Algiers: Several hundreds students demonstrated Tuesday in Algiers against the government and for the freedom of the press despite the ban on rallies and an imposing police presence, the day after major protests on the occasion of the 2nd anniversary of the protest movement of the Hirak.
Prior to the interruption of the weekly Hirak marches in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students used to parade every Tuesday.
From the early hours of the day, police trucks took up positions near the main squares in the center of the capital, in particular the Place des Martyrs, at the foot of the famous Kasbah, which was the starting point for the weekly march. students.
Despite the police lines, dozens of students and activists managed to walk a few hundred meters to the national theater, shouting “We are students and not terrorists”, “For a free press and independent justice “Or” Free and democratic Algeria “, according to AFP journalists on the spot.
They also took up historic slogans of the protest movement such as “A civil state and not a military one”.
The progress of the march was stopped near the Central Faculty of Algiers. Police then evacuated the protesters to a student-only bus station before forcing them out of the city center.
Brief scuffles took place after police tried to push back the students, according to an AFP reporter there, who saw two people arrested.
According to an incomplete list from the National Committee for the Release of Detainees (CNLD), the police arrested at least 18 people in Algiers on Tuesday. Some were released at the end of the day.
On Monday, large crowds of Algerians marched across the country, rekindling anti-regime protests in the streets.
“The government must take note of the failure of its roadmap and urgently initiate a new democratic process,” said the vice-president of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights, Saïd Salhi.
The Front des forces socialistes, the oldest of the opposition parties, criticized the regime’s “destructive immobility”. “The national political context can no longer support further authoritarian drifts and other failures. ”
Launched on February 22, 2019, the Hirak, an unprecedented peaceful protest movement in Algeria, pushed President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power for two decades, to resign two months later after being let go by the army, the pillar of the regime. .
Interrupted by the pandemic, however, the movement continued to demand the dismantling of the “system” in place since independence in 1962.
Commenting on Monday’s protests, the independent newspaper El Watan referred to “the shattering return of the Hirak” in “an Algeria which is rumbling”. “The Hirak has never left the minds of Algerians,” the Tout Sur l’Algerie (TSA) website noted.
The next test of whether or not a sustainable resumption of the movement is expected to be Friday, the weekly day of the Hirak Great Marches before the ban on gatherings due to the pandemic.
