Rioting broke out on Wednesday when Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika took his re-election campaign to this flashpoint city in the restive Kabylie region, homeland of the nation’s Berber minority.
Protesters clashed with security forces outside a cultural centre where Bouteflika was holding a campaign rally ahead of presidential elections on April 8.
Police fired teargas and used water cannons to disperse the protesters, most of them local youths.
Barricades were set up on some of the main streets in the city centre and in the Genets neighbourhood, a hotbed of anti-government sentiment.
The visit is Bouteflika’s first to Tizi Ouzou, the most restive city in the poor, mountainous Kabylie region, since April 2001 when Berber elders known as aarchs began to spearhead a campaign for minority rights.
During the period known as the Black Spring, bloody riots left more than 100 dead.
Bouteflika, one of six candidates in the North African country’s presidential polls, went on Monday to Kabylie’s second largest city, Bejaia, where witnesses said minor incidents broke out after a rally.
The aarchs have led tough demands for recognition of the Berber identity — including the elevation of the Berber language Tamazight to the same status as that of mainstream Arabic — and a credible plan for Kabylie’s social and economic development.
Negotiations over the demands collapsed after a few weeks early this year, when only a section of the aarch leadership took part. — Sapa-AFP