Former Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika will be buried on Sunday in the Martyrs’ Square in the El Alia cemetery in Algiers, reserved for heroes of the War of Independence, but he will be entitled to fewer honors than his predecessors.
Driven from power in 2019 after 20 years at the head of Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika died on Friday at the age of 84 in his nursing home in Zeralda (west of Algiers).
The one who was also for 14 years head of Algerian diplomacy in the 1970s must be buried after midday prayer, according to state television.
The exhibition of his remains at the People’s Palace in Algiers, initially announced, has been canceled, according to corroborating sources. However, this ceremonial building had been the subject of preparations for such a meditation in the presence of high dignitaries of the country.
The bodies of Bouteflika’s predecessors and even his ex-chief of staff Ahmed Gaïd Salah were all exposed in this Palace before being buried.
According to private radio M, the funeral procession will leave directly from Zeralda where the ex-president lived since a stroke in 2013, to the cemetery of El Alia, about ten kilometers away. Access was restricted to the national public media.
It will be “an official funeral procession with a protocol and security deployment” of custom and “the mortal remains of the former head of state will be carried by a military tank, said the radio. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, members of the government and foreign diplomats will be present at the cemetery.
Then, Abdelaziz Bouteflika will be buried in the Square of the Martyrs where his predecessors rest, alongside the figures of the War of Independence (1954-1962).
Nervous
Weakened and aphasic since his stroke, the former president was forced to resign on April 2, 2019, after nearly two months of massive demonstrations by the Hirak pro-democracy movement against his intention to run for a 5th consecutive term.
At the end of several hours of floating without official reaction to the death of the ex-president, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who was prime minister under Bouteflika, decreed the half-masting of the national flag “for three days”, to honor “the moudjahid (independence fighter, Editor’s note) Abdelaziz Bouteflika ”.
These procrastination illustrate, according to observers, fears of hostile demonstrations against a former president with a tarnished image.
“I imagine that the decision-makers are nervous, because there is a lot of hatred around the figure of Bouteflika on social networks”, explains to AFP Isabelle Werenfels, Swiss researcher specializing in the Maghreb at the German institute SWP.
“They do not really know what to do since among the political, economic and administrative elites, there is a fairly large number of people who are products or profiteers of the Bouteflika era,” she adds.
According to the professor, the current leaders “seek to distinguish themselves from him, but they cannot, or do not want to pass him to the oblivion of history”.
Message from Morocco
The former heads of state were buried with the greatest honors, like the first president of independent Algeria Ahmed Ben Bella (1963-1965) who was entitled to a solemn funeral in April 2012.
Bouteflika, who then declared national mourning for eight days, had personally accompanied the coffin of the People’s Palace to the cemetery of El Alia, in the presence of all the political class and senior leaders of the Maghreb.
The death of the third president of Algeria (from 1979 to 1992), Chadli Bendjedid, at the origin of a democratization of the institutions, was also followed by a national funeral and an eight-day mourning, in 2012.
Sign of the embarrassment of the authorities, the official media mentioned in brief the death of the deposed president. And state television waited 24 hours to mention in its newspaper the main stages of a political course of nearly 60 years, without dwelling too much.
Abroad, the King of Morocco Mohammed VI sent a message of “condolences and compassion” to the Algerian president after the death of Bouteflika, in the midst of strong tensions between Algiers and Rabat.
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