Date: Apr 8, 2019 Source: The Telegraph Algerians return to streets - to sweep up after protests Our Foreign Staff,The Telegraph•April 6, 2019 Groups of young people roam the streets picking up bottles and other detritus after Algeria's weekly pro-democracy protests - AP Groups of young people roam the streets picking up bottles and other detritus after Algeria's weekly pro-democracy protests - AP More Algeria's anti-government protests have swept through the country's towns and cities and toppled its aging ruler. But unlike previous mass movements, demonstrators have been careful not to tear their country up. In a a powerful symbol of the movement's peaceful spirit, after massive pro-democracy demonstrations every week the protesters themselves have been roaming the streets picking up bottles, papers and other detritus left behind. After events like the latest protest on Friday, when the boulevards of Algiers thronged with so many people that it took hours to traverse a few blocks, residents have done their duty to leave roads as they found them. After the protests started on February 22 against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his entourage, organisers started sending messages on Facebook calling for demonstrators to avoid violence and clean up after themselves. "We're volunteers. We organized ourselves after appeals on social networks. The shop owners give us free garbage bags. We have formed several groups," said Abdellah Debaili, 36, a cleanup worker from the working class Algiers neighborhood of Hussein Dey Est. He stands on a boulevard leading to the central post office, the most iconic gathering point of the movement, cajoling passersby to discard their orange peels, coffee cups or newspapers in the black plastic bag at his side. Each time they do, he smiles and says, "shukran," or thank you. "We're happy," he told The Associated Press, "because people congratulate us for doing this work." The tidy revolutionaries have drawn attention in France, where yellow vest protesters have been holding their own weekly protests for 21 weeks, and where protest violence has left stores and restaurants trashed or burned out or boarded up. By contrast, in Algeria - once the jewel in France's colonial crown - protesters and local businesses are on the same side, and police rarely intervene. Many Algerian expats have been travelling from France and the UK to join the movement in their homeland. "I took unpaid leave to come and march in Algeria, to be here physically," said Chahrazade Kaci, who arrived back from London just days before president Abdelaziz Bouteflika resigned in the face of huge protests. "It's a duty," said Kaci, 52, who has spent almost half her life in the British capital since going into exile at the height of Algeria's 1990s civil war. Last night Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi said he did not want to run for a second term in presidential elections expected this year, despite his party's calls for the 93-year-old to stand. The mass protests in Algeria have stirred the opposition in Tunisia, and social media campaigns have begun rejecting a second term for Essebsi. The Tunisian constitution adopted by parliament in 2014 gives him the right to run for two terms. "I will say frankly that I do not want to present for a second term because Tunisia has a lot of talents," Essebsi said at a meeting of his party Nidaa Tounes in Monastir. Tunisia will hold a parliamentary election on October 6 and a presidential election starting on Nov. 17. They will be the third set of polls in which Tunisians can vote freely following the 2011 revolution that toppled autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who ruled for 23 years.