Written evidence submitted by Dr Hugh
Roberts
POLITICAL ISSUES AND DEVELOPMENTS IN ALGERIA
1. DR HUGH
ROBERTS
I am a specialist writer on North African and
especially Algerian politics and history, having first visited
Algeria in 1972. I carried out fieldwork there in the 1970s for
my doctoral thesis on politics in the Berber-speaking region of
Kabylia (D.Phil Oxon, 1980). I have visited the country repeatedly
since then, including nine visits since 1992, most recently during
the presidential election in April 2004. I have published many
articles on various aspects of the country's politics and history,
and a book, The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in
a broken polity (2003). I have worked both in academia—Universities
of East Anglia, Sussex, California (Berkeley), London (SOAS and
LSE)—and as a free-lance writer and consultant. From 1997
to 2002 I was Senior Research Fellow of the Development Studies
Institute at the London School of Economics. Since October 2002,
I have worked full time for the International Crisis Group as
Director of the North Africa Project, based in Cairo.
2. ISLAMISM AND
ISLAMIST GROUPS
IN ALGERIA
Algerian Islamism can trace its internal roots
back to the Islamic reform movement which developed in the 1920s
and was led from 1931 by the Association of Algerian Muslim `ulama[1]
(Association des Oulémas Musulmans Alge«riens, AOMA)
founded by Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis (1889-1940). The AOMA rallied
to the FLN during the national liberation war (1954-1962) and
its brand of austere, scripturalist Islam dominated the "official
Islam" of the Algerian state until the 1980s. It then began
to be outflanked by a new movement of Islamist preaching and agitation
inspired by Middle Eastern fashions—the Wahhabi-dominated
Salafiyya movement, the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and the radical
Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb.
Islamist Political Parties
These currents fed into the Islamic Salvation
Front (Front Islamique du Salut, FIS), the first Islamist
party legalized in Algeria in September 1989. The FIS was thus
doctrinally a hybrid; it was also and above all a mix of Islamism,
populism and Algerian nationalism. This mixture gave it initial
political and electoral dynamism, and underlay its impressive
election victories in June 1990 and December 1991, but also made
it fairly easy to disrupt and pull apart when the Algerian authorities
decided to clamp down on the party in 1991 and suppress it completely
in 1992.
Since the banning of the FIS in February-March
1992 and the onset of the violence, several other Islamist parties
have remained legal. The main ones were initially two but became
three:
— the Movement for an Islamic Society
(Harakat li-Mujtama` Islami, known by its Arabic acronym
as HAMAS), renamed in 1996 the Movement of Society for Peace (
Harakat Mujtama` al-Silm, HMS; Mouvement de la Socie«te«
pour la Paix, MSP), founded by Sheikh Mahfoud Nahnah (1942-2003),
now led by Bouguerra Soltani; and
— the Movement of the Islamic Renaissance
(Harakat al-Nahda al-Islamiyya, Mouvement de la Nahda Islamique,
MNI)), renamed in 1996 the Nahda [Renaissance] Movement (MN),
founded by Sheikh Abdallah Djaballah (b 1956).
In 1999 the MN split; Djaballah lost control
of the party to its secretary general, Lahbib Adami, and broke
away to found:
— the Movement for National Reform
(Harakat al-Islah al-Watani, Mouvement de Reforme Nationale,
MRN).
There are thus three legal Islamist parties,
MSP, MN and MRN. All three are offshoots of the tradition of the
Muslim Brothers in Egypt, and the MSP is recognised by the Egyptian
MB as its Algerian affiliate. All three are non-violent, accept
the constitution of the state as the legal framework of their
activity and claim to accept modern democratic norms. The main
political difference between them is that both the MSP and the
MN since 1998 (under Lahbib Adami) have consistently accepted
regime cooptation, supporting the government's position in the
National Assembly and holding a small number of portfolios in
the government itself, while the MRN has held to a consistent
opposition stance. In the 1997 legislative elections, the MSP
emerged as the largest Islamist party, with 69 seats to the MN's
34. In the legislative elections of 2002, the MRN won 43 seats,
the MSP 38 and the MN was reduced to one seat. In the 1999 and
2004 presidential elections, the MSP and MN fielded no candidates
of their own and supported the candidacy of Abdelaziz Bouteflika,
whereas the MRN's leader Djaballah was a candidate on both occasions.
Overall, the Islamist parties' share of the vote has declined
fairly steadily in successive elections since 1990, and now represents
under 20%.
Islamist armed movements
The armed rebellion which began in 1992 was
initially a very complex affair with numerous groups and ideological
currents—Islamo-nationalist, Salafist and Qutbist—involved.
In 1993-94 a polarity was established between the group initially
known as the "Armed Islamic Movement" (Mouvement
Islamique Arme«, MIA) fighting to pressure the state
to reverse its ban on the FIS and the rival and very extreme "Armed
Islamic Group" (Groupe Islamique Arme«, GIA)
which denounced the FIS and all idea of negotiations with the
regime and practiced a wholly indiscriminate form of terrorism.
In 1994 the MIA was reconstituted as the Islamic Salvation Army
(Arme«e Islamique du Salut, AIS), explicitly announced
its allegiance to the banned FIS and its imprisoned leaders. In
1997 it abandoned its objective of persuading the regime to rehabilitate
the FIS as unrealisable, announced a nation-wide cease-fire and
effectively ended its campaign. Following a kind of amnesty in
2000 it dissolved itself, as did a number of smaller groups which
had broken away from the GIA.
The GIA developed around a core of veterans
of the Afghanistan war with extremist views. An attempt by elements
of the FIS underground to infiltrate the GIA leadership in order
to rein it in and bring it under FIS political control failed
and hundreds of pro-FIS elements died in internal purges in 1994-96.
Thereafter the GIA was controlled by the most extremist elements
and oriented by the doctrine of takfir al-mujtama` (the
condemnation of the entire society as infidel), which was the
ideological basis of the indiscriminate massacre of civilians
in which the GIA engaged.
This behaviour provoked splits, with less extreme
factions dissociating themselves from the GIA in 1997 and 1998.
Most of these negotiated cease-fires with the Algerian army and
dissolved themselves in 2000. Two, however, kept fighting under
new names and are still active. These are:
— The Salafi Group for Preaching and
Combat (Al-Jama`a al-Salafiyya li 'l-Da`wa wa 'l-Qital; Groupe
Salafiste pour la Pre«dication et le Combat, GSPC), founded
by Hassan Hattab in September 1998 and based primarily in the
western districts of Kabylia in east-central Algeria but also
in the Tebessa district of south-eastern Algeria; in 2003 a section
of the Tebessa-based GSPC expanded into the Saharan region and
was involved in kidnapping 32 European tourists.
— The Guardians of the Salafi Call
(Houmat al-Da'wa al-Salafiyya, HDS), also founded in 1998
by Kada Ben Chiha (killed 1999) and based in western Algeria,
especially the Ouarsenis mountains in the wilayat (governorates)
of Relizane and Tissemsilt.
These movements regard the state as infidel
and therefore a licit object of jihad, but do not regard the society
as apostate and do not target civilians as a rule. Thus the armed
rebellion has been reduced to the jihadi wing of the Salafiyya
current in contemporary Sunni Islamism. On the ground it has become
very linked to and parasitic on illicit commercial activities,
namely long-distance smuggling.
3. GOVERNMENT
RESPONSES
The Algerian government has followed a complex
strategy in regard to the Islamist movement. There is no doubt
it initially sought to exploit and manipulate the FIS as a proxy
in a factional struggle within the state power-structure in 1988-90.
Since 1992, the policy followed had several features:
— a constant determination not to relegalise
the FIS;
— tolerance but also a degree of manipulation
of the legal Islamist parties, using them to co-opt elements of
the ex-FIS's electoral constituency while also playing them off
against one another: ie using Islamists to neutralise Islamists;
— a very brutal military counter-insurgency
campaign against the armed movements, combined with
— a willingness to negotiate with the
less extreme wing of the rebellion on condition that the civilian
wing of Algerian Islamism was not involved in these negotiations
and drew no benefit from them.
Between 1993 and 1999, government policy was
unable to furnish a proper resolution of the problem in large
part because of factional disagreements within the regime expressed
in the dichotomy between two policy tendencies, dubbed "the
eradicators" and "the conciliators". Successive
presidents (Mohammed Boudiaf, Ali Kafi and especially Liamine
Zeroual) were inclined to a conciliatory stance in that they sought
political rather than military solutions to the rebellion, but
were blocked by the army general staff, whose Chief, Lt. General
Mohammed Lamari, was the leader of the "eradicator"
tendency.
Since the election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika to
the presidency in 1999, government policy has evolved considerably,
if slowly at first. Bouteflika committed himself publicly to end
the violence by promoting a "Civil Concord Law" in July
1999 which offered terms intended to encourage elements of the
rebellion to surrender, and then followed this in January 2000
with a decree offering a strange combination of pardon and amnesty—une
grace amnestiante—to the AIS and associated groups which
had been observing a ceasefire since 1997; these then dissolved
themselves. Thereafter he appeared interested in extending these
arrangements to cover the remaining armed movements still active
(GIA, GSPC, HDS), but this was very controversial and he was unable
to make progress. His re-election with a convincing majority in
April 2004 seems to have unblocked the situation. Not only has
Lt General Lamari been pushed into retirement, but Bouteflika
has been able to mobilise popular support for the idea of a broader
amnesty in the name of "national reconciliation". Moves
to translate this into reality are now under way, although there
may well still be pitfalls to negotiate.
4. LINKS WITH
AL -QAEDA
One pitfall is definitely the question of the
remaining active groups' links to Al-Qaeda. This has repeatedly
been invoked by Algerian newspapers known for their hostility
to the Islamists in general—and their closeness to the military
"eradicator" tendency in particular—as grounds
for refusing and denouncing any negotiation with the rest of the
rebellion, given in particular Algeria's participation in "the
war against terrorism" and its resulting close ties with
the US government. There is no doubt that all three of the groups
still active have had some links with Al-Qaeda, since the GSPC
and HDS come out of the GIA whose core consisted of veterans of
the Afghan war and have therefore had longstanding personal connections
with the network run by Bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Ideologically, the GSPC and HDS share the doctrine of Al-Zawahiri
concerning the issue of takfir (denouncing only the state, not
the society, as impious). But these groups are primarily rooted
in the Algerian national context, and their jihad has been and
remains the internal jihad against the Algerian state, not the
global jihad proclaimed by Al-Qaeda. The position appeared to
change when the GSPC's founder, Hassan Hattab, was replaced by
Nabil Sahraoui in September 2003, since Sahraoui very emphatically
proclaimed his allegiance to Bin Laden. This did not subsequently
translate into any significant change in the nature of the GSPC's
activities, however, although it certainly tended to block all
possibility of a negotiated end to its campaign. The killing of
Sahraoui and three of his lieutenants in an ambush in June 2004
may, however, have unblocked the position once more.
5. THE PROBLEM
OF DEMOCRATISATION
AND HUMAN
RIGHTS
This is a longstanding and deep-rooted problem.
Human rights violations have occurred on a large scale in the
course of the rebellion and the army's response to it. But underlying
this state of affairs is the much older problem that arises out
of the fact that the Algerian state is not a state bound by law
(un e«tat de droit), but characterised rather by a high degree
of arbitrariness at every level of authority.
This fact is partly a legacy of the revolutionary
manner in which the state was constituted by the historic FLN
in 1962, but it is above all a consequence of the excessive weight
of the executive branch of the state and the correspondingly stunted
powers of the legislature and the dependent nature of the judiciary.
The advent of formal party-political pluralism in 1989 did not
seriously modify this state of affairs, since it did not lead
to any significant empowerment of the legislative branch at either
national or local (region and municipality) levels. Algeria's
own political parties share some of the blame for this, since
they have not so far made a serious issue of this question, with
the partial exception of the Islamist MRN. But the principal reason
for the lack of progress on this issue has undoubtedly been the
commanding influence which the Algerian army has exercised over
the executive branch and thus over the state as a whole since
1992 if not before (arguably since 1980). It has been entirely
unrealistic to expect any substantive democratisation of the Algerian
state for as long as the army's political role continued. In short,
the demilitarization of the political sphere has been a necessary
condition of its eventual democratisation.
This has now at last begun to happen. There
is no doubt that the army's political primacy entailed the weakness
of the presidency of the Republic and that the army commanders
knew this and were inclined to keep the presidency weak by destabilising
successive presidents at frequent intervals. Senior generals who
wanted to maintain this position were accordingly very hostile
to Bouteflika's ambition to secure a second term. His success
in outmanoeuvring this element of the army command (headed by
Lt. General Lamari) and getting himself re-elected has entailed
a dramatic strengthening of the presidency and has accelerated
the army's retreat from the political stage.
In the short run, however, the reinforcement
of the presidency has exhibited an emphatic authoritarian aspect,
since it has also involved the marginalisation of the political
parties. The prospect in the medium term is thus one of strong
presidential rule, quite possibly displaying a new-found capacity
to address and resolve some of Algeria's most pressing problems,
but without any immediate progress towards a substantive democratisation
of Algerian political life. However, should this formula succeed
in completely ending the violence and thus the premise of the
state of emergency (enacted in February 1992 and renewed every
year since then), it could well establish some of the conditions
of a subsequent resurgence a few years from now of party politics
of the kind that is indispensable to effective democratic government.
Dr Hugh Roberts
26 January 2005
1 `ulama (singular: `alim) means the scholars or doctors
of law who are the religious authorities in Islam.
Back
|
