Algeria’s Army Shows its Hand

Army Tilt Toward Bouteflika Provokes Other Parties, Candidates

Algeria’s powerful Army has continued to claim it will play  a neutral role in the April Presidential elections, but over the past two weeks senior generals and retired officers have left little doubt that the Army is fully backing former Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika over the other candidates in the increasingly crowded race. (For further background, see the last issue .) The Army’s support of Bouteflika now shows signs of becoming an issue in its own right, with the (currently) ruling National Democratic Rally splitting over the issue and several parties talking about uniting behind a candidate to challenge Bouteflika. Bouteflika has been nominated by the National Liberation Front (FLN), the former ruling party, and has also won the support of the al-Nahda, a small quasi-Islamist party, though the party leader opposed his bureau’s vote to back Bouteflika.

At least until the past week or so, most observers had thought that Algeria’s Army leadership was divided, and it may well still be. Reports have suggested that Bouteflika had the support of key generals in the special services, but that the powerful Chief of Staff, Mohamed La‘amari, was remaining neutral. But there have been charges of considerable pressure from the Army to back Bouteflika. Some reports claim that the Secretary-General of the FLN, Boualem Benhammouda, has said that he received “unwritten instructions” from “higher authorities” to back the “national consensus” candidate, meaning Bouteflika. But Benhammouda has denied press reports that he ever made that statement. Much more open and explicit was the charge by Tahar Benbaïbeche, Secretary General of the ruling National Democratic Rally (RND), that there had  been “pressure amounting to threats” on local party members of the RND, demanding that they sign a document backing Bouteflika’s candidacy. While he did not explicitly say where the pressure was coming from, he threatened to “reveal the origin” of the pressures if they did not stop.

Benbaïbeche held his press conference last Sunday, January 10. The next day’s newspapers carried a strong attack by former Defense Minister and retired General Khaled Nezzar, a powerful figure who had more to do than anyone else with making President Liamine Zeroual President. Nezzar attacked Benbaïbeche and presidential candidate Mouloud Hamrouche as failures — Hamrouche in particular he blamed for the country’s collapse into civil conflict — and Nezzar openly admitted he supports Bouteflika. (In the past, he has been publicly critical of Bouteflika.)

Nezzar does not necessarily speak for all of the current military leadership, and La‘amari has continued to protest his neutrality, but the conventional wisdom has it that Bouteflika has the support of several key generals, and no one doubts who was putting “pressure” on Benbaïbeche or giving “unwritten instructions” to Benhammouda.

Amid this public exchange of charge and countercharge, more and more voices were being heard, calling for a genuinely competitive election. One reason Benbaïbeche gave his press conference was a growing wave of “spontaneous demonstrations” and petition signing in the countryside, apparently inspired by the military, and backing Bouteflika. Reportedly many of the RND’s rank and file have signed on for Bouteflika, while Benbaïbeche, offended that the RND was not consulted before the FLN nominated Bouteflika, despite the fact that the RND is technically the senior partner and the FLN the junior in the present ruling coalition, wants the RND to nominate its own candidate.

A longtime opponent of Bouteflika, Youçef El Khatib, has also criticized his candidacy, insisting that the FLN leadership opposed it until pressured by the Army; while the newspaper El Watan warned on January 4 — before the Benbaïbeche press conference — of growing military influence in support of Bouteflika, saying that “Now that the Islamist threat and terrorism are receding, the voters, in principle, should not be forced to choose between plague, represented by the FIS [Islamic Salvation Front] and cholera, this lesser illness which is said to be represented by the authorities.”

The Army has made much of the fact that in the first three weeks of Ramadan, only about 100 people had been killed, compared to over 1,000 during the month last year. (Government body counts do not include the number of Islamist guerrillas the government itself claims to have killed.) But as El Watan’s remarks emphasize, the very fact that the violence is less severe than at the last Presidential election in 1995 may make it less likely that the Army can persuade some of the parties to back the “consensus” candidate, Bouteflika.

Other parties are trying to position themselves as well. The small Islamic party al-Nahda voted to back Bouteflika, but its leader, ‘Abdallah Jaballah, reportedly has opposed this decision and was taking part in a five-party meeting which sought both to call for peace in the country and also for fair elections. The other four parties involved were Hamas, the Movement for a Peaceful Society, an Islamist party whose leader, Cheikh Mahfoudh Nahnah, is a candidate for the Presidency; Benbaïbeche’s RND, the Berber-backed Socialist Forces Front (FFS), and the small Workers’ Party, a leftwing group. The FFS has said it might support another party’s candidate rather than putting up its own, but only if it is convinced the Army is not calling the tune. It will choose its candidate February 4.  Its leader, Hoçine Aït Ahmed, one of the “historic” leaders of the Algerian Revolution, plans to return to Algeria from his self-imposed European exile at the end of the month.

Besides Bouteflika and Nahnah, other announced or nearly-announced candidates are former Prime Ministers Mouloud Hamrouche, Mokdad Sifi, and Sid Ahmed Ghozali, Former Foreign Minister Ahmed Talib Ibrahimi, and most recently, 70-year-old former Prime Minster Belaïd Abdessalam. Attorney Moulay Habib is also an announced candidate. The “establishment” view seems to be that the strongest candidates are Bouteflika (of course), Hamrouche, and perhaps Ibrahimi, and that they will poll well ahead of the others assuming all these names are actually still in the race by April.

But the Army’s role has now become an issue in the campaign. The RND, which was created for Liamine Zeroual out of mostly ex-FLN members and which many predicted would have trouble establishing an identity with Zeroual’s departure, may have found one: campaigning as the establishment party resisting pressure by the Army to unite behind Bouteflika.

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