Mali: Here we go again

by Sheldon Richman

January 28, 2013

In testimony before Senate and House committees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enthusiastically endorsed increased U.S. intervention in Africa. When government officials seem incapable of learning obvious lessons from the recent past, maybe their incentive is not to learn but to keep doing the same destructive things.

President Obama’s inaugural speech contained this line, which has gone quite overlooked: “America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe. And we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad.”

That’s a recipe for perpetual war and perpetual fiscal crisis.

The latest locale for American intervention is the west African country of Mali. Aside from whatever covert activity the U.S. government may be conducting there, the American role is said to consist of logistical support for France, Mali’s former colonial overlord, which has intervened militarily to defend a central corrupt government. (The deadly hostage-takings in Algeria may have been retaliation for France’s action.) As the New York Times reports, “The Pentagon is airlifting a French battalion to join the fight in Mali against Islamist militants, Pentagon and administration officials said.” Ominously, the Times adds, “The airlift expands the involvement of the United States in support of a NATO ally, but officials stressed that the American military footprint on the ground in Mali would remain small.” That is, there’s already an American footprint on the ground.

Such is how quagmires begin.

What’s going on in Mali that requires U.S. meddling? It’s a complicated and murky story that goes back to the repression of the separatist ethnic group, the Tuaregs, in northern Mali and, writes Jeremy Keenan, the Algerian government’s effort after Sept. 11, 2001, to concoct a “terrorist threat” to motivate the U.S. government to pay for modernization of its army. Seeing Africa as a rich source of oil, gas, and other resources, the Bush administration was happy to get involved in the region. (Got to keep the Chinese away.)

While the Obama administration sounds alarms about al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), reporter Patrick Cockburn notes that


Tuareg nationalist insurgency, not radical Islam, is at the heart of the crisis in Mali. What, for instance, are AQIM doing in northern Mali, which has never in the past been a bastion for fundamentalists? AQIM is in origin an Algerian movement that emerged from the civil war of the 1990s. Formed in 1998, its members moved to northern Mali in 2003, where the government saw it as a counterbalance to Tuareg separatists.…

The strange truth is that it was the Malian government which, over the last 10 years, tolerated AQIM in northern Mali and allowed it to operate, taking a share in the profits of its kidnapping and drug-running operations. International military aid for use against al-Qa’ida was diverted for use against the Tuareg.

A key precursor to the latest episode was the 2011 U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya, which overthrew the government of Muammar Qaddafi and provided a cornucopia of weapons. When the regime-change operation ended, well-armed Tuaregs, who had fought for Qaddafi, returned to northern Mali to pursue their separatist aims. After expelling the central government’s army, they declared independence last April, after a coup overthrew the government in Bamako. Tuaregs also live in neighbouring Algeria, Niger, Libya, and Burkina Faso, and a successful separatist movement in Mali could spread throughout the region, which those countries would abhor.

The Tuareg movement, Keenan writes, was co-opted by jihadists linked to the Algerian intelligence service, and these jihadists have imposed sharia law and have committed horrendous violence. Thus, he wrote, “Washington’s Global War on Terror has come home to roost for the peoples of the Sahara.”

These events now provide the excuse for the latest Western intervention. When will it end?

The lesson is clear: Internationalizing local, often ethnic, conflicts has consequences that furnish the pretext for further intervention. Inevitably, innocents are killed, while the American power elite pursues its geopolitical aims and the military-industrial complex prospers.

Moreover, intervention — once again on behalf of a corrupt and brutal government — makes enemies of those who would otherwise present no threat to the American people. Nothing helps jihadi recruitment like Western occupation.

As a cover for imperialism, the war on terror has worn thin.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/mali-here-we-go-again/

Algeria hostage crisis could weaken veteran spymaster Mediene

More cock-up than dirty trick, In Amenas raises questions about competence of Tewfik Mediene and brutal security apparatus

• 
• • Ian Black, Middle East editor
  • The Guardian, Friday 25 January 2013

General Mohamed 'Tewfik' Mediene, Algeria's rarely photographer spymaster, is considered by some to be more powerful the country's president

If anyone in Algeria knows the full story of what happened at the In Amenas gas facility in the Sahara it is General Mohamed "Tewfik" Mediene. And he, characteristically, is not talking.

As the echoes of the hostage drama reverberate across north Africa, the mysterious head of the DRS intelligence agency is leading the effort to hunt down the jihadists who orchestrated the raid.

His deputy, General Bashir Tartag, commanded the assault that ended the most high-profile terrorist incident to take place on Algerian soil, threatening vital gas exports to the west. Tartag, known as "Le Bombardier", also has a reputation for brutality and ambition.

Mediene, 73 and in poor health, has stayed in the shadows. Described as "the God of Algiers", the spymaster is the most powerful man in the country after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika – and perhaps a candidate to succeed him; some say he is even more powerful.

"Algeria has long been governed, alternately more and less behind the scenes, by varying groups of men known collectively as 'le pouvoir' [the power]," US diplomats said in a 2007 cable released by WikiLeaks. "It has become increasingly clear that the "pouvoir" now consists primarily of Mediene and Bouteflika."

The 75-year-old president was absent throughout the crisis, undergoing medical treatment in Geneva. Mediene and the army, say well-placed sources, kept him out of the picture because they were angry that his agreement to let French planes fly over Algeria to attack Islamist rebels in Mali was leaked from Paris.

The Algerian regime is famously opaque. Photographs of Mediene are rare – duringat official ceremonies cameras systematically avoid his face. "Mediene meets other security chiefs. The French, the Americans, the Russians, probably the Saudis and maybe the Egyptians. But only the big boys," says a European analyst.

Born in Kabylie in 1939, Mediene served in the French colonial army and deserted after the start of the FLN revolt in 1954. Trained by the KGB, he was promoted after the 1988 riots and became head of the DRS in 1990 – which probably makes him the longest-serving head of any intelligence agency in the world.

Mediene was a tough and influential figure at a crucial moment in 1992 when the military cancelled elections that Islamists were poised to win, triggering a bloody civil war that claimed about 150,000 lives over the next few years. He was with the hardline "eradicateurs", not the "conciliateurs" who backed negotiations.

Under his command the DRS infiltrated armed groups and was accused of committing massacres to discredit its enemies – some of whom later morphed into al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Allegations of torture were rife.

"Their operating manual was straight KGB," says Jeremy Keenan, an Algeria expert at London University. "That means creating your own terrorists, setting up parallel trade unions so nobody knows what's going on, and then atomise them. It's the most stunning form of control. Mediene is absolutely ruthless."

It is a backhanded tribute to Mediene's formidable reputation that some have suggested the In Amenas attack was another DRS dirty trick designed to "prove" the danger of jihadi extremism. Details about the raid remain confused and there is concern about the way that it was handled by the Algerian authorities. But there is no evidence that it was not a genuine terrorist incident. It looks much more like a cock-up than a conspiracy.

"The DRS is a powerful agency in Algeria but it is wrong to think that it can control everything," says Francis Ghiles, a Maghreb analyst at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. "This was a major failure for Algerian security. They would not have been complicit in something like this. Mediene's whole raison d'etre is to make Algeria secure."

In Amenas may well turn out to have weakened the veteran security chief.

"Bouteflika got rid of a lot of people who opposed him but he has not been able to stop the DRS," says George Joffe, a consultant on Algeria.

"Tartag has been rather badly damaged. The system over which he and Mediene preside has been shown to be incompetent at a time that the succession to Bouteflika has not been resolved. People know there was a level of incompetence that is frightening and a level of brutality that was probably unnecessary. That raises questions about the competence of the DRS."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/25/algerian-hostage-crisis-tewfik-mediene

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

Algerian elections 'fraudulent'

(UKPA) – 

Algeria's legislative elections last month were fraudulent and the final results have no legitimacy, according to a long-awaited report by a multi-party election monitoring panel.

The National Commission for the Surveillance of Legislative Elections cast doubt on the May 10 parliamentary contests which were marked by low turnout, a dominating victory for two pro-government parties and a relatively poor showing by Islamist parties.

The results at the time were described as Algeria's bucking of the trend in the Middle East of Islamist parties doing well in elections during the Arab Spring uprisings.

"The electoral process was marred by multiple violations and excesses," said Mohamed Seddiki, chairman of the commission in a press conference. "These elections are completely unlawful."

Mr Seddiki accused the government of pressuring police officers, troops and other security forces into voting for two parties allied to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. He said authorities also thwarted monitoring efforts by the panel.

The two pro-government parties together took 273 seats in the 462-person parliament, greatly expanding their presence and taking a comfortable majority. Islamist parties actually lost seats. Opposition parties have also condemned the election as fraudulent.

The 44-member commission was composed of representatives from several of the country's more than 40 political parties and but only 35 of those signed the report. Those from the pro-government parties refused. The commission is a consultative body and has no power to cancel the elections.

Mr Seddiki also complained that the government was hostile to its mission, and did not give it sufficient means to observe the elections.

A European Union observer mission reported that the elections took place in an atmosphere of calm efficiency, but did not describe them as free and fair.

Oil and gas-rich Algeria was largely spared the unrest that swept Middle East and North Africa in 2011, with a few protests quickly crushed by police. The government has raised wages and spent heavily to keep the population satisfied.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5iNIzQQHmfNxQaEPeYJDUrgWq0lww?docId=N0058971338668325257A