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Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria’s Leader for 20 Years, Dies at 84

Ousted by Protests, Bouteflika Was Once Algeria's Saviour

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who led Algeria out of civil war to become its longest-serving president, has died at 84, according to state television.

The report didn’t provide a cause of death for the former leader, who resigned in 2019 after a 20-year rule and on the back of mass protests against him seeking a fifth term. 

Bouteflika was rarely seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. Though he was re-elected in 2014, Bouteflika was largely incapacitated, governing with the help of his brother Said and a coterie of army officers, businessmen and officials of the FLN party, known collectively as “le pouvoir.” 

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria’s Leader for 20 Years, Dies at 84

His bid for re-election at the time prompted anger and disbelief among Algerians, nearly half of whom were under 25 and didn’t want to be ruled by aging veterans of the country’s war of independence from France.

During his time at the helm of one of Africa’s largest oil and gas exporters, Bouteflika worked to co-opt and weaken the country’s opposition parties. He was succeeded by Abdelmadjid Tebboune, a longtime government insider who was elected in a sparsely attended vote in December 2019.

Stability First

When he first came to power in 1999, Bouteflika cut a more popular figure. At the time, Algeria was still ravaged by a civil war that began in 1992 after the army, unwilling to accept an expected Islamist victory in parliamentary elections, scrapped the poll.

By the end of the decade, the rebels were divided and Bouteflika and the military exploited those splits to defeat them, effectively ending the conflict. As many as 200,000 people died in brutal fighting, thousands went missing, and Algerians who lived through the violence still credit Bouteflika for his role in restoring peace.

Barely touched by the Arab Spring uprisings that spread through the region in 2011, Algeria’s lawmakers approved at the time constitutional changes granting more political rights to key constituencies, including the indigenous Amazigh community, women and businessmen.

Critically, a long run of relatively high oil prices provided Bouteflika with the financial resources to buy off public discontent with generous state benefits. During the 2014 electoral race, he quelled smaller protests with a mixture of water canons and enhancements to subsidies and public sector salaries.

The slump in oil prices during his fourth term in office, coupled with a failure to modernize and diversify the economy, made those handouts increasingly unaffordable just as thousands of teachers and doctors staged strikes in 2018, demanding better pay and work conditions. 

His detractors accused Bouteflika of failing the country’s youth and allowing corruption to flourish. An inward-looking system controlled by a small and opaque cabal of aging men failed to keep pace with a fast-changing world and create enough economic growth and jobs for its youthful population of over 40 million. Unlike other OPEC members, Algeria resisted tapping the global debt market despite the oil slump, its leaders, most of them heroes of the anti-colonial movement, wary of ”mortgaging” the country’s future to outside powers.

Military Role

Bouteflika was born on March 2, 1937, in Oujda, then French Morocco, though his parents, Ahmed Bouteflika and Mansouria Ghezlaoui, were from the Tlemcen region of Algeria.

In 1956, Bouteflika interrupted his philosophy studies to join the military wing of the National Liberation Front, known by the French acronym FLN. He went on to serve in the National Liberation Army, where he was a protege of Houari Boumedienne, a commander in the war against French colonial rule.

After Algeria won independence in 1962, Bouteflika became minister for youth and sport in the government of President Ahmed Ben Bella, whom he helped overthrow three years later in a coup led by Boumedienne, the defense minister at the time.

Bouteflika then served as foreign minister until Boumediene’s death in 1978. He left the country for about six years following allegations of misappropriating public funds, returning in 1989 to a period of political turbulence. Power struggles between President Chadli Bendjedid and influential generals paralyzed the government and frustrated the public.

In 1992, the army canceled elections that the Islamic Salvation Front was set to win, triggering the civil war. Bouteflika stayed on the sidelines during the early years of fighting and then, with the support of the army, ran for president.

Electoral Success

He was the sole candidate in the 1999 ballot, with other contenders withdrawing before polling day, and was elected with 74% of the vote. International monitors made allegations of electoral fraud following his repeated landslide victories at the ballot box.

While his rise brought initial hopes of economic development and political openness, Bouteflika quickly disappointed, restricting the activities of political parties and banning new ones. Even as the economy improved, Algeria failed to reach its target oil output, because local taxes and corruption probes within the state-owned petroleum company, Sonatrach SpA, dampened foreign interest in exploration.

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