THE ALGERIAN Interior Minister read the results with a straight face. Eleven million voters, 79.8 per cent of the Algerian electorate, had participated in Thursday's constitutional referendum, Mr Mustafa Benmansour announced yesterday morning on national television.
The Yes votes - an overwhelming 85.81 per cent of votes cast - had carried the day. All of the opposition political parties contested the government's figures. But President Liamine Zeroual will have his new constitution.
Election rigging has been a tradition in Algeria since the French fixed results during the colonial period to keep Algerian nationalists out of the pseudo parliament set up for the Arabs. This time, the results were so blatantly false that they provoked only cynical laughter among the weary population.
"I watched the polling station from my window," said a doctor in central Algiers. "Not 10 people showed up all day. And the government tells us 80 per cent of the population voted!"
Mr Benmansour was not so forthcoming about the election's casualties. The authorities had rounded up more suspected Islamists and deployed reservists in preparation for the vote, but news of attacks began emerging yesterday. A bomb in a cafe in the Algiers slum of Baraki killed up to five people - the cater was near a "communal guard" militia office.
Local journalists in Relizane, 250 km west of Algiers, said 11 people were killed by a bomb in a polling station there. The Front of Socialist Forces reported that 10 people were wounded by a bomb near Tizi Ouzou, in the Kabyle mountains.
In central Algiers, a man in a car was shot dead shortly after voting started in the morning. Residents of the neighbourhood are so accustomed to such incidents that they mentioned it only in passing, after an hour's conversation.
"I heard a woman scream, said the doctor who lives near the polling station. "There was gunfire, then about a hundred cops all ran in the same direction. He was riddled with bullets. The car was covered with blood. A police truck came and towed it away."
President Zeroual will now forge ahead with the next stage in Algeria's "democratisation"; legislative elections to be held early next year. Under the new constitution, Gen Zeroual will appoint one third of the members of the upper house of parliament, which enables him to block legislation.
The opposition political parties who called for a boycott or No vote in the referendum may now refuse to participate in the parliamentary elections. Gen Zeroual is taking no chances on a repeat of the near victory of the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in 1992. Parties based on religion are banned. The president can dissolve the parliament at will, and can rule by decree in its absence.
Yet even the ban on religious parties is inconsistent. The Hamas (not related to the Palestinian group of the same name) and Ennahda Islamic parties are allowed to function because the military does not consider them a threat, and because it is hoped they will relieve some of the pressure for Islamist representation. If present trends continue, however, there will be less and less possibility for independent political activity in Algeria.
Ironically, law and order is breaking down even as the regime tightens its grip on the political system. Car theft, burglary and murder have created an atmosphere of anarchy. "Be very careful," an Algerian friend warned in a note she left for my arrival in the capital. "Especially, don't venture near places where there are FIS people, because they've gone crazy. Don't trust anyone. Watch out. Everyone is settling accounts now."
