Region

KHARTOUM — Sudan and rebels in South Kordofan would adopt an immediate ceasefire and allow aid to reach more than one million people, says a proposed agreement issued as peace talks broke off last week.

AFP obtained a copy of the draft on Sunday.

African Union mediators presented the proposal for Khartoum and rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) on Tuesday, when the talks in Ethiopia adjourned after both combatants traded accusations.

There are no reliable figures for how many people have died in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, where the rebels have been fighting for nearly three years, but the United Nations says an estimated 1.2 million have been displaced or otherwise affected.

Sudanese authorities have restricted access to the war zones for aid workers, journalists and foreign diplomats, although relief has reached people in government-controlled areas.

There has been no aid access into SPLM-N zones from within Sudan since 2011, and a senior UN official said last year that people were surviving on “roots and leaves”.

Several days of negotiation — the first in nearly a year — failed to make progress, but a source close to the talks said both sides left to study the draft agreement, dated February 18.

The rebels and government would “cease all hostilities unconditionally” under the proposal, which says an AU-designated “third party” would monitor the ceasefire.

“The parties shall facilitate the immediate and safe delivery and movement of humanitarian assistance to all affected persons,” it says.

Chief mediator Thabo Mbeki said last week that the rebel and government delegations would consult on “proposals” from the mediation team, but he did not elaborate.

Talks are supposed to resume on February 28.

During the first round in Addis Ababa, the head of the rebel delegation, Yassir Arman, said Khartoum wants “to freeze this war without giving any solutions to the humanitarian situation and the political situation”.

‘Marginalised areas’ 

The government accused SPLM-N of raising issues unrelated to the two war zones of South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Ibrahim Ghandour, who leads the Sudanese negotiators, had begun the talks by saying they should focus on security, political and humanitarian aspects “concurrently and as one package” for South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

SPLM-N has said humanitarian issues should be addressed first. They want the wars in “marginalised areas” including South Kordofan and Blue Nile to stop ahead of a national constitutional conference to address the root causes of conflict.

The ethnic uprisings in the two states, and an older insurgency in the Darfur region, are fuelled by complaints of economic and political neglect by the Arab-dominated regime.

A day after talks broke off last week, the rebels rained rockets down on Kadugli, the South Kordofan capital, official radio reported.

In the draft obtained by AFP, the government and rebels would “affirm the need for an inclusive and holistic process of national dialogue and constitutional reform”.

Such a process would uphold the principles of democracy, unity in diversity, and the rights and equality of all citizens, it says, adding that the broader national dialogue would not be prejudiced by talks on South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

A Sunday editorial in Khartoum’s The Citizen newspaper said some leaders of the ruling National Congress Party still insist on “partial solutions”.

They hope to weaken an alliance between SPLM-N and Darfur rebels by dealing with South Kordofan and Blue Nile in isolation, it said.

“If both sides are genuine, there has to be a compromise” between the government and SPLM-N, Farouk Mohammed Ibrahim, chairman of the Sudanese Organisation for Defence of Rights and Freedoms, told AFP.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Though voices are getting louder inside and outside Israel about the threat of economic boycotts for its continued occupation of Palestinian territories, there seems little prospect of it facing measures with real bite.

With a number of European firms already withdrawing some funds, Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid has warned that every household in Israel will feel the pinch if ongoing peace talks with the Palestinians collapse.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has also warned that Israel risks a financial hit if it is blamed for the failure, but investors and diplomats say they are unconvinced.

It is true that some foreign firms have started to shun Israeli business concerns operating in East Jerusalem and the West Bank — land occupied in the 1967 war — and the European Union is increasingly angered by relentless Jewish settlement expansion.

But the bulk of Israeli business is clustered on the Mediterranean coast, a world away from the roadblocks and watchtowers of the West Bank, and not even the Palestinian leadership is demanding a total economic boycott.

“The boycott is being used like a bogeyman, a scary story you tell a child at night,” said Jonathan Medved, CEO of OurCrowd, a crowdfunding platform looking to provide venture capital to Israeli companies.

“The truth is that Israel is a world leader in water technology, next-generation agriculture, cybersecurity, healthcare innovation and start-ups. What sane person is going to walk away from that?” he said, speaking by telephone during a visit to South Africa to seek out potential partners.

Europe stirs

Embargoes, sanctions and boycotts, along with internal resistance, helped bring about the isolation and eventually the end of apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s.

Pro-Palestinian, or anti-Israeli, activists hope to use the same tactics to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sign a deal to create an independent Palestine based on the 1967 borders. They believe recent action by a handful of European firms to distance themselves from Israel might be the start of something big.

In December, Dutch firm Vitens said it would not work with Israeli utility company Mekorot because of its West Bank footprint. The following month a large Dutch pension fund, PGGM, ended its investment in five Israeli banks because of their business dealings with settlements considered illegal under international law. Denmark’s Danske Bank blacklisted Bank Hapoalim for the same reason.

These moves sent a jolt through the Israeli government.

“If the negotiations with the Palestinians break down and a European boycott begins, even partially, Israel’s economy will go backwards, every person will be directly affected in their pockets,” Lapid said in a speech earlier this month.

Unlike some of his Cabinet colleagues, the finance minister supports the need to pull back from much of the occupied territories in an effort to secure an elusive peace accord.

Looking to convince the sceptics, Lapid said failure to strike a deal could lead to a 20 per cent drop in exports to the European Union and a halt in EU direct investment, warning that this would cost the Israeli economy 11 billion shekels ($3.1 billion) a year.

Supporting his case, Lapid points to an EU decision last summer to bar financial assistance to any Israeli organisations operating in the West Bank, and warns this could be expanded.

But EU diplomats say business with firms operating in the settlements, such as skincare company Ahava, represent less than 1 per cent of all Israeli-EU trade, which last year totalled $36.7 billion, up from $20.9 billion a decade earlier.

The European Union matters because it is Israel’s largest trading partner and it is the only place where murmurings of sanctions have so far been raised outside the Arab world, where only Egypt and Jordan have formal ties with Israel.

However, Europe is not united on how to deal with Israel and has not yet even agreed to introduce EU-wide labelling to make clear if goods come from settlements, much less anything more radical along the lines suggested by Lapid.

“There is no EU boycott,” the president of the European parliament, Martin Schultz, said this month during a visit to Jerusalem during which he questioned whether the 28-nation bloc would want to penalise Israel if the US-backed talks failed.

EU governments say it is up to each firm to decide its own investment strategy.

While a handful of states, including Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, discourage links with the settlements, there are no consequences for ignoring that steer, beyond the “potential reputational implications” a British Foreign Office agency warns of on its website.

Schultz said he was “not convinced about economic pressure”, and also cast doubt on the need for clear labelling of settlement goods that would allow consumers to chose.

“Does it carry such a large weight that it could really change something?” he asked reporters.

Divestment

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement seeks something much more emphatic, eager to turn all Israeli brands into toxic property as a way of forcing the government to roll back settlements and sign a full peace deal.

Omar Barghouti, the BDS co-founder, told Reuters he sensed a changing international atmosphere and was particularly buoyed by news of divestments from Israeli banks.

“We’re talking about a completely different league here. Forget boycotting settlements, [that is] peanuts. Targeting the banks, that’s where the money is, that’s the pillar of the Israeli economy,” said Barghouti.

However, divestment moves by the likes of Danske Bank appear to be the exception rather than the norm.

Germany’s biggest lender Deutsche Bank AG denied reports last week that it was set to boycott Israeli banks, while the giant Dutch pension fund ABP announced this month that after a review, it saw no need to cut ties with Israeli banks.

All the while, foreign firms continue to pour into Israel. According to the latest Bank of Israel data, direct investment was $10.51 billion in the first nine months of 2013, up from $9.5 billion for the whole of 2012. Exports to Europe rose 6.3 per cent last year.

Global brands such as Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, AOL and Facebook have all invested in Israel, so, like it or not, users of computers, smartphones and apps could well be supporting Israeli engineering.

“All the talk about boycotts has not so far caused any damage to our economy,” Uriel Lynn, president of the Israeli Chambers of Commerce, told Reuters.

“Israel has gone through much harsher boycotts in the past. For example, we did not have commercial relations with China for years, and for a time we could only buy crude oil from Mexico and Egypt. So we can definitely withstand boycotts.”

CAIRO — A shake-up of Egypt’s food import and storage authorities has seen an official from its main food buying agency referred to prosecutors over suspected corruption on local rice deals, while the head of its silos and storage holding company was fired.

Egypt is the world’s biggest wheat importer, normally buying some 10 million tonnes a year and while the suspected corruption is focused on rice, the moves come just days after two senior officials from the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) were transferred from their posts.

Traders fear any disarray within GASC could hurt its ability to launch international tenders. GASC has said the re-shuffles would not impact its import activity.

It has also unnerved companies involved in importing grain to Egypt and potentially a small group of global traders that supply them.

“It’s chaos, even the people inside GASC don’t know what’s going on and are concerned,” said an international grain trader.

On Saturday, Supplies Minister Mohamed Abu Shadi had referred the head of the central import administration at GASC to administrative prosecutors for suspected corrupt dealings with traders.

“The case has no relation at all with wheat, it is about dealings to purchase local rice from local traders in which the official had extended traders’ deadlines to 10 days instead of a week,” ministry spokesman Mahmoud Diab told Reuters but declined to name the man.

While GASC were not immediately available for comment, rice industry insiders were sceptical about the supply ministry’s assessment.

Egypt suspended rice exports in November to meet its domestic needs for a government subsidy programme. The country had an exportable surplus estimated at 800,000 tonnes of rice last year.

Local consumption amounts to around 4 million tonnes of white rice a year, of which around 1.1 million tonnes are used for its subsidised rice programme.

“It seems odd as there is an abundance of rice available for the local market since Egypt shut the door for exports,” a senior rice industry source said, referring to Diab’s comments.

Abu Shadi also sacked the head of the silos and storage holding company and other officials for failing to reach targets set for 2012/13. Diab said it was within the minister’s rights to inject new blood into the company.

GAZA CITY — The Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers have said they plan to let private contractors take over the running of the Palestinian territory’s border crossings with Egypt and Israel.

“The government is to give the private sector the opportunity to handle the technical management of crossing points from the Gaza Strip,” Hamas Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Al Zaza told AFP on Saturday and said that a commission of seven businessmen would be dedicated to the project.

“Supervision of all terminals will be under government control,” said Zaza, who is also finance minister.

The coastal strip, whose air and sea lanes are blocked by Israel, has three land crossings; Erez and Kerem Shalom with Israel and Rafah with Egypt.

Kerem Shalom is for goods only, while Erez and Rafah are for passenger traffic.

Although Hamas ousted the western-backed Palestinian Authority from Gaza in 2007 PA officials continue to coordinate the work of the crossings with Israel.

Israel does not have direct political or economic ties with Hamas which it defines as “a terrorist organisation”.

Hamas MPs, who hold the majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament — met in special session in a tent at Rafah on Sunday to demand that Egypt lift border crossing restrictions.

“We are here in front of the Rafah terminal to ask our brothers in Egypt to open Rafah to goods and persons,” Deputy Parliament Speaker Ahmad Bahar said.

Egypt imposed the restrictions as part of a campaign by its security forces against jihadists in the lawless Sinai Peninsula, which borders Gaza and Israel.

Exit through Israel is strictly controlled, with permits mainly limited to “medical and humanitarian” cases.

Entry of goods to Gaza from Israel is also limited, with passage barred to a range of “controlled items” which Israel deems could be used by fighters to make weapons or build fortifications.

BAGHDAD — Sunni Islamists shot down a helicopter on Saturday and briefly occupied a town overnight, in an escalating turf war with Iraq’s Shiite-led government that has killed at least 25 people in two days, police said.

All four crew members were killed when their helicopter was downed during a reconaissance flight over the town of Karma in Iraq’s western province of Anbar, where the army is engaged in a standoff with anti-government fighters.

Sunni Islamist insurgents have been gaining ground in Iraq over the past year and in recent weeks overran several towns, raising the stakes in a conflict that made last year the deadliest since sectarian civil strife began to abate in 2008.

Late on Friday, dozens of militants in SUVs drove into the small town of Al Sainiyah near Baiji, some 180km north of Baghdad, after bombing the local police headquarters, and fought troops for several hours overnight, witnesses said.

At least four policemen and two Sunni government-backed militia members were killed in the fighting, officials said.

The militants raised the black flag of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) over government buildings in the town, recording their victory on video, before withdrawing on Saturday morning.

“The attack started at 7:30pm [Friday] when we heard intense gunfire and successive mortar explosions near the police department. This situation lasted for around three hours,” a resident called Yasser told Reuters by telephone.

He said the militants drove round the town all night, blasting religious anthems glorifying ISIL from their cars.

‘War of attrition’

Police sources said the militants came from Anbar province, where the Iraqi army has been laying siege to the city of Fallujah since early this year, when ISIL and other militant groups took it over.

A suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives blew himself up at the entrance to a military base in the east of Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, killing at least six people on Saturday, security sources said.

Security officials say ISIL, which is also active in neighbouring Syria and seeks to establish a Sunni state spanning the border into Iraq, wants to divert the security forces’ attention away from Fallujah.

“It’s a war of attrition and they are attempting to exhaust the capabilities of the army by dragging it into sporadic fighting here and there,” a senior security official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

“ISIL is still looking to find a suitable land to plant the seed of their Islamic emirate.”

By Saturday, troops had regained control over most of Sulaiman Pek, another town in northern Iraq overrun last week by militants who also raised ISIL’s banner, senior security officials said.

Three villages in the area surrounding Sulaiman Pek, 60km north of Baghdad, remain under the control of militants, they said.

Separately, five policemen were killed when gunmen opened fire at a checkpoint in a village east of Baqouba, 65km northeast of Baghdad, police said.

A further three policemen were killed in three car bomb explosions on Saturday near the homes of police commanders in Tikrit, 150km north of Baghdad, said police.

Police declared a curfew in the city and its suburbs in response, anticipating more attacks.

Last year was Iraq’s bloodiest since sectarian violence began to abate in 2008.

Deteriorating security in northern and western Iraq has raised doubts that parliamentary elections can be held nationwide in April as scheduled.

CAIRO — Egypt’s deposed president Mohamed Morsi on Saturday urged supporters from a courtroom dock to continue their “revolution”, as a protest movement demanding his reinstatement shrinks before a fierce police crackdown.

The defiant call came during Morsi’s trial on charges related to jailbreaks and attacks on police, as a separate court acquitted six police officers of killing protesters during the 2011 uprising against his predecessor Hosni Mubarak.

Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood still stages diminishing weekly protests despite a crackdown that has killed more than 1,400 people since the military overthrew him in July, after just one year in office.

“The revolution of the people won’t stop — continue your peaceful revolution,” said Morsi during the second hearing of the trial, one of three under way for the deposed leader.

Speaking from inside a glass cage, Morsi also insisted that he remains the “president” of Egypt.

“I am present here by force,” he said.

He also blamed Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the army chief who led his overthrow and who is expected to stand in and win presidential elections this spring, for the bloodshed across Egypt.

“The head of the coup, the defence minister, has killed more than 3,000 people in the streets. 

“He is the one who killed them and it was not investigated, but he will be held accountable,” said Morsi.

Defence lawyer Kamal Mandour demanded that Sisi be investigated for “toppling the regime” of Morsi and for detaining him.

Another defence lawyer, Mohamed Abu Leila, asked the panel of judges to withdraw from the trial.

Morsi and 130 other defendants including Palestinian and Lebanese fighters are charged with organising jailbreaks and attacking police stations during the 2011 revolt against Mubarak.

The defendants chanted “Down with the military” and flashed the four-finger salute associated with a pro-Morsi protest camp in which hundreds were killed in a police operation last August.

The trial was adjourned to February 24.

Policemen acquitted 

Since his ouster, Morsi and the Brotherhood have been retroactively accused of committing much of the violence during the anti-Mubarak uprising.

Nearly 850 people died during the 18-day uprising that toppled Mubarak, most of them on January 28, 2011, when protesters battled the then-despised police.

Many of those who died were killed outside police stations when protesters attacked what they saw as symbols of Mubarak’s autocratic rule.

More than a dozen policemen were put on trial, including top commanders. Mubarak himself was sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the killings, but won a retrial on appeal.

On Saturday, a court acquitted six police officers of killing 83 protesters during the 2011 uprising outside police stations in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.

Prosecutors allege that the attacks on police stations and the jailbreaks, in which Morsi and other political prisoners escaped, were a Brotherhood-led conspiracy to sow chaos in Egypt.

That narrative of events has gained wider public acceptance amid a backlash against the Brotherhood following Morsi’s turbulent year in power.

Morsi also faces two other trials, one for espionage and carrying out “terror attacks”, and one for the killing of protesters during his presidency.

He is also expected to go on trial for “insulting the judiciary”, but no date has yet been set for that case.

BEIRUT — Syrian government forces captured Saturday two rebel-held areas on the edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights after days of intense fighting near a decades-old cease-fire line between Syria and Israel, state TV said.

The violence came as the UN Security Council unanimously demanded immediate access everywhere in Syria to deliver humanitarian aid to millions of people in desperate need.

Russia and China, strong supporters of the Syrian government, joined the rest of the council Saturday in sending a strong message to President Bashar Assad’s government that civilians caught in the three-year conflict must be helped.

The resolution doesn’t threaten sanctions but it does express the council’s intention to take “further steps” if the resolution isn’t implemented. The government and rebels hold several areas in the country under siege, leaving tens of thousands of people suffering from lack of food and medicine.

The Syrian TV report, citing a military official, said troops and pro-government gunmen known as National Defence Forces captured the areas of Rasm Al Hour and Rasm Al Sad, south of the town of Quneitra. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed troops were on the offensive, adding that the air force was taking part in the attack.

The Syrian army has been reinforcing its positions in Quneitra as part of efforts to drive rebels from the area, which is near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, since the opposition named a new military chief on Monday.

Brig. Gen. Abdul-Ilah Al Bashir hails from southern Syria and was an army commander in Quneitra until 2012, when he defected to the opposition.

In December, the UN Security Council strongly condemned all military activity on the Golan Heights by the Syrian army and opposition fighters, warning that it could “jeopardise the ceasefire” between Syria and Israel.

The council then approved a resolution extending the mandate of the UN peacekeeping force until the end of June. The force, known as UNDOF, was established after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Israel occupied the Golan Heights during the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it in 1981.

Also Saturday, Syrian activists said Kurdish fighters captured a northeastern town near the Iraqi border after days of combat with members of an Al Qaeda breakaway group.

The observatory and a Syria-based activist who identified himself as Salar Al Kurdi said members of the so-called People’s Protection Units captured Tel Brak earlier in the day. It was the latest gain by Kurds in almost a year of fighting with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

“There are few civilians in the areas since many of them fled because of the fighting over the past months,” Kurdi said via Skype.

The units are dominated by members of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or PYD, Syria’s most powerful Kurdish group. Since mid-2013, Kurdish fighters have been on the offensive capturing wide areas in northeastern Syria from the ISIL.

The Tel Brak battle left some 19 people dead, of which 16 were ISIL fighters, the observatory said.

Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, making up more than 10 per cent of the country’s 23 million people. They are centred in the impoverished northeastern province of Hassakeh, wedged between the borders of Turkey and Iraq. The capital Damascus and Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, also have several predominantly Kurdish neighbourhoods.

BEIRUT — A suicide bomber killed two Lebanese soldiers with a car bomb near an army checkpoint in a Hizbollah stronghold in northeast Lebanon on Saturday, security sources said.

The latest bombing, in a country destabilised by the civil war in neighbouring Syria, was the third such attack in recent weeks in Hermel, a predominantly Shiite Muslim area near the border with Syria. Fifteen people were wounded.

It followed a suicide attack in Beirut on Wednesday targeting the Iranian Cultural Centre. A radical Sunni group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, said it had carried out that bombing, which killed eight people, as a reprisal for the military involvement of Hizbollah and Iran in the Syrian war.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Saturday’s attack. The bomb was set off when soldiers at the checkpoint became suspicious of the man in the vehicle, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, the sources said.

Hizbollah, an Iranian-backed political and military movement, is fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces against predominantly Sunni Muslim rebels in a conflict that has exacerbated sectarian tensions in Lebanon.

Assad is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Security is one of the main challenges facing a new Lebanese government that took office a week ago after the country went for nearly a year without a cabinet because of political tensions fuelled by the Syria conflict.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam, the highest-ranking Sunni Muslim in the administration, condemned Saturday’s attack as an act of terrorism. He called for “solidarity in confronting terrorism in all its forms”.

The security forces cordoned off the area after the blast.

Hizbollah is a long-standing ally of Damascus. It says it is fighting in Syria to prevent Sunni radicalism from spreading to Lebanon. Its Lebanese critics say it must pull out, saying Hizbollah’s role in Syria is provoking such attacks.

GAZA CITY — Sixteen Palestinians were wounded by Israeli army gunfire Friday in two separate incidents near the border fence in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources said.

Ashraf Al Qudra, a spokesman for the Hamas-run health ministry, said a 12-year-old boy was in serious condition after being shot in the head northeast of Gaza City near Jabalia.

Thirteen other Palestinians who had been throwing stones at Israeli soldiers were also wounded when the troops opened fire at them, he added.

An army spokeswoman told AFP “hundreds of Palestinians” had been throwing stones at Israeli soldiers beyond the border fence and attempting to sabotage it.

The soldiers opened live fire at “the lower extremities of the main instigators” after attempts to disperse them with riot dispersal means failed, she said.

In the other incident a Palestinian boy, also aged 12, was seriously wounded by Israeli gunfire near the Sufa crossing, east of Rafah in southern Gaza, Qudra told AFP.

A Hamas security officer was moderately wounded when he was shot in the leg, he added.

Hamas security sources told AFP several children, residents of the area, were playing near the border when they were shot at by Israeli soldiers.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said soldiers had identified “an armed suspect” approaching the security fence and fired warning shots before using live ammunition.

Israeli security sources told AFP the armed suspect was most likely the Hamas officer but they were not aware of a child being hit by Israeli bullets there.

Clashes are common on Fridays, with regular protests near the border in support of Gaza farmers who say troops uprooted their trees to create a buffer zone.

ALGIERS — Ailing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who turns 77 next month, will run for a fourth term in April, his office said Saturday in comments carried by national television.

Bouteflika, in power for 15 years, suffered a mini-stroke last year and was hospitalised in Paris for three months. It had been unclear whether his health would prevent him from seeking reelection.

The president has informed the interior ministry of his intention to run in the April 17 poll and has collected appropriate documents, the television quoted Bouteflika’s office as saying.

The electoral law requires candidates to gather at least 60,000 signatures from supporters across no fewer than 25 provinces by midnight on March 4, and the documents will be used to that end.

Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said Bouteflika had made his decision in “response to the encouragement of citizens from all over the country”.

“President Bouteflika is in good health. He has the intellectual capacity and vision needed to guarantee this responsibility,” Sellal told a news conference on Saturday.

But he added that Bouteflika could rely on aides to run the presidential campaign, which officially opens March 23.

“The president is not obliged to do everything. Members of his support committees can take charge,” said Sellal, who was his campaign manager in 2004 and in 2009.

Ironically, Bouteflika has not made any public address since returning home from hospital, has only received a few foreign dignitaries and chaired just two Cabinet meetings.

More than 80 people have said they will run, with the most serious challenger among them appearing to be Ali Benflis, known as a defender of human rights and popular with intellectuals.

Benflis, 69, was prime minister during Bouteflika’s first term in office and ran against him in 2004.

Bouteflika, one of the few remaining veterans of the war of independence against France, came to power in 1999 with the support of the military.

He ran unopposed as the candidate of the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) after all other candidates withdrew, citing fears of electoral fraud.

The latter years of his rule have been dogged by ill health and, more recently, by corruption scandals implicating members of his inner circle.

Bouteflika has also tried to check the power of Algeria’s military and intelligence leaders, who have played a key role in the North African country’s politics since independence in 1962.

Despite his efforts to roll back their prerogatives, the army and its secretive DRS intelligence agency retain a great deal of political power.

There has been a mounting war of words over the role of the military in public life, relayed by Algeria’s independent media, in which senior officers were portrayed as opposing a fourth term for Bouteflika.

This month, a retired senior general urged him to step down “with dignity” and not stand for reelection.

Hocine Benhadid also accused his inner circle of “treason” after Amar Saidani, the ruling party’s secretary general, publicly accused the military intelligence chief of interfering in politics to the detriment of the country’s security.

But Bouteflika himself hit out on Tuesday at what he said were moves to undermine his office and the army, suggesting both were falling prey to political infighting.

“The fictitious conflict... within the ranks of the People’s National Army is linked to a destabilisation plan developed by those troubled by Algeria’s regional weight and influence,” he said, without elaborating.

Bouteflika, who never married and has no children, has been credited by many Algerians with helping end the murderous civil war in the 1990s that killed at least 150,000 people.

The conflict was sparked by the military-backed government’s decision to cancel elections in 1991 which an Islamist party had been poised to win.