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Algeria. Next of the dominoes? Day of rage Feb 12

For twitter fans some people to watch.

@themoornextdoor @weddady @12fevrier @fbess @cethura @opine16 @7our @Algerian_Dude
 
Looks like it all got crushed pretty decisively. 800 arrested. Lots of people battered senseless. Lots of women arrested.
 
People are saying that Facebook + Twitter slow but all working just to confirm, like.

E2A Twitter is a veritable deluge of tweets on #Feb12 so if it's slow I can't imagine what it's like when it's supposed to be working normally (I appreciate that a lot of the people tweeting are not actually in Algeria, but still).
 
The regime has hinted at the following before, but still of interest to see it mentioned again:

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.

via the Guardians live page which now covers 'Unrest in the Middle East' as opposed to just Egypt:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/feb/14/middleeast-unrest
 
So I haven't heard much about this, partly because there is too much white revolution noise out there just now, partly because I just haven't been able to give as much attention, but mostly because it's gone a bit quiet.

Here someone tries to explain what's been going on.

http://eyesonalgeria.wordpress.com/

More demos are called for this weekend
 
I was just headed over to report this. Good news. No idea of context mind as I've been all about the Libyans. Keep on pushing, Algeria.
 
It doesnt seem to have gone too well overall in Algeria, where the regime seem to have been quite successful so far at thwarting protests using fairly standard crowd control policing techniques to squash things before they could escalate.

Time will tell if there is opportunity in future, at least they got their state of emergency removed, and today the auxiliary police went on a huge protest over pay, and managed to get through security cordons and defy the ban on protests in the capital.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/af...ocId=CNG.f3779fe46480337e9e52c424e4001496.541
 

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.
 
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
 
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.

...

http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq4.html
 
Anyone know anything about this?

Ahmed Kerroum found dead

The translation is a bit machine. According to reports in French, the body was found by a MDS party member at a party meeting point/office ie it had been dumped there at night as a warning for other members.

The MDS, a small 'middle class' 'leftist' split from Ettihad
http://mds-algerie.over-blog.com/

The party was one of the signatories for the call for the weekly anti-regime/anti-Bouteflika demonstrations as part of the Coordination Nationale de Concertation pour le Changement Démocratique.


http://www.la-laddh.org/spip.php?article568

There's a facebook group to find his murderers

https://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_193816233995458&ap=1

It was common practice throughout the civil war. 1100 assassinations are listed here

http://www.algeria-watch.org/mrv/2002/1100_executions/1100_executions_A.htm
 
Major protests going on in Algeria but I haven’t seen much coverage. This report gives some background.

Algeria: the people versus the ‘mafiocracy’ – Brian Whitaker – Medium
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.

 
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