Violence in Algeria has increased considerably in recent weeks and has now spread from outlying districts to Algiers, the capital, and holiday resorts in its vicinity. The attacks apparently occur at random, and responsibility for them is seldom claimed by anybody, with the result that Algerians throughout the country feel unprotected and bewildered.
Heavy-handed police tactics succeeded in preventing a protest-march by thousands of minority Kabyle Berbers in Algiers, the Algerian capital, from taking place on July 5, the 39th anniversary of the country’s ‘independence’ from France. Yet, despite its success in averting another potential flashpoint in the three-month-old popular uprising, the military-backed regime continues to teeter on the brink of total collapse.
Algeria does not need a fresh eruption of Berber nationalism after a debilitating decade-long ‘civil’ war waged by the secular establishment, dominated by the military, against the country’s Islamic movements.
In Algeria the year 2000 was one of undiminished violence and bloodshed, very different from the harmony that president Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika claims to have ushered in by his offer of amnesty to the country’s armed groups.