Algeria’s army chief on Saturday reiterated his call for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to be declared unfit for office and told opponents not to seek to undermine the military.
The Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Ahmed Gaed Salah had previously proposed on Tuesday for the constitutional council to declare Bouteflika unfit for office, a move provided for under article 102 of the charter.
The proposal is a response to weeks of protests demanding an end to the ailing leader’s 20-year rule.
On Saturday Salah said in a statement issued by the Defense Ministry that most people supported the army’s plan but some were resisting. He did not name those opposed to the move.
He said these opponents had met on Saturday to start a media campaign against the army claiming people were against the proposals.
Salah added that trying to undermine the military, an institution in Algeria whose support has long been seen as vital to keeping Bouteflika and the ruling elite in power, was a “red line” that should not be crossed. He did not elaborate.
“All that emerges from these suspicious meetings of proposals that do not conform to constitutional legitimacy or undermine the national army, which is a red line, is totally unacceptable,” he said in the statement.
Opposition figures and protesters have rejected Salah’s move, describing it as another attempt by the ruling class to maintain the status quo.
Bouteflika, 82, has rarely been seen in public in recent years. He has faced demonstrations for over a month after he announced we would run for a fifth term as president.
His announcement that he would not seek a fifth term but that he would postpone elections and not quit immediately has failed to subdue protesters.
Bouteflika established himself in the early 2000s by ending a civil war that had claimed 200,000 lives. But he has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, and now faces the biggest crisis of his two-decade rule.
Under the constitution, the chairman of parliament’s upper house, Abdelkader Bensalah, would serve as caretaker president for at least 45 days if Bouteflika stepped down.
However, there is no obvious long-term successor to rule the nation which secured independence from France in 1962 after years of conflict and was embroiled in a bloody Islamist insurgency during the 1990s.
