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Algeria

Site of a long and bitter war of liberation from France that ended in 1962, Algeria is now emerging from a 13-year civil war that claimed well over 100,000 lives. In a September 2005 referendum, voters approved a "Peace and National Reconciliation Charter" proposed by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. The charter came under harsh criticism for extending an amnesty to military officers and Islamist militia leaders for all but the worst crimes, but the regime hopes to use it to "turn the page" on Algeria's bloody recent past.

The war began in 1992 after the military mounted a coup to cancel parliamentary elections the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win. Constitutional rule has been slowly restored since 1995, though both parliamentary and presidential contests have been rigged to varying degrees. Mainstream Islamists have dropped their violent opposition to the state, and only tiny splinter groups fight on. Their insurgency has generally degenerated into banditry.

Most analysts believe, however, that the cause of the war was not simply the clash between Islamism and the military-dominated regime, but rather deep popular alienation from the state and its failures to allow political participation and convert oil deposits into widespread prosperity. There is a general popular sense of ill treatment by the state (hogra, the "disdain" of rulers for ruled), especially in the Berber-speaking Kabyle region, where the feeling of disenfranchisement is combined with cultural and linguistic demands. Hundreds of thousands of Algerian youth migrate northward in search of work each year. Emigration has been pushed along by the formerly socialist regime's implementation of International Monetary Fund recommendations to cut price subsidies, downsize the bureaucracy and sell off state-owned enterprises.

As a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, the Algerian government had chilly relations with Washington, but since 2001, relations have warmed as Algeria's conflict with radical Islamists became subsumed under the US-led war on terrorism.

Facts and Figures »