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**Iberius** · 06 avril 2013, 21h32

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Algeria – ‘a giant afraid of its own shadow’ ?

Algerian authorities illegally barred 96 civil society activists from travelling to the World Social Forum last week in the latest indication that the regime is more insecure than it appears, say observers.

The activists included members of the Algerian League for Human Rights, the National Autonomous Union of Public Administration Staff (SNAPAP), and several other non-governmental organizations.
“The Algerian authorities are disrupting the legitimate activities of local human rights and civil society activists, as they have so many times before,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch. “It is high time they end their campaign of harassment and intimidation of reform advocates, and observe their obligations under international law.”
Last year’s elections appeared to confirm that Algeria remains the exception in North Africa, as a bastion of relative stability in a turbulent region.
“With more than $200bn in foreign reserves, a powerful and well-trained military, a relatively well-educated population, as well as oil and gas, Algeria is one of the strongest and richest nations in Africa,” yet the continent’s largest country “remains a giant afraid of its own shadow,” notes the FT’s Borzou Daraghi:
The country’s leadership, under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for the past 14 years, has been likened to a white-knuckled driver gripping the steering-wheel, eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror, unable to focus on problems ahead. Those problems include the growth of Islamist radicals in neighboring countries and an over-dependence on hydrocarbons. Inflows from foreign direct investors, who can only hold 49 per cent of a local business, fell 15 per cent last year.

“Algeria is very wealthy, the population is young, the people dynamic,” says Ihsane El Kadi, editor of the business website Emergent Maghreb. “But Bouteflika is stuck in a very old doctrine: that Algeria should not interfere anywhere, especially with neighboring countries. Economically, they manage the country like an elderly lady.”
“Trouble has come not from inside — there has been no major pro-democracy uprising among Algeria’s 37.4 million people — but from the outside in the form of the region’s tumult, which is closing in on Algeria and rocking the political system that has held sway for 50 years,” notes one observer.
Superficially, Algeria appears ripe for revolution, the Project for Middle East Democracy reports: an aging autocratic ruler lacking a clear succession plan, high unemployment, and poor prospects for developing the economy beyond energy exports.

But other factors have discouraged Algerians from following in the regional upheavals that unseated neighboring autocrats, notably fear of a return to civil war.
“While the leaders don’t get enough credit for settling peace and security since the 1990s, Algeria is still psychologically scarred by that period,” says a western diplomat in Algiers. “The mindset is safety-first. They’re not going to open up too fast.”
The other reason a coherent opposition has failed to materialize, says Johns Hopkins University professor William Zartman, is that sporadic protests have been provincial or centered on specific grievances, lacking the wider appeal to encourage coalescence in a broad-based protest movement, and allowing the authorities to buy off, suppress, co-opt, or discredit protesters. The Bouteflika government also enjoys a degree of legitimacy arising from the 2012 elections, which saw gains for the ruling National Rally for Democracy and National Liberation Front, while opposition Islamists lost relevance.
Economic development and political reform are also stymied by a pervasive lack of trust and confidence within a ruling elite that prefers to operate opaquely, the FT suggests:
A healthy but small private sector is expanding in Algeria but analysts say it is often held back by powerful and well-connected oligarchs with military ties jealously guarding their turf from encroachment. “One day I had a dinner with the son-in-law of a former general turned businessman,” says Rabah Boucetta, an opposition activist. “I asked him: ‘Why don’t you invest the money you make here instead of abroad?’ He said to me: “Would you trust these guys?’”
“In Algeria, power likes to hide,” says a political scientist in Algiers. “The military and security forces have come to the conviction that they have to work in a hidden way, that they have to practice power but never in the light, and they try to resolve all domestic and international problems using secret services rather than going through public institutions.”
The trauma of the devastating 1990s civil war, which pitted secular generals against Islamist radicals, contributes to a sense that the country is living on borrowed time. Hundreds of thousands died in the conflict, with little or no accounting yet as to who committed which atrocity. Some say it will take a new generation of leaders to change the country’s ways……Although the country managed to weather the Arab spring, protests did erupt and continue to break out over local issues. The leadership is jittery.
“This is a country that deploys 30,000 police at a football match,” says one human rights activist. “It’s not a confident regime that’s going to take the world stage.”
The key question, Time’s Vivienne Walt writes from Algiers, is:
Can Algeria’s regime ride out the instability, or will it crack under the pressure, adding yet more upheaval to the region, in a country with billions in Western investments and from which U.S. imports last year were worth nearly $1 billion? And will these outside pressures prompt internal unrest? Already, Algeria’s youths — 70% of the country is under 30 — are clamoring for jobs, houses and better lives and griping about the aging men in power.
“People are patient,” says Fayçal Métaoui, political columnist for al-Watan newspaper in Algiers, But they have their limits.”
The Project for Middle East Democracy is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Annonce

L’Algérie est un géant qui a peur de son ombre

L’Algérie est un géant qui a peur de son ombre

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