Algeria: police steal milk
As the commentator of the Quebecois television channel that broadcast the video points out, it is an unbelievable scene, but a real one. Police robbers. They rob a milk distributor to extort from him more than a dozen sachets of this product so precious to Algerians who have to get up at dawn to stock up.
The shopkeeper is helpless. He is forced to obey and be robbed by those who are supposed to protect him from the thieves. "This is the new Algeria of Tebboune", say the young people filming the scene. An Algeria whose leaders are white-collar criminals waging an all-out war to get their hands on loot that in no way belongs to them.
Algeria is the only country in the world that has three former prime ministers and a score of ministers, as well as businessmen and some forty generals, all of them in prison for "squandering social goods, embezzlement of public funds, corruption, illicit enrichment...". In other words, those who have run Algeria for the past two decades are, quite simply, unscrupulous thieves. Those who arrested them, brought them to justice and put them in jail are no cleaner. They were all part of the same clan and the same system, and they have all been caught red-handed. For example, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the current head of state, was one of the protagonists of the scandal of the century, led by the golden boy Abdelmoumen Rafik Khalifa. This billionaire, whose meteoric rise was mirrored by his fall. The faster he rose, the faster he fell.
Khalifa was the head of a holding company that included pharmaceutical companies, an airline, a television channel and a bank. His fortune was made through a bank that received astronomical sums from state-owned companies, including some in the real estate sector whose minister was none other than Abdelmadjid Tebboune. As a reward for his contribution to the enrichment of Al-Khalifa Bank, Abdelmadjid Tebboune received a gold bank card, although he did not have a bank account with the bank. By his own admission, he had spent 26,000 euros on medical treatment in France using this card, he told the president of the Blida court, which tried the case in the early 2000s. Tebboune, like many other regime leaders of the time, was never questioned.
General Saïd Chengriha, the current chief of staff of the Algerian army, was the head of a gang of hashish traffickers when he was head of the 3rd military region in the south-west of the country. He spent 14 years there, in an area where, at worst, no more than 3 years are served. Chengriha deserves to enter the Guinness Book of Records for his record in a difficult area, considered a punishment zone, and for his 18 years in the same rank, Major General. For having agreed to spend 14 years in Béchar and 18 in the same rank, the old officer found a lot to do: extortion of traders passing through the region, trafficking and robberies of all kinds.
In his book "La sale guerre" (Les éditions La Découverte 2001), Second Lieutenant Habib Souaïdia recounts the circumstances in which the current Algerian army chief of staff shot a peaceful citizen in the head when his home was raided at midnight by an armed group led by Saïd Chengriha, then a colonel in the Bouira region, under the orders of General Abdelaziz Medjahed, current director of the Global Strategy Institute.
When a country is led by a President of the Republic and an army chief of staff whose past is tainted by theft, embezzlement and murder, there is no reason for the police to hold up a shopkeeper for a few bags of milk.
