Five facts you may not know about Algeria

Algeria is known for several things that distinguish it from the rest of the countries in the region. Over the past months, international news about Algeria has occupied topics related to the health status of the Algerian president, its relations with Iran, its view of the Syrian crisis and its war on the Ahmadiyya sect... But Algeria is much larger than that.

Dozens of facts about Algeria that the foreign reader may not know, we have chosen here five of them:

1. The largest country in the League of Arab States and the African Union in terms of area:

Algeria has an area of 2382 km, 80 percent of its area is desert, as Algeria includes 20 percent of the Great African Sahara. Until recently, Algeria was the second African and Arab country after Sudan. the top.

2. The female rai:

Rai art spreads in the Maghreb region as a whole, but most studies confirm that its origin is Algeria, as it spread in the middle of the last century, and among the first names that were known there by Sheikha Remy and Massoud Belmo, before other artists took him to the world, such as Cheb Khaled, Cheb Mami and the late Cheb Hosni .

What confirms Algeria’s eligibility for rai is that it is the only one in which singers of this color still maintain their popularity, which is the opposite of what happened to the majority of rai names in Morocco and Tunisia. Algeria recently wrote to the United Nations to classify rai as its own intangible heritage.

3. The biggest revolution facing French colonialism:

France considered Algeria a copy of it, especially since it had occupied it since 1830, so the struggle of the Algerians for independence was bitter and characterized by the fall of many victims whom official Algeria classifies as one and a half million martyrs, (a number questioned by several Algerian circles), and the Algerians began the battle of liberation in 1954 and did not They end it only in 1962, forcing France to enter into negotiations that ended with the acceptance of a referendum for self-determination, with which the Algerians chose independence.

4. Acquiring half of Africa's arms imports:

Algeria is the largest importer of arms in the brown continent, accounting for 46 percent of the continent's total imports, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute reported in February 2017. The same institute's reports confirm that Algeria has always been among the ten most heavily armed countries in the world.

The institute explains this by an arms race with neighboring Morocco, which has also developed its war imports, as may be explained by the centralization of the army institution in Algeria, as its budget has not affected any change despite the austerity policy in several sectors, and several reports indicate the political weight of this institution throughout the modern history of Algeria .

5. Economic contraction due to the decline in the price of oil and the dinar:

Since 2014, the world has witnessed a significant decline in oil prices, which had a negative impact on the Algerian economy, which depends for its construction on its energy exports, as it constitutes about 95 percent of total exports.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika acknowledged the existence of this crisis, which was exacerbated by a clear decline in the value of the dinar, which reached the month of August 2015, when it reached 101.94 in relation to the value of the US dollar, in the worst decline since independence. It also pushed it to adopt austerity policies characterized by raising taxes and reducing public spending.