will rewrite the constitution with the president, ensuring that any reforms will be carefully controlled.

Part of the problem with changing Algeria, explained Roberts of Tufts University, is that there isn't any clear alternative that everyone can agree on. "Everybody will agree the system stinks, but no one has a positive proposal how we will get out of here," he said.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/may/24/ml-algeria-elections/

Is Algeria immune to the 'Arab Spring'?

As the old ruling party wins a new parliamentary majority, we ask if change has bypassed Algeria. Inside Story Last Modified: 14 May 2012 11:15 inShare14 Email Print Share Feedback

Algeria's ruling National Liberation Front won almost half of the 462 seats in the Algerian parliament in Thursday's parliamentary elections. "[In terms of] reforms I think the Algerian authorities have introduced these kinds of reforms not necessarily to implement a democratic transition but it was basically window-dressing …." - Youcef Bouandel, an international affairs professor at Qatar University But will this new majority for the old ruling party mean that Algeria is now immune to the 'Arab Spring'? While the National Liberation Front - which has ruled Algeria since independence from France in the early 1960s - won 220 seats, the National Democratic Rally came second with 68 seats in the National People's Assembly. The Green Alliance - which had been widely predicted to do well - secured 48 seats. That is just three-quarters of the number it won in the last elections in 2007 - bucking the trend that has seen religious parties gain power across North Africa after the 'Arab Spring'. The Green Alliance says the elections were rigged to keep it out of power in a country that has experienced decades of violence between radical groups and government security forces. But Western countries and international monitors have largely praised the vote as a step in the right direction. Hanafi Wajih, the head of the Arab League's observer mission, said: "The election was free and transparent and the Algerian people have expressed their choice without coercion." "Unfortunately the good Algeria for the West is a weak Algeria and having it weak is by sponsoring diplomatically, helping politically, supporting even militarily and by other means, this regime." - Mohamed Larbi Zitout, the former Algerian deputy ambassador to Libya Jose Ignacio Salafranca, the EU mission's monitor-in-chief, noted some shortcomings but said: "There were more transparency criteria than in previous elections." And Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, praised the vote and, in particular, the high number of women elected as "a welcome step in Algeria's progress toward democratic reform". Prior to the elections, the government had portrayed the parliamentary contest as Algeria's 'Spring' - inviting 500 international observers and promising that the vote would be the freest in 20 years. But has the spirit of change witnessed in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East bypassed Algeria? Will the ruling party's success now make it less likely to introduce change? And has the government, as the opposition insists, missed an unprecedented opportunity for a peaceful political transition to democracy? Joining Inside Story, with presenter Stephen Cole, to discuss these issues are: Mohamed Larbi Zitout, the former Algerian deputy ambassador to Libya; Youcef Bouandel, a professor of International Affairs at Qatar University; and Malek Serrai, an international economist and former economic adviser to the Algerian president and a former regional adviser on international finance and trade for the UN. "We dislike what happened in Libya and we refuse to follow because we had our problem in 1998 … we already lost 200,000 people [in the civil war] we cannot again go through this kind of problem. We are really looking for security and stability." Malek Serrai, an international economist ALGERIA ELECTION: The ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) party won 220 of 462 seats in parliament It is the country's first election since the Arab Spring swept the region An estimated 25,800 candidates competed for the parliamentary seats There were 44 parties, 21 of them newly created, who campaigned for seats Voters cast their ballots at more than 48,000 polling stations An alliance of conservative parties only won 66 seats in parliament Algeria's interior ministry reported a 42 per cent voter turnout Officials said the vote was the most transparent ever and Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president, described it as the dawn of a new era About 500 foreign election observers including from the EU, the African Union and the Arab League monitored the vote http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2012/05/201251465357500445.html

Algerian Elections - Twitter Backlash

After elections in Morocco and Tunisia saw the win of the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) and Ennahda respectively, now regional attention will be oriented toward Algeria, the largest country in the Maghreb.

While Algeria may not have seen protests on the scale of its regional neighbors, many Algerians are expressing their political dissent through abstention. On Twitter, the hashtag #10MaiToz was used to post various updates pertaining to police crackdown on minor protests and voter fraud, with reports of registration under the names of dead people used to vote.

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5475/algerian-elections_-10-may-

1. The following are selected tweets and images from Twitter users posting about the Algerian elections and the #10MaiToz campaign.
2. 

   Proverbe algérien: "c'est quand le bureau de vote est vide que l'urne se remplit". #10MaiToz #Fraude

   
   

   Baki 7our

   
   

   a day ago

   ReplyRetweet
3. Algerian proverb: "It is when the voting booth is empty that the ballot box is full." 
4. 

   Algérie: Le taux de participation au niveau national est de 44,38 % (Ministre de l'Intérieur) Il était de 35,67% en 2007 #10MaiToz

   
   

   ۩ ♔Ņāđīŗā TheOne♔ ۩

   
   

   20 hours ago

   ReplyRetweet
5. Algeria: According to the Ministry of Interior, the voter turnout is 44.38%. It was 35.67% in 2007.
6. 

   #Algérie: Urnes incendiés par des manifestants et routes coupées dans la commune de Saharidj à Bouira via @elwatancom #10MaiToz #çaChauffe

   
   

   Hocine Lamriben

   
   

   a day ago

   ReplyRetweet
7. Algeria: Ballot boxes set on fire by protesters and roads blocked in the Saharidj municipality at Bouira.
8. 

   RT @fbess: The only reverence parliament has for trees is after they've chopped them down to a modest stump and torched them. #10MaiToz

   
   

   Massoud Hayoun

   
   

   20 hours ago

   ReplyRetweet
9. 

   Reformulation: moins de 45% des algériens ont participé aux législatives (zombies compris). #10MaiToz

   
   

   Maj Uscule

   
   

   21 hours ago

   ReplyRetweet
10. Less than 45% of Algerians voted (including zombies)
11. 

    RT @7our: Business as usual MT @beautifultango7: Tomorrow intern comm will praise the election turnout + transparency & encourage reforms. #10MaiToz

    
    

    Mélissa Rahmouni

    
    

    21 hours ago

    ReplyRetweet
12. 
    

    

    Dernier graphe de la journee: taux de participation en Algerie #Algerie #10MaiToz http://pic.twitter.com/w3ec4cca

    
    

    DZCalling

    
    

    21 hours ago

    ReplyRetweet
13. Chart graphing the voter turnout by the hour.
14. 
    

    

    المراقبون الدوليون يراقبون السير الحسن للتزوير ؟؟ #algeria #10maitoz #algérie http://pic.twitter.com/PsmlV2g0

    
    

    Ayoub visiongfx

    
    

    a day ago

    ReplyRetweet
15. 
    

    

    RT @ayoubvgfx: Un bureau de vote à Alger centre /A voting center in #Algiers #algeria #Algérie #10MaiToz http://pic.twitter.com/0ffUVBpn

    
    

    Nahla Djabi

    
    

    a day ago

    ReplyRetweet
16. 
    

    

    Des élections sous haute surveillance. #10MaiToz #Dilem http://pic.twitter.com/jYY0aHTf

    
    

    Ali KHARCHAFI

    
    

    a day ago

    ReplyRetweet
17. 
    

    

    #10MaiToz #élections #Législative #Algerie, #Algeria vraiment c'est ridicule http://pic.twitter.com/p9nserKL

    ♣ My name is سمية ♣