In Bab El Oued, election is 'news from a foreign country
Bab El Oued is the real heart of Algiers but it was beating slowly Thursday, as residents sat out...
Bab El Oued is the real heart of Algiers but it was
beating slowly Thursday, as residents sat out an election they feel they
have no part in and is happening in a world far removed from theirs.
"It's
like a day off, I'm just resting. I know there's nothing for me in this
election," said Mohamed, a lanky young man wearing shorts and
flip-flops, sitting on a pavement in a sun-drenched street.
The
shops were shuttered and the neighbourhood unusually silent, with only a
trickle of mainly elderly men heading to the nearby school to elect
their members of parliament.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who
was already a minister in Algeria's first independent government in
1962, has said the polls are an opportunity for the youth to step up and
build their country.
But Mohamed is deaf to the head of state's
appeals, amid fears of a historically low turnout.
"I switch on
the TV set and I see election coverage on the state channel. It's like
news from a foreign country," he said. "It's not Algeria, it's the land
of those people in power."
"I'm 30 years old and I am nothing. My
heart is empty," said Mohamed, who earns 200 euros ($260) a month
working for a water delivery company. "I would have to work 100 years to
get a flat of my own."
The disconnect between the neighbourhood's
youth and the politicians running the parties in the governing
coalition is huge.
In 2001, flash floods destroyed entire
apartment blocks on the heights of Bab El Oued, unleashing rivers of mud
and rubble into the narrow colonial-era streets snaking down towards
the Bay of Algiers.
Bab El Oued and its surrounding slums is where
many of Algeria's social and political revolts kicked off but on
Thursday it was all bitter resignation and had no whiff of Arab Spring
about it.
In front of the nearest polling station, a rare student
prepared to vote.
"The only reason I'm voting is because I'm a
young adult and I'm about to enter the job market," said Bilal, who like
most people in a country with an all-pervasive security apparatus would
only give his first name to journalists.
"I'm afraid one day the
authorities somewhere will ask to see my voter's card before granting me
access to housing, or employment or even health coverage," he
explained.
"But if it's not for that, young people here don't
vote. We're sick of all the lies, they've never done anything for us."
Behind
him, an old man with a stick wearing a blue Mao jacket walked past
electoral boards that were left completely blank throughout the campaign
and slowly scaled the steps to the polling station.
"I vote
because I've always voted. There is someone I've known a long time on
one of the lists, so I'll vote for him. The rest of it is way above my
head," said Mustafa, in his seventies.
A few streets down, Hamid
was stacking shelves in his convenience store.
"These dozens of
new parties are not legitimate. They were putting ads in the newspapers
to recruit candidates, it's incredible," said Hamid, an Islamist
sporting a long, bushy beard and wearing a white knitted skull cap.
"The
other parties? They've all been co-opted, they're all eating out of the
president's palm," he said.
The main forces in Thursday's polls
are Bouteflika's former single party, the National Liberation Front, as
well as its government partners, the National Rally for Democracy and
the moderate Islamist Movement of Society for Peace.
"The
so-called Islamist MSP? I abhor these people. It's all pretence," said
Hamid, a former member of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), a party
banned by Bouteflika's regime.
When the FIS won the first round of
a legislative poll in 1991, the army stepped in to stop the electoral
process, triggering a civil war that lasted 10 years and left 200,000
people dead.
"Our rulers are illegitimate, greedy and incompetent.
The hardest thing for us in this area is that the state is sitting on
200 billion dollars (in foreign currency reserves and we aren't seeing
any of it," Hamid said.
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