THE posters for Algeria's parliamentary elections yesterday were an odd sight: alongside the coloured snapshots of candidates for the new assembly were black and white "wanted" posters of Islamist guerrilla leaders on the run.
The candidates smiled; the bearded men, shown in old mug shots or identity photos, did not. The government has offered bounty for Algeria's 72 most wanted militants: a leader like Ahmed Benaicha of the Islamic Salvation Army, or Antar Zouabri of the Armed Islamic Group, is worth nearly £50,000, dead or alive. Local "emirs" bring barely £1,000.
Algerians found an almost comic irony in the juxtaposition. They also made fun of President Liamine Zeroual's National Democratic Rally (RND), which was launched on February 21st to stock the assembly with apparatchiks. The RND was mocked as "a newborn baby with a moustache" - the Algerians' way of saying it is virtually a copy of the old National Liberation Front (FLN), which discredited itself through 3 1/2 decades of misrule.
Mr Zeroual is a retired army general whom the military appointed head of state in January 1994. His regime needed legitimacy, so it held a presidential election - which Mr Zeroual won in November 1995. Back then, Algerians had huge hopes that he would stop the civil war; most observers believed Mr Zeroual genuinely won the election.
But the regime seems pathologically incapable of reforming itself. The Military Security (SM) remains the most efficient government institution, dabbling in import export, choosing high ranking civil servants and infiltrating Islamist groups. Algerians privately accuse the SM of carrying out assassinations as well as some of the war's worst atrocities.
Today the Algiers government is expected to announce that the RND has won the largest share of seats in the new assembly an amazing feat for a party that is less than four months old Why one wonders, would a majority vote for a government which cannot provide security, which supplies running water only one day in three in Algiers, which has presided over a 35 per cent devaluation in salaries in three years?
Whatever the results of the election, power will remain with MrZeroual and the generals who surround him. Under the new constitution, passed in a dubious referendum last November, the President can rule by decree when he wants to. He hand picks a third of the "Council of the Nation" the upper house whose approval is needed for all legislation.
The government used international observers to try to convince a sceptical public that yesterday's election was fair. The very concept of democratic elections is debatable when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which won a landslide victory in the first round of elections in 1991, has, been totally excluded from the "democratisation" process.
The Arab League and the Organisation of African Unity - groups hardly known for their defence of democracy - sent 120 election observers to Algeria. Before the vote began, the head of the Arab League delegation was already praising the "neutrality of the administration and of President Zeroual in organising the election." The UN sent six technicians to assist 80 foreign observers. Like the foreign journalists permitted to watch this exercise in "democracy", the observers are allowed to move about only with a heavily armed escort.
Opposition parties have complained that the large number of mobile polling stations, the ability of the walis or regional governors to change voters' lists, the presence of security forces in polling stations and the government's refusal to provide detailed vote counts destroy the election's credibility. How could 200 observers possibly certify the results when there were 16.77 million voters and 37,587 polling stations, they asked.
The future of an EU Algerian agreement of association depends on the answer. The EU has suspended negotiations on the trade agreement until it decides whether these elections were "free and fair". Meanwhile, widescale human rights abuses continue. A report released by the International Federation of Human Rights this week listed 15 government torture centres in Algiers, where it said suspected rebels are beaten, sodomised and tortured with electricity. In at least two cases, the report said, a blow torch was used to burn the victims' genitals.
