ALGIERS: Visit the tin-roofed shacks of Algiers' “Kamikaze Slum” and you'll find plenty of poverty and discontent. What is harder to uncover is any expectation that parliamentary polls this week will bring change for the better.
Like many in Algeria, a north African oil-exporting country, inhabitants of this pocket of urban poverty feel the polls are unlikely to be transparent and parliament serves little purpose.
“We thought that the candidates, or at least some of them, would visit the slum and talk to the people,” said one resident,
Saidani Hamoud, 23. “No one came, so why should I go to vote?”
The ghetto earned its most recent nickname because it was the home of one of the three suicide bombers who blew themselves up, killing 33 people, in Algiers on April 11.
Marwan Boudin grew up in the huddle of 200 brick, corrugated iron and plastic shanty homes which used to be nicknamed, somewhat optimistically, The Garden.
Its inhabitants have little hope the May 17 polls will usher in solutions to unemployment and homelessness.
Providing jobs, improving housing, health and education and reducing reliance on oil are key to stabilising a society still reeling from a decade of violence in the 1990s and shocked by a recent resurgence in bombings by Islamist armed groups.
One of Africa's most brutal conflicts, the 1990s struggle between the army and Islamist armed groups cost an estimated 200,000 lives and caused damage estimated at $20 billion.
But the abiding, albeit often unspoken, conviction is that the 389-seat assembly is dominated by a powerful executive and made up of politicians happy to rubber stamp its decisions.
The residents of Kamikaze Slum tend to feel they have been forgotten, even if the April 11 attacks claimed by al Qaeda's north Africa branch brought the ghetto a brief notoriety.
“The gap between the people living in the slum and the politicians is big,” said Abdelhamid Bouhala, 39, a resident.
