Louisa Hanoune
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| Louisa Hanoune | |
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| Born | 7 April 1954 Jijel, Algeria |
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| Political party | Workers' Party |
| Alma mater | University of Annaba |
| Profession | Lawyer |
| Religion | Islam |
Louisa Hanoune (Arabic:لويزة حنون) (born 7 April 1954 in Jijel) is head of Algeria's Workers' Party (Parti des Travailleurs, PT). In 2004, she became the first woman to run for president in Algeria.
Hanoune was imprisoned by the government several times prior to the legalization of political parties in 1988. She was jailed soon after she joined the Trotskyist Social Workers Organisation, an illegal party, in 1981, and again after the 1988 October Riots, which brought about the end of the National Liberation Front's (FLN) one-party rule.
During Algeria's bloody civil war of the 1990s, Hanoune was one of the few opposition voices in parliament, and, despite her party's secularist values, a strong opponent of the government's "eradication" policy toward Islamists. In January 1995, she signed the Sant'Egidio Platform together with representatives of other opposition parties - notably including the Islamic Salvation Front, the radical Islamist party whose dissolution by military decree brought about the start of the civil war.
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[edit] Early life
Born on the 7th April 1954 into a family of poor mountain peasants from Jijel, Algeria, she had to flee in the midst of war with all her family to the city Annaba, after her parent’s home was bombed by the French army. After independence in 1962, she was the first woman of her family to go to school. “It is this right to education which will completely change the position, the representation of women in our society and of which I am partly a product of” (1) she says. A right for which once pubescent she will have to fight fiercely for. Against her own father.
[edit] Political career
She will eventually end up choosing to totally break off contact with her father in order to study law at the university of Annaba, after passing her baccalaureate. It is then within the ‘socialist turmoil’ of Algeria’s newfound independence that Louisa Hanoune formed her political conscience: “The whole country was still pulsing from the war of liberation, everybody was talking about socialism, of justice, of progress. Algeria was at the height of its anti-imperialist battle…we were completely united with the Palestinians, their cause was also ours. We were against apartheid in South Africa, we talked about Vietnam, I grew up like all my generation in this militant atmosphere, of struggle”. Under the dictatorship of the one-party system, Louisa Hanoune campaigns in feminist groups who are protesting against the family code, adopted by the Algerian assembly in 1984 and is still in force today. As a member of an underground far left party, the Workers socialist organization (OST) she will be arrested in 1986 and will spend six months in prison. When, under pressure from bloody riots, Algeria adopts a pluralist system in 1989, Hanoune is part of the founders of the Workers Party of which she has always been the spokesperson.
[edit] Candidate to Presidency of Algeria
In 2004, she is the first Algerian female candidate in the presidential election and she will most probably never be president of the Algerian Republic. Algerian presidential election, 2004. This event is not only a first in Algeria but in the entire Arab world. Only six candidates were recognized by the constitutional council. Many candidates presented in the press as ‘political tenors’ were refused access to the presidential election campaigns, while other ‘tenors’ preferred to throw in the towel. It’s in this context that we can justly appreciate the achievement of this woman. Louisa Hanoune sera candidate for the Algerian presidential election, 2009.
