Geography

Friend Kelly emailed me recently asking me if I was in Armenia yet.

So I figured a fast geo-historical lesson on ALGERIA may be in order.

Algeria is a huge country (second biggest in Africa, fourth biggest in the world) shaped roughly like a fat arrowhead backed up against the Mediterranean with the point aimed into the rest of the continent.

In addition to the sea to the north, it touches on six surrounding countries, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Mauritania, Mali and Niger. And over the Mediterranean all of Europe is just a couple hours away. This makes it a great shipping point and an easy staging area for terrorists.

The country is divided into 48 waliyas – or states – and communes or counties. But most of the population lives in the north between the Mediterranean and the Atlas Mountains, but the sprawling south-central area is loaded with oil. Algerians cannot travel into this area without essentially an internal passport. The area along the west border is also restricted because it is filled with refugees.

Algeria is not really African and not really Middle Eastern, which people seem proud of, They speak Arabic but with a rich mixture of French (plus Berber, Turkish and Spanish. Arabic speakers in Egypt would have a hard time understanding it. However, the US Ambassador Richard Ford is a fluent speaker.) French is the second language, which everyone tells you – learn, it’s easy. It was a French colony for 135 years then fought a long, bloody horrific war for Independence. One million people died before the French relented in 1962. July 5. (How did it happen that so many countries won freedom in that month?) The Algerian war was waged mostly in Algeria and people here remember gun battles in the streets and danger as routine.

There are tribes in Algeria, of course. I’m just learning about them. The Chaoui (pronounced CHOW-EE) dominate the powerful army and major government officers. You want a Chaoui for a friend. And the Kabyle (KAH-BEEL-LAY) are famed for their independent resistance against the French, the Arabs, against anyone who wanted to disarm them.

Here’s what you probably know about Algeria and didn’t realize.

*The Casbah or citadel, is the oldest part of the city, very beautiful on a hill above the sea, but you don’t go alone because of street crime.

*The pirates of the Barbary Coast