About 2,000 protesting students marched Tuesday, March 2 in Algiers against the power, in the middle of a large police deployment and despite the ban on demonstrating because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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For the second week in a row, the young demonstrators, accompanied by sympathizers and teachers, marched without major incidents from the Place des Martyrs, at the foot of the Casbah, in old Algiers, to the center of the capital.
Blocked at the start of the march, they succeeded in overwhelming the police force.
Chanting the Hirak slogans - "
Free and democratic Algeria
" and "
Civil and non-military state
" - they took the narrow streets of the Casbah in order to bypass the multiple police lines drawn up on the usual route of the march.
Before the interruption of the popular protest movement's (Hirak) weekly marches in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, students used to march every Tuesday.
After 11 months of hiatus, the Algerians descended en masse in the streets on the occasion of the 2nd anniversary of Hirak on February 22.
In a televised interview Monday evening, President Abdelamadjid Tebboune assured that the demands of the “
genuine popular Hirak
” “
have been satisfied
” for the most part.
"
The Algerian people took to the streets and we realized their demands,
" Tebboune said.
But the popular protest movement has not lost its vitality and continues to demand the dismantling of the "
system
" in place since independence in 1962.