Algeria's internal issues

Algeria's internal issues reflect those of a number of troubled nations in the region that have a large and active anti-government population of fundamentalist Muslims who seek to establish the nation as a strictly Islamic state. The civil war of the past decade has abated, but the danger of serious instability remains. Algeria is run today by Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a powerful individual whose reign has focused on putting down internal dissension and protests, often brutally. He is backed by the military, and although he was elected, the entire electoral process is under the cloud of corruption. This corruption and suspicion is almost a decade old, since the military usurped the legal power of the fundamentalist party which won the elections in 1992. Electoral corruption and particularly the election of Bouteflika are representative of the troubles faced by Algeria today, a nation torn by political, economic, religious, legal and other serious conflicts. With respect to the electoral issue:

The army aborted the country's first multiparty parliamentary election in 1992 for fear that Islamists might sweep the board. In 1997, prolonged demonstrations followed Algeria's second contested parliamentary election after the opposition claimed fraud. Now the latest election, for a civilian president, has gone up in smoke, as all but one of the candidates withdrew (Economist "Farce" 48).

The 1997 elections were invalidated, in effect, because of the outlawing of religious parties

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Category: Foreign - A