Algerian courts use cover of pandemic to reverse protesters' gains
Reforms sought by Algeria's Harek, or mass movement, are "stillborn" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the coming of the coronavirus pandemic, protesters who once thronged Algeria's city centers in the hundreds of thousands have vanished. In their absence, state power is reasserting itself.
Through 2019 and the early months of 2020, Algeria's mass protest movement, called the Hirak, made stunning gains when it took to the streets in opposition to the stifling bureaucracy and endemic corruption of the opaque cadre — or pouvoir — of military leaders, trade unionists and business elites surrounding the office of the president.
Over the space of months, pressure from the street brought around a president's resignation, dramatic arrests among the country's senior political hierarchy and the promise of dramatic, far-reaching reform.
Under the cover of a global pandemic today, many of those reforms remain stillborn, while observers point to the use of the courts and curbs on freedom of speech to reverse engineer the Hirak's gains.
