Notes

Why did observers think Algeria was next after Tunisia for an uprising?

• Algeria appeared vulnerable for many reasons:
1. It has a historical role as the trendsetter in the Arab world.
2. Algeria fought a very bloody yet successful war of national liberation against France from 1954 to 1962, thus becoming an object of emulation for anti-imperialists throughout the region and world.
3. During the war, Algerian revolutionaries not only committed acts of violence against soldiers and civilians alike, the fetishized those acts, claiming those acts provided the only route to national cleansing and national self-awareness.
4. This "cult of armed struggle," as it came to be known, later became the central pillar of the revolutionary doctrines of the Palestine Liberation Organization and other national liberation movements.
5. Algeria was the state in the Arab world to nationalize its oil and natural gas industries in the 1960s, and it led the battle for Third World economic rights in the 1970s.
6. They were also the first in the Arab world to experiment with free multiparty elections in 1989, and when Islamists won the first round of the balloting and the army stepped in to end the experiment in democracy, Algeria descended into the hell of “civil war,” during which as many as 150,000 Algerians may have died.

Algerian Flag