Once-Thriving Algeria Suffers 3rd World Ills

After a new National Assembly was elected in February, a joke began going around Algiers to the effect that the real winners of the election were butter and coffee.

To Algerians, no explanation was needed. It is an open secret here that instead of voting for one of the three government-picked candidates running for each of the assembly’s 295 seats, many Algerians simply wrote the word coffee or butter across their ballots to protest the fact that neither commodity had been available in the stores for weeks.

Coming on top of riots over food shortages and price increases in the cities of Constantine and Setif the previous November, the unorthodox write-in ballots were deeply unsettling to the government of President Chadli Bendjedid, according to diplomats in the Algerian capital.

“Those riots were not organized,” a Western diplomat said. “They were not staged by fundamentalists, by leftists or any other hidden hand. They were genuine and spontaneous. They were like a social volcano erupting.”

No figures have been made public, but the riots involved as many as 200,000 people--nearly a quarter of the populations of Constantine and Setif, according to Western diplomats. At least 15 people, possibly more, were said to have been killed in the three days of disorder, in which government offices and branches of the National Liberation Front, Algeria’s sole political party, were attacked.

There has since been nothing on the same scale, but “you get the feeling there’s still a lot of discontent boiling beneath the surface,” another diplomat said. “This government is very, very worried about it.”

Indeed, as socialist Algeria approaches the 25th anniversary, in July, of its independence from France, the Bendjedid government finds itself beset by a host of familiar but formidable Third World problems from which it had thought itself more or less immune: unrestrained population growth, declining revenues, high unemployment and the alienation of a generation of young people less concerned about what they can do for their country than what their country has failed to do for them.

“Algeria has been hit by the double whammy of shrinking revenues and a rapidly expanding population,” a Western diplomat said. “In the short term they can probably cope, but over the long term they face real trouble. They can’t build enough houses, open enough schools or train enough doctors to keep up with their population growth. In the long run, population growth is just going to overwhelm them.”

Spoiled by comparatively high earnings from oil and gas exports throughout the 1970s, Algerians until recently tended to regard many of the economic and social problems of their poorer North African neighbors with an “it-can’t-happen-here” smugness.

Scaled-Back Plans

But since 1981, when revenues peaked at $12 billion, declining oil prices have cut income in half, forcing the government to scale back development plans, sharply curtail imports and raise the price of a number of essential commodities.

At the same time, Algeria’s population of 23 million, nearly all of it pressed into a narrow strip of fertile land between the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean coast, has been growing at the rate of 3.2% a year. At this pace, it will double in the next 20 years--and double its demands on a government forced to rely on steadily diminishing resources.

The effects of overpopulation are evident on even a casual stroll through Algiers. In the fabled Casbah, now an inner-city slum, about 80,000 people live in sardine-can conditions, five or six to a small room. Once filled with intrigue, the Casbah’s narrow, winding streets today are piled high with garbage. Plans to restore the historic district have been drafted but are on hold because of the lack of new housing needed to relocate the area’s inhabitants.

Slow-Moving Government

The Bendjedid government has recognized the need for reform but, hampered by ideological divisions and bureaucratic inertia, has been slow to move.

Bendjedid’s goal, officials say, is to promote more efficiency by easing bureaucratic controls and breaking up large and lethargic state enterprises into smaller, more competitive companies. Emphasis in economic planning has shifted from heavy industry to agriculture, where limited private-sector participation is being encouraged in the hope of lessening Algeria’s dependence on imported food.

However, these efforts have become embroiled in a fierce political debate between Bendjedid’s reformers and ideological hard-liners who fear that the president’s more pragmatic approach to the economy is liable to undermine Algeria’s “socialist gains.”

“Bendjedid’s opponents accuse him of trying to bring capitalism in by the back door,” a Western diplomat said. “They see his reforms as a threat to the system and their own privileged positions in it.”

Until now, the hard-liners have had a powerful ally in the mammoth state bureaucracy which, with some justification, views Bendjedid’s reforms as an attempt to amputate the hand that feeds it.

“Together, the opposition of the hard-liners and the resistance of the bureaucracy have been quite effective in blocking most reforms,” a diplomat said.

Still, some analysts think they have detected a change in the president’s favor since the riots in Constantine and Setif.

“Although they were a big shock, the riots strengthened the position of the pragmatists, who have been able to argue that the system must be reformed if further disruptions are to be avoided,” another diplomat said.

One sign that the president may be gaining the upper hand, this and other experts said, were the results of the National Assembly elections. Although the election offered voters no real choice--all the candidates were nominated by the ruling party and there was no political campaigning--the new assembly emerged with more Bendjedid supporters than the previous one.

“The important thing about the elections was the debate that took place between the party and the president to choose the candidates,” one diplomat said. “The president won this. The new assembly has fewer officials from the old party machinery and more professionals, doctors, lawyers and engineers, who represent the reformist trend.”

Due in part to agricultural reform, shortages of essential goods have eased somewhat, especially since the elections. And for the first time there are signs of official concern over the frustrations and alienation felt by the young, who do not share the bitter memories of the eight-year war of independence, with its more than 1 million dead, that forged their parents’ socialist outlook.

Disillusioned with the system’s failure to provide for them, some young people are turning to Islamic fundamentalism. Diplomats say that fundamentalism does not yet pose a serious threat, but no one forgets that the Constantine and Setif riots started as a student protest that spread like a chain reaction to the general populace.

As a result, the government “is finally beginning to admit that there are serious social problems that need to be addressed,” one diplomat said.

Whether it can succeed in addressing them is still doubtful. For one thing, while the reformers have a freer hand, it is not completely unfettered--powerful opposition still exists within the party, the bureaucracy and, more importantly, the army.

For another, while the reformers’ goal is to invigorate the economy, there is still a great deal of reluctance to confront what diplomats and other experts agree is Algeria’s most serious problem--population control.

“Only recently have they begun to admit that there might even be a problem,” one diplomat said. “They are approaching it very cautiously. They’re only just beginning to talk about things like birth spacing.”

Population, another diplomat said, “is the most serious problem that Algerians face. They can reform the economy as much as they like, but unless they take drastic measures to reduce their birth rate, neither socialism nor capitalism nor anything else will save them.”