[Algerian President, Abdul Aziz Butefliqa. Read photo caption below].

ALGIERS, (AFP) - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared Tuesday he would hold on to power, despite ongoing riots against his regime that have killed more than 50 people in the past two months.
A defiant speech by Bouteflika to a rally in southern Algeria came after his government announced measures that would open the way for troops to move against demonstrators, and press reports said more violent protests had claimed another seven lives.
It also notably came after an ethnic Berber-led anti-government march by almost a million people last week in Algiers, which turned riotous and bloody, and which presented the biggest challenge yet to Bouteflika's leadership.
"I am not a captain who abandons a sinking ship -- I am here, I am staying, in line with the will of the people who elected me," Bouteflika told the rally in Tamanrasset.
He admitted "Algeria is in crisis," but said he was willing to start talks to find a peaceful solution.
"Reforms and change must be undertaken calmly. I will not accept a revolution against public property and the people," he said.
Bouteflika's government late Monday announced it was banning all protests in the capital "until further notice" -- a move that enables soldiers to be used to put down further riots.
The violence in the capital last week claimed at least four lives and left 946 injured, according to official figures, and followed two months of serious unrest in the Kabylie region to the east.
Meanwhile, Tuesday's press said seven people were killed, including two paramilitary policemen, in disturbances in Kabylie.
These deaths brought to 87 the unofficial tally of people killed in the past two months. Official figures put the toll at 56 people killed and 2,300 injured.
The riots were triggered April 18 when a Berber youth was shot dead in police custody on April 18.
Veteran opposition leader Hocine Ait Ahmed on Tuesday urged UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to go to Algeria and called on the world body to send an international team to probe the unrest.
Earlier, he handed a list of 130 names of people, mainly youths, declared missing since the Algiers riots, to a top aide to UN Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.
Ait Ahmed heads the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), which is strong in Kabylie.
Apart from the former ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) and the now outlawed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), it was the only party to win parliamentary seats in December 1991.
The second round of that general election was called off by the military the following month when it became clear that the fundamentalist FIS would sweep the polls. This move triggered a guerrilla war that has since claimed some 100,000 lives.
Proposals for a political transition addressed by Ait Ahmed last month to Bouteflika -- and the generals in charge of the army and the political police, Mohamed Lamari and Tewfik Mediene -- drew scorn in Algiers.
Officials have also rejected calls for international intervention.
The government action drew a mixed response Tuesday from the powerful General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA) confederation.
In a statement, UGTA General Secretary Abdelmadjid Sidi Said expressed a commitment to "defend the country, the republic, freedoms and the democratic ideal" and warned against all "protests in the shape of violence, destruction of public and private property and looting".
However, the UGTA, which opposes privatisations undertaken by the government for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), also said the unrest was "the inevitable outcome of a series of thoughtless economic and social policies, which are fundamentally unjust and blindly wreck all the workers have gained."
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PHOTO CAPTION

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika meets with the nomadic Touareg people in the remote town of Tamenrasset some 2000 kilometres (around 1200 miles) south of Algiers in the Sahara dessert region, June 19, 2001. The capital Algiers and the troubled Kabylie region remained tense after a week of violent protests and clashes between police and Berber-speaking youths. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra
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