Algeria's 17.5 million voters were called to the polls yesterday for the sixth time in four years.
The question was simple: "Are you for or against the general policy of the President of the Republic, whose goal is peace and civil concord?" When the results are announced this morning, there is no doubt that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika will obtain a majority "yes" vote intended to make his people - and the world - forget he was elected as sole candidate last April.
The only uncertainties yesterday were how big the turnout would be, and whether the authorities could refrain from fiddling the figures.
Implicit in the one-question referendum is acceptance of Mr Bouteflika's partial amnesty law, which pardons members of Islamist guerrilla movements who have not committed rape, "crimes of blood" or set off bombs in public places in the war that has claimed more than 100,000 lives since 1992.
If they surrender before January 13th, 2000, more serious offenders will be tried but do not risk the death penalty. Mr Bouteflika's law was voted by parliament on July 13th and has already been in effect for two months.
Four years ago, another Algerian president said he needed popular endorsement if he was to restore peace to the nation. President Liamine Zeroual also decreed a clemency law for Islamists, but the two bloodiest years of the war then followed.
Yet despite a sense of deja -vu, Algerians place great hope in Mr Bouteflika's promises. Unlike his predecessor, the short, balding, former foreign minister knows how to talk to them.
Mr Bouteflika has conducted an energetic campaign for the referendum, travelling throughout Algeria and exercising his oratorial skills to such an extent that Algerians now call national television "the Bouteflika channel".
The President pleaded for mutual understanding during the campaign. "We need to reinvent language, find words that will not hurt people on either side," he said. Civil concord meant neither giving into Islamists nor exterminating them; it meant accepting the differences among Algerians.
Mr Bouteflika's verbal attacks on corruption have bolstered his popularity. Speaking of gendarmes and customs officers at a rally, he said: "They live off baksheesh and bribes. People say that I criticise the institutions of the Republic. Yes, I criticise them . . . The clean-up within the state is only beginning."
The charm offensive has been so effective that few notice when Mr Bouteflika fails to deliver. Of 10,000 prisoners who were supposed to be freed in July, only 2,300 were released. The return of Air France to Algiers has been delayed because the President refuses to allow the airline to use its own security personnel. Now Mr Bouteflika has given the guerrillas an ultimatum. If they don't give up, he said on the eve of the referendum, "I swear before God that after January 13th, the sword I shall brandish will be sharper than that of Hajjaj." Ben Youssef Hajjaj put down an 8th century revolt against the Omayyad dynasty.
