al jazeera, nairobi, kenya. >> this is al jazeera. these are the headlines. saudi arabia is opening its airspace and borders to qatar, in what are seen as big steps towards resolving a 3.5 year diplomatic crisis. kuwait has been mediating between qatar and 4 arab states. the announcement was made on the eve of a summit in saudi arabia.

gabriel has more from washington, d.c. >> they will be spinning this as a big foreign policy victory, especially here, with only 18 days, 16 days now until president donald trump leaves office and hands over power to joe biden. >> iran has confirmed its resumed enriching uranium at 20%. the move, denounced as nuclear extortion by the u.s., is another breach to the vienna accord in 2015. south korea is demanding the release of one of its oil tankers, seized by iran. iran says it was breaking maritime environmental laws, carrying over 7000 tons of oil chemical products. donald trump is on his way to the state of georgia, ahead of 2 run off votes for senate seats.

joe biden, thanking voters earlier for helping him with the white house. he asked them for more support to help the democrats take control of the senate from trump's republican party. england goes back into lockdown as they try to tempt down a new kronos variant. -- coronavirus variant. other states are imposing their own locked on. stay with us. inside story is next -- their own lockdown. stay with us. inside story is next. ♪

♪ >> this is inside story. welcome to the program. in algeria, the younger brother of the deposed president and two former intelligence chiefs jailed have been acquitted by a military court. the generals had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for plotting against the state and undermining the army. they were the highest profile prosecutions after the president resigned in april of 2019.li

following months of protests against his role. we will discuss this with our guest shortly. first, we have this report. reporter: he is the brother of algeria's former president. he was once viewed as the real power in algeria after his brother suffered a stroke in 2013. in september of 2019, he was handed a 15 year sentence along with two former intelligence chiefs. he and this general -- he and these generals were accused of conspiring against the state and plotting to overthrow the government. sunday, the three were acquitted. one general has been released. the two others are staying to face trials and other charges. this has triggered her's is him -- triggered criticism in algeria.

>> i think we should expect the worst, even as we hope for the best. this development will to the worsening of algeria's problems. activists will return to the streets and thousands across the country to stop what is going on. reporter: others say the ruling may be intended to strengthen national unity. >> i think this ruling has to do with the current historical circumstances in the country. it seems to be based on the rule of agreeing to differ, and attempts to overcome differences and allows the state to deal with real challenges facing it. including outside threats close to the borders. it is also a plan by the president of his political program's implementation. the general reportedly arrived aboard a private jet and landed at the military airport right before algeria's president

announced he was going to call for an early general election. many algerians say these are signs of a possible return of the military guard to power in algeria. a jerry is undergoing a political crisis, as it tries to heal itself from economic mismanagement and political corruption, after decades of military backed one-party rule. in 2019, millions of protesters managed to push the long-term president out of power and unseat most of his senior allies and top ranking military backers. but the republican still unhappy with the pace of reform, with some accusing the new democraticly elected president of failure or a lack of will to bring about genuine political change. ♪ >> let's bring in our guest

today in paris. she is a research fellow at the school for advanced studies and social sciences in washington. -- and social sciences. in washington, are second-guessed. and in beirut, a scholar at the carnegie melon center. is the military now calling all the shots in algeria? >> well, you know, it has been a year where he has been elected as the president. what we can see is there has not been true renewal of the system in algeria. even before the president, there was already a problem of leadership.

the current issue in algeria is there's a kind of fatigue that we have already heard of in the 1990's. the presidential system with the new president has shown it is not sustainable. the army is really in charge of the country. we have had the president absent from the country for almost two months. what we have observed is everything was blocked in the absence of the president, like foreign policy, in the context where a lot is happening, even the choice of covid vaccines, for example, economic measures that should be urgently taken have not been yet. in a nutshell, the country is in a real crisis, but no new leadership is able to face these

challenges, and the former generals, even if they are free now, they are not going to fix the urgent problems the country is facing. >> the arrests of these three individuals that we are talking about in march/april 2019, that was seen as a measure of the success of the protest movement. do these acquittals mean the protest movement was not a success? does that mean it was actually a failure? >> you are right. the rest of these political figures, among them, the younger sister of -- sorry, the younger brother of the former president, was seen as a victory and a

tangible result reached. again, i do believe that it was. you need to imagine that a few months ago, a year ago, it was impossible in this country for millions of all jillions -- of algerians to imagine these political figures were one day going to be jailed, to be put in trial. i do believe it is a victory. fortunately, with these decisions to acquit two of them, to free them, it shows that the trials against the president and the generals were aimed at getting rid of opponents, that it was also a political trick for the regime to improve its perception of accountability and

transparency. but unfortunately, if anything, these trials and the decision taken yesterday show that the decision-making process is still very opaque and complex. it shows the meager strength of the civic state in nigeria -- in algeria. >> when we talk about protest movements and the reaction to that, generally, the political trick kind of thing usually dovetails with somebody high up, making a return, then exerting real power. is it possible to give us a sense, if you can, of how much power the president still has? it is too early to say he is a free man, because he is not. he is still behind bars, but he has been acquitted on these charges against him. >> the answer goes to the heart of the system in algeria. it was never autocratic, since the revolution in the 1950's and 1960's.

the power struggles are often described as a war of the clans. there are these different power centers, somewhat geographically organized, but not entirely, in algeria, that fight against each other. so the president represented one of these clans. his brother was seen as the most powerful man in nigeria. particularly after his heart attack in 2013. his rather invalid status from 2013 to 2019. that is the important thing about him. that me add -- let me add to what they said about the release. in autocratic systems, when someone gets arrested, it is not usually what they did, it is, who is angry at them? in this case, and a system of coup -- in a system of coup

after coup, elections terminated by the military apparatus, in that system, these three were convicted of plotting against that system where that type of activity was already going on. i always thought it was peculiar in that the private meeting was the reason they were convicted. i always saw this arrest and conviction bogus, they should have been in jail for other reasons. >> going back to paris, if these acquittals actually mean people high up in the military are not as angry as they were during the summer of 2019, particularly with the president, you were talking in your first answer about the current president disappears for two months because of coronavirus, comes back, still heavy smoker, not a good thing to do if you've got covid-19.

he's back, literally a few days ago, signed off on the new constitution. if you read the new constitution, that is about a separation of powers and more transparency. does that have any real worth and value at all, if the military are still pulling the strings? >> no, i think what we should focus on is really the [indiscernible] which has flowed with the chief. the chief found himself the head of the army, and he thought that he could be the new providential man of algeria. and a lot of algerians believed it, as well.

after the president's death, the army has started to organize what he decided as the head of the army. but now, the only thing that remains from the inheritance is really the president himself, the constitution, the plan of having elections soon. all of these are things that have been decided. now the main problem is that he has an army that is trying to get away from this heritage, but without having the capability to

propose anything new, because the army in algeria is still on its old rhetoric of "we don't do politics." >> i want to simmer down the point you are making and knock it forward to what might be about to happen. if the analysis of this is accurate -- if that analysis of this is accurate, therefore the protest movement in algeria knows what is really going on. why are we not hearing from them? >> well, first of all, we need to take into consideration the pandemic. the covid-19 pandemic halted the demonstrations that were going on for more than a year, for students on every tuesday and for the general population, every friday. for more than a year, algerians

were able to take to the streets and do it in a very peaceful, nonviolent, very peaceful way. the pandemic put an end to that. one has to talk about what is going on in algeria right now on the level of human rights violations. so the algerian authorities took advantage of the pandemic to silence voices of dissent, and they have been doing that for months now. we are also talking about the country. this is the only country in the world that has totally closed its frontiers for more than 270 days. again, who took the decision? why the decision has been taken -- thousands of algerians are stuck outside algeria and cannot go back to their country. so, they are expressing themselves, but the pandemic

halted everything, and people have been trying to mobilize on social media. but again, many newspapers, many media, and the internet websites have been closed. the internet has been cut from time to time, again, to silence the voices of dissent. i think the real problem is the decision-making process. who is making obvious decisions. how come, for instance, the algerian president disappeared for two months, and we had little to no information about his health. this is creating a really have a sense of injustice and fatigue. whether they are going to take to the streets or not, we will probably see it at the end of the pandemic. >> william in washington, is there a vacuum here cause-and-effect by what the opposition movement for the

protester movement has not done? it seems to me they are very good at saying, this is what we are against. everyone understood that, because they peacefully took to the streets we got there we. -- streets week after week. they were not good at articulating. but this is what we are for. there's still a vacuum, because they do not have a leader. there's no one person. the protest movement can coalesce around and say, we are going to make him prime minister for six months, then we will have proper elections. >> there's a lot of validity to what you are saying. i would not call it a vacuum. i would call it formlessness were shapeless this. another way to say vacuum. -- or shapelessness. another way to say vacuum.

beyond that, there was not much consensus among algerians about what type of system they wanted. we have seen this and other places and big umbrella movements, where they still get work done. in this case, the system it self created the very situation we are in. in other things we were alluding to, something we have not mentioned yet, part of what prompted everything that is going on right now was the president's illness. the establishment one into a bit of a panic when he got very ill and evacuated to germany, this was a 10 week illness that he had. than the succession, forget they could not find a successor for him for years since 2013 until he was forced out. then we had another succession struggle about to start. what was happening was, they

were putting together a system of the siders who decide who was going to be the successor, and part of that was letting these guys out of jail and repatriating some other key historic figures to try to decrease the amount of dissent,. forget these three were in jail for dissenting, and that is still part of the conversation going on right now. >> coming back to you, does that mean the current president is maybe more of a threat for the protest movement instead of the brother? he still uses the language of a not a correct. one could say to him, have you learned nothing in the intervening two years? his language is still the dna of the military. >> nothing really changed. this is a man, we replaced a man by another man. he is a pure [indiscernible]

system. what is important is to maintain the balance. algeria's elite wanted to preserve their own authority. the more pluralist system the regime has allowed to form remains tightly controlled. this is what they are still trying to do. again, that was possible after february 22nd. things are changing, algerians no longer remain where they used to be before february 22. now, we are facing a political still meant -- political stalemate. to come back to the question of the leadership for the protest movement, this is one of the reasons to explain why the

popular movement has achieved so little. i think the absence of leadership is very important in that regard. many people will disagree with me, but i will take the risks to say that while i do understand algerians' refusal to have the leadership because they have in mind what happened to the movement into thousand one -- in 2001, i do believe that change requires sustained political organizing, and being on social media is not enough. >> may put that point of change -- let me put that point of change to amell. 2019, demonstrations, standoffs, face-offs with the military, it was labeled at the time as the arab spring, the sequel -- the

arab spring, the sequel. do you think this will actually go to a mini arab spring in the coming year or so? >> the problem with algeria and top generals is that they have been so focused on managing the past, that they have not been able to anticipate the crisis and the deterioration of the country. now the protest movement has brought a lot of things. it's brought a changing political nature and the emergence of a new generation of leaders locally. the problem is, that is the main question to understand algeria's future, is, to which extent the regime will continue to be successful on the basis of a failed state. that means that even for this

new generation of leaders to emerge, protest leaders to emerge, -- opposition leaders to emerge, they need proper functioning state institutions. and that is that the case today. that is why we will not see the emergence of a true democratic leadership within the current algerian institutions. >> we are trotting towards the end of the program. very briefly, a last point to you, william, that point about the economy, do you get the feeling and algeria that it is ripe for something else to happen from the ground up, inasmuch as to be balancing its books fiscally, it needs to be selling oil at $100 a barrel? oil is selling for about $40 a barrel. the currency has taken a hit in the past 12 months. the economic fundamentals are not there anymore. >> that is exactly right.

what algerians will tell you is they had their first arab spring in 1988 when they had a full democratic opening, then much of what unfolded in the other countries in the 1990's. usually, driven in large part by economic factors. in 1988, triggered by the oil price dipping in 1986. there needs to be a triggering event. we don't know what event will trigger that. >> would it be fair to say the country is less predictable, scenario wise, than it was two years ago? also, we can't say what we think the military might do with the current president or someone who wants to position themselves to become president. >> it is less predictable because of one important factor,

the popular movement actually changed so many things and gave people hope, but it also gave people the feeling that they can change things. the leadership -- this is something the leadership could not predict. i believe algeria is to remain on the watchlist, because in 2021, many things are going to happen in the north african country. >> thank you all so much. thank you to our guests. thank you, too, for your company. for further discussion, do check out our facebook page, facebook.com ajinsidestory. i will see a very soon. for the moment, bye-bye.

♪ ai>úog

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