Algerian Fundamentalists End 2-Week Strike

Islamic fundamentalists ended a two-week general strike on Friday as they and the government backed away from further street violence of the kind that interrupted Algeria’s experiment with multi-party democracy.

Within hours of the announcement at Friday prayers by Abbasi Madani, leader of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), the removal of a water cannon, a bulldozer and hundreds of police from a key fundamentalist stronghold here showed an easing of tensions.

But conflicting statements by the government and Islamic Front, apparently designed to support victory claims by each side, encouraged suspicions that the two sides had reached only a temporary truce in their power struggle.

Eleven days of violent protest by fundamentalists prompted President Chadli Bendjedid to impose a nationwide state of siege Wednesday and cancel multi-party elections scheduled for June 27.

Madani had set the crisis in motion May 22 by announcing an open-ended general strike to protest an electoral law that the Islamic Front said favored the ruling party by extending the vote to two days, doubling the number of National Assembly seats and gerrymandering districts.

The Islamic Front also had demanded presidential elections before the expiration of Bendjedid’s term in December, 1993.

Friday night, new Prime Minister Sid Ahmed Ghozali promised that an early presidential vote, as well as rescheduled parliamentary elections, could be held “separately” before the end of the year. He suggested that a presidential contest would take place after Algeria’s first multi-party legislative elections since independence from France in 1962.

Addressing thousands at the Sunna mosque in the working-class district of Bab el Oued, Madani said the strike should end “without demonstrations or anything similar” because “agreement has been reached between us and the National Liberation Front,” the ruling party. He gave no details.

But Abdelhamid Mehri, the National Liberation Front secretary general, denied a deal was made.

Rather, he said, Ghozali and Madani met and the Islamic Front leader, along with others, accepted undisclosed “terms of the mission” entrusted by the president.