Tunisia protests spread to neighboring Algeria, the most populous and wealthiest country in the Maghreb. In the capital, in a dozen cities, including Boumerdes, and, above all, in Oran, the second largest city in the country, hundreds of young people very violently confronted the police throughout the afternoon of Wednesday and sometimes until the early hours of Thursday.The origin of the protest is not as precise as it was in Tunisia, but is just as spontaneous. The first signs of discontent emerged in Algeria on Tuesday, but left the next day when young, sometimes hooded and provided with sticks or iron bars, they seized the center of Oran and at least four districts of Algiers, including downtown Bab el Oued.
Took to the streets to denounce the rising prices of some commodities such as oil and sugar, wrecked furniture, and stoned and threw cocktail "bombs" against public buildings, starting as a police station of Bab el Oued. "The state will subsidize the basic necessities," he hastened to declare the trade minister, Mustapha Benben, in an attempt to end the revolt.
In Algeria, the rebellion is younger, less massive, and more violent than in Tunisia. Beyond their specific triggers in both cases highlights the desperation of a majority of unemployed youth, which is considered without a future and oppressed by authoritarian regimes of different signs but economic liberal in Tunisia and reminiscent Socialists in Algeria.
In Tunisia the revolt, which began three weeks ago with the immolation of a 26 year old street vendor whose cart was overturned by the police, continued yesterday with a strike called by the Bar Association and was followed by 95% the 8,000 lawyers in the country, according to Dean Abderrazak Kilani.
Hundreds gathered in the lobby of the Palace of Justice in the capital under the watchful gaze of riot police did not intervene. The police did act, however, yesterday morning to catch one of the most famous bloggers, Hamadi Kalouicha, and "The General", a rapper who wrote a song whose lyric reads "President, your people are dead," according to Nawaat alternative web.
org. Dozens of lesser-known people have also been detained across the country. Despite police repression, some of the traditional figures of the opposition to the regime, to which the revolt was taken by surprise, are convinced that the protests will continue. Continue it beyond the "barbaric methods" of law enforcement "has not been able to answer the legitimate demands of the population," he told the television "France 24" lawyer Radhia Nasraoui, president of the Association illegal Combating Torture.
Sihem Bensedrine, spokesman of the outlawed National Council for Liberties and exile in Barcelona, even dares to predict, in conversation with this correspondent, that "we are at the end of the regime of President Ben Ali." Why? "Never in the contemporary history of Tunisia, a head of state has been treated well by ordinary people who by tradition and fear far respected institutions," he responds.
"The mass chanted slogans in the street showing the contempt inspired by the regime," continues Bensedrine. The most repeated slogans of the protesters are, according to her, "Ben Ali, coward!", "Thieves, return the money to the people !, "" Out of Carthage thieves! "the presidential palace headquarters of Ben Ali took 23 years.
Abdelatif Bensalem, a Spanish-speaking intellectual in exile in Paris, he laments, however, that the regime of their country has even with the support of France, Italy and Spain and the U.S., countries that have managed to convince that it is a bulwark against radical Islam. No European government has condemned the actions of the Tunisian police fire which killed two protesters on Christmas Eve in Mezel Bouzayane.
The Spanish Secretary of State for the EU, Diego Lopez Garrido, made great efforts during the Spanish Presidency to give Tunisia the so-called "advanced status" enjoyed by Morocco since 2008 and which makes it a privileged partner in Europe, but failed to finish negotiation. IFEX, a Canadian NGO that supports the Tunisian opposition, tried to hold in November in Madrid, a meeting of dissidents inside and outside the country, but could not because the Consulate of Spain in Tunisia did not grant visas to two prominent opponents Ben Ali, according to organizers.
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