A Convenient UnTruth

Attributing The Bombings In Algeria To Al-Qaida Obscures The Fact That This Is A Continuation Of A Civil War, Not A New Front In The 'War On Terror'.

By George Joffe
April 2, 2007 2:30pm
Guardian

Algeria's premier, Abdelaziz Belkhadem, was still outraged by the apparent attack on his life at his offices in central Algiers on April 11 when he appeared on al-Arabiya television that evening. A suicide bomber had rammed a truck into the guard post outside his offices before it exploded, in the first attack in the centre of the country's capital for many years. Al-Qaida, he told his region-wide Arab audience, was responsible for "this cowardly attack, this rejection of reconciliation".

It is, of course, a very convenient explanation,...Algeria should know, for it only recently ended a decade-long civil war which broke out after the Algerian army aborted legislative elections in 1991, causing at least 200,000 deaths, because of its fears that an Islamist party would win them.

Yet, that experience highlights the dilemma as to whether the bombings were really part of the global terrorist threat or whether they reflected, as the civil war had done, more localised, purely Algerian problems. One of the major reasons for the civil war was the widespread view in Algeria that, over the previous 30 years, the country's government had betrayed its revolution and the bloody war with France between 1954 and 1962.

The Islamist movement, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), was popularly seen as a more legitimate inheritor of the revolutionary mantle than the country's official single political party, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and that was why it was set to win the elections - to the detriment of the vested interests of the elite. That was also the reason why the civil war was fought with such viciousness.

The group that was responsible for the bombing of the premier's office last Wednesday, the Groupe Salafiste de Predication et du Combat (GSPC), which renamed itself al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb last September, had emerged out of the conflict in 1997 and has continued the fight ever since, with the same goals, in northern Algeria and in the Sahara. Although it is now reduced to a hard core, estimated at between 800 and 1,000 fighters, it continues its campaign.

But the campaign is local, as it always was, against the Algerian security services and the Algerian state, which it seeks to replace with an Islamic caliphate. Even though it now claims the mantle of al-Qaida - something which Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's number two, confirmed after the group's second attempt to gain such an endorsement last September (the first was made in 2001) - its real agenda has not changed.

Even though western intelligence agencies claim that it organises training camps in the Sahara, for which there is little evidence, its real target is still the government in Algiers.

Even the timing of the attack, which was accompanied by another car-bomb attack on a police station in the eastern suburbs of the capital, was determined by local events. It did not occur as part of a coordinated campaign with the suicide bombings in Casablanca the previous day; the Moroccan authorities are satisfied that there was no "external connection".

Instead, it was a response to a determined effort by the Algerian army to destroy its redoubts in Kabylia, to the east of the capital, an operation that has been going on for the last two weeks, and to a spate of trials in absentia of its leaders because of their refusal to accept an amnesty offered by the government last year, which had been intended to produce "national reconciliation".

The attack also fits into a pattern of recent attacks by the group, starting last October, which have involved police stations and foreign personnel working for companies in Algeria. Their purpose is to demonstrate that, despite its best efforts, the Algerian government has not been able to subdue the group and that it can continue its fight. Worse still, yesterday's bombing demonstrates that not even the capital is safe, despite the government's claims.

And where does al-Qaida fit into the picture? The suggestion that it acts as a transnational organisation directing violence in Algeria according to a centrally-conceived plan is simply untrue.

Events there do not fit into the alleged global threat to western states accused of interfering in the Muslim world. They still address the group's proclaimed national agenda of removing un-Islamic, tyrannical and corrupt government.

However, as a rhetoric of rejection, as an idea, an ideology of resistance, accessible through the internet and by word-of-mouth, al-Qaida's global vision of confronting the west to create an idealised Islamic state instead has become a commonplace throughout the Muslim world and even in Europe itself - a fitting counterpart to the "global war on terror" that has, in large part, helped to foster it and now becomes its bedfellow.