For twitter fans some people to watch.
@themoornextdoor @weddady @12fevrier @fbess @cethura @opine16 @7our @Algerian_Dude
If it's one place where it could get really ugly surely Algeria is it.
I thought you were keeping out of this one
*whistles* I am. I'm just trying to be helpful.
People can follow live here:
http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/artic...s-en-algerie_1479002_3212.html#ens_id=1461890
It's french mind.
9.09am: The 19-year-old state of emergency in Algeria will end within days, foreign minister Mourad Medelci said. There were running battles between police officers and about 2,000 demonstrators in Algiers on Saturday. Officials said that 400 were arrested by police – who vastly outnumbered them. Most were then released. Reuters reports:
A state of emergency has been in force in Algeria since 1992 and the government has come under pressure to ditch emergency laws following uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.
"In the coming days, we will talk about it as if it was a thing of the past," Medelci told the French radio station Europe 1 in an interview.
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said earlier this month the state of emergency would be lifted in the very near future.
(Reuters) - Algeria's cabinet on Tuesday adopted an order to lift a 19-year-old state of emergency in a concession designed to dodge the tide of uprisings sweeping the Arab world, but protesters said it was not enough.....
Just saw Battle for Algiers today, a very powerful film. It's a tragedy that their attempt at a democratic state was swept away by (surprise surprise) a US dollar-infiltrated ruthless military state. It really says something, that even when a people successfully throws out colonizers and dictators, the victory they think they have won can still so easily be infiltrated and turned against them.
The "endless struggle for dominance" continues.
Exactly what will happen in Libya
Of course because that is how history works.
Louis MacNeice
In December 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Algerian political party, had won national democratic elections, proving to be immensely popular. However, before the parliamentary seats could be taken after January 1992, the Algerian military violently overturned democracy. The parliamentary elections that would have brought the FIS to power were cancelled by the Algerian army. The army rounded up tens of thousands of Muslims who supported the winning party and threw them into concentration camps in the midst of the Sahara, to be tortured and abused.[1] Subsequently, the army took power, democracy was eliminated, and the popular FIS was scattered. Summarising the coup, Lahouri Addi observes that “in February 1989, just months after the October 1988 riots that cost nearly a thousand lives, the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) embarked on a series of reforms, changing the Constitution to allow multipartism and alternation in power by means of elections. Yet the legalization of multipartism mainly benefited the Islamists organized into the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which carried both the June 1990 local elections and the first round of the December 1991 national legislative races. The military suspended the process and nullified the first-round results in January 1992. Next, it forced President Chadli Benjedid to resign. Since then, Algeria has plunged into murderous strife that already has claimed more than 60,000 lives.
...
When the Arab Spring uprisings broke out in 2011 there were riots in Algeria, as elsewhere in the region. But while the leaders of three neighbouring countries — Tunisia, Egypt and Libya — were toppled the regime of Abdelaziz Bouteflika survived relatively unscathed.
Although Algeria had similar socio-economic problems to its neighbours and similar reasons for people to revolt, the regime was able to buy off discontent, thanks to its oil and natural gas resources. A decision to lift the 19-year-old state of emergency probably helped too, as did bitter memories of the country’s armed conflict in the 1990s that cost 100,000 or more lives.
Now, however, the regime is facing a new challenge. During the last week there have been widespread protests calling on President Bouteflika to step down and this time they may not be so easy to quell.