Tidy revolutionaries clean up after rallies
Algeria’s prodemocracy movement has drawn attention for its tidy revolutionaries. After massive protests, they retrace the march route picking up bottles, papers or anything left behind.
ALGIERS, ALGERIA—
Here’s one way Algeria’s protest movement is unlike any other: After massive prodemocracy demonstrations every week, the protesters themselves roam the streets picking up bottles, papers and other detritus left behind.
It’s a powerful symbol of the movement’s peaceful, hopeful spirit.
And it’s no small task after events like the latest protest on Friday, when the boulevards of Algiers thronged with so many people that it took hours to traverse a few blocks.
After the protests started on Feb. 22 against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, organizers started sending messages on Facebook calling for demonstrators to stay peaceful and clean up after themselves.
Appeals on social networks
Now the cleanup operation is a fundamental part of the Friday protest ritual, including volunteers pitching in around the city, along with more organized crews wearing orange vests.
“We’re volunteers. We organized ourselves after appeals on social networks. The shop owners give us free garbage bags,” said Abdellah Debaili, 36, a cleanup worker.
He stands on a boulevard leading to the central post office, the most iconic gathering point of the movement, cajoling passersby to discard their orange peels, coffee cups or newspapers in the black plastic bag at his side.
“We’re happy because people congratulate us for doing this work,” Debaili said.
Drawing notice in France
The peaceful nature of the protests is especially important to Algerians after the horrors they lived through in the 1990s, when an Islamic insurgency fought the energy-rich country’s security services for years and around 200,000 people were killed.
Today’s protests are a family affair. Young couples come out to march with babies in slings or strollers and small children on their fathers’ shoulders.
The tidy revolutionaries have drawn attention in France, where yellow vest protesters have been holding their own weekly protests for 21 weeks, and where protest violence has left stores and restaurants trashed or burned out or boarded up.
By contrast, in Algeria—once the jewel in France’s colonial crown—protesters and local businesses are on the same side, and police rarely intervene.
The Algerian movement succeeded in forcing Bouteflika from office this week, and is continuing to keep up pressure on a political elite seen as corrupt and repressive.
As Algeria’s Friday protests wind down, volunteers walk backward along the march route, scooping up water bottles, protest signs or anything else left behind. By Saturday morning, little sign is left of what happened the day before.