Symposium on Algeria: Contributions

Five constitutions in 46 years of independence

The Algerian people is not in control of its destiny: it undergoes politics instead of leading it. Political life is designed with a single aim: to perpetuate the regime in place.

Algeria has had many constitutions, the fifth being the one just adopted by parliament, without ever respecting them and the rules of the game they imply. Changing the constitution every nine or ten years is an excess that does no honour to democracy. For each new president of the republic, the constitution in force is the root cause of all the country’s ills: it must be changed, revised, amended. Constitutions that are barely applied are flouted, revised and worn out before they have served. Should we change the people or the leaders?

The constitution of 28 November 1996 has been violated by the excessive strengthening of personal power. The feeling of being indispensable and irreplaceable is inherent in every position of authority. The president of the republic has not distanced himself from the intoxication of power, which is a poor counsellor, and does not look at himself from outside. He has sat on principles, because they always end up giving way. A power that has exceeded its political credit is being kept beyond its usefulness. No minister has resigned, and none has been made to resign.

Power is embodied in one man, who has put every form of political activity into hibernation. Algeria is the country of a single man, its leader, an absolute monarch ruling without sharing. Over the years power has turned into a monarchy to dominate, control and govern everything, with the help of advisers made in his image and devoted to him, of a government that is a management centre with his unconditional supporters in the key posts, and of a senior administration held by his loyalists.

A president of the republic who is at once head of the executive and minister of defence, who has made the government an annex of the presidency, parliament two rubber-stamp chambers, and the judiciary his repressive right arm, a tool at his service that does not meet the criteria of the constitution. The tendency to accumulate titles and functions, to grant himself ever wider powers, to intervene in every area of public life, to appoint his close supporters to every position of responsibility, and to develop monarchical relations with his entourage, the government and parliament, does not conform to a constitution that is parliamentary in its letter but presidential in its spirit.

The new constitution

It has endorsed all the powers the president appropriated during his two five-year terms, in breach of the constitution and amid the silence, if not the approval, of the Constitutional Council. The constitutional revision amounts to granting the president an almost absolute, irremovable power for life. It makes him alone the whole of the executive: all power, in symbiosis with ultra-liberalism. Presidentialism is the identification of the people with the one who governs it, the sure path to citizens giving up the full exercise of their rights.

The constitutional revision legally guarantees the president a presidency for life, since he wants no successor in his lifetime. By this vote, parliament has sunk into a discredit from which it will struggle to recover.

When a man’s political story is over, when his legal term ends, destiny should not be forced by adding a new chapter: ten years is enough, ten years will do.

“Changing the constitution for one man would not be right,” said the former Russian president Vladimir Putin.

What is the record of the president’s two terms?

A policy is judged by its effectiveness and its results, not by its intentions. Power must be demystified, its customary excesses denounced, and its faults and errors, their causes and consequences, analysed. The people must know the real state of the country. The economic and social crisis repeats itself, drags on, chains on, grows and worsens; the cup is full, people have had enough; the country is stirring, fracturing, cracking everywhere, and the street is the last resort when every possibility of being heard has been exhausted. Algeria is an example of profound social injustice: impoverishment of the population to the point of destitution, disintegration of the social and family fabric, collapse of the health system.

Human security concerns poverty, the weakness of the education system and the lack of freedom. The regime’s neo-conservative, ultra-liberal policy can only lead to a dual, vertically divided society: on one side the well-off who live well, and on the other the majority of the population, the unemployed, workers, pensioners and a crushed middle class, exasperated by the living conditions imposed on them and the brutal fall in their standard of living. There are only two forms of solidarity: sharing poverty or sharing prosperity.

Corruption, rife at every level and in every field, has become a way of life and of government. As long as this cancer is not defeated, the moral health of the people is under threat.

Lifting the state of emergency, in force for more than 16 years, is the precondition for freeing the political and media space and for the exercise of individual and collective freedoms. Peace, which is the purpose of our reflection and action, must be approached from the only angle not yet considered: its political rather than its security dimension. This is not the path chosen for the moment, but it deserves to be explored. The presence of suicide bombers poses a problem that will soon upset the regime’s entire security strategy. The GSPC, present and active on the ground, is able to renew itself, because teenagers, young people and the not so young are knocking at the doors of the maquis.

The West, and the European Union in particular, says to our leaders as to those of the countries of the South: run your countries as you please, as dictators; shoot at crowds, torture, imprison, give yourselves over to corruption, rig elections as you please, ban or restrict trade union freedoms; but open yourselves wide to foreign investment and to the free movement of capital, though not of people, and to the free accumulation of profits.

The president does not want to leave on a failure, but wants to stay in power all his life to carry out his five-year programme. As Kaid Ahmed, minister of finance and planning after the coup of 19 June 1965, used to say: “The three-year plan will be carried out, even if it takes ten years.”

The sovereignty of the dinar must mean an end to its decline, the recovery of its value and its convertibility. Common sense indicates that a nation must first truly occupy every part of its territory, which means cultivating it and making it produce, for its true wealth and its true health derive from what it does with its land and the relationship it has established with it. Food self-sufficiency is becoming a distant, if not unattainable, objective.

Algeria’s position abroad is weakening, and the first objective is to restore its place and its authority in the world.

To whom is the president accountable, and what are the limits of his power?

The army is in command of the country, fully intends to remain so, and has no intention of giving up its status as holder of real power. Coups, by arms or by the ballot box, are part of its tradition. The philosophy of the political system in place is that the president of the republic, chosen by the army’s decision-makers and then elected by a vote that is a mere formality of confirmation, is placed under their close watch throughout his term, so that he does not stray from the mission they have assigned him; otherwise, as the established formula has it, he must submit or resign.

Brought to power by the army’s decision-makers, President A. Bouteflika has made statements of variable geometry, saying one thing and its opposite in the same breath. He asserts his autonomy of decision vis-à-vis the real power and refuses to be its hostage and executor. Are there strategic differences at the top of the state? Locking the country into an iron corset would be a mistake quickly paid for by the bursting of the frame itself.

What credibility and legitimacy can elections born of fraud have?

Electoral fraud, well integrated into the country’s political mores, is present at every election.

The purpose of elections is not to choose the leaders, since the choice is made beforehand and elsewhere, but only to try to legitimise them. Algerians cannot have rights where they have not first been raised to the dignity of citizens. The worst is not having subjects, but calling them citizens. Today a nation of subjects is ready to become a nation of citizens. The same political play is performed at every election, with the same actors and each time a single winner: the regime. Alternation in power is the only possible protection against the easy ways and temptations that come with growing used to power, and the political and moral degradation of the institutions is due to its absence.

The president’s illness

This is a field in which psychological bluff and disinformation are part of the rules of the game. Algerians wonder about the president’s illness. For some, he is very ill, unfit to carry out his duties, kept on for a third term only to prepare his succession. Is he physically able to exercise his function fully? Why the secrecy and mystery surrounding his illness? And always these rumours and doubts, and denials by way of reply. The president’s confidence in his energy, his vigour and his intellectual faculties is a natural, human reaction. For his fans and admirers, very numerous, who are only waiting for his signal to beg him to sacrifice himself for a third term, he is sharp, in very good shape and in remarkable physical and intellectual condition. The president could say, like the former king of Spain: “There is no abuse of power in this country, only abuse of obedience.” Fidel Castro gave up his functions because he was ill. Where is Algeria, accelerating its descent into purgatory, heading? What will become of it in the next four months? What political replacement, what alternative? The political game is locked. The centralised political system, now at its end, negates freedoms. A radical change is needed in the style and method of running the country, to put an end to the political and moral degradation of institutions corroded for ten years by the clans in power, which are merely a form of tribalism recognising only the interests of its members. After a decade of totalitarian political power that keeps growing stronger, national sovereignty and citizenship; freedom and justice, for there is no freedom without justice and no justice without freedom; the separation and balance of powers; the will to give the presidential function its democratic meaning without diminishing its pre-eminence; to restore to the government its prerogatives, to parliament its powers and its dignity, and to the judiciary its independence: these are the common programme of the opposition.

We must take time to think in order to move in the right direction, since politics, by its nature and role, has created sharp tensions and divisions between the various political, social and cultural currents. Political thinking is not yet concerned with rigour and coherence, and does not yet embody the spirit of synthesis and concord needed to keep time bombs from weakening the future. The contradictions exist; they must be tackled head-on without evading reality. We must keep listening to the impulses of society.

The opposition will have to take up the problems, because it will have an audience and authority only if it offers solutions, overcomes its differences, remains united and speaks the same language, and is determined, as a whole and in each of its components, to define the objectives to be achieved and the methods for achieving them. It must guard against the two dangers that threaten it: sectarianism and exclusion.

We must exclude exclusion and be intolerant of intolerance.

The dividing line runs between democrats and false democrats, republicans and false republicans, Islamists and false Islamists. The price of a free, just and pluralist society is each person’s contribution to this profusion of ideas, initiatives, proposals and divergent and contradictory expressions, which will release the energies of millions of men and women whom the current regime condemns to powerlessness. It is together that we can turn public opinion and open a space of freedom in the eventful four months ahead, with the will and ability to act in full confidence and mutual respect, so that the people becomes the leader of the future. First, the political, social and cultural currents, public figures and activists must be allowed to express themselves and make their convictions and ideas heard. Then all these voices and writings must be coordinated and synthesised, in order to identify the conditions for political renewal and launch an appeal to gather the forces and means of success.

Such an appeal does not belong to its initiators; it belongs to the men and women who take it up in their workplaces and decide for themselves how to use and adapt it. The one they are waiting for, and who is waiting for them to act together, may be close by. Transparency and consultation in decision-making are a decisive political impetus.

To win, it is not enough to know how to fight; one must above all first prepare, and then carefully choose the place and time of action and political confrontation. When the people do not support the regime, there is active resistance but also passive resistance, more serious because of the force of inertia.

“You pretend to pay us, we pretend to work,”

said the workers of Romania to Ceausescu.

The mechanism by which power was stolen from the people, proclaimed sovereign by every constitution, has been analysed many times. The next presidential election will pose a serious problem, because the memory of electoral fraud is still vivid in Algerians’ collective memory. The election’s results are settled before it has even begun. As usual, the vote will pass at best for a formality, at worst for an electoral farce. The road to freedom is not participation in rigged elections, but abstention, the boycott, which is an effective political weapon.

Change is inevitable

Brahim Younessi, 13 November 2008

This paper was to have been delivered at the symposium organised by the Cordoba Foundation in Geneva on 13–15 November on “Prospects for political change in Algeria”.

Change denotes the passage from one state to another. Physicists know this phenomenon well, notably in thermodynamics, which develops an evolving picture of the universe. The social sciences have tried, with varying success, to borrow the concepts of enthalpy and entropy produced by this branch of physics in order to explain, through the principle of entropy, the natural degradation that undoubtedly affects social systems. And in the face of the chaos generated in particular by time, and of disorder, negentropy, the organising principle of the system, becomes a necessity in order to produce cohesion and a reasonable order founded essentially on values.

Sociology, for its part, set itself the fundamental task of stating the laws of social change. Auguste Comte’s law of three stages is known to all. For the positivist philosopher, change is necessarily an evolution, a progress marked by the passage from the theological stage to the metaphysical stage and then to the positive stage, which corresponds to the age of science.

Change can be explained in no other way than by the transformation or modification of a thing, a situation, a person, a society and so on.

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed,” said the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. And every transformation, the enthalpy of a change of state, as physicists say, needs energy and action to take place.

To reassure everyone, I do not mean here revolution, which generally denotes a sudden and abrupt change in the established order. But one may speak of revolution whenever a profound and radical change occurs in the political and social structures of a state, and that is what interests us here. The choice of this symposium’s subject seems to me quite eloquent, because the first word of its title, “Prospects for political change in Algeria”, reflects the organisers’ optimism about achieving change, distant perhaps but probable. Without certainty, but change has a chance of happening. Edgar Morin says that an “impartial observer, situated in a time and a place and well informed about the past and the processes under way in the present, can project into the future what seems probable to him.” The absence of certainty leaves room within the probable for the random and for chance, whereas necessity and urgency demand change. So does the principle of entropy. And because of this principle the system cannot transform itself: it cannot change, although it absolutely must. We know that change cannot be decreed; it must therefore be helped to happen, to come about. So how can it be helped, and by what means? Let me hasten to say, before attempting an answer, that our conception of change is necessarily positive, beneficial and liberating: we want to transform society, to replace a situation we judge bad by another that seems, or that we believe, better. Yet we are not unaware that change can also have harmful effects; in its negative sense it can be understood as an alteration, an inconstancy, a misadventure that is, after all, an unfortunate event…

Hence all the caution with which we speak of change, even though, as we know, it often brings advantages, unlike the status quo, which almost always benefits the established order and those who resist change. And resistance to change, when it comes from social forces, is often motivated by fear of insecurity, by mistrust and above all by uncertainty and the unknown. Change is almost always regarded as risky; conservatism, habits and interests weigh heavily in the choice to resist any transformation. As Jean Monnet said, “Men accept change only in necessity, and they see necessity only in crisis.”

And the crisis is here. Algeria has been living it for a very long time. The failure, in the mid-1970s, of the project of modernising the economy through accelerated industrialisation had already half-opened the door to change, or at least to a period of transition, which the regime quickly closed again on the grounds of a threat on our borders with the Western Sahara affair.

Made potentially possible, change is still waiting for its hour, despite the many convulsions that have shaken the country. A succession of major political upheavals (Kabylie in 1980, Constantine and Sétif in 1986, the whole country ablaze in 1988, the start of the violence in 1992) has not overcome a regime too autistic to accompany a change that it knows necessity will impose sooner or later. The breach opened in February 1989 did not fundamentally change the matrix of power, which continues to control all resources and use every means, including armed force, as in October 1988, to keep itself at the head of the state.

The passage from a society of authority to a society of freedoms struggles to happen without clashes, without violence and without tragedy. Each time the country has come close to a peaceful change of the system, the regime in all its components has chosen confrontation in response to society’s democratic aspirations. The worst of politics is the politics of the worst, a source of chaos and disorder, pursued by a regime facing social protests in the making because, by a curious reversal, of the country’s financial windfall brought by the extraordinary and incredible surge in hydrocarbon prices. Paradoxically, this financial ease marks the evanescence of the state and the absence of any public policy in the face of society’s expectations and many demands. The accumulation of problems that are at once

– political: the locking-up of this resource undeniably raises the nagging question of the exercise of the popular will, which the president of the republic has just flouted by revising the constitution, which now gives him the right to seek a third term;

– economic: this resource is left to incoherence, anarchy and disorder; everyone here knows the negative and regressive performance of the Algerian economy, tarnished by the image of the harraga fleeing unemployment and poverty;

– social: this resource is explosive, a powder keg that can catch fire at any moment; trade union protests are multiplying, young people who do not try their luck at sea cry out their despair and often find themselves sentenced to prison for “disturbing public order”, and every socio-professional category suffers from weak purchasing power;

– cultural: this resource is just as blocked; Algerians’ quest for identity is still pressing and has lost none of its acuity; it can serve as a detonator for the other resources; it characterises the entropic evolution of a system that is becoming ever more unstable because of the dilapidated state of the country and the disorder that reigns there.

So I return to my question: how can it be helped to change, and by what means? Building a credible, serious, hard-working opposition seems to me one means, I did not say the only means, of making change not only possible but inevitable.