The Hirak, the huge youth-led protest movement that has erupted across Algeria this past year, is a break with the past, being non-violent and including people from across the political spectrum. Although it isn’t even an informal opposition, it has already twice forced a postponement of Algeria’s presidential election.

‘Go!’ Protestors demand that remaining Bouteflika officials step down in Algiers this July Farouk Batiche · Anadolu · Getty

Tens of thousands of people flooded Rue Didouche-Mourad in central Algiers on 1 November. The street was too narrow to contain the torrent of protestors wearing and carrying the colours of the national flag on hats, scarves, flags and banners. Their chants were audible even over the noise of the authorities’ helicopters; they demanded the cancellation of the presidential election scheduled for 12 December and attacked the chief of staff, General Ahmed Gaid Salah, who has been the regime’s strongman since President Abdelaziz Bouteflika resigned on 2 April (1).

The demonstrators are known as the Hirak (‘movement’), after the popular protest movement that extends to Lebanon and Morocco’s Rif. They called for Gaid Salah to go, along with the interim president, Abdelkader Bensalah, and the prime minister, Noureddine Bedoui. They chanted, ‘Civil state not military state’, ‘By God, we will not stop’, ‘Gang of thieves, you’ve ruined the country’, ‘Cowards, free our children’, ‘No dialogue, no elections with the mafia’. They sang Liberté by the rapper Soolking and La Casa del Mouradia, a protest song from the football terraces (2). They invoked the anti-colonial struggle and Ali la Pointe, revolutionary leader and hero of the Battle of Algiers. The chants of ‘Istiqlal!’ (Independence) and ‘Throw out the generals, Algeria will have independence’ proved how hated the authorities are. This was the 37th successive Friday protest, and the 65th anniversary of the start, on 1 November 1954, of the struggle that ended French colonial domination.

To reduce the size of the demonstrations, the authorities have tried since the summer to prevent people from outside Algiers coming to the city. Police roadblocks ring Algiers to control traffic and turn back those whose number plates or identity cards show they live outside. So determined protesters walk long distances to circumvent roadblocks and join the Hirak. Others, wryly referred to as ‘internal clandestines’ (harragas), come by boat from coastal towns to Algiers’s beaches.

The authorities have also attempted to prevent videos of the marches being streamed online and have encouraged pro-election counter-demonstrations. The national broadcaster, more tightly controlled than ever despite protests from many of its journalists, has had to show close-up footage of paltry pro-regime gatherings, but that just provoked mockery. On 7 November in Tlemcen, Hirakists doused a square with insecticide and bleach after it had been used for a small ‘spontaneous gathering’ backing the army and the presidential election.

‘Clinging on at any price’

Though the government has not used violence, it has employed repression and targeted intimidation against young activists and ordinary citizens, who have been arrested and jailed as a warning. According to an unofficial count by Algerian NGOs, including the National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees (CNLD), there were over a hundred prisoners of conscience at the end of October. Other estimates claim 300; the authorities refuse to reveal the official number. On 12 November, 28 people were given custodial sentences for possession of an Amazigh (Berber) flag. Several prominent figures are in custody, including Lakhdar Bouregaa, the highly respected 86-year-old hero of the war of independence, and Karim Tabbou, a former Socialist Forces Front (FFS) leader and Hirak spokesman. Both are accused of undermining army morale.

By mid-November, Algerians doubted the authorities could organise an election in such a charged atmosphere. Whatever happens with the election, the Hirak is unlikely to end soon. To get a sense of the dynamics and challenges of this movement, in many ways a break with the past, not least because of its pacifism, it is worth retracing how it began.

This is not solely a young people's movement, but the young are at the head of the marches. There are more of them and they're more vociferous Intissar Bendjabellah

There were power struggles at the top of Algeria’s regime in 2018 (with Bouteflika’s succession and the future unsure), exacerbated by multiple corruption and trafficking scandals in which rival factions tried to implicate each other. The security forces discovered a 700kg shipment of cocaine on a boat, docked in Oran, which was allegedly transporting meat from Brazil for an importer with close links to the regime, Kamel (‘the Butcher’) Chikhi. Along with Chikhi, many high-ranking military officers, senior police, magistrates, prominent politicians and even imams are under arrest or on the run. This scandal, still only partly explained, has shocked Algerians, who are used to corrupt leaders, and has given rise to a Hirak slogan, ‘Free the detainees — they haven’t sold cocaine.’

On 9 February 2019 confirmation that the bedridden Bouteflika would seek a fifth mandate sparked anger. Social media exploded and on 16 February the Hirak began. Young people in Kherrata — a small town in northeast Algeria where the French army and its European auxiliaries massacred the Muslim population on 8 May 1945 — took to the streets to protest against Bouteflika’s re-election bid. On 19 February a crowd destroyed a giant portrait of the president displayed on the front of the town hall as part of Algeria’s enforced personality cult. On Friday 22 February, in response to an anonymous call on social media to demonstrate, a countrywide movement began that reached even remote villages and led to Bouteflika’s resignation and the cancellation of the election scheduled for 18 April.

The deputy leader of Youth Action Rally (RAJ), Djalal Mokrani, saw the first march set off from the Bab El Oued district of Algiers. He and his colleagues were at the association’s offices in the town centre; ‘We dropped everything and joined the citizens, whose numbers kept growing and growing,’ he told me a few days after he had been arrested with other RAJ activists this October. Five were accused of ‘inciting a crowd and endangering state security’. Their arrest won them support at home and abroad, and the RAJ condemned ‘the reprehensible, scandalous and despotic actions of a dying regime trying to cling on at any price’.

Algerians had watched the popular Arab uprisings of 2011 from a distance, but young people’s anger was decisive in the Hirak’s rapid take-off. Mustapha Benfodil, a journalist on the independent French-language El Watan, reporting from working-class districts of Algiers a few days before the 22 February demonstrations, wrote, ‘Young people had just one word on their lips, “humiliation”. They could no longer tolerate the image of Bouteflika, a man close to death, being used as a puppet by what has since been referred to as the essaba or gang.’

A demonstrator holds a mask of detainee Lakhdar Bouregaa, prominent in the struggle for Algerian independence at an Algiers protest in November Farouk Batiche · Anadolu · Getty

Student protests set the tone

Intissar Bendjabellah, 30, a feminist activist, said that the Hirak is ‘not solely a young people’s movement, but the young are at the head of the marches. There are more of them and they’re more vociferous.’ On the Tuesday before the large gathering on 22 February, there was a student demonstration, and since then Tuesday afternoon protests have set the tone, reacting to speeches by General Gaid Salah during the morning. They prefigure the Friday demonstrations, and indicate how repressive the authorities are likely to be.

Despite loathing the regime, many people were wary of demonstrating because of previous unsuccessful protests, such as those of 2014, which failed to stop Bouteflika’s fourth mandate. Bendjabellah admitted that ‘in 2014, I had the impression that my country didn’t want to liberate itself.’ She did not demonstrate on 22 February this year to avoid further disappointment, but she followed the movement on social media and ‘the pictures convinced me to go along the following Friday.’

There's a sort of polarisation. On one side, military power and on the other, this Hirak opposition which is in the street but has no representatives and doesn't recognise any. It's quite a heady anarchistic moment, but it requires a lot of stamina Mustapha Benfodil

Many Algerians, like Messaoud Babadji, 66, a lawyer and human rights activist from Oran, were suspicious of the anonymous call to demonstrate and saw it as a sign of the Islamists’ return to the political stage, as the only force thought capable of organising such a movement. But on the day of the demonstration, Babadji was surprised to see that the first groups of protestors were his young colleagues from Oran’s associative movement. Arezki Ait-Larbi, a journalist and close friend of Djamila Bouhired, a heroine of the anti-colonial war and Hirak icon, explained he was cautious about the first demonstration as it was scheduled for after Friday prayers, a tactic from the era of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS).

Surprisingly, Islamists too were suspicious of this call to act. Ali M, 52, a former FIS activist who was imprisoned from 1992 to 1998, saw it as ‘provocation, a trap. I thought the army would open fire like they did in October 1988. I said to myself, “It’s another dirty trick [by the security services] to create a state of emergency.” My sons and my neighbours’ sons have never been involved in politics. But despite my warnings, they went out without hesitation on 22 February. I waited till 8 March. Since then, I haven’t missed a single one.’

In March, the unexpected size of the movement ended such misgivings. ‘This revolt has come in a historical context in which the regime squeezed opposition parties, both Islamist and democratic, unions, professional bodies and civil society organisations. Everyone was crushed or bought off,’ said Ali Brahimi, one of 24 activists imprisoned in the ‘Berber Spring’ of 1980 and a former parliamentarian for the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD) in Bouira, south of the capital. Brahimi, a Marxist activist and Berber advocate, thinks ‘the degree of corruption and closed nature of the Bouteflika regime guaranteed that, sooner or later, things would blow up. What’s interesting is that from the start the movement has had a revolutionary dynamic.’

Trauma of the black decade

People told me that the Hirak would not have been possible without overcoming the trauma of the ‘black decade’ of the 1990s, and showing unexpected political maturity. ‘Algerian society was dislocated and despairing,’ Brahimi said. ‘The regime worsened various forms of antagonism, such as between the religious and the secular. Because of its scale, the Hirak has shown that in the main the people have overcome the ideological divisions of the 1990s.’

Ait-Larbi agrees, and sees a ‘qualitative evolution’ of the movement. He believes the Hirak has ‘brought out the best in Algerians, things that had been hidden’: consensus over demands around a rejection of the system, demonstrators’ civic-mindedness, ‘the extraordinary evolution of relations’ among people used to the existing power relations. He also cited the government’s crude move to criminalise carrying the Amazigh flag. ‘In June, General Gaid Salah tried to cause divisions by banning this symbol. That touched a nerve. It could have caused clashes between Berber and Arabic speakers, but it did the opposite. In Arab-speaking towns, people you’d never suspect of having Berber sympathies have been waving the outlawed flag.’

The peaceful nature of the demonstrations is another break with the past. If young people are tempted to fight the authorities, there is an immediate call to order — ‘Silmiya!’ (Peaceful) or ‘Khawa!’ (Brothers) — to defuse the tension. Brahimi said, ‘In 2017 the official figures recorded 13,000 riots across Algeria. We’ve gone from violent demonstrations to a calm, self-disciplined movement. That’s because of regular discussions about rejecting rioting and the uselessness of violence to oppose a regime that is itself violent.’ He cited the small coastal town of Aokas, where residents protested against the banning of a book group by taking to the streets, carrying books.

The Algeria that is protesting is a united one in which all political persuasions are represented. Friday demonstrations always follow the same pattern. The night before there will be a pot-banging protest in support of detainees, then in the morning the first groups assemble around the Place Maurice-Audin or the Place de la Grande Poste. In the early afternoon, after Friday prayers, marchers converge on the city centre — the group from Bab El Oued is one of the biggest — and the city resounds with protesting voices. In the evening, the media, lawyers and NGOs count the arrests, some of which last only a few hours, and the disappearances. Demonstrators are often taken away by men in plain clothes and their location and charges only revealed days later.

The Hirak has prevented a fifth Bouteflika mandate and twice had presidential elections postponed, but the situation in mid-November was a stand-off between the movement and the head of the army. The people keep demonstrating their refusal to submit to a regime they hold responsible for wrecking the post-independence nation-building project. The regime seems determined to organise a presidential election involving two former prime ministers (Ali Benflis and Abdelmadjid Tebboune) and two of Bouteflika’s ex-ministers (Azzedine Mihoubi and Abdelkader Bengrina). The fifth candidate, Abdelaziz Belaid, is also a long-term Bouteflika supporter. Since the campaign began, election rallies, which attract few people, have been systematically disrupted by Hirakists. Appeals to demonstrate every evening against the election have been made on social media, and nocturnal meetings have been broken up by the authorities.

The same old faces

Benfodil said, ‘People today talk about “dictatorship-lite”, but I think you can drop the adjective ... we still haven’t managed to secure the right to demonstrate freely. State television is worse than before. We’ve seen a return to the reflex celebration of our despots. On the political stage, it’s the same old faces, the same shows of allegiance, the same “FLN” habit of applauding everything that comes from the top.’

The regime strengthening its authoritarian grip can be seen in the (unconstitutional) banning of non-residents of Algiers from visiting the city and the imprisonment of demonstrators for carrying the Amazigh flag. Gaid Salah ordered these arrests in a speech, but they have no basis in law, according to lawyer Aouicha Bekhti, of the Network Against Repression, for the Liberation of Prisoners of Conscience and for Democratic Freedoms. ‘There is an article forbidding public authorities and ministries from displaying any symbol apart from the national flag, but it doesn’t apply to demonstrators. So prosecutors invoke article 79 of the penal code, under which any attack on the nation’s territorial integrity is punishable by a prison term. In their charges, they say that the accused “carried an emblem other than the national emblem”, which picks up what General Gaid Salah said. So his speech is being treated as if it had the force of law.’

Leaders and activists are considering what to do next, trying to look beyond the presidential election. Bekhti said, ‘We need to develop a joint vision of a new society, a new constitution that sets out the plan for a modern society. I’m convinced this movement will continue and that change has already begun. Some people point out it took seven years to free Algeria from the colonial presence and the Hirak could go on for seven years or more.’ For many participants, the Hirak’s staying power is its first victory.

Benfodil is less sanguine. ‘There’s a sort of polarisation. On one side, military power and on the other, this Hirak opposition which is in the street but has no representatives and doesn’t recognise any. It’s quite a heady anarchistic moment, but it requires a lot of stamina. I think that at the popular level we’re heading towards a kind of radicalisation in response to the presidential election that’s been imposed.’

In eight months, there have been many attempts to give the Hirak political representation. None has succeeded and the repression of its prominent members, especially young activists, has not helped. Algerians, who have lived three decades without freedoms and pluralism, deeply distrust political parties.