Algerian protesters pick up after themselves in ‘tidy revolution’
ALGERIA’S anti-government protests have swept through the country’s towns and cities and toppled its ageing ruler. But unlike previous mass movements, demonstrators have been careful not to tear their country up.
In a powerful symbol of the movement’s peaceful spirit, after massive pro-democracy demonstrations every week the protesters have been roaming the streets picking up bottles, papers and other detritus left behind.
After the latest protest on Friday, when the boulevards of Algiers thronged with so many people that it took hours to traverse a few blocks, residents have done their duty to leave the roads as they found them.
The protests started on Feb 22 against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his entourage, with organisers sending messages on Facebook calling for demonstrators to avoid violence and clean up after themselves.
“We’re volunteers. We organised ourselves after appeals on social networks. The shop owners give us free garbage bags. We have formed several groups,” said Abdellah Debaili, 36, a clean-up worker from the workingclass Algiers neighbourhood of Hussein Dey Est. He stands on a boulevard leading to the central post office, the most iconic gathering point of the movement, cajoling passers-by to discard their orange peels, coffee cups or newspapers in the black plastic bag at his side. Each time they do, he smiles and says “shukran”, or thank you.
“We’re happy,” he told The Associated Press, “because people congratulate us for doing this work.”
The tidy revolutionaries have drawn attention in France, where “yellow vests” protesters have staged weekly protests for 21 weeks, and where violence has left stores and restaurants trashed, burnt 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.
Many Algerian expats have been travelling from France and the UK to join the movement in their homeland.
“I took unpaid leave to come and march in Algeria, to be here physically,” said Chahrazade Kaci, who arrived from London just days before the 82-year-old president resigned.
“It’s a duty,” said Ms Kaci, 52, who has spent almost half her life in the British capital since the height of Algeria’s civil war in the Nineties.
Last night Beji Caid Essebsi, the 92-year-old Tunisian president, said he did not want to run for a second term. The mass protests in Algeria have stirred the opposition in Tunisia, and social media campaigns have begun rejecting a second term for Essebsi.
The Tunisian constitution gives him the right to run for two terms.
“I will say frankly that I do not want to present for a second term because Tunisia has a lot of talents,” Mr Essebsi said at a meeting of his Nidaa Tounes party in Monastir.
The elections later this year will be the third set of polls in which Tunisians can vote freely following the 2011 revolution that toppled autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who ruled for 23 years.