With Limited Freedoms, Many Algerians Vote with Their Feet

By Vivienne Walt / Algiers

An Algerian electoral worker sits beside a ballot box while waiting for people to cast their votes for the parliamentary elections at a polling station on the outskirts of Algiers on May 10, 2012

“You’re an American journalist?” says Yassin Benabdullah, a lanky 21-year-old in a baseball cap, when I introduce myself to him on a down town street. “Take me with you! I’ll go now, this minute.”

In Algiers, a city of 3.5 million people, this is not a rare encounter. Stop any young person, and invariably the conversation turns to one preoccupation: leaving. When I meet 20-year-old Mehdi Haouchine in a café, he seems like a young man with a bright future. A marketing student at a private college in the Algerian capital, he tells me he has a shelf full of trophies for karate at home. So, I ask, What are his ambitions? “I just need the opportunity to go to a foreign country,” he says. “I don’t mind where I go. There are no prospects here.”

At least on paper, this should not be the case. The biggest country in Africa, Algeria is nearly four times the size of Texas, and just like Texas, it has made fortunes in oil. It has Africa’s third biggest energy reserves (after Nigeria and Libya), pumping 1.16 million barrels of oil a day, with the U.S. as its biggest customer and foreign cash reserves exceeding $170 billion. Bread, cooking oil and gasoline are heavily subsidized for 35 million Algerians. Health care and education are free, and there’s even a $15 monthly book allowance for university students.

Yet that public wealth is part of the problem. Back in early 2011, when the Arab Spring exploded, first in next-door Tunisia and then in Egypt, many thought Algeria would be the next to blow. It seemed to have all the right ingredients: a powerful security force and an aging president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was installed with military approval in 1999 and showed no signs of retiring.

But the Arab Spring never arrived in Algeria. And in fact, Bouteflika, now 75, is expected to run for a fourth term in office, in an election scheduled for next year, since the government has scrapped presidential term limits.

Algerians seem fiercely opposed to any revolution, having lived through a brutal civil war in the 1990s, which killed up to 200,000 people. In addition, when young Algerians began street protests in early 2011, inspired by the Tunisian uprising, Bouteflika rushed to snuff out dissent, by pouring money at the problem. Minimum wages were increased by 20%, youths were offered interest-free loans worth tens of thousands of dollars, and officials promised to build 2.4 million new homes, addressing one of the most-bitter complaints by young Algerians who say they are stuck living in their parents’ cramped apartments, rather than getting married, since there is nowhere to move out to.

Two years on, those new houses have been slow in coming, although earlier this month, the state-run Algerian TV led the evening news showing blueprints for a new housing complex (delivery date: unknown). And while Algerians earn more money these days, many complain that it has barely kept pace with inflation, and that much government largesse has gone to police and military pay.

Algeria’s government is aware that they are losing its bright youths. “You’re right some people want to leave the country, while others are coming back,” says Minister of Energy and Mines Youcef Yousfi during an interview in his office when I ask him why so many young people want to leave Algeria. Nonetheless, the World Bank estimates about 200,000 more people have left Algeria than have arrived over the past five years. Yousfi says that is one reason why the government is racing to create jobs by opening new industries. Then, he says, “the feeling of wanting to go outside will progressively disappear.”

But the youths’ grievances are not all economic. Underlying all the complaints is the fact that the political system has barely changed in decades — and neither have most of the faces at the top. Bouteflika appoints a portion of parliamentary seats himself, while the military and intelligence services hold key decisionmaking powers. Mosques deliver government-written sermons. Mass protests are banned. Police officers stand watch over neighborhoods carefully, looking for signs of organized dissent. “We need a change here, but it is going to take a long time,” says Amin Ouslimani, 24, a political-science student. “I can state my opinion,” he says, “and anyway, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t care what I am saying.”

Indeed, the griping among the youths is so pervasive and so loud, that it’s a shock for anyone who has traveled around this region. Algeria’s government invites few foreign journalists; and in the country, I am restricted to the capital and obliged to leave Algeria after just one week. But unlike Libya or Tunisia before the Arab Spring, where people were terrified to speak to journalists, no one is at all inhibited about what they say. Public ranting about the government seems a favorite pastime among young Algerians, who look at the old men running the country as wholly disconnected from their lives.

It seems many young Algerians have simply given up waiting for change. When I ask Haouchine, the management student–karate champion, why he doesn’t wait for the old leaders to die off rather than trying his luck abroad, he shakes his head. “The leaders will die, but then there’ll be their sons,” he says. “It’s like a heritage.”

So, as true change, with a dynamic economy and open democracy, looks remote and as a revolution is ruled out, many youths focus on the option that seems to hold most promise: getting out.

In the café where I meet Haouchine, friends swap rumors about which embassies might be open to a bribe of about $7,500 in order to obtain a visa. One says it used to be France. Another says it is now Spain. Few care where they go. “I have one friend in Boston, another in Spain,” says Ouslimani, the political-science student. “But New Zealand, Norway, Vienna — they all seem like nice places to live.”

Source: http://world.time.com/2013/02/18/with-limited-freedoms-many-algerians-vote-with-their-feet/#ixzz2YSkgUEkk

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