Why Algeria is still dull and gloomy

[Al-khiyal]

Why Algeria is still dull and gloomy

March 5, 2009 -- As young women emerge in chattering, self-confident groups from the university building on the Didouche Mourad Boulevard in Algiers, it might seem that the country’s decade-long nightmare of violence never happened. These students were toddlers when the first-round election victory of an Islamist party in 1992 brought army tanks onto the streets. Up to 200,000 people may have been killed in the eight years of strife that ensued. Today’s students may have just left primary school when Abdelaziz Bouteflika was declared president in 1999, amid claims of electoral fraud. Now, it seems, he is to lead their country for yet another five years, due to a constitutional amendment to let him run for a third term. His re-election is expected on April 9th, despite a handful of well-vetted opponents. Mr Bouteflika is bent on staying in power despite reports of bad health that have dogged him for years.

Even his harshest critics admit that his ten years as president have brought — or at least coincided with — an end to the darkest years of conflict. He enticed most of the armed Islamist groups down from the hills with amnesties. He has sacked some of the generals who ran the no-holds-barred counter-terrorism of the 1990s. The secret service, whose listeners were said to lurk on every street corner, is no longer so nosy.

Districts of Algiers once in the grip of local “emirs” — gang leaders with an Islamist veneer who sometimes displayed their victims’ heads on pikes — have regained a humdrum normality. The police and gendarmes, once targeted for assassination by Islamist militants as they helped out with the dirty work of arbitrary detention and torture, have been retrained and try to behave well, at least in public.

The avuncular Mr Bouteflika has helped reduce the bitterness between the large body of opinion receptive to Islamist ideas and the secular-minded Francophone intellectuals terrified of the Islamist Salvation Front that won the poll in 1992. Though many female undergraduates in Algiers wear the Islamist headscarf, their bare-headed fellow students are equally at ease. Local commentators, however, detect a groundswell of religious observance.

Mr Bouteflika tries to surf the trend rather than resist it. His government includes the Islamists of the Social Movement for Peace, who trace their line back to Egypt’s Muslim Brothers. Their views are echoed in mosque sermons broadcast every Friday on state television.

The average Algerian, not to mention foreign investors, can only guess at the shifting alliances and tensions in the civilian and military establishment. But it is hard to find much enthusiasm for Mr Bouteflika’s third term. He is at least a known quantity in a murky political landscape, but few Algerians are proud of their country’s politics. Many ask, “Where has all the money from oil and gas gone?”

In fact, a lot of new housing and infrastructure has been built. The outskirts of Algeria’s second city, Oran, are dotted with scores of new high-rise housing blocks that have replaced slums. A new east-west motorway is to extend to Algeria’s long-closed border with Morocco. The government paid off most of the country’s external debt when oil prices were high.

Middle-class Algerians bought so many imported Renault, Peugeot and Hyundai cars that the government slapped on a sales tax to reduce traffic jams. The sales of a mobile phone operator, Djezzy, owned by Egypt’s Orascom, boomed. But a decision by Orascom’s construction arm in 2007 to sell some cement plants it had built in northern Algeria to France’s Lafarge — at a fat profit and without consulting Algeria’s government — is said to have turned Mr Bouteflika against foreign investors.

Now they can own only 49% of any Algerian company. Nor can they buy the land on which to build a factory. Many investors lack confidence in Algeria’s oft-changing legal system. In December a licensing round for 15 blocks of oil and gas exploration got only nine bids, as the big foreign oil companies grumble about Algeria’s tax burden. The government says it wants to liberalise the economy. But it moves very slowly. Algeria’s private businessmen chafe under a heavy bureaucratic yoke.

Some younger people who fled abroad in the 1990s have come home, bringing back valuable professional experience. But many leave again. A recent opinion poll found that 29% of men between 15 and 34 “certainly” intended to emigrate to Europe or elsewhere illegally; 21% said they “probably” would. Youths on a street corner in Oran explain that Europe offers more and better-paid jobs, more human rights, more fun. Under Algeria’s continuing state of emergency, many people still fear wrongful arrest. Businessmen fear punitive tax demands if, say, they offend an official.

Islamist violence has recently begun to bubble up again. Armed Islamists, most of them in the hilly Berber region of Kabylie, have become bolder. Almost every day, newspapers report a traveller robbed, a businessman kidnapped, an army patrol attacked or a villager killed for co-operating with the army in the past.

So Algeria is still a long way from true normality. Major-General Muhammad Mediene still runs the security service, as he did in 1990s, when even officials admit that more than 6,500 people were killed after last being seen in the hands of the security forces. Under five more years of Mr Bouteflika, do not expect drastic change.

[Cat40]

I am a foreigner married to an Algerian, we just returned from holiday and I wanted to say thank you for this really good post. I visited Algeria for the 1st time in 1997 and it looked like a war zone, well I suppose it was. Then visited for the 1st time again in 2005 and have done so each year as we go on holiday and the picture I see is just as you describe it in this post. I watch Algerian TV everyday and it is amassing the picture you get being outside Algeria, being all rosy. Plenty accommodation, loads of foreign investment, big projects but when you visit Algeria you really do see the different side. I visited my family in law in 1997 and the Apartment Block they live in is even more broken down now and dirty then in 1997. No improvements have been made, rubbish everywhere, and play areas for the children in this area are non-existent. This is the same picture you get in many areas in Algiers, broken buildings and very dirty streets. Each year we visit my husband, who is very proud about Algeria keeps saying next year will be better; well I am not so sure. Like you say I do question, "How can a country that get so much money for oil and gas?" not be able to paint a building or put a cleaner on the street or even spend a little of the money educating people about rubbish or recycling as this is a major problem for Algeria. Even on the beautiful beaches!! I know Algeria just hosted the Pan-African Festival that cost them billions and I am sure many Algerian's have been very unhappy about this, as I spoke to a really nice lady on the street selling some homemade cakes who had very strong views and I agree 100 % with her. So on this I do ask the question would it not have been better to spend this money on the still broken down infrastructure of Algeria. On a good note at least my family in law now have water every day, a basic necessity that most Algerians still don't have.