After Election, What Next for Algeria?

By Sylvia Poggioli

Published April 16, 2004 at 12:00 AM EDT

Sheifa Bobabdallah holds up a photo of a missing relative at a rally in Algiers. She is among a group, Mothers of the Missing, who gather each Wednesday to protest the disappearance of an estimated 7,000 men at the hands of Algerian security forces.

A week ago, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected to a second term in a country emerging from more than a decade of civil strife. Many Algerians wonder how he intends to bridge the gap between the nation's Islamists, secular civil society and restless ethnic Berber minority. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports.

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Sylvia Poggioli

Sylvia Poggioli is senior European correspondent for NPR's International Desk covering political, economic, and cultural news in Italy, the Vatican, Western Europe, and the Balkans. Poggioli's on-air reporting and analysis have encompassed the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and how immigration has transformed European societies.

See stories by Sylvia Poggioli