With the bankruptcy of party politics, growing dissent and discontent in the last few years have been increasingly expressed through the emergence of social movements organising around social and environmental issues, particularly in the gas-rich Sahara.
Just 85km away from Hassi Messaoud, one of the wealth centres of the country and Algeria’s first Energy Town, the unemployed movement CNDDC that started in Ouargla in 2013 succeeded in mobilising tens of thousands of people in huge demonstrations demanding decent jobs and protesting against economic exclusion, social injustice and the underdevelopment of their region.
The unemployed of Ouargla rightly wondered why they have not been the beneficiaries of the oil wealth that is lying under their feet.
How come they continue to suffer from unemployment and political and economic exclusion while multinationals thrive and plunder their resources? As expected, all attempts have been made by the authorities to crush, discredit and co-opt the movement, which played an important role in bringing an anticorporate dimension to the anti-fracking uprising that started in January 2015, following the Algerian authorities’ announcement at the end of December 2014 that drilling would begin in the first pilot shale well in In Salah in the Ahnet Basin, by a consortium of three companies: Sonatrach, Total and Partex.
Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher and activist. He works for the Transnational Insitute (TNI).
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