Photo president abdelaziz bouteflika biography examples

It is hard to imagine behind the inert, swollen mask of the disabled old man glimpsed in the past few years, Abdelaziz Bouteflika in his youth. His principal asset was his power of seduction. Charming, brilliant, talkative, his priority always seemed to be to win his listeners over to his ideas; he made his friends laugh and fascinated his admirers, male and female with his blue eyes and the smile of a Hollywood star.

Boumediene’s companion

Luck was on the side of this young Algerian born at Oujda in Morocco in 1937. At 19, twenty months after the beginning of the armed insurrection, he was conscripted in June 1956 like all the Algerians of the Sherifian Kingdom by order of the fearsome commander of the wilaya 5, Abdelhafid Boussouf. The military instructor, one Houari Boudienne, turned him down, deeming him too short. He was sent to do an internship as overseer of the maquis in Oranie, across the border and to inform the hierarchy of what was happening on the ground. He spent less than four months there and was more fortunate than his companion who was killed. In August 1957, Boussouf’s successor, who was none other than Boumediene, was in search of a secretary “knowing how to write” to draft his orders and recruited Bouteflika. He was to be attached to him for over two decades, until his death.

He soon became specialised in external relations, organising a second front against the French army in Mali or trying to convince “historic” leaders, jailed in France to rally round Boumediene. An eminent member of the “Oujda clan,” which brought together five former cadres of wilaya 5 to shoot the bull and smoke Cuban cigars, a gift from Fidel Castro, he was to owe Boumediene his career. Elected MP from Tlemcen, Minister of Youth at the moment of independence in 1962, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs following the assassination of his predecessor by a madman who turned out to have been manipulated.

Young Abdelaziz was not

President of Algeria from 1999 to 2019

Abdelaziz Bouteflika (pronunciation; Arabic: عبد العزيز بوتفليقة, romanized: ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Būtaflīqa[ʕabdelʕaziːzbuːtefliːqa]; 2 March 1937 – 17 September 2021) was an Algerian politician and diplomat who served as the seventh president of Algeria from 1999 to his resignation in 2019.

Before his stint as an Algerian politician, Bouteflika served during the Algerian War as a member of the National Liberation Front. After Algeria gained its independence from France, he served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1963 until 1979. He served as President of the United Nations General Assembly during the 1974–1975 session. In 1983 he was convicted of stealing millions of dinars from Algerian embassies during his diplomatic career.

In 1999, Bouteflika was elected president of Algeria in a landslide victory. He would win re-elections in 2004, 2009, and 2014. As President, he presided over the end of the Algerian Civil War in 2002 when he took over the project of his immediate predecessor President Liamine Zéroual, and he ended emergency rule in February 2011 amidst regional unrest. Following a stroke in 2013, Bouteflika had made few public appearances throughout his fourth term, making his final appearance in 2017.

Bouteflika resigned on 2 April 2019 amid months of mass protests opposing his candidacy for a fifth term. With nearly 20 years in power, he is the longest-serving head of state of Algeria to date. Following his resignation, Bouteflika became a recluse and died at the age of 84 in 2021, over two years after his resignation.

Early life and education

Abdelaziz Bouteflika was born on 2 March 1937 in Oujda, Morocco. He was the son of Mansouria Ghezlaoui and Ahmed Bouteflika from Tlemcen, Algeria. He had three half-sisters (Fatima, Yamina, and Aïcha), as well as four brothers (Abdelghani, Mustapha, Abderahim, and

“There will be no fifth term,” Mr Bouteflika was quoted as saying in a statement. “There was never any question of it for me. Given my state of health and age, my last duty towards the Algerian people was always contributing to the foundation of a new Republic.”

Celebrations erupted on the streets of Algeria capital Algiers as the news broke. Critics, however, fear Bouteflika could install a puppet president and postponing the election indefinitely as a threat to democracy.

“Even if this is a beautiful victory for the Algerian people and the gesture was there, I do not believe that the entire regime and its system is going to collapse,” Dalia Ghanem Yazbeck, a resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told Al Jazeera.

Last week, as thousands of Algerians took to the streets protesting against his reelection bid, Bouteflika had pledged to step down early if reelected. But his promise failed to diffuse the protests.

Who is Bouteflika?

Bouteflika was born and raised in Oujda, French Morocco in 1937. He joined the Algerian Liberation Army (ALN) at the young age of 19 and quickly rose through the ranks. After Algeria attained independence from colonial France, his ALN connections helped him become a minister in the government. Bouteflika also served as president of the United Nationa General Assembly in 1974.

He was convicted by an Algerian court in 1983 for syphoning off 60 million dinars while he was foreign minister. However, he was granted amnesty by President Chaldi Benjedid and his debt erased.

In 1999, Bouteflika became president after Liamine Zéroual unexpectedly stepped. After serving two terms, Bouteflika brought in a Constitutional amendment in 2009, allowing him to run for office an unprecedented third term. He was again reelected in 2014 after bringing in another Constitutional amendment.

Shortly after winn

Algeria's longest-ruling president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, died Friday aged 84, public television announced.

Under pressure from the military, the former strongman left office in April 2019 after two decades in power, following weeks of demonstrations all over the country over his bid to run for a fifth term in office.

After quitting, he had stayed out of the public eye at a residence in western Algiers.

Bouteflika became president of Algeria in 1999 as the former French colony emerged from a decade of civil war that killed nearly 200,000 people.

Dubbed "Boutef" by Algerians, he initially won respect for helping foster peace, notably with an amnesty law that prompted thousands of Islamist fighters to hand in their weapons.

Bouteflika went on to be elected for three more consecutive five-year terms, most recently in 2014.

Journalist Farid Alilat, who has written a biography of Bouteflika, says that at the height of his rule in the early 2000s, the president had "all the levers of power."

Crucially, he was backed by the army and the intelligence services.

"He became an absolute president," Alilat told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Algeria was largely spared the wave of uprisings that swept the Arab world in 2011, with many crediting still-painful memories of the conflict in the 1990s for keeping a lid on tensions.

But Bouteflika's rule was marked by growing corruption, leaving many Algerians wondering how a country with vast oil wealth could end up with poor infrastructure and high unemployment that pushed many young people overseas.

Health concerns

In his later years, Bouteflika's ill health started weighing on his credibility as a leader.

Despite suffering a mini-stroke in April 2013 that affected his speech and forced him to use a wheelchair, he decided to seek a fourth mandate despite growing public doubts about his ability to rule.

His bid in 2019 for a fifth term sparked a