Louisa Hanoune
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Louisa Hanoune (Arabic:لويزة حنون) (born 7 April 1954 in Jijel) is head of Algeria's Workers' Party (Parti des Travailleurs, PT). In 2004, she became the first woman to run for president in Algeria.
Hanoune was imprisoned by the government several times prior to the legalization of political parties in 1988. She was jailed soon after she joined the Trotskyist Social Workers Organisation, an illegal party, in 1981, and again after the 1988 October Riots, which brought about the end of the National Liberation Front's (FLN) one-party rule.
During Algeria's bloody civil war of the 1990s, Hanoune was one of the few opposition voices in parliament, and, despite her party's secularist values, a strong opponent of the government's "eradication" policy toward Islamists. In January 1995, she signed the Sant'Egidio Platform together with representatives of other opposition parties - notably including the Islamic Salvation Front, the radical Islamist party whose dissolution by military decree brought about the start of the civil war.
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