In Algeria, they’re called heittists.

Out of jobs and out of luck, they are the thousands of men who spend their days leaning against the wall — or in Arabic, the heitt.

You can see heittists in big cities such as Algiers and Oran and in smaller towns at shabby Sovietstyle public housing complexes, where their 10- or 12-member families must squeeze into one tiny room. The reason that they loiter is tragically simple: There are not enough mattresses for everyone to sleep on, so they take shifts.

Combining two languages in one word, the term “heittist” is as poetic as it is original. It is an expression that captures the plight of a population left in limbo — dispossessed of its country’s immense wealth by an elite class of thieving people with dual residences in France and Algeria.

The nation’s descent into hell began after a rise to glory. In 1962, the Algerian people brought 132 years of French occupation to an abrupt end.

But in the more than 45 years since then, the liberators have become the oppressors. A tiny clique of 1.5 million people now monopolizes 90% of the wealth of the country — which has abundant natural resources, including water, forests, oil, natural gas, vast agricultural expanses, and a spectacular Mediterranean coastline.

After coming to power, those who fought in the hills — and from exile — immediately declared Algeria to be an Islamic nation of Arab nationalism and socialism. It was not.

They then eviscerated Frenchlanguage education but failed to replace it with an Arabic equivalent. Egyptian teachers were imported but, when they arrived, were unable to communicate. Within a decade, the whole school system had collapsed. Today, Algeria’s educational establishment is a ruined landscape, graduating illiterates who can speak neither French nor Arabic. Dropouts are the norm.

Predictably, members of the elite classes sent their own children to private French schools in Algeria — or even to France — for higher education. According to this class system, Francophones rule — albeit in the name of Arab nationalism — while the heittists rely on the miserable welfare state.

Very confident of its control, the ruling elite decided to experiment with the semblance of democracy in 1991. A somewhat free election was held, and it produced another catastrophe, with the big winners being the “Islamic Salvation Front” — an offshoot of the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood movement to which millions of the deprived had gravitated in their years of misery.

The ruling elite freaked out, promptly canceling the election’s results and banning the winning party. I stood on a balcony at the St. George Hotel on that clear night, peering over the twinkling lights of Algiers as the very first shots of what became the civil war rang out in the narrow streets of the Kasbah, just as the Algerian revolt against the French had done four decades earlier.

In the 16 years since, more than 100,000 Algerians have died, shot by the army or chopped to pieces by jihadists with swords in the name of Allah. Whole villages have

been wiped out. Both sides — the army-party elite and the extremist Muslims — want the money, the oil, and the power. The majority of the populace has no champion in either camp.

On several occasions in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, there would be an uprising by the poor, the heittists, or the university students — and most important, by about 6 million Tamazight-speaking people proud of their Afro-Asiatic heritage as well as fierce Berbers from the Kabylie mountain regions. The government would do the usual roundup. People would be shot. Others would be imprisoned. And many would be tortured.

So here we are 40 years after independence: The heittists wait next to their walls, the elite sit secure with their families and bodyguards inside spectacular whitewashed villas and mansions perched on craggy landscapes, and the bearded jihadists run amok, butchering everyone.

On April 11, the angels of death brought the war back to the capital, bombing the prime minister’s office, killing 33 and wounding more than 200. When asked what happened, the country’s minister of the interior, Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni, said it was all a conspiracy perpetrated by foreigners.