Despite the Al-Qaeda-backed attacks which have killed more than 50 people in Algeria, it is reassuring that President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika insists that terrorism in his country is in retreat. But the scale and sheer brutality of the two days of violence is so reminiscent of what Algerians endured in the 1990s that one cannot but help think Bouteflika is just as concerned as the war-weary citizens themselves.
The Algerian civil war was a nightmarish affair: brutal, amoral and excessive. It cost the country’s infrastructure some $30 billion and claimed more than 200,000 lives. The chaos and violence of Algeria during the 1990s forced all citizens to search for answers to questions about the conflict, its causes and effects. The national predilection for settling scores had to be stopped. But the war inspired the worst kind of fanatical ugliness and seems not to have come to a conclusion. It had supposedly ground to a halt but apparently it has not entirely ended. The crux of the conflict, which erupted in 1992 after the army scrapped elections which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win, continues to pit the banned party against the Algerian regime.
Since those days, FIS leaders have not been allowed to become politically active or revive their party. The Armed Islamic Group, better known by its French acronym GIA, was badly battered by the Algerian government clampdown on militant groups and has been sidelined politically. But during last year’s six-month reconciliation amnesty, dozens of Islamists who were freed from prisons have returned to armed uprising. Together with the GPSC, which also waged a campaign of violence after the 1992 annulment of the elections, armed groups, high unemployment rates and a shattered economy make up the legacy Bouteflika inherited when he took office almost a decade ago. The war left the country at the crossroads and coincided with a resurgence of popular calls for democratic transformation in Algeria and neighboring countries.
However, such change has been slow and halting. The country is in a dual crisis of confidence that concerns its essence as well as its performance as an emerging nation bent on political reform. It is a crisis that is part of — but goes beyond — the crisis of the Maghreb of northwest Africa. Resource-rich Algeria is a potentially wealthy country but it desperately needs long-term peace and stability. It understands that peace and prosperity are interrelated. Algeria is also a nation with great moral and political weight due to the Pan-Arab aspirations of Hawari Boumedienne, the diplomatic acumen of Bouteflika and its long and unique legacy of struggle for national liberation.
This land of a million martyrs lost during the war of liberation is no stranger to violence. However, fighting a colonizer is one battle; warring against fellow citizens and fellow Muslims is an entirely different matter. Movements that politicize Islam using violence as the preferred method have no place in Algeria or anywhere else.
