April 16, 1999
Web posted at: 1:32 p.m. EDT (1732 GMT)

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ALGIERS, Algeria (CNN) -- Abdelaziz Bouteflika, backed by Algeria's powerful military, won a presidential election in which all six other candidates withdrew to protest fraud.

Bouteflika, 63, a former foreign minister, took 73.8 percent of the vote, the Interior Ministry announced Friday.

For months, he had been considered the likely winner of Thursday's election, and his victory became certain after all other candidates withdrew on the eve of voting.

With Bouteflika assured of victory, the only remaining question had been whether he would accept the post as Algeria's first civilian president in more than three decades -- and whether critics would quietly submit.

Bouteflika, who declined to comment on the results, had said he would not take the job without a massive turnout and a large majority.

Dispute over turnout

The Interior Ministry set the participation rate at 60.3 percent -- below the 75 percent turnout in the 1995 presidential race, but still high for a scaled-down election which had touted a broad choice of candidates as its drawing card.

One of the six candidates who withdrew from the election said in a newspaper interview published in France Friday that voter turnout was lower than officially reported.

"According to my sources, voter participation was very low in large cities, as well as in mountainous regions," Mouloud Hamrouche was quoted as saying in the French daily Le Figaro. "The numbers given by officials are, in my opinion, incorrect."

Hamrouche said he would not recognize Bouteflika's election as legitimate.

The government insisted the voting had been fair. Interior Minister Abdelmalek Sellal complained that since the North African nation gained independence in 1962, "all we've heard is fraud, fraud, fraud."

He called the vote "normal, regular, and clearly transparent," and said he regretted the withdrawal of the six candidates.

Runner-up calls election 'sham'

The candidates who pulled out remained officially in the running, with ballots bearing their pictures lined up beside Bouteflika's.

Coming in second was a former foreign and education minister, Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, who had broad support that included the banned Islamic Salvation Front. He garnered 12.5 percent of the vote.

Ibrahimi called the vote a "sham."

"I refused to take part in an immoral process the people know is rigged. The proof is that the participation did not exceed 25 percent according to our information," Ibrahimi told a news conference after the results were announced.

In a surprise showing, an Islamic candidate, Abdallah Djaballah, scored nearly 4 percent.

President Liamine Zeroual, a retired general stepping down 18 months before the end of his five-year term, had warned that the withdrawal of the six candidates was "very dangerous" and ordered voting to proceed.

In a statement issued Thursday night, the six candidates who pulled out called for calm, and "reserved the possibility of taking any initiative to bring about a true democracy."

Call for demonstrations

A spokesman for the six former candidates, Djamel Zanati, said they would call for nationwide demonstrations Friday to protest the election.

Local Algerian journalists said the opposition also planned protests in the eastern cities of Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia, two Berber-speaking centers that saw the lowest turnout, with only 6 percent in each location.

But the army-led authorities banned any protests and Sellal said it considered them "illegal" because they were not authorized.

Witnesses said scores of riot police with shields and batons sealed off a main square in Algiers to prevent demonstrations after Friday prayers.

The nation has worked to surmount an Islamic insurgency triggered by a 1992 debacle, when the army aborted an election that the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front party was on the verge of winning. The ensuing Islamic uprising and violence has left more than 70,000 people dead.

To critics, Bouteflika, foreign minister in the 1970s under President Houari Boumediene, is a throwback to a despised system run by generals and a ruling caste drawn from the National Liberation Front, the party that controlled Algeria for nearly three decades.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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