Category Archives: Algeria

Africa, Algeria, Arab League, Arab Politics, Arab Revolutions, Egypt, GCC, Syria

Life Terms: from Algiers to Cairo and Damascus and on to Pakalingding……….

      

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“Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika appeared set to win re-election for another five years on Friday after a vote opponents dismissed as a stage-managed fraud to keep the ailing leader in power. Sitting a wheelchair, Bouteflika cast his vote on Thursday in a rare public appearance since suffering a stroke last year that has raised doubts about whether, after 15 years in power, he is fit enough to govern the North African oil state. Official results were scheduled to be released later on Friday by the interior ministry, but Bouteflika’s allies on Thursday were already claiming a landslide victory……………………”

 

So, it has been three plus years on since the Arab uprisings started in Tunisia in December of 2010 and spread eastward. Let us look at the situation now:

  • In Algeria, president Bouteflika (father of teflika, wtf that be) ‘wins’ a fourth or fifth term of presidency today. At this rate he will be in power when he becomes eligible for a place in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo or in a basement corner of the Louvre where the mummies are kept.

  • Abd Rabbuh Hadi bin Zombie of Yemen won 98% of the vote last time in an election that the GCC potentates declared was clean and free and democratic. He may be getting ready to run again, unless a U.S. drone mistakes him for an Al Aqaeda zombie. Meanwhile the allegedly deposed Ali Abdallah Saleh is not far from the center of power, very likely plotting something or another.

  • Egypt is getting ready to “elect”, by the usual landslide, Generalisimo Field Marshal Sisi bin Mubarak Al Saud. Interim non-leader Adly Mansour Al Zombie will vanish; he will go back into the vast caverns of Mr. Mubarak’s everlasting bureaucracy.

  • Bashar Al Assad will apparently ‘win’ another term later this year in Syria. Before you start guffawing think of this: given the sorry state of the opposition Jihadis and the divisive fear they have sown inside Syria he actually might win an election by a plurality (probably not by a majority). Quite a feat given the bloody mess his country is in.

  • Nouri Al Maliki of Iraq may win yet another term as prime minister, unfortunately. That depends on parliamentary election results and how the leaders of the various factions and the Kurds feel. Ayad Allawi will again be the favorite candidate of the Baathists and the neighboring Arab potentates. But as I have fawtad years ago: he will never become prime minister of Iraq.

  • A gaggle of Lebanese right-wing generals and warlords are fighting for the ceremonial presidency of that country. What is at stake? The figurehead president gets to name a couple of minor cabinet members and he gets a fat Saudi check to help him pick sides. 

  • On the Gulf. The would-be tribal liberators and bearers of democracy to Syria hold tight to absolute power at home, with a little help from their oligarch friends. From Riyadh to Abu Dhabi and Manama, they cling to every morsel of power. Even the unloved prime minister of Bahrain who has been in power for some 42 years. One of my suspect sources tells me he has vowed to leave office the old fashioned way: feet first and straight to Boot Hill. 

  • No need to go over the besotted Sudan, whose president of some 27 years in power is usually wanted by some international criminal court or another but is traveling across the Middle East quite freely. 

  • Then there are the other two bulwarks of the Arab League, Mauretania and Somalia. Frankly I have no idea WTF is going on over there. I assume each of these two countries has a president or a wazir or sublime port or someone like that who rules or pretends to. 

  • I forgot about the Comoros, but maybe next year, after I pay a visit to Moroni. 

  • On the bright side, there are rumors that Gambia may be the next country to join the Arab League and the Gulf GCC. They would need a Saudi invitation for both (even the French would need a Saudi invitation for that). Which has me wondering what is happening in Banjul or even in Pakalinding nowadays. 

Algeria

MENA Medical: Why You Should Never Faint in Algeria……………

         

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“An old Algerian woman who was presumed dead and taken for burial opened her eyes and woke up just after mourners placed her in the grave, prompting most of them to flee, a newspaper in the North African Arab country reported. The woman, in her 70s, was carried out of the coffin and placed inside her grave in the cemetery in the tiny eastern town of El Mahmal. When one mourner uncovered her face to read the final Koran verse, she opened her eyes and began to breath……………“Most of the mourners fled the cemetery while a handful of religious old men stayed there and called people back to announce the woman is still alive,” it said. “They then lifted her out of the grave and carried her back home, where the woman’s funeral was turned into a celebration.”….. .……”

Apparently it can be dangerous to faint in some places. Before you faint, make sure you write on your chest: “I am not dead, just fainted”. Otherwise, you might end up either dead or a miracle.

Cheers
mhg

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Algeria, Arab Revolutions, France, North Africa

France after Nazism: the Massacre at Sétif………

   

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                          Neck of the woods
“On the European side, vague anxiety was succeeded by real fear. Despite all the changes, the idea of treating Algerians as equals was intolerable, to be avoided at all costs……… In Sétif the trouble started when police tried to seize the PPA flag, now the Algerian flag, and banners calling for the release of Messali Hadj and Algerian independence. It spread to the surrounding countryside, where tribes rose up. In Guelma the events were triggered by arrests and the actions of the militia, which provoked tribes to take revenge on local settlers. The European civilians and the police responded with mass executions and reprisals against entire communities. To remove all traces of their crimes and prevent investigations, they opened mass graves and burned the bodies in the lime kilns at Heliopolis. The army’s actions caused a military historian, Jean-Charles Jauffret, to say that its conduct “resembled a European wartime operation rather than a traditional colonial war” (4). In the Bougie region about 15,000 women and children were forced to kneel before a military parade. The final toll is speculative, as the French government closed the commission of inquiry directed by General Tubert and the killers were never tried………….”

The Pieds noirs, the European colonists, not only wanted to keep the myth that Algeria was French and that Algerians were “French. They also did not want the Muslim Algerians to have equal political rights. Messali Hadj later formed a movement against the FLN and was demonized by Arab nationalists (he died in exile in France). Ferhat Abbas went on to become first president of the Interim Algerian Government in exile after the FLN started its revolt in 1954. He was replaced later. After independence in 1962 Ahmed Ben Bella came out of a French prison to became president. He was overthrown in 1965 by a coup plotted by Boumedienne and Bouteflika (the current president) and others.
Later on, Ben Bella, after he was released from his ‘Algerian” prison, visited Hadj’s grave. 
Cheers
mhg
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Algeria, Arab Politics, Culture, France

Arab ‘Literary’ Awards: Good Writer in April in Paris, Bad Writer in June……….

    

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                       Neck of the woods
“A celebrated Algerian novelist was given a top French literary prize on Thursday in a ceremony that was marred by the withdrawal of its Arab sponsors. Boualem Sansal had been due to receive the Editions Gallimard Arabic Novel prize for his book “Rue Darwin” [Darwin Street] earlier in June. The 15,000 euro prize was to be given by the Paris-based Arab Ambassador’s Council, which founded the award in 2008. But between being nominated and being awarded his prize, Sansal attended the Jerusalem Writers Festival in May – as guest of honour. Militant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas called it, “an act of treason against the Palestinian people.” By the time the writer was due to receive his award, the Ambassadors Council had permanently withdrawn its support for the award………… Speaking on France Inter radio on Friday, Sansal said it was “completely unacceptable” that the ambassadors should interfere with their own jury’s decision ………..”

This is a strange case, not an easy one, involving politics and literary merit. If his book was good and deserved the prize in April, what has changed in the book to make it undeserving in June? Did he revise the book to make it less deserving during that period? Regardless of what you think of his visit to Jerusalem. Perceptions of the man’s work changed in some ways because of his visit, but the criteria for the award would be the same.
Now he won’t have the 15,000 euro to spend in Paris. That is a shame, a big fat dommage: I can think of no better place to spend 15,000 euro than Paris (the one in France not the one in Texas, assuming this guy is not into giving to charities).
All they did was to make his novel better known: I shall order a copy for my iPad or Kindle this afternoon.

Cheers
mhg
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Algeria, Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions

Algeria’s Ouyahia and Albert Camus: Arab Spring as a Plague, about the Humor……..

 

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“What was meant to be the highlight of the government’s election campaign – a mass rally in Algiers at the weekend addressed by prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia – seems to have backfired. Ouyahia’s speech was certainly memorable, but mostly for the wrong reasons. Harking back to the country’s independence struggle against France, he said: “The Arab spring for me is a disaster. We don’t need lessons from outside. Our spring is Algerian, our revolution of 1 November 1954.” Unlike the glorious days of 1954, the current Arab spring is “a plague” sweeping the region, he told voters. Its effects can be seen, he said, in “the colonisation of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the partition of Sudan and the weakening of Egypt”. “The revolutions that engulfed brotherly and friendly countries such as Iraq, Sudan, Tunisia, Mali, Libya and Egypt are not accidental but are the work of Zionism and Nato,”………..”

Zionism was behind the Arab uprisings? That sounds like the Saudi Mufti Shaikh Al Al Shaikh talking (or maybe the Saudi king or Muammar Qaddafi or the al-Khalifa of Bahrain or the Assad regime in Syria). They have all blamed “foreigners” and Zionists and drugs and even obsession with sex (Tahrir tents and virginity tests) for the uprisings.
Interesting that he called the ‘Arab Spring” a plague , maybe he is a fan of Albert Camus (another native of Algeria). I suppose it all depends on how things turn out in the end (whenever that may be). Who knows how it will turn out in the future, but at least people are voting for their own governments in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya (as they do in Lebanon and Iraq). They are NOT voting for their own governments in Syria and Bahrain and Yemen and Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the Sudan. I may not like the government they vote for, most likely I don’t in these cases, but it is their choice.

Cheers
mhg


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Algeria, France, North Africa

Cinquante ans plus tard: how France Dodged an Algerian Bullet …………

    

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“If they lacked reasonable arguments, the French Parliament has just provided them with another argument by passing the law penalising any remark undermining the Harkis , the Algerian auxiliaries of the French army during the occupation. Moreover, in December, the French Right-wing had attempted to deposit the ashes of General Bigeard, former torturer during the Battle of Algiers at the Musée des Invalides in Paris. For their part, the Algerians have refused an entry visa to the pieds noirs , the former French colonial settlers in Algeria, who wanted to make a pilgrimage to their birthplace. These are small spikes to remind each other that one can be moderate but not amnesiac. Whether we like it or not, the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of Algeria will not fail to crystallize all resentments and unspoken terms of the common history of the two countries that still continue to modulate memory 
according to politic issues…………”

Until 1962 many Frenchmen insisted that Algeria was part of France, that Algerians were French. They also thought that some Algerians, the non-Muslim whites, were more French than others, with more ‘French’ rights than other Algerians. Just imagine how things would be now, if the Algerian revolution had failed. If France had won, it would have been a classic pyrrhic victory. Imagine how things would be now:

France would have a population of about 100 million, of which about 40 million would be Muslims of Algerian (and other African descent). Forty percent of all French would be Muslim, with the percentage growing. Just think of the possibilities. From a certain French point of view, they truly dodged a Muslim bullet, and they have Charles de Gaulle to thank for that. This is of course based on certain undeniable assumptions on how the French feel about Muslims in their country.
These French right-wingers who still admire the hardline colonialists of old Algeria would feel differently about them now had Algeria remained French. Wouldn’t you say?
Cheers
mhg


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