History, Algeria

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The native Berber population of Algeria has been under the rule of foreign occupants for much of the last 3000 years. The Phoenicians (1000 BC) and the Roman Republic (200 BC) were the most important of these, until the coming of the Arabs in the 8th century. However, the flow of conquests was not all one-way; in medieval times the Berber Fatimid dynasty, originating in Algeria, took over Egypt, although it soon afterwards abandoned North Africa. Algeria was brought into the Ottoman Empire by Khair ad Din and his brother Aruj who made its coast a base for the corsairs; their privateering peaked in Algiers in the 1600's, after which the center of activity moved to Tripoli in Libya. On the pretext of a slight to their consul, the French invaded Algiers in 1830; however, intense resistance from such personalities as Emir Abdelkader made for a slow conquest of Algeria, not technically completed until the early 1900s when the last Tuareg were conquered. Meanwhile, however, the French invaders had made Algeria into an integral part of metropolitan France, a status that would end with the collapse of the fourth republic. Tens of thousands of settlers from France, Italy and Spain moved across the Mediterranean to farm the Algerian coastal plain and occupy the most prized parts of Algeria's cities. People of European descent in Algeria, known as the pieds noirs (black feet), were treated as French citizens like any other, with representation in Parliament, while native Arabs and Berbers were subjected to an intense apartheid-like system. In 1954, the National Liberation Front(FLN) launched the guerrilla Algerian War of Independence; after nearly a decade of urban and rural warfare, they succeeded in pushing the French out in 1962. In that year the French government under de Gaulle secretly signed the Evian Accord with Algerian leaders; upon ratification by both the French and Algerian electorates, Algeria was proclaimed an independent country by de Gaulle on July 3. Consequently, approximately 900,000 pieds noirs fled Algeria, most resettling in France. Tens of thousands of native Algerians who had been loyal to French sovereignty, known as harkis, fared much worses. Abandoned by their French allies, most were subsequently massacred by FLN forces after independance. Algeria's first president, the FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella, was overthrown by his former ally and defense minister, Houari Boumédičnne in 1965. The country then enjoyed almost 25 years of relative stability under the one-party socialism of Boumedienne and his successors. In the 1990s, Algeria was engulfed in a bloody civil war after the military prevented an Islamist political party, the Islamic Salvation Front from taking power following the country's first multiparty elections. More than 100,000 people were killed, often in unprovoked massacres of civilians, by guerrilla groups such as the Armed Islamic Group.

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General Tips about Algeria

» Electric power
» Area code to Algeria
» Telephone system in Algeria
» Money in Algeria
» Visas
» Religion in Algeria
» Languages in Algeria
» Flora and fauna in Algeria
» Climate in Algeria
» Transportation in Algeria
» Communications in Algeria
» History
» Sétif, Algeria
» Oran, Algeria
» Constantine, Algeria
» Bijaya, Algeria
» Annaba, Algeri
» Tlemcen
» Tindouf
» Sidon
» Algiers

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