ALGIERS (Reuters) - President Abdelaziz Bouteflika landed in Algeria on Sunday Ennahar TV said, after spending two weeks in a Swiss hospital while protesters have massed at home in the biggest threat to his 20-year rule.

An Algerian government plane transporting the president arrived at Boufarik military airport just southwest of the capital. Top Algerian officials often use that airport.

Tens of thousands of Algerians of all social classes have protested over the past three weeks against Bouteflika’s decision to stand in April’s election.

In the clearest indication yet that the generals sympathize with them, the chief of staff said the military and the people had a united vision of the future, state TV reported. Lieutenant General Gaed Salah did not mention the protests.

The ruling FLN party urged all sides to work together to end the political crisis, Ennahar TV said. It wants national reconciliation and to preserve security and stability, the station said.

But there are no signs Algerians are prepared to heed that call after rejecting Bouteflika’s offer to limit his term after the election.

“Bouteflika’s system is over,” said a commentator on Ennahar TV, which is close to the president’s inner circle, noting that some of the Bouteflika’s allies have joined the protests.

Ennahar TV also said Bouteflika underwent routine medical checks in Geneva.

On Sunday, thousands took to the streets of the capital carrying the Algerian flag and chanting: “Bouteflika, there will be no fifth term”. Many shops in Algiers were closed and residents said train services had been suspended.

“We have taken to the streets today to protest a fifth presidential term. We are against a fifth term. This is enough,” protester Zakaria said in front of the Central Postal Office.

Young Algerians are desperate for jobs and angry about unemployment, corruption and an elderly elite in the North African country, a major oil and gas producer.

“The current system is unable to provide jobs,” said Farid Kahil, 27, who is unemployed.

A general strike has hit the country’s Mediterranean oil ports of Skikda and Bejaia but exports were not affected, according to port staff.

Bouteflika managed to remain in power as the “Arab Spring” uprising toppled autocrats in neighboring countries in 2011 because Algeria had enough foreign reserves to boost state spending.

Older Algerians haunted by the civil war in the 1990s tolerated crackdowns on dissent in exchange for stability, giving the government some breathing space. Now some have appeared at demonstrations to demand reforms.

“We need a new generation to govern us and secure a better future for our children,” said pensioner Ahmed, 63.

Even if Bouteflika’s position becomes untenable, it is not clear who could replace him. Algeria has stagnated for decades under veterans of the independence war who dominate the country.

For years, rumors have swirled about potential successors, but no one credible has emerged who has the backing of the army and elite and is not in their 70s or 80s.

Algeria’s chief of staff has warned that chaos would not be tolerated. The military has stayed in barracks.

Several public figures, including members of Bouteflika’s FLN party and lawmakers have resigned to join the rallies against a political system dominated by war veterans since independence from France in 1962.

Two branches of the powerful labor union UGTA, representing tens of thousands of workers, have opposed the re-election plan and lawyers have also joined rallies.

Algerians packed central Algiers to capacity on Friday in the biggest protests in the capital in 28 years. Security forces detained 195 people, state television said, citing offences such as looting.</s>ALGIERS (Reuters) - More than 1,000 judges said they would refuse to oversee Algeria’s election if President Abdelaziz Bouteflika contests it, and clerics defied any state role in their work, in a double rebuff to an ailing leader fighting for his political survival.

Bouteflika, who returned to Algeria on Sunday after medical treatment in Switzerland, has watched one long-time ally after another join mass demonstrations calling on him to step down.

Now in their third week, the protests have seen Algerians desperate for jobs and angry about unemployment and corruption demonstrate in towns across around the vast North African country against Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth term in office.

The marches have shattered years of political inertia and unsettled Algeria’s opaque but powerful security establishment.

In a statement, the judges added their voice to the protests by announcing the formation of a new association “to restore the gift of justice”.

“We announce our intention to abstain from ... supervising the election process against the will of the people, which is the only source of power,” the judges said in a statement.

The statement drew a sharp retort from Algerian Justice Minister Tayeb Louh, a member of Bouteflika’s inner circle, who said judges should remain neutral.

“The independence and integrity of the judge must be consistent whatever the reasons,” Ennahar TV quoted him as saying.

In another setback for the president, who plans to stand in elections in April, clerics told the minister of religious affairs to stop pressuring them to issue pro-government sermons.

“Leave us to do our job, do not interfere,” cleric Imam Djamel Ghoul, leader of an independent group of clerics, said in remarks to reporters.

The 82-year-old Bouteflika faces the toughest fight of his 20-year-old rule, following a tenure in which he became the north African country’s most powerful president in 30 years.

The secretive military-based establishment known to Algerians as “le pouvoir” (the powers-that-be) appears to have stood aside while the demonstrations have taken place.

“Bouteflika is back, we delivered a message, we need a response, and we need a response now,” pharmacist Mouloud Mohamed, 29, told Reuters.

In Algiers, tens of unionists staged a protest rally outside the headquarters of the main union, UGTA, calling on its leader Abdelmadjid Sidi Said, a Bouteflika ally, to resign.

The veteran head of state has rarely been seen in public since a stroke in 2013. Last April, he appeared in Algiers in a wheelchair.

In the clearest indication yet that the army is seeking to put some distance between itself and Bouteflika, the chief of staff said the military and the people had a united vision of the future, state TV reported. Lieutenant General Gaed Salah did not mention the unrest.

His ruling FLN party urged all sides to work together to end the crisis and promote national reconciliation, Ennahar TV said. But some of its members have quit and joined ranks with demonstrators.

Even if Bouteflika is forced from office, there is no clear replacement, raising the strong possibility that the ruling elite will maintain their grip.

Political sources say that if he caves in to the demonstrators’ demands, several parties including the military, war veterans and members of the opposition would need to build consensus on a way forward to secure an orderly transition.

The process could also include prominent protesters.

For years, rumors have swirled about potential successors, but no one credible has emerged who has the backing of the army and the elite and is not at least 70.

“The end of the reign of the outgoing president is over. It is just a matter of time,” said Louisa Ait Idriss, a university professor and prominent political analyst.

“The challenge is to end Bouteflika without having another Bouteflika.”

The protests come four years after Bouteflika consolidated his position by dismissing military intelligence chief Mohamed Mediene, a rival once seen as Algeria’s “Kingmaker”, a move many expected would allow the president to step aside for an ally.

Bouteflika’s dismissal of the general was the culmination of a struggle to impose his authority on military intelligence, a leading player in the civil war of the 1990s, and make the presidency the true center of national power.</s>ALGIERS (Reuters) - President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a veteran of Algeria’s war for independence who has ruled for two decades, announced on Monday he had reversed his decision to seek a fifth term following weeks of mass demonstrations.

Bouteflika, 82 and rarely seen in public since a stroke in 2013, had returned to Algeria on Sunday after medical treatment in Switzerland - coming home to a country in the grip of protests against his decision to stand again in the elections.

In a series of announcements on Monday evening, the presidency said an election previously set for April would be postponed. It did not set a new date but said a new constitution would be submitted to the public for a referendum.

A fighter in the 1954-1962 war to end French colonial rule, Bouteflika became independent Algeria’s first foreign minister and one of the forces behind the Non-Aligned Movement that gave a global voice to Africa, Asia and Latin America.

He championed post-colonial states, challenged what he saw as the hegemony of the United States and helped turned his country into a seed-bed of 1960s idealism.

He welcomed Che Guevara, and a young Nelson Mandela got his first military training in Algeria. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, on the run from U.S. police, was given refuge. Cleaver held court in his Algiers safe house with Timothy Leary, the drug-taking high priest of U.S. counter-culture.

As president of the U.N. General Assembly, Bouteflika invited Yasser Arafat to address the body in 1974, a historic step toward international recognition of the Palestinian cause.

By the end of the 1970s, though, Bouteflika had fallen from favor at home and went into exile. He returned to public life when Algeria was being ravaged by a conflict with Islamist militants which killed an estimated 200,000 people.

First elected president in 1999, he negotiated a truce to end the fighting and wrested power from the secretive military-based establishment known as “le pouvoir” (the powers-that-be).

Helped by oil and gas revenues, Algeria became more peaceful and richer. But it remains mired in corruption and political and economic torpor in a region where uprisings brought changes in neighboring countries.

With a cushion of foreign reserves and a population wary of major upheaval after their civil war, Algeria avoided the Arab spring revolutions that toppled leaders across the region in 2011.

But protests against poor living standards, the lack of job opportunities and services are common, and foreign investors are keen for economic reforms that will cut the red tape that often hampers business.

Some biographers say Bouteflika was born in Tlemcen, western Algeria, and others give his place of birth as Oujda, just over the border in Morocco.

Aged 19, he joined the rebellion against French rule as a protege of Houari Boumediene, a commander who would later become Algerian president.

After independence, Bouteflika became minister for youth and tourism at the age of 25. The following year he was made foreign minister.

Dressed in the tailored suits and sunglasses fashionable in the 1960s, Bouteflika became a spokesman for states emerging from colonial rule, given added authority by the cachet Algeria had earned from defeating France.

Bouteflika demanded that Communist China be given a seat in the United Nations. He railed against apartheid rule in South Africa.

The invitation to Arafat to address the General Assembly was controversial. Only two years before, Palestinian gunmen took hostage and killed members of the Israeli team at the Olympic Games in Munich. Bouteflika watched from the chairman’s dais as Arafat, a gun holster on his waistband, addressed the assembly in New York.

When pro-Palestinian militant Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as “Carlos the Jackal”, kidnapped oil ministers from an OPEC meeting in Vienna in 1975, he demanded to be flown with his hostages to Algiers. Bouteflika was shown on camera embracing Carlos at the airport before they sat down to negotiate the hostages’ release.

When Boumediene died in 1978, Bouteflika lost his mentor. He was replaced as foreign minister and an investigation was launched into financial impropriety. Bouteflika said the allegations were invented as part of a political plot.

He left Algeria in the early 1980s and settled in Dubai, where he became an adviser to a member of the emirate’s ruling family. He returned home in 1987 but kept a low profile, refusing offers of government posts.

In the meantime, Algeria was unraveling. The military-backed government annulled a parliamentary election in 1992 that Islamists were on the verge of winning. In the conflict that followed, whole villages were massacred and civilians walking in city streets had their throats slit.

Bouteflika, backed by the military, was elected president in 1999 with a pledge to stop the fighting. Against fierce opposition from the establishment, he gave an amnesty to militants who laid down their arms. The violence declined dramatically.

He won re-election in 2004 and again in 2009, although his opponents said the votes were rigged. Through a series of ferocious turf battles with his security forces behind the scenes, Bouteflika had, by the start of his third term, become Algerian’s most powerful president in 30 years.

He consolidated that power last year by dismissing about a dozen top military officers.

Little is known about his private life. Official records mention no wife, though some accounts say a marriage took place in 1990. Bouteflika lived with his mother, Mansouriah, in an apartment in Algiers, where she used to prepare his meals.

Age and poor health caught up with him. French doctors operated on him in 2005 for what officials said was a stomach ulcer. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables said he was suffering from cancer. He became weaker after his mother died in 2009.

Bouteflika said in a speech in Setif, in eastern Algeria, in May 2012 that it was time for his generation to hand over to new leaders. “For us, it’s over,” he said.

Months later at the start of 2013, a stroke put him into a Paris hospital for three months. He was seen little in public after returning to Algeria to convalesce.</s>ALGIERS (Reuters) - More than 1,000 judges said they would refuse to oversee Algeria’s election if President Abdelaziz Bouteflika contests it, and clerics defied any state role in their work, in a double rebuff to an ailing leader fighting for his political survival.

Bouteflika, who returned to Algeria on Sunday after medical treatment in Switzerland, has watched one long-time ally after another join mass demonstrations calling on him to step down.

Now in their third week, the protests have seen Algerians desperate for jobs and angry about unemployment and corruption demonstrate in towns across around the vast North African country against Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth term in office.

The marches have shattered years of political inertia and unsettled Algeria’s opaque but powerful security establishment.

In a statement, the judges added their voice to the protests by announcing the formation of a new association “to restore the gift of justice”.

“We announce our intention to abstain from ... supervising the election process against the will of the people, which is the only source of power,” the judges said in a statement.

The statement drew a sharp retort from Algerian Justice Minister Tayeb Louh, a member of Bouteflika’s inner circle, who said judges should remain neutral.

“The independence and integrity of the judge must be consistent whatever the reasons,” Ennahar TV quoted him as saying.

In another setback for the president, who plans to stand in elections in April, clerics told the minister of religious affairs to stop pressuring them to issue pro-government sermons.

“Leave us to do our job, do not interfere,” cleric Imam Djamel Ghoul, leader of an independent group of clerics, said in remarks to reporters.

The 82-year-old Bouteflika faces the toughest fight of his 20-year-old rule, following a tenure in which he became the north African country’s most powerful president in 30 years.

The secretive military-based establishment known to Algerians as “le pouvoir” (the powers-that-be) appears to have stood aside while the demonstrations have taken place.

“Bouteflika is back, we delivered a message, we need a response, and we need a response now,” pharmacist Mouloud Mohamed, 29, told Reuters.

In Algiers, tens of unionists staged a protest rally outside the headquarters of the main union, UGTA, calling on its leader Abdelmadjid Sidi Said, a Bouteflika ally, to resign.

The veteran head of state has rarely been seen in public since a stroke in 2013. Last April, he appeared in Algiers in a wheelchair.

In the clearest indication yet that the army is seeking to put some distance between itself and Bouteflika, the chief of staff said the military and the people had a united vision of the future, state TV reported. Lieutenant General Gaed Salah did not mention the unrest.

His ruling FLN party urged all sides to work together to end the crisis and promote national reconciliation, Ennahar TV said. But some of its members have quit and joined ranks with demonstrators.

Even if Bouteflika is forced from office, there is no clear replacement, raising the strong possibility that the ruling elite will maintain their grip.

Political sources say that if he caves in to the demonstrators’ demands, several parties including the military, war veterans and members of the opposition would need to build consensus on a way forward to secure an orderly transition.

The process could also include prominent protesters.

For years, rumors have swirled about potential successors, but no one credible has emerged who has the backing of the army and the elite and is not at least 70.

“The end of the reign of the outgoing president is over. It is just a matter of time,” said Louisa Ait Idriss, a university professor and prominent political analyst.

“The challenge is to end Bouteflika without having another Bouteflika.”

The protests come four years after Bouteflika consolidated his position by dismissing military intelligence chief Mohamed Mediene, a rival once seen as Algeria’s “Kingmaker”, a move many expected would allow the president to step aside for an ally.

Bouteflika’s dismissal of the general was the culmination of a struggle to impose his authority on military intelligence, a leading player in the civil war of the 1990s, and make the presidency the true center of national power.</s>Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who on Monday announced he is pulling out of a bid for a fifth term, is Algeria’s longest-serving president and a veteran of the independence struggle who held on to power during years of ill health.

His presidency survived the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled other leaders in the region.

But Bouteflika’s bid this year for a fifth term in office sparked public anger and brought tens of thousands onto the streets demanding he step down after two decades in power.

Dubbed Boutef by Algerians, he had helped foster peace after a decade-long civil war in the 1990s.

“I am the whole of Algeria. I am the embodiment of the Algerian people,” he said in 1999, the year he became president.

Bouteflika has had a history of medical problems and often flew to France or Switzerland for treatment.

A stroke in 2013 affected his mobility and speech, and he has used a wheelchair ever since.

Known for his three-piece suit even in the stifling heat, Bouteflika is respected by many for his role in ending the 1990s civil war, which official figures say killed nearly 200,000 people.

But he has also faced criticism from rights groups and opponents who accuse him of being authoritarian.

When Bouteflika came to power with the support of an army battling Islamist guerrillas, nobody expected him to stay in office for so long.

After his election he addressed critics who saw him as another puppet of the military, saying: “I’m not three-quarters of a president.”

Paradoxically, it was only after his stroke that Bouteflika was able to consolidate power in a country where the shadowy intelligence service has long been viewed as a “state within a state”.

In early 2016, he dissolved the all-powerful DRS intelligence agency after dismissing its previously immovable leader General Mohamed Mediene, better known as Toufik, after a quarter century in the post.

Bouteflika was born in Morocco on March 2, 1937 to a family from western Algeria.

At the age of 19 he joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle against the French colonial rulers.

When independence came in 1962, he was appointed minister of sport and tourism at the age of just 25, under Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella.

He became foreign minister the following year, a post he held for more than a decade, but was sidelined after the death of president Houari Boumediene in 1978 and went into self-imposed exile.

While he was abroad the military-backed government cancelled the 1991 elections, which an Islamist party had been poised to win, sparking a decade of bloodletting.

Bouteflika returned from Switzerland in 1999 to stand for president with the backing of the army which saw in him a potential figure of reconciliation.

He initially faced six rivals, but when the opponents dropped out, crying foul, he found himself the only candidate.

He proposed an amnesty for rebels who laid down their arms and twice secured public endorsement for “national reconciliation” through referendums.

The first, in September 1999, was a major gamble but paid off, leading to a sharp decrease in violence that helped propel Bouteflika to a second term in 2004.

His third term in 2009 followed a constitutional amendment allowing him to stand again.

His supporters argue that under his stewardship public and private investment created millions of jobs and dramatically lowered unemployment.

But a lack of opportunity continues to drive many Algerians abroad as youth unemployment remains high.

When the Arab Spring erupted in January 2011, Bouteflika rode out the storm by lifting a 19-year state of emergency and using oil revenues to grant pay rises.

For political commentator Rashid Tlemcani, Bouteflika “should have left office at the end of his second term, after securing national reconciliation and conquering the hearts of a large part of the population”.

In April 2013, Bouteflika was rushed to hospital in France after his stroke, and spent three months recovering.

He had already been hospitalised in Paris in 2005 because of intestinal problems from which he never fully recovered.

Bouteflika’s decision to seek a fourth mandate in 2014 after 15 years in power sparked both derision and criticism from those who questioned his ability to rule.

He did not even campaign and voted from a wheelchair, but still won an official 81 percent of the vote.

But it was Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth term in elections due to be held in April that proved the last straw for many Algerians.

His candidacy was formally submitted on March 3 while he was in Switzerland for what the presidency described as another round of routine medical tests.

His pledge not to serve a full term if re-elected failed to quell public anger and protests continued as his office announced his return from Geneva a week later.

He finally announced his decision to withdraw his candidacy on Monday, saying he was responding to “a pressing demand that you have been numerous in making to me”.

Bouteflika’s tenure has been overshadowed by the bloody repression of protests in the Kabylie region in spring 2001 and corruption scandals, while major challenges remain, including regular jihadist attacks.

“Bouteflika failed to turn Algeria into a modern country, with real institutions,” according to Myriam Ait-Aoudia, a professor of political science.</s>PARIS (AP) — Algeria's longtime leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been known as a wily political survivor ever since he fought for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. And his crafty concessions Monday aimed at quelling mass protests show he's not ready to give up yet.

While he abandoned his bid for a fifth term in office , his simultaneous postponement of an election set for next month has critics worried he intends to hold on to power indefinitely.

So much about the 82-year-old Bouteflika, badly weakened by a 2013 stroke, has remained an enigma. The president returned Sunday from two weeks in a Geneva hospital, but the exact state of his health is unclear.

A slow, frail Bouteflika shown in rare televised images released on Monday night gave little hint of his firebrand past.

Bouteflika famously negotiated with the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal to free oil ministers who had been taken hostage in a 1975 attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and flown to Algiers.

He became foreign minister at the young age of 25, and stood up to the likes of Henry Kissinger at the height of the Cold War. At the time, Algeria was a model of doctrinaire socialism tethered to the former Soviet Union and the country's capital, Algiers, was nicknamed "Moscow on the Med."

More recently, Bouteflika helped reconcile his own citizens after a decade of civil war between radical Muslim militants and Algeria's security forces.

In 20 years as president, however, age and illness took its toll on the once-charismatic figure. Corruption scandals over infrastructure and hydrocarbon projects have also dogged him for years and tarnished many of his closest associates.

Secrecy surrounds Algeria's leadership and Bouteflika himself — it has never been clear whether full power lay in his hands, or whether army generals who molded the North African nation called the shots from offstage.

All this has driven unprecedented protests that have shaken Algeria since last month, demanding Bouteflika abandon plans for a fifth term in the April 18 elections.

In a letter to the nation released by state news agency APS on Monday, Bouteflika stressed the importance of including Algeria's disillusioned youth in the reform process and putting the country "in the hands of new generations."

But for many of the protesters, the most important sentence said: "There will be no fifth term."

Others were more cautious, as Bouteflika gave no date or timeline for the delayed election. Critics said they fear the moves could pave the way for the president to install a hand-picked successor. Others saw his decision to postpone the election indefinitely as a threat to democracy in Algeria.

Born in the border town of Oujda, Morocco, Bouteflika became one of his country's most enduring politicians. In Algeria's bloody independence war, he commanded the southern Mali front and slipped into France clandestinely in 1961 to contact jailed liberation leaders.

He later embodied the Third World revolutionary who defied the West, acting as a prominent voice for the developing nation's movement. He was active in the United Nations, and presided over the U.N. General Assembly in 1974.

Yet Bouteflika stood firmly with the United States in the fight against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, particularly on intelligence-sharing and military cooperation.

After becoming president in 1999, Bouteflika managed to bring stability to a country nearly brought to its knees in the 1990s as an Islamic insurgency left an estimated 200,000 people dead. He unveiled a bold program in 2005 to reconcile a nation fractured by a civil war by persuading Muslim radicals to lay down their arms. Many victims' families still oppose it.

Bouteflika and the country's armed forces neutralized Algeria's Islamic insurgency, but then watched it metastasize into a Sahara-wide movement linked to smuggling and kidnapping — and to al-Qaida.

He also failed to create an economy that could offer enough jobs for Algeria's growing youth population despite the nation's vast oil and gas wealth.

When Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 overthrew dictators to the east, Bouteflika balked at the region-wide calls for change. He then kept his job through a combination of swift salary and subsidy increases, a vigilant security force and taking advantage of the lack of unity among the country's opposition.

Concerns over Bouteflika's health began during his second term in 2005, when he secretly entered the Val de Grace military hospital in Paris for a bleeding ulcer. Numerous hospitalizations and medical visits followed, few publicly reported. In April 2013, he had a stroke.

Whole sections of Bouteflika's life have been kept secret, including his marital status — or how he was allowed to assume the presidency when the constitution demands that any head of state be wedded to an Algerian. There have been reports of a secret 1990 marriage to the daughter of a diplomat.

Said Bouteflika, 61, a brother of the president and top aide, is said to hold enormous influence in the presidential apparatus. Critics claim he is at the center of the circle of businessman, pejoratively called "oligarchs," who grew rich during Bouteflika's presidency.

After years in office, Bouteflika's powerful political machine had the constitution changed to cancel the presidency's two-term limit. He was then re-elected in 2009 and 2013, amid charges of fraud and a lack of powerful challengers.

The recent protests surprised Algeria's opaque leadership and freed the country's people, long fearful of a watchful security apparatus, to openly criticize the president. The citizens' revolt drew millions into the streets across the country to demand Bouteflika abandon his candidacy.

Associated Press writer Aomar Ouali in Algiers, Algeria, contributed to this report.</s>Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his withdrawal on Monday from a bid to win another term in office and postponed an April 18 election, following weeks of protests against his candidacy.

A government reshuffle is expected to take place soon, Reuters reported.

Bouteflika, in a message carried by national news agency APS, said the presidential poll would follow a national conference on political and constitutional reform to be carried out by the end of 2019.

Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia resigned and Interior Minister Noureddine Bedoui, not known as a member of Bouteflika’s inner circle, replaced him. Ramtane Lamamra, a diplomatic advisor to Bouteflika, was named deputy prime minister, reported Reuters.

Bouteflika met Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Gaed Salah and veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, the kind of widely respected figure the military might look to as a guarantor of stability.

The Algerian leader’s announcement brought crowds back onto the streets in celebration on Monday evening.

Hundreds of people, young and old, some draped in the national flag, jumped up and down with excitement. Cars beeped their horns in approval.

The 82-year-old president returned to the North African country on Sunday after two weeks in a Swiss hospital undergoing “routine medical checks,” amid mass protests against his bid for a fifth term in office.</s>PARIS (AP) — Algeria's longtime leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been known as a wily political survivor ever since he fought for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. And his crafty concessions Monday aimed at quelling mass protests show he's not ready to give up yet.

While he abandoned his bid for a fifth term in office , his simultaneous postponement of an election set for next month has critics worried he intends to hold on to power indefinitely.

So much about the 82-year-old Bouteflika, badly weakened by a 2013 stroke, has remained an enigma. The president returned Sunday from two weeks in a Geneva hospital, but the exact state of his health is unclear.

A slow, frail Bouteflika shown in rare televised images released on Monday night gave little hint of his firebrand past.

Bouteflika famously negotiated with the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal to free oil ministers who had been taken hostage in a 1975 attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and flown to Algiers.

He became foreign minister at the young age of 25, and stood up to the likes of Henry Kissinger at the height of the Cold War. At the time, Algeria was a model of doctrinaire socialism tethered to the former Soviet Union and the country's capital, Algiers, was nicknamed "Moscow on the Med."

More recently, Bouteflika helped reconcile his own citizens after a decade of civil war between radical Muslim militants and Algeria's security forces.

In 20 years as president, however, age and illness took its toll on the once-charismatic figure. Corruption scandals over infrastructure and hydrocarbon projects have also dogged him for years and tarnished many of his closest associates.

Secrecy surrounds Algeria's leadership and Bouteflika himself — it has never been clear whether full power lay in his hands, or whether army generals who molded the North African nation called the shots from offstage.

All this has driven unprecedented protests that have shaken Algeria since last month, demanding Bouteflika abandon plans for a fifth term in the April 18 elections.

In a letter to the nation released by state news agency APS on Monday, Bouteflika stressed the importance of including Algeria's disillusioned youth in the reform process and putting the country "in the hands of new generations."

But for many of the protesters, the most important sentence said: "There will be no fifth term."

Others were more cautious, as Bouteflika gave no date or timeline for the delayed election. Critics said they fear the moves could pave the way for the president to install a hand-picked successor. Others saw his decision to postpone the election indefinitely as a threat to democracy in Algeria.

Born in the border town of Oujda, Morocco, Bouteflika became one of his country's most enduring politicians. In Algeria's bloody independence war, he commanded the southern Mali front and slipped into France clandestinely in 1961 to contact jailed liberation leaders.

He later embodied the Third World revolutionary who defied the West, acting as a prominent voice for the developing nation's movement. He was active in the United Nations, and presided over the U.N. General Assembly in 1974.

Yet Bouteflika stood firmly with the United States in the fight against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, particularly on intelligence-sharing and military cooperation.

After becoming president in 1999, Bouteflika managed to bring stability to a country nearly brought to its knees in the 1990s as an Islamic insurgency left an estimated 200,000 people dead. He unveiled a bold program in 2005 to reconcile a nation fractured by a civil war by persuading Muslim radicals to lay down their arms. Many victims' families still oppose it.

Bouteflika and the country's armed forces neutralized Algeria's Islamic insurgency, but then watched it metastasize into a Sahara-wide movement linked to smuggling and kidnapping — and to al-Qaida.

He also failed to create an economy that could offer enough jobs for Algeria's growing youth population despite the nation's vast oil and gas wealth.

When Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 overthrew dictators to the east, Bouteflika balked at the region-wide calls for change. He then kept his job through a combination of swift salary and subsidy increases, a vigilant security force and taking advantage of the lack of unity among the country's opposition.

Concerns over Bouteflika's health began during his second term in 2005, when he secretly entered the Val de Grace military hospital in Paris for a bleeding ulcer. Numerous hospitalizations and medical visits followed, few publicly reported. In April 2013, he had a stroke.

Whole sections of Bouteflika's life have been kept secret, including his marital status — or how he was allowed to assume the presidency when the constitution demands that any head of state be wedded to an Algerian. There have been reports of a secret 1990 marriage to the daughter of a diplomat.

Said Bouteflika, 61, a brother of the president and top aide, is said to hold enormous influence in the presidential apparatus. Critics claim he is at the center of the circle of businessman, pejoratively called "oligarchs," who grew rich during Bouteflika's presidency.

After years in office, Bouteflika's powerful political machine had the constitution changed to cancel the presidency's two-term limit. He was then re-elected in 2009 and 2013, amid charges of fraud and a lack of powerful challengers.

The recent protests surprised Algeria's opaque leadership and freed the country's people, long fearful of a watchful security apparatus, to openly criticize the president. The citizens' revolt drew millions into the streets across the country to demand Bouteflika abandon his candidacy.

Associated Press writer Aomar Ouali in Algiers, Algeria, contributed to this report.</s>ALGIERS (Reuters) - More than 1,000 judges said they would refuse to oversee Algeria’s election if President Abdelaziz Bouteflika contests it, a challenge that drew a sharp retort from the justice minister on Monday who said the judiciary should be neutral.

In a statement, the judges added their voice to anti-Bouteflika protests now in their third week by announcing the formation of a new association “to restore the gift of justice”. Bouteflika returned to Algeria on Sunday after undergoing medical treatment in Switzerland.

“We announce our intention to abstain from ... supervising the election process against the will of the people, which is the only source of power,” the judges said on Sunday.

Judges should join an effort to “declare that we are the people”, the judges said in a statement.

Algerian Justice Minister Tayeb Louh, a member of Bouteflika’s inner circle, said judges should remain neutral.

“The independence and integrity of the judge must be consistent whatever the reasons,” Ennahar TV quoted him as saying.

The 82-year-old Bouteflika faces the toughest fight of his 20-year-old rule, following a tenure in which he became the north African country’s most powerful president in 30 years.

In another setback for the veteran president, who plans to stand in elections in April, clerics told the minister of religious affairs to stop pressuring them to issue pro-government sermons.

“Leave us to do our job, do not interfere,” cleric Imam Djamel Ghoul, leader of an independent group of clerics, said in remarks to reporters.

Algerians from all social classes have rejected his plan to secure a fifth term in April, a move protesters feel would perpetuate a stale political system dominated by veterans of an independence war against France that ended in 1962.

“Bouteflika is back, we delivered a message, we need a response, and we need a response now,” pharmacist Mouloud Mohamed, 29, told Reuters.

The secretive military-based establishment known to Algerians as “le pouvoir” (the powers-that-be) appears to have stood aside while the demonstrations have taken place.

In Algiers, tens of unionists staged a protest rally outside the headquarters of the main union, UGTA, calling on its leader Abdelmadjid Sidi Said, a Bouteflika ally, to resign.

The veteran head of state has rarely been seen in public since a stroke in 2013. Last April, he appeared in Algiers in a wheelchair.

Young Algerians are desperate for jobs and angry about unemployment and corruption, and complain that their leaders still dwell on the victory over France instead of improving living standards for the future.

In the clearest indication yet that the generals sympathize with protesters, the chief of staff said the military and the people had a united vision of the future, state TV reported. Lieutenant General Gaed Salah did not mention the unrest.

His ruling FLN party urged all sides to work together to end the crisis and promote national reconciliation, Ennahar TV said. But some of its members have quit and supported the demonstrations.

Even if Bouteflika is forced from office, there is no clear replacement, raising the strong possibility that the ruling elite, dominated by veterans of the war of independence against France and their allies, will stay in place.

For years, rumors have swirled about potential successors, but no one credible has emerged who has the backing of the army and the elite and is not at least 70.

The protests come four years after Bouteflika consolidated his position by dismissing military intelligence chief Mohamed Mediene, a rival once seen as Algeria’s “Kingmaker”, a move many expected would allow the president to step aside for an ally.

Bouteflika’s dismissal of the general was the culmination of a struggle to impose his authority on military intelligence, a leading player in the civil war of the 1990s, and make the presidency the true center of national power.</s>Barristers across Algeria on Monday joined strike action against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term in office, a day after the ailing leader's return from hospital in Switzerland.

The lawyers launched a 48-hour walkout to demand the Constitutional Council reject Bouteflika's re-election bid on the grounds of "incapacity" to carry out the role.

The Council has until Thursday to rule on candidates for Algeria's April 18 election.

Magistrates have also been called to strike, although Justice Minister Tayeb Louh has stressed they were duty-bound to remain neutral.

"Justice must keep its distance from political tensions," he said.

Bouteflika's return from Geneva -- where he spent the past two weeks in hospital -- came as protest strikes Sunday shut down the capital's public transport system and many schools across Algeria.

The 82-year-old president, who suffered a stroke in 2013, left Algeria on February 24 for what the presidency described as "routine medical checks".

Demonstrations against Bouteflika's bid for another term have brought tens of thousands of protesters onto Algeria's streets for each of the last three Fridays, with smaller demonstrations taking place on other days.

Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999 and whose rare public appearances since his stroke have been in a wheelchair, has made no public comment since his return to the country.
Prime Minister of Algeria Ahmed Ouyahia resigns after Bouteflika's speech. He is replaced by Noureddine Bedoui.