Algeria has risen!
It is a country where protesting against the regime has become constant for many years now. The revolution and the war for independence against the colonizing French State were paralyzed and then betrayed by the FLN, that turned into a party led by a real mafia, identified and denounced as such by the Algerian people.
The people, particularly the youth, are massively condemned to poverty, unemployment and migration, in a country that is flooded with resources. In fact, Algeria is an important producer and exporter of natural gas (5th producer and 4th exporter) and oil (13th producer and 9th exporter), and also has important reserves of iron, gold, uranium and zinc. It is the first world producer of green beans, 6th of dates, 8th of apricots, 9th of artichoke and even 10th of almonds.
We must emphasize that, since 1988, the Algerian regime has obeyed the IMF’s structural austerity plans against the people and the social conquests of the Algerian revolution. As a result, the ruling mafia has no other popular base than itself. Against the “5th mandate” of Bouteflika, that the governing mafia wants to present in the presidential elections, for dignity, for the same reasons that caused the yellow vests movement in France, the Algerian people have started to walk the path of the workers, youth, popular, democratic and social revolution.
As in France, massive abstentionism turned into massive activism
But we must also emphasize that the Algerian people do not copy the French. They have their own movement that joins the Arabs and the Berber people in the same struggle for the rights of everyone, and finds support in the Algerian immigration in France. Its struggle has its roots deep in the ‘54-’62 revolution, after 130 years of cruel French colonization.
The current regime pretends to democratize itself. But the “multiparty” system only means that there are several parties. Well, now those parties are under the rules of an utterly corrupt regime. That is the case of the Workers Party (PT), of which Luisa Hanoune is spokesperson and representative.
As old militants of that “Lambertist” party say, the PT had its ascendant phase, where it was effectively a party of revolutionary fighters and Hanoune was a brave militant. However, she finally joined the regime and accepted that Bouteflika could govern for more than two terms, in rigged elections that were challenged by the abstention of a large majority. Hanoune fought against this radical abstentionism.
That is why Hanoune and the PT delegation were spontaneously thrown out of the colossal mobilization last Friday the 1st in Algiers, a city where all mobilizations are banned.
In the last two weeks, in Oran, Setif, Tizi Ouzou, Constantine and now Alger and many other cities, the country is brimming with unprecedentedly large mobilizations, filled with mottoes that express the pain, the anger and the hope of the people.
The spring of the peoples begins.
Daniel Petri, Francia, 4/3/19