Urban violence increasing in Algeria’s marginalised communities

Urban violence is on the rise due to social insecurity, painful shared memories of Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s and the mushrooming of “ghettos” on the outskirts of major cities.

The demographic boom, reaching 40 million in 2016, and growing migration from rural towns and villages to major urban cities has added to Algeria’s acute housing shortage despite the government launching a programme in 2000 to build two million homes by 2019, Agence France Presse reported.

New towns like Ali Mendjeli near the Algerian city of Constantine have been built “without any territorial and environmental logic,” according to Nadir Djermoune, a professor of architecture at the University of Blida in Algiers.

These towns fail to become urban spaces and instead function as marginalised communities where gang violence thrives, Djermoune explained.

According to Professor Rachid Belhadj, head of forensic medicine at the Mustapha Bacha University Hospital Centre in Algiers, these marginalised towns are “ghettos” where violence is growing “like cancer.”

“Violence was already there, but it was used by organised gangs … [this] is what worries us,” Belhadj said.

Belhadj’s centre verifies the claims of victims of violence before they are passed on to the police to investigate. According to Belhadj, the number of people using the centre’s services has leapt from 2,500 per year to 6,000 in just a decade.

The relocation of the inhabitants of the new towns to established cities has also “caused friction between young people,” according to Interior Minister Noureddine Bedoui.

No official statistics on crime rates are currently available to measure exactly the threats of gang violence in urban spaces.

One Algerian family was forced to leave the small satellite town of Ali Mendjeli to seek refuge with in-laws. Karima, the 45-year-old mother of three, was forced to move due to the anxiety of daily life where rival gangs regularly fight each other with knives and swords.

“I was afraid they would attack my children,” she told AFP. “I have two teenagers and I feared it would end badly.”

Due to high oil revenues, an increase in wages and subsidies was a necessary step to curb the descent into civil unrest that has shaken other parts of the region.

A further collapse in crude oil prices in 2014 forced the national budget to raise taxes on basic goods to offset the losses. According to official figures, youth unemployment was at a 26.7 per cent in September 2016 in a country where a quarter of the population is aged between 15 and 29.

Social and economic woes have pushed Algerian youth into drug trafficking and kidnapping according to sociologist Fatma Oussedik at the University of Algiers.

“But the fundamental link that unites them is insecurity … which places them outside of society,” and pushes them to the easier alternative of crime in criminal gangs.

The transition into crime has been linked to the violence witnessed during the civil war between the government and armed Islamist groups in the 1990s that killed around 200,000 people.

According to United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, Dainus Puras, the collective-memory has caused “a profound trauma in the population that has not yet been adequately addressed”.

“While the number of suicides is declining, violence against oneself has turned into violence against others,” Puras explained after a visit to Algiers last year.