...is a very difficult task. It helps to be able to read French, because much of the really interesting stuff is in French and the history and economic "interests" of the two countries are almost inextricably linked, as much today as ever when Paris considered the place to be an overseas département (adminstrative region) of mainland France.
The screenshot has been scaled down too much clearly to read the difference between what Google News came up with and what the latest version of DEVONagent (1.2.2b for OS X only) churned with as results for the same four words: "Algeria generals power vote".
Google gave me about 40 pertinent pages.
DevonAGENT, however, provided with a broader set of search engines, inspected 1,495 pages and produced 219 results, of which more than half shed light on what I wanted.
But that's an aside.
At the Canteen the other day, I asked one of my Berber friends how he thought the military in Algeria cooked the books in last week's general election (official results in French).
In a book to be published this month, 'Françalgerie: crimes et mensonges d'Etats' (Algeria-Watch, Fr), two journalists, Lounis Aggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, explore how Algeria's generals have always held the reins of power, and still do, with French complicity.
'FrancAlgeria: crimes and lies of states' looks as set to stir up trouble as Habib Saoudia, an Algerian former 'special forces' military officer, did in 2001 with 'La Sale Guerre' (The Dirty War).
One of the best known of the men who really run Algeria is General Khaled Nezzar, Retd. (sic), who laughed and blustered his way through an interview last July, reported in 'Algeria's Ashes' (Australian Financial Review).
I knew about the game the country's rulers play with ballot boxes, summed up thus by my friend, who paraphrased an Algerian comedian: "Before we had one party, one candidate and one ballot box. Now we've got a multiparty system, seven candidates and seven ballot boxes."
An exaggeration, of course. A single stuffed ballot box is enough to replace the one people cast their votes in between the closure of the polls and the count. I was discussing this practice this afternoon with friends from Morocco, who gave me their eyewitness accounts of similar practices under the late King Hassan II.
"It's better now," one of them said.
But not in Algeria it isn't. You scarcely have to scratch the surface of the Internet to get a good idea of how things are really done in a country summed up thus by Rivoire and Aggoun in today's issue of 'Les Inrockuptibles':
"So the personal economic interests of the Algerian generals would explain a good part of the 'dirty war'...
L.A. - The problem is that there's nothing left but corruption; the product on to which corruption is normally grafted has itself disappeared from the economic circuit.
J.B.-R. - For a developing country, companies have to be created. In Algeria, they content themselves with imports so that the people in power can systematically cream off commissions, which they put into Swiss bank accounts in foreign currency. As soon as a factory was set up, it blew up, and they said it was the fault of the GIA [Armed Islamic Group (CFR Terrorism)]. Today, Algerians import 85 percent of what they eat, but the country was once a real breadbasket."
Talking to the Wildcat about such things last night, she said I should blog them, since they're apparently not as widely known as I thought. But here's the trick that took my breath away. One of my sources at the Canteen told me about the army, state television and the Codes.
"[Ali] Benflis," he said of the former prime minister who was Bouteflika's main challenger at last week's polls, "is a chain smoker. He even smokes when he's making speeches. Everybody knows that. But when you see him on television, you never see him light up and you never see him put it out. What you do see is the puff of smoke coming out of his mouth when he exhales. The message: 'I'm poisoning myself, would you like me to poison you too?'
"There's better, like the army officer who doesn't smoke. Also well known. He might go on television. He gets interviewed. And guess what? In one hand, he's got a cigarette. In the other, he's got a lighter. That's the message, not what he says. The message is: 'If you do this, we'll set the house on fire.'
"They have a system, all these people. They use the television to give each other messages. It's all in the gestures, the hand signals: don't worry about what I say, watch what I do.'
Among many pieces offering good background to the daily bad dream is Hamou Amirouche's 'Algeria's Islamist Revolution: The People Versus Democracy?', a 1998 strategy paper.
After most of the online part of the day spent checking this out, and not liking what I found at all, one of Gary Brecher's stories for 'the eXile', a Moscow-based paper, came almost as light relief.
Gary might contend that the Koran is "absolutely in favor of violence against everybody who's not already a Muslim", along with a few other odd things, but his perspective on Algeria in 'The Psychos Will Inherit the Earth' (War Nerd) is entertaining, thoughtful and, worse, closer to the "truth of it all" than makes for comfortable reading.
So what does Winona Ryder have to do with anything?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that's the point.
She cheers me up.
10:39:59 PM link 
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