Algeria: Repression intensifies in the wake of the 7 September election travesty
Arrests, intimidation, requests for the extradition of opponents abroad and a ban on all activity for the few opposition parties that are trying to survive.
A few days after Tebboune's inauguration as President of the Republic, the Douera stadium in the southern suburbs of Algiers was the scene of violent clashes between riot police and supporters of Algeria's most popular club, the Mouloudia Club d'Alger, Algeria's oldest club, founded in 1921, long before the first political party of the national movement, the PPA (Algerian Popular Party), which called for the country's independence.
Ahead of the second leg of the second preliminary round of the African Champions League against Tunisian side US Monastir, the Algerian club experienced a real nightmare in their new stadium, which bears the emblematic name of one of the heroes of the war of liberation, Ali Ammar, known as Ali La Pointe.
In the age of online ticket sales, fans of Algeria's oldest club have had to endure the hell of long queues and pushing and shoving outside the ticket offices of the Stade du 5 Juillet in Cheraga. They never imagined the worst that awaited them on match day.
Unbelievable but true. For 50,000 spectators, the organisers decided to open only one gate. This was enough for the fans, who had come to celebrate with their tifos, flags, banners and banners, to sit up and take note. They demanded that other gates be opened. When their demands were ignored, the fans began to chant political slogans against the government, repeating ‘Civilian state, not military state’. The reaction of the gendarmerie was swift. The fans were beaten to a pulp. The scenes filmed by fans show horrifying images. ‘Even the Israeli soldiers are not as violent and cruel to the Palestinians as the Algerian gendarmes were to the Mouloudia d'Alger supporters,’ they observed. The scuffles outside the stadium resulted in the death of a young man in his twenties, more than a hundred injured and 14 arrested.
It was only the first round of an inexplicably violent crackdown. The second assault was to take place at the end of the match inside the stadium. Just as time was running out in a match won by Mouloudia d'Alger 2-0, guaranteeing them a place in the next round, the gendarmes fired tear gas canisters from the stands of the stadium. Three of them landed on the pitch. Players from both teams, referees and everyone on the railings were crying. In the stands, the gendarmes did more than just use their batons. They ripped up the plastic chairs and threw them at the players. It was a nightmare for which there was no explanation.
The public authorities have taken no action to punish the gendarmes responsible for this senseless violence, nor have they ordered any investigation. On the contrary, they sanctioned the Algerian club with a match behind closed doors under the pretext of ‘the need to wait for tempers to cool down’.
Courageous women in struggle
For the activists, the powers that be, in order to act more effectively in a complicit silence, began by hacking into the Facebook page of the National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees (CNLD). This page regularly reported on arrests and prison sentences handed down by Algerian courts throughout the country. Naturally, the Algerian press, private or public, said not a peep about these matters.
Consequently, nothing will be known about the militants kidnapped or detained by the security forces. Only a few voices, with a little time before their arrest, can post messages on social networks about what might happen to them. This is how we learned of the imprisonment of the ‘brave woman of the desert’, Abla Guemari, before she was arrested by police officers at her workplace on 27 September. The examining magistrate of the Touggourt court had ordered that her judicial supervision be changed to pre-trial detention. Abla Guemari is accused of ‘apology for terrorism’ for having denounced the precarious and miserable situation in which the populations of the southern region of the country, which feeds Algeria with its oil, gas, iron and gold ores, are languishing.
At the same time, in the mountains of Kabylia, on 15 September, four off-road cars of the gendarmerie turned up in the village of Wafia, a young woman who refuses to submit to injustice, as she says. ‘The gendarmes searched my house. They broke down the door of my room and searched room by room,’ she wrote on her Facebook page.
Djamila Bentouis, sentenced to three years in prison for having composed a song dedicated to the ‘hirak’, is still serving her sentence. The Algerian regime has turned a deaf ear to the appeal of UN experts who called on the Algerian courts to overturn the three-year prison sentence.
Djamila is not the only one to have gone to jail for a song that is not to the rulers' taste. Long before her, rapper Bilel Hemila alias ‘Bilal double Kanon’ spent time behind bars. After serving his sentence, he left the country, like thousands of other young people, on a makeshift boat to seek asylum in Spain, where he is currently living as a political refugee.
On Monday 30 September, the young Djenadi Ahmed Kamel, alias DAK, a rapper from the eastern city of Annaba, was arrested and imprisoned. His crime? A song in which he denounced the powers that be.
Political parties, or what is left of them, are going through very difficult times. The RCD, which survived the purge carried out by its former president Saïd Saadi, who emptied it of all its co-founding tenors, is back on its feet. But it was soon called to order. Banned from activities during the election period, it continues to suffer from the dictates of an excessively cautious regime that is very sensitive to the slightest opposition. Its president, Athmane Mazouz, was banned from organising a debate at the Bejaïa theatre, scheduled for 5 October. A refusal without the slightest justification.
These are just a few of the facets of the repression that has been raining down on Algerians for the past ten days.