(Sidali Djarboub, File/Associated Press)PARIS — Algeria’s longtime leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has been known as a wily political survivor ever since he fought for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. So much about the 82-year-old Bouteflika, badly weakened by a 2013 stroke, has remained an enigma. A slow, frail Bouteflika shown in rare televised images released on Monday night gave little hint of his firebrand past. In Algeria’s bloody independence war, he commanded the southern Mali front and slipped into France clandestinely in 1961 to contact jailed liberation leaders. The recent protests surprised Algeria’s opaque leadership and freed the country’s people, long fearful of a watchful security apparatus, to openly criticize the president.

Source: Washington Post March 12, 2019 10:34 UTC