The generals who rule Algeria learned from their former Soviet mentors how to stage a coup. No need to surround the presidential palace or take over the television station, for the coup comes from within. Earlier this month the Chief-of-Staff, Gen Mohamed Lamari, simply asked the President, Mr Liamine Zeroual, to pre-record a television speech.
He had put Algeria's new institutions in place, Mr Zeroual announced on the evening of September 11th. It was time for others to take over and he would step down next February rather than complete his five-year term.
Algeria's tame opposition parties and foreign chanceries said the muffled coup was the result of the power struggle between army factions. If anyone needed confirmation that Gen Lamari is in charge, he wrote this week in the army magazine, El Djeich, that "henceforward, access to power through free elections shall be an irreversible practice". Rumours of power struggles among clans are "evil omens hatched by the enemies of Algeria", the Chief-ofStaff added.
After the annulment of Algeria's first free elections dragged the country into civil war in 1992, the generals understood they had to create something that could be mistaken for democracy. So after presidential elections in 1995, a constitutional referendum in 1996 and parliamentary and regional elections in 1997, Algerians are to be called to the polls a fifth time.
Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Algerians have been killed and with each successive ballot inflated turnout figures and vote counts discredit the process of "democratisation".
Algerians reacted to President Zeroual's surprise announcement with weariness, the cynical conviction that his successor has already been chosen, and fear that the forthcoming electoral charade prefigured worse violence. They were quickly proved right. More than 100 civilians have been killed in massacres and bombings in the past 13 days.
On September 16th the report issued by the six-member UN panel which visited Algeria in July at the request of the UN Secretary-General diverted attention from the country's internal problems. Mr Ahmed Attaf, the Algerian Foreign Minister, was so delighted with the document that he called a press conference in Algiers and distributed it to local newspapers for publication. The report was exactly what the government had agreed upon with the UN, Mr Attaf said. He was satisfied and relieved that the group led by the former president of Portugal, Mr Mario Soares, had kept their word. A reliable source confirmed that the UN went so far as to submit the document to Algiers before publication.
Amnesty International, which has tirelessly chronicled the Algerian war, immediately issued a rebuttal of the UN report, calling it a whitewash. The panel's information-gathering mission was meaningless without a human rights mandate, Amnesty said. By the panel's own admission, it had neither the means nor the mandate to conduct investigations of its own and was refused permission to meet those who truly represent a threat to the regime.
The UN panel report contradicted the findings of 18 UN experts from the Geneva-based Human Rights Committee two months ago. The experts had spoken of "collusion of members of the security forces in the perpetration of acts of terrorism" and condemned the government's evasive replies to evidence of routine torture and disappearances of those arrested by the authorities.
The panel accepted the government's contention that it is "fighting terrorism" and concluded that "Algeria deserves the support of the international community in its efforts to combat this phenomenon".
In 19 pages the panel used the words "terrorism" and "terrorists" 91 times, without once defining who these "terrorists" are or asking why they are trying to overthrow the government. They repeatedly cited - and apparently agreed with - interviewees who said "excesses" committed by the security forces could not be compared with Islamists' "crimes against humanity".
The panel's report, Foreign Minister Attaf insisted, proved that Amnesty International and other human rights groups which demand an international commission of inquiry are wrong and should apologise. This week the European Union, which sent its own craven mission to Algiers earlier this year, endorsed the UN panel report.
Now Algeria may receive the economic and military aid it seeks from the West, Mr Attaf boasted. The West, it seems, would rather cosset Algeria's papier-mache democracy than confront the roots of that country's tragedy.