Abdelaziz Bouteflika

Biography

Abdelaziz Bouteflika was born in 1937 in Oujda, Morocco, to a family from Tlemcen. In 1956 he joined the National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the FLN, and became a close aide of Houari Boumédiène; he served on the Moroccan border and later on the Malian front in the far south, where he took the nom de guerre Abdelkader al-Mali.

After independence he was youth and sports minister under Ahmed Ben Bella and, from 1963, foreign minister. He helped Boumédiène overthrow Ben Bella in 1965 and kept the foreign ministry until 1979, presiding over the UN General Assembly in 1974-1975, when the assembly suspended apartheid South Africa from its session. Passed over for the presidency after Boumédiène's death, he went into exile in 1981 and was convicted in 1983 of misappropriating embassy funds before receiving an amnesty.

Backed by the army, he won the 1999 presidential election after his rivals withdrew, and put amnesty measures for Islamist fighters to referendums in 1999 and 2005 as the civil war wound down. Re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014 after the constitution was changed to remove term limits, he also chaired the FLN from 2005 and lifted the state of emergency in 2011.

A stroke in 2013 left him largely out of public view. His bid for a fifth term in 2019 set off the mass Hirak protests, and he resigned on 2 April 2019 under pressure from the army. He died at Zéralda in 2021.