The former Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika has died at 84, the presidency announced on Friday, more than two years after he stepped down amid mass protests and under pressure from the army.
Bouteflika, a veteran of Algeria’s war for independence, had ruled the North African nation for two decades. He resigned in April 2019 after nationwide street demonstrations rejecting his plan to seek a fifth term in office.
He had rarely been seen in public, even before his departure, after suffering a stroke in 2013.
After Bouteflika’s resignation, in an attempt to end the protests demanding political and economic reform, Algerian officials launched unprecedented investigations into corruption.
The probes led to the imprisonment of several senior officials, including Bouteflika’s powerful brother and advisor Saïd.
Saïd Bouteflika is in jail serving a 15-year sentence on a range of charges, including plotting against the state.
Place on the world stage
After Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, Abdelaziz Bouteflika became Algeria’s first minister of youth and sports and then, within a year and at the age of 26, foreign minister.
He was an influential figure in the Non-Aligned Movement, which gave a global voice to the emerging nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
As president of the UN General Assembly in 1974, Bouteflika invited the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to address the United Nations, a historic step towards international recognition of the Palestinian cause.
He also demanded that China be given a seat on the UN Security Council and was loudly critical of apartheid rule in South Africa.
He championed post-colonial states, challenged what he saw as the hegemony of the United States and helped turn his country into a seedbed of 1960s idealism.
He welcomed Che Guevara to Algiers, and the young Nelson Mandela got his first training in Algeria. The Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was given refuge in Algeria while on the run from the US police.
Negotiating the peace
In the early 1980s Bouteflika went into exile after the death of President Houari Boumédiène and settled in Dubai, where he became an advisor to a member of the emirate’s ruling family.
He returned home in the 1990s, when Algeria was ravaged by a war between the army and armed Islamist militants which killed at least 200,000 people.
Elected president in 1999, he negotiated a truce with the Islamists and launched a national reconciliation process that allowed the country to restore peace.
Bouteflika joined the independence war against France at the age of 19 as a protégé of the then Commander Boumédiène, chief of staff of the Algerian border army.
On independence in 1962, Bouteflika became minister of youth and tourism in the government of President Ahmed Ben Bella at the age of 25. His appointment as foreign minister the following year made him the youngest in the world. That record still stands.
His rise continued after Boumédiène seized power and became president in 1965.
Little is known about Bouteflika’s private life. Official records mention no wife, though some accounts say a marriage took place in 1990. For years he lived with his mother, Mansouriah, in an apartment in Algiers, where she used to prepare his meals.
He used the revenue from oil and gas to soothe internal discontent, and the state he ruled became more peaceful and prosperous, allowing it to sidestep, for a while, the Arab Spring unrest that toppled leaders across North Africa in 2011.
But corruption flourished and Algerians were increasingly angered by the country’s political and economic torpor. This fuelled the mass protests which finally brought Bouteflika’s presidency to an end.
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