18 November 1998

President Zeroual announced his decision to cut short his term of office. The early presidential elections will be held before the end of February next year.

The President did not put forward any credible reason to justify his decision. He confined himself to invoking the principle of alternation and declared that he had decided not to be a candidate in these elections.
In his televised speech, made on 11 September with the official announcement of his unexpected decision, he gave a brief account of what he had accomplished as head of the country since January 1994. The image he presented to the citizens was one pervaded throughout with self-satisfaction.
Listening to him, you’d have thought the dangers threatening Algeria were a thing of the past. He showed the country as having “managed finally to complete its institutional structure, to restore its macroeconomic balance, to provide a new climate favourable to improving social conditions, to curb the spectre of abject terrorism and to regain gradually its natural position among all nations.”
Zeroual’s words convinced no one.
The policy Zeroual implemented with rare persistence on behalf of the centrist bourgeois classes that have held power both before and after his election in November 1995 ended in complete bankruptcy in all sectors.
Unfortunately, life has confirmed the analyses made public by the communists on the occasion of the presidential elections in 1995: Zeroual’s real programme consisted, on the political level, of seeking an agreement with the Muslim bourgeoisie i.e. with the bourgeoisie who camouflaged their class interests behind a shameful use of Islam and, on the economic level, of continuing to destroy the country’s productive base by implementing the agreements signed in 1994 with the IMF, thus completing the destructive work begun by others during the 1980s.
The working people, poor peasants, the large number of intellectuals who live on their salaried activity, are all social categories who are suffering profoundly from the terrible consequences of this policy.
A small minority of profiteers have become immensely wealthy through the network set up by some 23,000 importing companies which the authorities have generously paid with the nation’s funds.

On the political level, the resistance by broad segments of the population who have organised themselves into self-defence groups, and the blows struck by the ANP against the barbarous hordes of FIS have made it possible to reduce the dangers from and ravages of terrorism even if the game has not yet been definitively won.

But the centrist groups in power, whom Zeroual has represented in the highest offices of the state, have applied themselves persistently to debasing the products of this resistance. They have been ceaselessly endeavouring to profit from the balance of forces that has been created by the weakening of the forces of Islamic fascism in order to come to some understanding with those factions of FIS which will agree to lay down their arms. In exchange, they propose to include them in the exercise of power together with the Islamists of MSP to whom cabinet positions and other positions of less visible responsibility have already been assigned.

Under cover of a tactical truce that permits them to regroup their forces and to prepare for new offensives, hundreds of AIS murderers are strutting around freely in certain regions of the country, and above all, through the gates of the capital city.
The ruling groups have passed to another stage of their strategy which consists of fragmenting the popular forces. Applying the principle of “divide and rule” they set up the provocation of the law regarding the so-called generalisation of the use of the Arabic language in order to set one part of the population against another. They do not hesitate to use any means whatsoever to consolidate their domination.
The goal of this strategy as a whole is becoming more obvious to a growing number of citizens, and it is to expand the social basis of power, to use all means to stifle the growing resistance of the working people and the hostility of certain sectors of industrial capitalism which lost money on the liberalisation of foreign trade to a policy which is plunging the country deeper into destructive capitalism and into a mortal dependence.
Zeroual’s resignation comes at a time characterised by increasingly acute dissensions between senior state officials about the solutions that must be found to the political and economic crisis and about the way in which its aggravation should be addressed, taking into account the drop in the price of oil and the renewed demand for repayment of the foreign debt. How to deal with a situation that will be characterised by a serious reduction in fiscal resources in foreign exchange if the revenues from hydrocarbons fall to 10 billion dollars, and if debt servicing exceeds 6 billion dollars, thus leaving less than 4 billion dollars for the country? What credibility can still remain with a government which has used up the available funds that were created by the redistribution not to support the recovery of productive enterprises but to feed a gigantic drain of capital through the importing companies to reduce the people to a misery comparable only to what plagued it during the black years of the colonial period?

The battle rages behind the scenes.
There are differing opinions that pit the branch of power that acts in connivance with the Islamicists, which has never given up hope of bringing FIS back to centre stage, against the branch that categorically rejects this ill-fated prospect for the country. There are also branches that appear among the cliques that constitute the fringe sections of the centrists in power. These fringe sections have tried to find or to impose an intermediate solution, supporting the fight against terrorism while at the same time showing tolerance to the political organisations of Islamic fascism. The international campaign by the French neo-colonialist circles linked with social democracy, in conjunction with the pressures exerted by certain US circles that are counting on the ascent of an Islamic power, as they did in Afghanistan, reinforced the weight of these centrists in the machinery and at the same time exacerbated the tensions between the two poles of power.

The struggles waged by the working people under the extremely difficult conditions of fascist terrorism, the high-handedness of management in both the private and public sector, as well as the fear of a social explosion influenced the balance of forces and the actions of the various ruling circles.

These struggles alarm all the forces of power who are afraid that they might lose control of the situation. They are above all frightened that they might find themselves suddenly face to face with a movement that is a vehicle for a democratic progressive alternative that cannot be defined either in terms of the prospects of conciliation with the representatives of the Islamist bourgeoisie, or in terms of perpetuating the status quo, or in a regime of modernist economic liberalism, but only in a return to the progressive values that established and glorified an independent Algeria.

The working people, the labouring masses who aspire to democracy, social justice, and dignity in a country that is master of its own fate and capable of offering them tangible hopes, do not want a change of facade that would just be translated into the replacement of one Zeroual with another. They want another policy, a policy which will lead Algeria once again onto the road of economic, social and cultural progress.

Some people wonder whether the person who follows Zeroual will be a military man or a civilian. The real question does not lie there. It lies in whether the socio-economic and political content of the goals and ideals that the candidates actively support will conform to the interests of the working people and the country. It lies in the support which the broad strata of the working people who are associated with progress will decide to offer resolutely to the candidates whom they judge as being closest to their own interests, in terms of the objective content of their programmes, their acts past and present, and not solely their electoral promises.

Moreover, the duty of the progressive forces is to prepare for this election with determination by refusing defeatist attitudes that feed passivity or adventurous beliefs solely in decisive action from above. Their duty is also to reject attitudes that consist of making their participation in these elections contingent on an illusory elimination of the adherents of Islam from the election process. The rejection of their participation in this election campaign would be justifiable only in the case that the ruling groups had managed to prevent candidacies of progressive democrats or liberal modernists through fraudulent means.

The present power is globally the government of a bourgeois class of middlemen, as shown by its entire economic policy which has ruined production and benefited profiteers exclusively.

No real radical change can be made without a mass democratic and progressive movement that will eliminate this parasitic predatory bourgeoisie politically and economically.

The communists address the most conscientious working people, the progressive people who act in the struggle to close the road to Islamic fascism, to defend democratic liberties, including the fight against the intolerable high-handedness of power and of its anti-Islamist elements, the battle to annul the agreements signed with the IMF and to regain our national ability to make decisions, to retain the public sector with respect to the strategic economic, industrial, financial and trade sectors, and to take action in favour of social progress for working people and their gains.

They call upon them to work together to nominate the candidate who will defend these ideals, to do everything they can to ensure that such a candidacy plays a crucial role in developing militancy and the broadest mobilisation of the working people in favour of a democratic, anti-fascist progressive alternative.

20 September 1998

Algerian Party for Democracy and Socialism (PADS)