Abdelaziz Bouteflika

Abdelaziz Bouteflika (2 March 1937 – 17 September 2021) was an Algerian politician and diplomat who served as his country's foreign minister for sixteen years (1963-1979) and then as president for almost twenty years (1999-2019), making him Algeria's longest-serving head of state, until the Hirak protests forced his resignation in 2019. ^{1 2}

He began as a young fighter in the National Liberation Army during the war of independence and became one of President Houari Boumédiène's closest collaborators, before exile and a corruption conviction interrupted his career. ¹

Bouteflika was born in Oujda, in eastern Morocco, to Algerian parents from the Trara mountains near Tlemcen who had emigrated there; he grew up in Oujda, while his younger brother Saïd, later his special adviser, was raised mostly in Tlemcen. ^{1 3}

The son of a zaouia sheikh, he was well versed in the Qur'an, attended the Sidi Ziane, El Hoceinia and Abdel Moumen schools in Oujda, and was affiliated as a schoolboy with a Qadiriyya zaouia in the city, as the English article reports. ¹

In 1956, aged nineteen, Bouteflika joined the National Liberation Army, trained at its officers' school at Dar El Kebdani in Morocco, and became controller of Wilaya V and administrative secretary to Houari Boumédiène, a core member of his "Oujda Group". ³

In 1960 he was assigned to lead the Malian front in the Algerian south, and came back with the nom de guerre "Abdelkader al-Mali", which stayed with him. ¹

After independence in 1962 Bouteflika became deputy for Tlemcen and minister for youth and sport, and in 1963 minister for foreign affairs, a post he kept until Boumédiène's death in 1978. ¹

He served as president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974-1975, the youngest person to have done so, and in November 1974 suspended the apartheid South African government's participation in that session of the Assembly. ¹

Algeria in those years led the Non-Aligned Movement, and he held talks with Henry Kissinger, the first between United States and Algerian officials since diplomatic relations resumed. ¹

After Boumédiène's death Bouteflika was a leading candidate for the succession but lost to the compromise candidate Chadli Bendjedid, and steadily lost power under "de-Boumédiennisation". ¹

In 1983 the Court of Financial Auditors convicted him of fraudulently taking 60 million dinars from Algerian embassies during his diplomatic career; he received an amnesty from President Bendjedid, spent six years in exile in Switzerland, and was brought back to the FLN Central Committee in 1989. ¹

During the civil war of the 1990s he stayed on the sidelines, and the English article reports that in January 1994 he refused the army's proposal that he succeed the assassinated President Mohamed Boudiaf, because the army would not grant him full control of the armed forces. ¹

Bouteflika was elected president in 1999 after all other candidates withdrew just before the vote citing fraud concerns, and was re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014, ruling for four terms. ¹

Under him the civil war ended in 2002 as he completed his predecessor's reconciliation project; the 2005 Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation granted a broad amnesty, and emergency rule was lifted in February 2011. ¹

A constitutional amendment in 2008 removed the presidential term limit, allowing him to stand repeatedly. ¹

A stroke in 2013 left him severely weakened; through his fourth term he appeared rarely in public, had not given a speech since 2014, and communicated with his ministers by letter. ¹

In February 2019 his announcement of a fifth candidacy triggered the nationwide Hirak protests; he first withdrew the candidacy, then, under pressure from the army chief of staff, resigned on 2 April 2019. ^{3 1}

Bouteflika spent his final years as a recluse in a medicalised residence at Zéralda, a suburb of Algiers, and died there on 17 September 2021 of cardiac arrest, aged 84; President Abdelmadjid Tebboune declared three days of national mourning, and he was buried at El Alia Cemetery on 19 September in a subdued ceremony. ^{1 2}

The Arabic article reports that he had married Amal Triki, a diplomat's daughter, in great secrecy in August 1990, that they had no children and later divorced, and that nothing of his marital status was known throughout his presidency. ³

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

Supporters. His supporters credit him with ending the civil war and restoring stability and national unity through reconciliation, paying down the foreign debt, and building large housing and infrastructure programmes. ¹

Critics. His critics point to repeated allegations of fraud and vote-tampering at the elections from 1999 to 2019, to his 1983 corruption conviction long before his presidency, and to the Suisse Secrets leaks reporting a Swiss bank account held during much of his presidency with a maximum balance of over 1.4 million Swiss francs. ¹

Bouteflika remains Algeria's longest-serving head of state. His image among Algerians is bound both to the end of the "black decade" of civil war and to the oil-boom years, and his fall is bound to the Hirak, when a whole generation took to the streets demanding the departure of the system he embodied. ¹

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