By Arezki Daoud – 12 November 2019 – An Algerian court handed over one-year jail terms to 28 demonstrators for the “crime” of carrying the Amazigh flag. The court’s argument to justify its abusive sentences was that those sentenced were “undermining national unity.” In fact, many Algerians were arrested even for carrying the national flag. Carrying flags in the current political turmoil is seen as a direct challenge to the military command and those controlling it from abroad. Quoted by AFP, Said Salhi, vice president of the Algerian human rights group LADDH, condemned the ruling as “heavy, hard and unexpected.”
The regime in Algeria has engaged in what is an existential fight with the Algerian people. The latter has been demanding a complete overhaul of the political system, which has long favored corruption and nepotism, and now the military command is favoring despotism to enable the continuation of the Bouteflika governance model but with difference faces.
The inability of the Algeria military to come up with a reasonable political compromise makes it behave as in the dictatorships of the 1970s. Indeed, the Algerian regime has taken a new but extraordinary step towards the militarization of the state. A new law proposes that the military security services will have the same rights and duties as those of the police and the gendarmerie. In other words, soldiers and intelligence operatives will be able to arrest civilians as if they were the police. Even worse, they will not need any judicial oversight since arrests will not require a magistrate’s warrant. The law will soon be voted in the People’s and National Assembly through a series of drastic amendments made by the Ministry of Justice to the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Minister of Justice Belkacem Zeghmati, who reports to Deputy Minister and army chief of staff General Gaid Salah, said this week: “the prerogatives of the Military Security Services in the field of judicial police do not differ in any way from those attributed to the Police and the Gendarmerie.” This is an unprecedented situation rarely seen in other country in the world. The crisis in Algeria is now entering its most dangerous period as the regime behaves erratically and continues to turn down any logical strategy that would stabilize the country.
