After a year of interruption of weekly demonstrations because of the Covid-19, thousands of Algerians took to the streets on Friday in Algiers to revive the “Hirak”, the pro-democracy protest movement.
Popular fervor is back in the streets of Algiers. A year after the end of the protests, thousands of people defied the ban on gathering to march, Friday, February 26, in the center of the Algerian capital. The objective of the demonstrators: to rekindle the flame of Hirak, this movement initially directed against a fifth term of ex-president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, which gradually turned into a vast protest against the Algerian regime.
Despite the ban on gatherings for health reasons, several processions were formed at the beginning of the afternoon in working-class neighborhoods, in particular in Bab El Oued, to reach the city center, according to testimonies collected by AFP.
“It’s grandiose. It’s like the great Fridays of Hirak,” said a protester, about the weekly marches interrupted on March 13, 2020 due to the health crisis.
The police used batons and tear gas on a major thoroughfare in the capital when demonstrators forced a police roadblock to reach the Grande Poste, an emblematic place for gatherings of anti-regime demonstrators, according to a video posted on the Interlignes website .
“A civil state and not a military one”
“Neither Islamist, nor secular but Hirakist”, one could read on a poster brandished by the crowd which chanted “A civil state and not military”, flagship slogan of the protest.
Police trucks have taken up positions near the main squares in the city center and filter dams have been installed on several roads leading to the capital.
In Algiers, demonstrators appeared to be at least as numerous as last Monday when thousands marched on the occasion of Hirak’s second anniversary, witnesses said.
Gatherings were also underway in the provinces, notably in Bejaïa, in Kabylia (north-east), and in Oran (north-west), where a pillar of human rights, the academic Kadour Chouicha, was arrested, according to the National Committee for the Release of Prisoners (CNLD).
