Washington, DC — More than one million protestors took part in a peaceful demonstration that turned violent in the Algerian capital Algiers on Thursday. The protestors who came from various parts of the country tried to march to the presidential palace but police intervened and opened fire after being pelted with stones. Two Algerian journalists were killed and more than one hundred and fifty protestors injured.
Thursday's demonstration was the latest in a series trigged by the death of a young Berber man in police custody in the region of Kabylia (90 miles east of Algiers) in April. Scores of other deaths occurred in subsequent clashes with the security forces in Kabylia and elsewhere.
The Algerian authorities have generally depicted these events as a Kabylian problem. Residents of Kabylia are descended from the Berbers, North Africa's original inhabitants. The Kabyles have for decades been pressing for official recognition of their language on a par with Arabic but successive governments have found the issue too sensitive to deal with and tended to dodge it.
But language was not the only grievance at stake in Thursday's demonstration. The demonstrators also called for replacing the army generals who are thought to wield real power behind the scenes with a democratically elected government and for alleviating the country's acute economic and social woes. Unemployment stands currently at 30% and young people are hardest hit in a country where 70% of the population are under 30.
While the government of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been relatively successful at containing the Islamist violence of the past nine years, it has so far not delivered on most of its promises for political and economic reforms. The economy continues to slumber despite a recent improvement in the prices of oil and gas of which Algeria is a major exporter. And as long as the army continues to be the real power broker, many Algerians feel President Bouteflika will not be able to deal with the real issues. Meanwhile, the build-up of tension continues in Kabylia and elsewhere in the country, with no long-tem solution in sight.
