Abdelkader Hachani, a senior leader of the banned Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was assassinated in Algerian capital, Algiers, on November 22. Hachani was shot in the chest several times as he was leaving a dentist’s clinic. His assassin was not captured.
Algerian president Abdul Aziz Bouteflika claimed a major victory in the September 16 referendum on his ‘progress towards peace’. The results, announced by the ministry of the interior the next day, showed that 98.63 percent of voters had answered ‘yes’ to the single question...
The Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), the armed wing of the banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), announced on June 6 that it would end its armed struggle against the government permanently, and place its forces under the states’s authority.
It would not be cynical to conclude that Algeria’s presidential election campaign will not produce new faces untainted by association with traditional power-elites,which are the usual arbiters of power in the country.
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan has sent an information-gathering six-member panel to Algeria on the invitation, and conditions, of the Algerian government in the hope that it would generate ideas on how the world body might help end Algeria’s crisis.
Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Leading western newspapers have suddenly stumbled on the fact that it is indeed the Algerian junta - not the ‘bloodthirsty Islamic extremists’ routinely blamed by the regime...
The countries of southern Europe, which fear the fall-out from the mounting violence in their neighbour across the Mediterranean sea, and Arab dictators unneved by the continued failure of an Arab regime to quell an Islamic challenge, are manoevring to intervene through dubious offers of mediation,...
