Arab spring (Algeria)
By Feroz Shahjahan
The Arab Spring was a revolutionary wave of both violent and non-violent demonstrations, protests, riots, coups and civil wars in the Arab world that began on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunasian Revolution, and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League and its surroundings. Algeria was one of the countries that was inspired by the Arab Spring.
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Despit Algeria’s demoratic constitutional background, corruption is a major issue the country faces, for example Algeria has been called a "controlled democracy", or a state where the military and "a select group" of unelected civilians—reportedly known to Algerians as “le pouvoir” (“the power”) who make major decisions, such as who should be president and Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been the president since 1999.
Due to corruption in the government, it caused a repelling effect by affecting the employment rate in the country, there was lack of housing for people, inflation rate increased, there were restriction for freedom of speech and living conditions was worsening day by day. These are the issues that led to the beginning of the movement.Inspired by the Arab spring movement in countries like Tunisia, and Egypt, Algeria decided to start an Arab spring movement in the Algeria in order for the voice of the people to be heard. The protest was both a violent and nonviolent. Before the Arab spring in Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika was the president of the country since 1999, and during his time in power corruption, regressive taxes, authoritarianism, unemployment and inflation were major causes that affected the economy of the country, which consequently affected the Algerian people’s standard of living. The inflation rate of Algeria took a huge hike towards the end of 2011 from 5 % to 8 %, this lead to increase in food prices and other commodities, and due to increase in prices people needed more high paying job and also demanded raise in their salaries from their existing jobs in order to survive the economic crisis, but companies due to rise in price had to layoff a lot of workers since the value of labor has increased and they cannot afford them. Local businesses have also reduced their rate of production since labor is expensive this again explains why there is raise in prices of commodities. The Algerian Arab spring has not been completely non-violent, there have been some violence in the protest, but the violet protest has given the regime more reasons to use police and military force in order to stop the movement. However, there have been non-violent protests that have aided the movement. The advantages that Algeria gained through the non-violence protest is that, the regime did not have any excuse to disperse off the protest through the use of police and military because the non-violent riots did not cause any harm. People were only using their freedom of speech to express their concerns. The movement attracted alot of youth polulation that was involved in the movement.Also, in late January 2011, the opposition group Rachad, uploaded film of a non-violent demonstration of "more than 1000 people" demanding housing. Lastly, as the self immolation of Mohamed bouazizi sparked a clear impact in the Tunisian movement, a wave of self immolation also swept in Algeria in order to gain an attention to the movement. |
Resourceshttp://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21600984-even-if-arab-spring-has-sorely-disappointed-dictators-even-benevolent-ones-are-not
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/opinion/the-algerian-exception.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/opinion/the-algerian-exception.html?_r=0 http://www.tradingeconomics.com/algeria/inflation-cpi |
Quick links to fileshttps://web.archive.org/web/20110727195202/http://www.rachad.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=617&catid=69&Itemid=101 |