Algeria Becalmed

As Libya, Tunisia and Egypt have gone through convulsions over recent months, the appetite for regime change in Algeria has been more muted. Analysts say the reason is not that the country lacks a record of political unrest, but the reverse – it has seen far too much turbulence over the years.

Following the first major protests earlier this year, the Algerian government launched a constitutional reform process intended to dampen demands for more far-reaching change. 

Despite a state in emergency in place since 1992, there have been frequent demonstrations over the years, but generally on local issues or specific concerns like food prices or water supplies.

As anti-government rallies began in Tunisia and Egypt at the start of 2011, protests in Algeria began coalescing into something similar. Beginning in January, the movement culminated in a large demonstration in central Algiers on February 12, with calls for regime change and democracy.

Large numbers of police were drafted in to disrupt the demonstration and arrest participants.

The government was nevertheless listening. Two weeks later, it lifted the two-decade-old state of emergency. In May, two months of consultations began on possible changes to the constitution – an attempt to show that Algeria’s leaders were receptive to reform calls.

With that consultation process now over, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is expected to present a new draft constitution, although just how much radical change it will contain remains open to question.

“I have had Algerians tell me that ‘our problem is not our constitution, but implementation’,” Alexis Arieff, an African affairs analyst in Washington, told IWPR. “I think that it’s likely that some proposal for constitutional reform will be put forward, but the question is more about the inclusiveness of that process and the process of adoption.”

Arieff explained that two major opposition parties, the Socialist Forces Front and the Rally for Culture and Democracy, had refused to take part in the consultation process.

The fact that Algeria’s rulers are still setting the agenda rather than having to fend off a more serious challenge says a lot about the political environment.

“People tend to forget the brutal civil war that took place only 20 years ago,” John Entelis, professor of political science and director of the Middle East Studies Programme at Forham University in New York, said.

The civil war began in late 1991 when the ruling party cancelled a parliamentary election after the Islamic Salvation Front or FIS emerged as the winner from the first round of voting.

The Algerian military took over government, FIS was banned, and the then president resigned. Violence soon broke out, escalating into a full-scale war between FIS supporters and the army that lasted for more than a decade. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people died before the conflict petered out in 2000. Some Islamist groups were defeated, many other guerrillas renounced violence under an amnesty, and a few hardliners continued to pose a threat.

“I think the Algerians feel like they have to a certain extent already had their ‘spring’ in 1988 – and it went very badly for them,” Jacob Mundy, a PhD student at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the UK’s Exeter University, said.

Mundy argues that years of bloodshed have immunised Algerians against risking further unrest.

Arieff adds, “There is both a fear of chaos, and of what the regime might do if it’s backed into a corner.”

Arieff said Algeria’s “dark decade” had discredited politics in general in many people’s eyes. In her view, opposition parties are still not seen as a “legitimate political force”, and their prominent role in the protests earlier this year – in contrast to Tunisia and Egypt, where the uprisings appeared spontaneous, leaderless affairs – may have detracted from the movement. Some of the political figures involved were seen as too close to elements of the regime.

“I think that in Algeria, the early involvement of political parties actually played against the protest movement’s popularity,” she said.

Another difference that may play in the Algerian leadership’s favour is that it is not headed by a single despotic figure or ruling dynasty. Instead, the country is run by the military together with a network of civilian officials and powerful businessmen.

President Bouteflika, elected in 1999 towards the end of the civil war, has the backing of the military. A two-term limit on holding presidential office was dropped in 2008, so that – with no obvious successor in sight – Bouteflika could go for a fourth term in 2024.

Arieff said the realisation that any protests must be against the entire system, not President Bouteflika in person, “that has had a restraining effect on people’s enthusiasm for public demonstrations”.

“National upheaval is not likely to happen now – there is no one to focus on,” Azzedine Layachi, associate professor of political science at St. John’s University in New York, said.

Other forms of opposition exist in Algeria, but they do not appear to present a major threat.

Al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, AQLIM Memories of the civil war are revived by intermittent bombings and shootings targeting the army, and suicide attacks by. This group grew out of the GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), itself an offshoot of the Armed Islamic Group or GIA that was one of the major opposition forces in the civil war.

Experts agree that the AQLIM has not played a role in Algerian demonstrations this year, although it presents a continuing challenge to the authorities.

Demands for greater recognition for the large Berber community, centred in the Kabyle region in particular, led to a million people taking part in demonstrations in 2001 after the killings by the army. That was echoed last month, when several thousand marched through a town in a Kabyle area, again after a civilian died at the hands of the military.

Analysts say the authorities are able to contain such protests because their ethnic colouring means they are not shared across the whole nation.

The principal risk to the Algerian leadership thus lies in economic grievances – youth unemployment, housing shortages, rising food prices and endemic corruption – shared by most of the population regardless of politics or region.

Entelis said that Algeria was rich because of its vast oil and gas resources, “most of that wealth does not trickle down”, and remained instead in the hands of a small affluent class.

Mundy does not believe constitutional change will make much change to Algerians unless it is accompanied by greater economic equality. Inequalities in the way oil and gas revenues are distributed have “detached” the government from the population, he said.

The revenues had a corrupting effect on political institutions, which would tend to negate even a well-written constitution.

Layachi believes developments in the wider region will be crucial to shaping Algeria’s future direction. If Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is ousted and a truly democratic transition begins, this is likely to put pressure on Algeria and Morocco to move in the same direction, and fast. The speed of progress in Tunisia and Egypt will similarly affect Algeria’s political future, he said.

Mariann Markseth Omholt is an IWPR editorial intern in London.