Algeria, NATO's next assignment?
Time to pull the plug on the Algerian sanguinary junta....
A fundamental confusion
Behind the hysteria about an Islamic threat to the West, the French and other Western governments are backing a bloody war against the Algerian people. Robert Hughes reports
Algeria has become the front line in the supposed war between Islam and the West. 'If Algeria's fundamentalist rebels overthrow its military government, as they probably will, some implacably bitter people will take control of North Africa's biggest country', warned the Economist last summer. And worse was to come: 'This may help fundamentalists to come to power elsewhere. For a time there will be a trans-Mediterranean cold war; perhaps, in flashes, a hot one.' (6 August 1994)
What is particularly worrying to Western commentators is that the Islamic opposition in Algeria is not only anti-Western, but irrational, apparently motivated by dark forces which 'we' cannot comprehend. After all, as Ronald Payne noted after the Christmas hijacking of a French airliner, the West 'cannot win an anti-terrorist war against suicide bombers burning with faith' (European, 6-12 January 1995).
But what is so unfathomable about the Algerian conflict? And, when it comes to relations between the West and Algeria, just who is threatening whom? There is nothing particularly mysterious about the causes of the war in Algeria. But the facts have been buried under a mountain of hysteria about the 'Islamic threat'. The truth is that for more than three years the French and other Western governments have backed the Algerian regime in a brutal war against its own people.
Algeria won independence from France in 1962 following a bloody eight-year conflict which cost a million Algerian lives. But by the end of the 1980s, the nationalist project of the National Liberation Front (FLN) had reached the end of the road.
The FLN regime's attempt to build a strong, independent country was curtailed by Algeria's continuing subordination to the world economy. In common with other third world countries, the Algerian economy was dependent on export sales of its resources. Oil and gas provided 97 per cent of Algeria's export earnings. By 1987, after a global collapse in oil prices, 87 per cent of those earnings were being eaten up by interest payments to Western financiers.
President Chadli Benjedid embarked on a massive programme of austerity and market reforms - 'Chadli's perestroika'. This met with the approval of Algeria's foreign creditors, but led to a further dramatic fall in the living standards of ordinary Algerians. By 1988 unemployment had reached 60 per cent for young Algerians. Even the most basic foodstuffs became scarce and could only be bought on the black market at inflated prices. A chronic housing shortage meant massive overcrowding.
The resentment of young Algerians erupted in major riots in October 1988. It took the army several days to regain control, and then only after killing 500 people. Chadli attempted to contain popular anger by rapidly introducing political reforms. Opposition parties were legalised for the first time.
The extent of disaffection from the ruling FLN was revealed in local elections in June 1990 when a majority of seats were won by the recently formed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The legitimacy of the FLN had rested on its leadership of the heroic struggle against the French and its promise of economic prosperity to come. But this meant little to the majority of Algerians who had been born after the war, and who could see no future except empty stomachs. The pauperisation of Algerians at the hands of Western banks made a mockery of Algerian independence.
The vote for the FIS did not mean that Algerians thought that a theocracy was the answer to their problems. Instead, the FIS filled a political vacuum. It expressed opposition to both the Algerian regime and its Western backers, at a time when the West was humiliating the whole of the Arab world through its destruction of Iraq in the Gulf War. In January 1991 half a million people marched in Algiers in support of Iraq.
After several delays and army crackdowns, the first round of elections to the national assembly took place in December 1991. The FIS won 189 of the 231 seats decided, requiring only 27 of the remaining 199 seats to win an outright majority in the second round.
But the second round never happened. The army commanders decided that things had gone too far. In January 1992 the Algerian armed forces took control and launched a massive crackdown. Over 10 000 FIS supporters were interned without trial in concentration camps in the southern desert. The FIS was outlawed. FIS leaders called for calm and urged people not to respond to army provocation. But things could not be contained so easily. After an initial lull there were riots and gun battles. Armed groups began to organise to take on the army. The war had begun.
This is a war that until recently attracted little media coverage. It has only hit the headlines when Europeans have been killed or when a particularly gruesome atrocity, like the January car-bombing that killed 42 people in Algiers, has been attributed to Islamic fundamentalists. Anybody reading the reports would have the clear impression that the government had adopted an essentially defensive posture, under siege from Islamist terror groups picking off government forces and civilians at will.
The reality is that the Algerian government is responsible for massacring thousands - not only Islamist activists but friends, family or sympathisers, or those with no connection with the FIS at all. Army policy includes the destruction of whole villages in reprisal for Islamist attacks. The government rules by terror, in a grim echo of French rule during the FLN's own war of independence. Little wonder the regime is now known as 'Hizb Fransa' (Party of France).
In the words of Professor Monique Gadant of the University of Paris VIII, 'the so-called "security" forces use exactly the same methods as those branded "barbaric" [when used] by the fundamentalists. Summary executions, torture and even throats slit and the public exposure of corpses' (Middle East Dialogue, 19 May 1994).
A recent report by Amnesty International detailed some of the government's grisly methods (Algeria: Repression and Violence Must End, 25 October 1994). The security forces have shot hundreds of people in retaliation or as an alternative to arrest. Tens of thousands have been detained under emergency laws. Special courts presided over by anonymous, masked judges have passed over 1100 death sentences.
State prisoners are held incommunicado for weeks or months after arrest and routinely tortured. Torture methods include the 'chiffon' (partial suffocation with chemical-soaked rags); the use of blowtorches and drills; the extraction of toenails and fingernails; electric shocks; suspension by the wrists in contorted positions for long periods; sexual abuse with bottles and sticks; beatings, death threats and mock executions. Confessions extracted under torture are routinely accepted in court. The regime has tortured scores of Algerians to death.
Amnesty also documented other activities of the security forces - the burning and mutilation of bodies, sometimes in front of the families of the victims; throat-slitting and decapitation of men, women and children; maiming by severing of genitals and limbs. The army has also taken to hanging bodies from trees, pour d‚courager les autres.
Until September 1994 the Algerian government insisted that the war had only produced 4000 casualties. Then, as a prelude to talks with the FIS, the government upped its figures to 10 000 dead. But in December 1994, Le Parisien disclosed figures from a secret Algerian army report stating that almost 35 000 had died in the first 10 months of 1994 alone. Current casualties are estimated at 800-1000 per week.
Against this bloody background, the reaction of the FIS is more noteworthy for its relative moderation than for its brutality. The actions of the FIS leadership have often belied its bloodthirsty image. The Islamists are not even responsible for many of the attacks for which they are blamed. For example, the televised assassination of President Mohammed Boudiaf in 1992 was immediately put down to fundamentalist terror. In fact, Boudiaf was killed by his bodyguards, probably as a result of a feud within the regime. From the start, the FIS has tried to contain popular anger. Its leaders have repeatedly expressed their willingness to work with the West, in particular voicing their appreciation of the call for negotiations from the USA. The aim of the FIS has never been to create a revolution, but to achieve a stake in power. Violence was only a reaction to government repression. Once violence broke out, the FIS aimed to use this as a lever to pressure the authorities to negotiate. The initiative for talks has constantly come from the FIS. Even the bogeymen of the Armed Islamic Group, responsible for the Christmas Air France hijack, have recently expressed their willingness to negotiate a ceasefire.
The key factor in sustaining the conflict has not been fundamentalist fervour, but Western intervention. Rather than being the innocent bystander threatened by Islam, the West has played a full role in the war from the start. Without support from its Western backers the Algerian regime would have had to come to some accommodation long ago.
France has played the leading role in orchestrating the war against the FIS, and was almost certainly directly involved in organising the 1992 coup that subverted the elections. Various reports have stated that Algerian interior minister General Larbi Belkheir visited Paris twice between the FIS victory in the first round of elections on 26 December 1991 and the coup on 11 January 1992, promising that on his return he would sweep the Islamist militants from the streets.
Shortly after the coup France's then foreign minister, Roland Dumas of the Socialist Party, visited Algiers to tell the junta that its 'policies of restoring the authority of the state and economic reform' were 'courageous'. France has supported the regime economically, politically and militarily. France led the way in winning agreement from Algeria's creditors in the IMF, World Bank, EU and elsewhere for the rescheduling of debt and the advancement of fresh loans. This Western aid to the junta has amounted to well over $20 billion since the 1992 coup.
There is intimate cooperation between the French and Algerian military and intelligence services. As the war has progressed the Algerian security forces have become more and more an adjunct of the French military. Indeed it seems more than a coincidence that the current army chief-of-staff Mohammed Lamari, along with the heads of military security and the gendarmerie are all former officers in the French army. Regular secret night-time flights from Rennes airport in Brittany have supplied the Algerian regime with French military equipment, including a large number of helicopter gunships with infra-red vision and thermal sensors to hunt down Islamist activists in the countryside at night. The French military are training helicopter pilots at Le Luc, near Toulon. The Paris weekly VSD reported in November that 50 French military advisers were operating with the Algerian armed forces.
Following an attack on the French embassy compound in August 1994, 1500 French paratroopers flew into Algiers with two planeloads of equipment. This was more than enough to guard the French embassy and consulates. Rumours circulated that the paras were also there to provide personal protection for the junta. While having access to Algerian intelligence, the French also operate their own monitoring systems. A French spy ship sits just off the Algerian coast monitoring all radio traffic - not just from the Islamist groups, but government communications too. French spy planes patrol Algeria 24 hours a day. Spying is also coordinated through the French embassy.
The Christmas Air France hijack made clear that Algerian sovereignty no longer exists in practice. It is normal procedure that the government of the country where the plane is located takes responsibility for resolving a hijack. However, although the plane was hijacked in Algeria, France made it clear from the start that it expected to run the show. France criticised the Algerians for refusing to allow French diplomats to negotiate from the control tower. The French pilot refused to cooperate with the Algerian authorities and kept the aircraft doors locked in order to thwart any attempted rescue by the Algerians. 'We insisted forcefully that the Algerian authorities should not allow a bloodbath in Algeria and expressed our strong desire to get the plane back', disclosed French foreign minister Alain Jupp‚. When the Algerians delayed, French prime minister Edouard Balladur phoned Algerian president General Liamine Zeroual with his orders. Within two hours the plane was on its way to Marseille.
For France, Algeria is far more than a foreign issue. Until 1962, Algeria was not merely a colony, but a department of the French state. Even today, the French political class automatically assumes that France is responsible for what happens in Algeria, and that what happens in Algeria will have serious repercussions for the domestic stability of French society. Hence the last vestiges of Algerian sovereignty have disappeared as the French have moved to take control of the crisis.
For the French elite, the war is not merely a question of what happens in Algiers, but of what will happen in Paris. 'We do not want to meddle in Algeria's domestic affairs', says prime minister Balladur, 'but we have the right to tell them, since a large Algerian community lives on our territory, that we look forward to the return of civil peace on Algerian soil'. In these circumstances it is not surprising that interior minister Charles Pasqua has been to the fore both in formulating France's Algeria policy and conducting a crackdown on immigrants from north Africa within France. A recent Le Monde cartoon equated Islamic fundamentalism with Aids. The implication is that the immigrant community will be the carriers of the Islamist virus into the heart of France.
In fact Muslims in France show little interest in Islamic fundamentalism. A recent opinion poll in Le Monde showed that fewer than 10 per cent wanted a FIS government in Algeria. If anything, it is the harassment at the hands of the authorities which will turn Muslims against France.
The hysteria about the 'Green Peril' of Islam has much more to do with the insecurities of the French authorities than with any real threat from fundamentalism. After all, if France's rulers were confident about their hold on society, there would be no need to worry about the loyalties of immigrants (or of the French). Like the rest of the Western political elite, the French authorities are dogged by selfdoubt and a loss of direction. They command little respect from the wider population because they have no solutions to the problems of contemporary society. It is hardly surprising that they see fundamental threats around every corner.
While the French are in the front line, other Western powers appear more relaxed about events in Algeria. The USA has criticised France's hardline approach as the barrier to a negotiated settlement. The US government has maintained extensive contacts with the FIS, and repeatedly called on the Algerian authorities to open a dialogue. In turn, the supposedly anti-Western FIS has hailed the USA for its 'objectivity and maturity'. Despite the killing of over 70 foreigners by Islamic groups, there has not been a single attack on a US citizen or US interests.
But US intervention has little to do with a desire for a just peace in Algeria. Washington simply wants a settlement that will enable it to extend its influence at the expense of the French, and to protect the multi-billion dollar contracts which US corporations have recently signed to exploit Algeria's oil and gas fields. Although Washington has criticised France for backing the Algerian military, US intervention has also stirred things up. The US supported the coup and has quietly provided support for the regime. At the same time, however, US contacts with the FIS have given it something to fight for, in the belief that it can play off the USA against France.
The yearning of ordinary Algerians for a better life has been suffocated by a brutal war and a sordid contest for Western sponsorship between the regime and the FIS. The first step towards a real solution must be to end all Western interference in Algeria's affairs.
Reproduced from Living Marxism issue 77, March 1995
Excerpted from:
informinc.co.uk
Background info:
anp.org
suite101.com
(click on the Algeria link)
PS - Re: Europe's first legislation to combat racial discrimination has been approved unanimously by European Union Social Affairs ministers.....
Frankly, Greg, I've found your previous 'Russian joke' much funnier than this one.... |
