Algeria cracks down on activists in bid to break protest movement

ALGIERS: Algeria has intensified a crackdown on an anti-government protest movement, targeting social media users in a bid to stop demonstrations resuming once coronavirus restrictions end. Weekly protests rocked the North African country for more than a year and only stopped in March due to the novel coronavirus outbreak. The “Hirak” protest movement caused the downfall of former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika in April 2019 after 20 years in power. It has continued demanding an overhaul of Algeria’s governance system, in place since independence from France in 1962.

Authorities have made about 200 arrests linked to the protests since the country’s coronavirus restrictions came into effect three months ago, according to Said Salhi, vice president of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights. “The authorities have taken advantage of the lull to arrest the maximum number of activists,” he said.

Protesters are being pursued for “crimes of opinion and expression connected to posts on social media, particularly Facebook”, he said, with some of their homes searched and mobile phones confiscated. Most of the authorities’ actions are based on changes to the penal code that were passed in April amid the health crisis and have been denounced by human rights activists.

Salhi called the moves “an irresponsible attack, verging on provocation, against fundamental human rights”. On Thursday, more than 20 opposition activists were summoned to appear in seven separate hearings, mostly in trials that had been delayed due to the pandemic. Those accused include figures in the protest movement, political activists, journalists and people accused of mocking the regime online.

“The government doesn’t believe in change, it refuses to listen to the people,” lawyer Mustapha Bouchachi was quoted as saying this week in French-language daily Liberte. “In my opinion, it is making these arrests to break the Hirak,” he added. According to detainees’ rights association CNLD, 60 prisoners of conscience are currently jailed.

In a sign the government might be nervous about the public mood, several academics rushed to its defense in official media this week, accusing a “neo-Hirak” of being “in the service of a foreign plan”. But press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on the Algerian authorities to “stop using the justice system to muzzle the media”.

“The increase in legal proceedings against Algerian journalists is extremely worrying and indicates a blatant deterioration of press freedom in Algeria,” RSF director for North Africa, Souhaieb Khayati, said in a statement. Four Algerian journalists were prosecuted or sentenced to prison last week. — AFP