Police use teargas against rioting Algerian youths

Press, 7 October 1988, Page 6

Police use teargas against rioting Algerian youths

NZPA-Reuter Tunis Police firing teargas have moved against rioting Algerian youths who set fire to Government cars and buildings and built street barricades in protest against the Government’s latest austerity plans. Thousands of youngsters, many of them secondary school students or unemployed, smashed shop windows, hijacked buses and built barricades of burning rubbish in the streets of the capital, Algiers, yesterday, witnesses said. One of the rioters’ targets was the building housing the Ministry of Youth and Sports. The rioting was the most serious in several

days of tension marked by wildcat strikes in the public sector and official statements insisting that only reform of heavily subsidised State industries can save the country from crisis. Police and gendarmerie answered the rioters with volleys of teargas. By nightfall the city was calm as municipal workers moved in to clear up the damage. One Algiers resident said the disturbances coincided with a clandestine call for a general strike on Wednesday, in defiance of the official trade unions which called on workers on Monday to support the austerity measures. The response to the strike call was patchy,

partly because those who made it had difficulty getting their message to most of the working population, residents said. An adviser to President Chadli Benjedid said: “These young people didn’t have any demands. It had nothing to do with politics.” Discontent among Algerians has been rising for several weeks after sharp rises in food prices and a speech on September 19 by Mr Chadli, saying that the abundant oil and gas revenues of the past had made Algerians lazy.

Those who could not do their jobs properly would have to make way for those who could, he said. Diplomats say, however, that Mr Chadli faces

stiff opposition from hardliners in the ruling National Liberation Front. The adviser to Mr Chadli said the security forces were in full control and no further trouble was expected. “It was just acts of vandalism by youngsters, stirred up by a bunch of hooligans. It was nothing serious,” the adviser told Reuters in Tunis by telephone. Witnesses said the police made many arrests but the adviser said he could not give a figure. He dismissed suggestions that the riots were linked with strikes at a vehicle assembly plant at Rouiba, on the edges of the capital, and in the postal and telephone services.