ABSTRACT
In 2004, Ali Fawzi Rebaïne – the leader of a small opposition party called Ahd ’54 (The Oath of 1954) – surprised observers of Algerian politics by successfully gathering enough signatures to take part in the Presidential elections. A clear outsider, Rebaïne ended up with less then one per cent of the vote, and joined the chorus of those questioning the fairness of the electoral procedures and Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s victory. Here is how, a couple of years before, he remembered his political upbringing:
I come from a family involved in politics. My mother and father, my brothers and even my aunts, all took part in the liberation war. Not all of them were involved in politics later on. My father had been in the unions. My granduncle wrote the Soumman platform,19 and became a minister [under Ben Bella] but retired from politics after the [1965] coup. In the 1980s I had friends in the Berber Cultural Movement. Around 1984/85 when I was about to get out of prison for some demonstrations – some of them told me they had constituted an association of Enfants des Chouhadas [Children of the Martyrs of the Revolution] and that they wanted to set up a network of associations at national level, but they were stuck in Tizi [Ouzou]. What we wanted was to defend the memory of the martyrs, to prevent the state from speaking in the name of our fathers. We decided to stop the official commemorations of the dates of the revolution – the 5th of July, the 1st
of November etc. Some of these people were also involved in the creation of the first league of human rights. The day they arrested us, on the 5th of July 1985, there were 300 of us. Despite the climate of fear back then, and the reluctance to meet up in public, we were many. From Algiers, Boumerdés, Chlef, Blida.20
