Sunday, February 13, 2011

The government silences claims of democratization in Algeria

An impressive display of force by police prevented thousands of people marched in the streets of Algiers to demand the democratization of the Algerian regime, which was the largest protest in the capital lived for a decade. More than three thousand citizens, challenging the government ban on the capital, focused on the First of May Square an hour before the start of the protest but were prevented from walking the streets in protest by about 30,000 police and riot forces took the city.

The march had been called for nearly a month after the fall of President Ben Ali in Tunisia, called the National Coordinator for Democracy and Change (NCDC), which brings together various civil society organizations and opposition parties. Hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes police mingled among the protesters and arrested dozens of people, including many trade unionists and representatives of civil society organizations belonging to the direction of the CNDC.

As co-convenor, detainees were more than 400, including nearly fifty women and Algerian and foreign journalists, and counted several injured but did not say how many. The concentration lasted for hours peacefully until the police officers approached the protesters and violent clashes that left dozens injured.

The police deployment end did not stop the protesters, mostly young but also workers from different social sectors, lawyers and academics, launched slogans against the regime headed by Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. "We're sick of this power," " genuine democracy and freedom, "" Down with the corrupt and rotten system, "Bouteflika, go away" or "We want a country run by young people and not the old" were among the slogans chanted by the participants encased in an adjacent street to the square by several police cordons.

These cords prevented more people could access the protest, but instead players expanded over a dozen teenagers, shouting slogans in favor of Bouteflika tried to provoke violent incidents mingling with the protesters. The president of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LADDH) Buchachi Mustafa, said: "The power has used force to keep the Algerians to demonstrate peacefully" and said they were cut "all access to the capital" so many people inside, especially in the region of Kabylia, could not come to Algiers.

To Buchachi, and the rest of the protest organizers, the event was a success, despite police repression, as it has managed to break the wall of silence and fear "still hangs over the country after the brutal civil war of the nineties.

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