Algeria: The most laughable speech by General Gaid Salah, chief of Algerian army

Versions francaise

Oped and opinion by Arezki Daoud | 20 November 2019: The Algerian regime has been working hard to show an image of a normal country that is preparing a

Population in Tichy town shutting down election office

normal presidential election. Sadly, the preparation phase and the ongoing election campaign are a disaster, to say the least. They are turning the whole affair into a comedy. They are showing how amateur and outright incapable the Algerian government is.

For those of you have no idea what is going on in Algeria, let’s do a quick recap: early this year, the severely handicapped President Bouteflika was bracing for a fifth term, after 20 years in power.  The people got fed up because Boutef has been president since 1999, and in 2013 he got hit by a debilitating stroke, and since then he was rarely seen, could never speak, could never work. Taking advantage of the public anger, with the first anti-Bouteflika rallies on 22 February, a handful of Algerian generals pushed the president out, arrested scores of personalities, including the president’s brother, all that in the name of the people. But the generals essentially executed a coup d’etat and have been working since then to rebuild the same type of governance, with a handful of former ministers under Bouteflika to reproduce the same system of corruption and cronyism, sponsored by France and the UAE.  The problem then is that the generals did not expect the people to

Public backlash: Campaigns are unable to even post their election posters

remain defiant. Since 22 February, the people went from demanding the ousting of Bouteflika to demanding a complete regime change. So for months, anti-regime rallies took place on the twice-weekly basis, and have now expanded to daily occurrences as we get closer to the 12 December election.  It is clear that virtually all Algerians, with the exception of operatives paid for by the intelligence services, are clearly opposing the election.  

So the Algerian people have been essentially on fire, but using peaceful means and without leaders. This situation has driven the military junta crazy. Without violence, it is difficult to justify the use of tanks and weapons against peaceful people. And how can you cut the head of the protest movement if it does not have leaders? So what the junta did is what every junta in the 70s and 80s did, from Chile to Argentina, and even before during the General Franco era.  It launched a counter-revolution to break the people’s rallies. Yet, all efforts, tactics and initiatives have failed. They tried dividing the Algerians along ethnic lines: it didn’t work. They tried to scare them about the risk of “Islamist terrorism,” it did not work. They said a power vacuum will bring NATO troops to invade Algeria, nobody bought it. And while doing this, they have been arresting hundreds of people on charges that do not exist in Algerian code and used a couple of rubber-stamping courts to do their bidding.  Meanwhile, they ordered French satellite company Eutelsat to shut down all opposition TV stations. Recently, they have convinced Facebook to close down pages of people who are critical to the Algerian regime. And Facebook, willingly or not, ended up closing thousands of pages of people who have not broken any term of use.

For the military junta and its supporters, in particular France and the UAE, the

Protesters hang one trash bag per each presidential candidate

endgame is to have an election that will produce some legitimacy.  Operatives of the regime say that even a 5% turnout “is good enough.” They produced five men who agreed to run, all are former ministers in the now defunct Bouteflika regime. Needless to say, they did nothing to appease public anger. If anything, every step that the military junta and their experts in Paris and Abu Dhabi have made have been counter-productive and, even more, they have produced the opposite affect and that is to galvanize the Hirak movement even more.  It is a hopeless situation.

After shutting down access to the Internet and disciplining domestic journalists, the regime proceeded to attempt to create counter-rallies in an effort to show to both a domestic audience and their patrons abroad that things are fine now. And that is “the public is in favor of elections!”  The only problem is really no one showed up in those rallies.  They managed to gathered a couple of dozens in most rallies, mostly by threatening workers of public entities to join or lose their jobs. They gathered seniors from remote villages promising them land and cash. Then, the public response has been extraordinary. Using mobile phones, members of the anti-regime movement filmed and shamed the few who participated in those pro-government rallies. Since then those rallies have all vanished. 

In the ongoing campaign, no single candidate is able to give a speech or meet

Algerian protesters rejecting election. Rally on 19 Nov 2019

with potential voters (though non-existent) because the local populations have been hostile to any election activity in their towns.  Candidates have been booed and ridiculed, in what is clearly the most extraordinary fake election ever recorded in history before our very eyes. This is happening live and there is no single international journalist covering it.

In light of this, and while the world is getting footage of and watching the massive backlash against an incompetent regime that is still alive because Paris and Abu Dhabi is keeping on live support, the chief of the military junta General Gaid Salah gave the most laughable speech on 12 Nov 2019, once again lying to his bosses.  That’s because the Algerians know the whole story, so the speech is likely targeted to observers outside Algeria.  Here’s what he said: