Algeria's internal issues
This is an excerpt from the paper...
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
. . .
999 elections were merely the latest electoral addition to a decade of governmental corruption and tyranny. The intervening years has seen such outrages as the passing of a constitution in 1996 which outlawed any political party based on religion, an attempt to emasculate the fundamentalist Islamic groups. The result was a civil war when the people realized that only through violence would they ever win the rights the government was denying them. Unfortunately, "Western media have largely bought into the Algerian government's claims of 'liberalization' and that the Islamists are the sole perpetrators of the worst violence" (Chalala 8).
Algeria's violence and instability, along with the presence of both an Islamic fundamentalist threat and a dictatorial government, is even more frightening to the region and the world when we consider that it may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons through its own development program, although the government denies such a claim, just as the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein denies the same charge.
As Albright writes, with respect to the threat of nuclear weapons development,
European and Arab governments alike continue to express concernAlgeria's nuclear [energy] program seems too
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Economist Farce, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Morocco Albright, Salvation Front, European Arab, Committee Inquiry, Unfortunately Western, Tunisia Morocco, Economist Algeria, , civil war, 11 2001, economist farce, nuclear weapons, social economic, algerian civil war, nation develop, fundamentalist islamic, violence algeria, economist algeria, threat nuclear weapons, party won,
Approximate Word count = 1730
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Algeria internal issues
|