ALGIERS, 4 October 2003 — A day after the last members of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) quit the Cabinet, a court yesterday ordered a ban on the party’s extraordinary congress that was officially to announce its candidate in next year’s presidential election.
The FLN was due to meet today in extraordinary session to officially name former Prime Minister Ali Benflis as the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential election. But a group of FLN party members opposed to Benflis petitioned the court to slap a ban on the congress, judicial sources said. The court ruled in favor of the request and passed on its decision to the Interior Ministry, according to the sources.
The court said the meeting should not take place until a ruling on a complaint filed by the anti-Benflis activists is handed down. Benflis’ opponents are asking the courts to overturn decisions taken at a FLN congress in March that gave Benflis broad powers as party leader and dropped the FLN’s backing of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
The FLN, which under Benflis’ leadership made a stunning comeback in legislative elections last year and now holds an absolute majority of seats in the National Assembly, had backed Bouteflika in the 1999 presidential race.
Opponents of Benflis within the FLN, who are also backers of Bouteflika, have been trying for several months to have decisions taken by the party at its eighth annual conference in March overturned.
Activists at FLN headquarters in Algiers said yesterday the party was “determined” to go ahead with its congress today, at which Benflis was to be officially announced as the party’s candidate.
“These people are no longer part of the FLN,” party spokesman Abdesslem Medjahed said, referring to the anti-Benflis group that had applied to have the congress banned.
“They want to put pressure on the party but they can no longer take advantage of their position within the party to do so. They are a clan, adrift of the main group,” he said. “The only legitimate force in the FLN is that which was decided at the eighth congress” in March, Medjahed said.
Tensions within the Algerian government deepened Thursday when the FLN pulled five ministers loyal to Benflis out of the governing coalition. But other ministers claiming to belong to the FLN remained in the government headed by Ahmed Ouyahia, leader of the National Democratic Rally (RND), which also has Islamist members.
The FLN’s political bureau said it had taken the step in the light of the “irresponsible and heretical behavior” of Bouteflika.
Last month, Bouteflika dismissed seven ministers, five of them FLN supporters, in a Cabinet reshuffle. The move was widely interpreted as a sign of conflict with Benflis in the run-up to presidential elections next year. Bouteflika sacked Benflis as prime minister in May and replaced him with Ouyahia amid far-reaching differences between the two longtime political allies.
The FLN bureau’s statement said the behavior of Bouteflika “and his courtiers” was “the result of a premeditated and programmed plot aimed at the principles of democracy and the rule of law.”
