Foreign Affairs: The Fall of Abdelaziz Bouteflika

A coterie of generals brought Bouteflika to power in 1999 in order to turn the page on a decade of bloody conflict. That “dark decade,” as it is known in Algeria, began in January 1992, when the army, which had been the real center of power since independence in 1962, canceled the country’s first multiparty legislative elections to prevent an Islamist victory. The coup sparked a violent Islamist insurgency, which in turn spiraled into a brutal civil war. Bouteflika came with a platform of “national reconciliation” and although his 1999 election was recognized as a sham, he initially achieved some real popularity. He had been a charismatic foreign minister in the 1970s, and many Algerians still identified him with that happier era of state building and national pride. In his first two terms (1999­–2009), Bouteflika not only tamped down on violence but put the country back on the map. [...]

Algerians were not afraid to dissent. Bouteflika’s presidency faced constant, low-level, local protests almost from the outset and one major regional protest movement in the Berber-speaking, mountainous Kabylia region in 2001. What these protests had in common was an underlying demand for more accountable, responsible government. In 2011, such protests were endemic and persistent, but unlike in Tunisia or Egypt, in Algeria they did not coalesce into a national movement. They were a means for a disenfranchised population to engage constructively with a state that had the money to address immediate, sectional demands. What the state lacked was a farsighted plan for addressing the deeper problem, let alone for managing the inevitable transition from Bouteflika to a successor. The announcement in February that the president, who was receiving medical treatment in Geneva, would run again served to bring all of Algeria’s local dissatisfactions together around a single point: “No fifth mandate!” But this was only the immediate demand: underlying it was already a maximal one, getting to the heart of the matter: “Time’s up for them all!” and “System get out!”

This year’s demonstrations, abundantly photographed and streamed on mobile phones via social media, have been a carnival of popular songs, football chants, and inventive, witty placards. Pithy slogans in Arabic, Berber, French, and English have festooned the signs of marchers and the banners draped from balconies, along with the ubiquitous national flag. Whole families have taken part: the crowds of demonstrators include not only young people but their parents and grandparents. The hirak, for these millions of Algerians, has been a conscious, deliberate reappropriation of public space and national symbols. Portraits of the martyrs of the revolutionary war of independence, fought against French colonial rule from 1954 to 1962, have been prominent in demonstrations. The physical occupation of the street—and the organized act of cleaning it up, in groups, after demonstrations are over—has enacted one of the movement’s central demands: for the Algerian people to take their country back.

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Quartz: Africa’s largest mosque has been completed with thanks to China

The Great Mosque of Algiers, or Djamaa El Djazair, sits on an area of 400,000 square meters and has a 265 meter (870 feet) minaret that houses observation decks. The compound’s domed sanctuary and outside courtyard overlooking the Bay of Algiers can house up to 120,000 worshippers and has an underground parking space with a capacity of 7,000 cars. [...]

With its completion, the mosque will now be the world’s third biggest by area and the largest in Africa. The two largest mosques are The Sacred Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina: both considered the holiest sites in Islam and accustomed by millions of Muslim worshippers and pilgrims every year. [...]

The choice of building Africa’s largest mosque is an interesting choice for a Muslim-majority nation that has for years struggled with an Islamist insurgency. After the government canceled the 1992 elections where Islamists appeared to win, that triggered a civil insurgency that led to the death of 200,000 people.

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The Atlantic: A Strongman Falls, and a Post-Colonial Era Ends

An outspoken free spirit and a columnist for Le Quotidien d’Oran, an Algerian daily, Daoud has long written that his country deserves better than a choice between military dictatorship and Islamists. A former Islamist himself, Daoud, now 48, has been harshly critical of how conservative religious forces in Algeria have tried to suppress individual liberties and the rights of women—views that are progressive at home but that have also won him fans on the right in Europe. [...]

But I think this is the usual strategy that dictatorships turn to when they’re forced to. They try to start a dialogue and reforms, which is what I’d call the first phase. That’s what’s happening now in Algeria. I think the regime pushed Algerians’ sense of humiliation too far. We reached a point of electing a photo, which Algerians can’t tolerate.

There’s an even deeper force: demographics. Half of the Algerian population is under 30. The entire regime is old. The people of the regime are all 85 years old, and sooner or later this generational rupture was bound to cause a crisis. I also think that the generation of the decolonizers has come to an end all over Africa, but it arrived quite late in Algeria. And that was going to have consequences sooner or later. [...]

Daoud: Yes. For several years now, I’ve tried to write about how to get out of the post-colonial mentality. A lot of people reproached me for this—a lot of people in France and in the United States and elsewhere—because post-colonialism has become a comfort. For years, I’ve been writing about how we need to stop using post-colonialism as a complete and total explanation of reality. I think now we’ve reached a sort of political expression that’s very clear: People want to get out of the post-colonial era. They want to be done with that generation. [...]

Daoud: I think there are two major factors. First, to declare the end of the FLN, the old party [of Bouteflika] that won the war of liberation. This party must be defeated because it should no longer continue to be business as usual. And the second is the status of religion. Religion must respect secularism in the country. We need to separate the political from the religious. I think those are the two most important things. The third thing is to repair Algerian identity. Arab culture is a beautiful culture, but it’s not an identity; it’s a culture. We need to return to our real identity.

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The Guardian: President Macron should be lauded for confronting France’s last great taboo | Andrew Hussey

Macron is a shrewd operator and some French commentators saw this, like his recently announced “war on poverty”, as his attempt to ingratiate himself with the left, especially the French Communist party, for whom Audin has long been a cause célèbre. But a more generous view would be to see Macron’s act as a brave and noble gesture, as his “Vichy moment”. This is a reference to the famous statement made in 1995 by President Chirac that France had been complicit in the deportation of 76,000 Jews to German death camps during the Second World War. As such, it marked a turning point in French history – the beginning of reconciliation with a recent, shameful past. [...]

This was the great moral dilemma for the French during the Algerian war and was taken up by the likes of Albert Camus and other intellectuals, who argued that torture was not just a crime against humanity but degraded the torturer. Having endured the Nazis in the Second World War, so the argument ran, the French were now themselves behaving like Nazis. And, as the Audin case reveals, they were also torturing and killing their own citizens. This much was revealed as far back as 1958 by Henri Alleg, a journalist in Algiers. Alleg was suspected of sympathies with the nationalists and so arrested and tortured at the same time as Audin. Unlike Audin, Alleg survived and wrote about his experiences in a book called La Question, which was immediately banned in France and Algeria but which nonetheless circulated underground at the height of the war, doing much to undermine the French cause. [...]

The open question is whether this model will change much in contemporary French society, particularly in communities of Algerian heritage, which have now been established in France for decades. One of the ever-present taboos on the French left is to make a link between the violence of radical Islamists and the French colonial legacy. This is dismissed as crude determinism or, worse still, pure racism. But it is a fact that a disproportionate number of homegrown French terrorists have Algerian origins, as do Muslim prisoners in French prisons.

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Jacobin Magazine: A Soldier for Peace

He later recalled how he misunderstood the French war effort as a restoration of legitimate French authority after the Japanese occupation, imagining a kind of fraternal occupation based on close contact with the local inhabitants. Yet he could not escape the thought that he was not a liberator but an occupier, that the Vietnamese nationalist forces resembled nothing so much as the maquis he had led only months before. [...]

De Bollardière would not yet abandon the old military ideal of a colonialism of service and fraternity. He understood “pacification” very differently from its institutionalization in violent French counterinsurgency, including the systematic use of torture. His command was staked on developing relations between the European settler community and indigenous Algerians, taking the protection of both equally seriously, refusing to view every Muslim as a suspect, and initiating work projects to secure employment and an income for the local population. This involved the cooperation and development of mutual trust between French troops and the local inhabitants. [...]

De Bollardière’s evolving views were also shaped by his work in the field of public housing, largely for immigrants from North Africa but also Portugal, Yugoslavia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Likewise, he threw himself into the provision of adult education, which he described as a particularly enriching experience. As a catalyst to continual self-reflection and questioning existing conceptions and values, he was convinced it had great potential to humanize society. He was also drawn to the regionalist movement in his native Brittany. His developing grasp of social and economic structures manifested itself in an interpretation comparable to an analysis of uneven development, seeing the decline of Breton culture and its relative economic underdevelopment as twin symptoms of a centralizing French state.

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Al Jazeera: Macron's Francafrique

President Macron, born long after French colonies became independent, displays an ostensible modernism, and - at least on the surface - attacks the obsolete political apparatuses, which, according to him, harm the vitality of the French society. As a result, perhaps too naively, many Africans expected him to change the old "Francafrique" - France's relations with its former colonies in Africa - for the better. [...]

After independence, several countries did choose to leave the franc zone: Tunisia in 1958, Morocco in 1960, Guinea in 1959, Algeria in 1964, Madagascar and Mauritania in 1973. But a total of 14 countries, 12 of which are former French colonies, decided to continue using CFA franc as their official currency. [...]

The CFA franc is guaranteed by the French Treasury. It had a fixed exchange rate to French franc until 1999, and now - to the euro under agreements that force the countries of the franc zone to deposit 50 percent of their reserves in foreign currency to the French Treasury. [...]

From Serval to Barkhane, French military operations in Africa are allegedly aiming "to fight terrorism" and more specifically to "return to Mali its sovereignty over Timbuktu and Kidal". But, of course, another objective of these military operations - if not the primary one - is to protect French economic and geostrategic interests in the region, such as exploitation of Nigerien uranium and Malian gold. Also, it is well known that France is behind the creation of the G5 Sahel (an institutional framework for regional cooperation in development and security policies, incorporating Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad). The G5 helps France seal its military's influence in the region and President Macron seems to be committed to maintaining the current unfair status quo.

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Böll-Stiftung: The European Union and its Southern Neighbourhood

Prior to the Arab Spring, the policies pursued by the EU and most of the Member States were focused on dealing with the regimes. In most cases, European governments shied away from dealing directly with the small, courageous and genuinely independent civil society movements or groups of individuals who campaigned for human rights. The EU’s interlocutor was the status quo. Moreover, the EU really had no unified, coherent long term strategy towards the region. As for the Member States, they had their own network of bilateral economic and trade ties built up over many years. [...]

At the time, the aim of the ENP was to foster stability, security and prosperity in these countries. It reflected the EU’s first European Security Strategy drawn up by Javier Solana. That document referred to establishing an arc of stability, from Europe’s east around to Europe’s south. Clearly for those campaigning for democracy in the MENA countries, neither the ENP nor the EU’s Security Strategy addressed the underlying tensions in the region: the irreconcilability of authoritarianism and democratisation; that the kind of stability prevailing in the MENA countries was inherently unstable.

The Arab Spring could have and should have provided the EU with a new and bold opportunity to radically overhaul its policies toward the region as a whole and towards particular countries. Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, the EU did realise that its previous policies had been flawed. But because of the sheer scale of the upheaval engulfing that Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt particularly, the EU scrambled for a reactive policy. [...]

The long term consequences of Europe’s role as bystander in the Syrian war is extremely damaging. Salam Kawakibi summed it up in a piece he wrote for Carnegie Europe. He argued that if the Europeans do not take the Syrian conflict seriously, other global actors will not take the Europeans seriously either. Indeed, one wonders if European governments now see its southern neighbourhood through the lens of security and stability in order to ensure the security of EU citizens. [...]

Echoing the Commission’s Review, the official insisted that the EU’s policies would be able to reconcile security and stabilisation with promoting good governance, ‘democracy, rule of law and human rights.’ But as the Commission itself states throughout the 21-page long review, it is the security and stabilisation issues that take priority.

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Foreign Affairs: Algeria on the Brink?

The pressure comes at a bad time for Algeria’s ruling elites, who are struggling to work out what will happen when President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s rule comes to an end. Now 78, Bouteflika has ruled the country since 1999. But after suffering a stroke in 2013, he has rarely been seen in public, leading many to wonder what role he actually plays in managing daily affairs. When he does appear, wheelchair-bound and frail, he is the embodiment of the regime he represents: aged and aloof, part of a generation of 70-year-olds presiding over a country in which roughly 67 percent of the population is under 30. [...]

The dismantling of the DRS also fits within the government's narrative that Algeria has become a normal state; “A Civilian State” has become one of the ruling elite’s favorite slogans. But whether or not the Algerian regime is truly aiming for this goal is uncertain. The slogan rings hollow given that for the past 25 years, the internal security services have operated entirely unchecked. And so when the government claims that the security services need to be dismantled, many Algerians ask, why now? From helping to rig elections to supervising the activities of political parties and activists, the DRS has long wielded power in Algeria. This makes it unlikely that the government will simply discard it altogether. A “cleaned-up” version of the security services, one that the president and his allies can easily tame, is a more probable outcome.

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