An article that appeared on the former Afrique du Nord.com newspaper on 21 September 2008.
The situation in Algeria, and for Algerians, has deteriorated much further since then, because Islamists who slit women’s throats have become national figures, the left no longer exists and state and popular anti-Kabylian racism has been normalised with the national ‘zero kabylian’ project and its batch of several hundred kabylians imprisoned with heavy sentences.
Over the last few weeks, Algeria has witnessed an appalling escalation in violence. Terrorist attacks, the work of the GSPC, which has proclaimed its allegiance to the Al Qaeda nebula, are multiplying. Each new morning brings its share of dead and wounded. The latest attacks, on the outskirts of Algiers, cost the lives of 55 people. Faced with a situation that could not be more untenable, the Algerian authorities are showing a powerlessness that is even more worrying than the monstrous crimes committed by the Islamo-integrist spawn of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The latest attacks, however, are just one grim episode in a long and horrible tragedy. Since 1990, no fewer than 200,000 people have lost their lives in this appalling tragedy. Thousands have been injured and billions have been damaged. How did we get here?
Let’s start by stating a historical truth: what is currently happening in Algeria is simply the continuation of a suicidal policy that began a long time ago.
Military-police system
Algeria gained its independence in 1962. But the Algerian peoples had emerged from their murderous war against colonial France only to be engulfed in violence of a different kind. The colonels who had been quietly waiting in Tunisia and Morocco for France to leave and take its place seized power, bloodily suppressing any hint of emancipation or resistance. Ahmed Benbella, Head of State, and Houari Boumediene, Chief of Staff, proclaimed themselves absolute masters of Algeria. The two men began by ethnically cleansing Kabylia. With the fall of this traditionally rebellious region, Colonel Boumediene and his lackey took possession of Algeria and turned it into their private property.
To consolidate their power and definitively silence any possible dissent, they set up the most odious military-police system in the Third World. State terrorism was, from every point of view, established as a mode of governance. Physical liquidations, arbitrary arrests, torture, shadowing, kidnappings and sequestrations were commonplace. For this purpose, the government acquired a fatal weapon: the political police, responsible for spying on any movement likely to challenge the government in power. This situation became even more acute after Benbella was overthrown by his chief of staff on 19 June 1965.
In this war against the Algerian peoples, intellectuals were the most closely watched. At the time, the only visible elite capable of producing ideas was to be found in Communist circles. The hunt for left-wing intellectuals went on unabated, with no limits on the means available. To track down leftist militants, the secret services installed informers in all universities, administrations, and production units. Any manager suspected of belonging to this political movement was dismissed, if not simply imprisoned or killed.
At the same time as this anti-leftist campaign was getting tougher and tougher, the government, clinging to its religious nationalism, redoubled its concessions to the nascent Islamist movement. Islam was made the religion of the State, Islamic associations were funded, a medieval Family Code was drawn up, schools were given Arabic, and the number of mosques increased.
Secret war against the Left
These two elements – the marginalisation of the French-speaking elite from the Left and the projection of the fundamentalist movement – have led to a national disaster.
The Islamist movement, which thrives on the unpopularity of the government and the lack of culture among the masses, took advantage of the excessive laxity shown by the official authorities to take root in the streets, on campuses and in people’s minds.
In 1988, after a savagely repressed popular uprising, the military government conceded a façade of democratic openness. The first to benefit was of course the fundamentalist movement, which had already come a long way. Indeed, the Islamists had no trouble structuring themselves by creating the Islamic Salvation Front, which won the first multi-party municipal elections in June 1990. A year later, the FIS repeated the feat by winning the first round of legislative elections. Fearing the worst, the generals cancelled the second round, dissolved the FIS and declared a state of emergency. The Islamist militants then went underground and declared war on the Algerian people, with all the consequences that we know.
Until 1999, it could be said that the Algerians had won their war against obscurantism and its corollary, terrorism, at a heavy price. Even if there were still a few die-hards, we were still close to the end. All that was needed was one more effort, the last. It would have been enough to take advantage of the dazzling military victory over religious fanaticism.
All the ingredients were there to give the Algerian people (there are many peoples in Algeria) a taste for peace. All that was needed was to accompany this victory with consistent gestures and decisive actions. We had to put a stop to the liberal project of liquidating social and national gains, ban Islamist parties, impose secularism, modernise schools, remove the army from the political arena, reform the justice system, put an end to corruption, free the press, introduce democratic alternation, make women the equal of men, promote the multiple identities of Algerians, including official recognition of the Tamazight language alongside Arabic, a political programme at the service of workers and the masses…
But peace does not have the same flavour for everyone. A lasting peace would of course threaten the market with corruption and put an end to the foreign trade lobby. From this point of view, it was highly risky to return peace to the Algerians. The military chiefs and their civilian accomplices, fearing for their fortunes and economic interests, did their utmost to preserve the regime in order to save their ‘business’.
The odyssey of a small man
The decision-makers, those who embody the hidden power, then set out to find that providential man, capable of restoring Algeria’s image abroad and able to keep the embers alive at home so that they could enjoy the rents provided by the chaos. Who better than Abdelaziz Bouteflika to fulfil such a mission?
Bouteflika is first and foremost a child of the System. In many ways, he symbolises the unfathomable way in which the Algerian regime operates. A populist and demagogue, Bouteflika knows how to keep a low profile in front of his sponsors and show a semblance of authority when addressing the people. However, what most appealed to his army mentors was his almost spontaneous ability to compromise. He can call himself an Islamist in the morning, a social democrat in the evening and a communist in between. But the truth is that Bouteflika is an Islamist of the worst kind, and the military knew it. When he was ‘promoted’ to President of the Republic in 1999, he began by establishing a civil concord through a national amnesty law. Clearly not satisfied with the largesse granted to those who slit women’s throats, Bouteflika had a ‘Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation’ adopted by referendum. These two texts enabled thousands of former terrorists to regain their freedom. Better still, the laws in question turned the emirs into super-citizens. These former terrorists have been cleared of any wrongdoing and now frequent the salons of honour, make the front pages of newspapers, host meetings and receive preferential treatment!
The two laws in question, it has to be said, constitute an unprecedented historical blunder in that they seek to equate victims and executioners. Bouteflika has gone so far as to reverse the roles! Readers will agree that there is something fundamentally perverse in this attempt to confuse good and evil.
The Head of State has often cited the example of South Africa, which was indeed able to overcome the apartheid crisis through reconciliation. But he forgets that the process of reconciliation in that country was courageously accompanied by work on truth and justice.
In conclusion, the damage caused by the falsely reconciliatory approach of the Algerian President is much more serious than we think. Bouteflika has not only psychologically disarmed the Algerian people, but – and this is more serious – he has given Algeria back to the Islamists in the hands of the liberal steamroller.
Afrique du Nord.com