Resignation follows weeks of massive protests against the man who ruled Algeria for 20 years.
A saviour for some, an opportunist for others, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika is no stranger to controversy.
Elected president of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria in 1999, the 82-year-old is the fifth and longest-serving head of state the North African country has had.
He resigned on April 2, following weeks of massive street protests against his 20-year rule.
Hundreds of thousands of people took part in nationwide demonstrations demanding the ailing leader, who suffered a debilitating stroke in 2013, step down.
They said he was no longer fit to run the country and called for him and his inner circle to quit, in order to allow for a real
democracy to be established.
Partisans of the veteran leader credit him with ending a bloody civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 Algerians throughout the 1990s, but his critics argue he overstayed his welcome.
Originally from the city of Tlemcen in Western Algeria, Bouteflika was born in the Moroccan town of Oujda on March 2, 1937.
In 1956, at the age of 19, Bouteflika joined the Army of National Liberation (ALN), the military branch of the FLN, then waging its war of independence against colonial France.
The young Bouteflika quickly rose through party ranks, winning the trust of Houari Boumediene, an ALN commander based in Morocco who later seized power through a bloodless coup in 1965.
Boumediene appointed Bouteflika administrative secretary for the fifth Wilaya – Arabic for province – in 1957, effectively charging the young officer with reporting on the situation in his ancestral region.
After Algeria gained its independence in 1962, members of the ALN based in western Algeria and along the Moroccan border – known as the Oujda group or clan – assumed control of the nascent state.
Boumediene’s protege was named minister of youth, sports and tourism at the age of 25 in Algeria’s first post-independence administration under the leadership of President Ahmed Ben Bella.
In 1963, Bouteflika became the world’s youngest minister of foreign affairs – a record that he still holds to this day.
Bouteflika’s age did not take away from his important role in shaping independent Algeria’s role in world affairs.
“However, it is worth placing Bouteflika’s age in context,” said Arthur Asseraf, a historian at Cambridge University.
“Algeria at independence was a young country, led by a radical revolutionary generation that had decided to break with the past.”
“The man whom Bouteflika replaced, Khemisti, became Foreign Minister aged 32 in 1962.”
Colonisation still weighed heavily on Algeria’s consciousness, influencing the country’s foreign policy and determination to free subjugated people around the world.
Movements ranging from Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Panther Party to the National Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Gulf found refuge in the Algerian capital.
Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela also received material support and in the case of the latter, military training.
Young though he may have been, Bouteflika knew how to play his cards right in a context of rapacious intraparty rivalry.
He stuck by his mentor, Boumediene, during the putsch that overthrew Ben Bella in June 1965 and was kept on as foreign minister.
In 1967, following the Arab military defeat against Israel during the Six-Day War, Bouteflika broke diplomatic relations with the United States.
“There’s no doubt that imperialism has hit again in the Middle East,” he said.
Dressed in tailored suits and cigar in hand, Algeria’s top diplomat built a reputation as an indefatigable defender of “third-worldism”, the idea that newly liberated nations should side with neither the West nor the Soviet bloc in their Cold War rivalry.
In 1974, Bouteflika was named president of the UN General Assembly and in an unprecedented move, invited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to address the world governing body for the first time.
After Boumediene died in 1978, however, Bouteflika began losing his status. Corruption charges forced him into self-imposed exile in 1981, first to Switzerland and then the United Arab Emirates.
