Algeria

Reading selections for the weekend of April 28, 2017.

Reading selections for the weekend of February 3, 2017.

Maged Atiya laments the Egyptian state’s devolution into idiocy. Sam Metz and Abdallah Brahimi explore the potential reasons behind the recent dismissal of Algerian spy chief Mohammed Mediene. Nada Elfeituri examines Libya’s tribal divisions and their role in Libya today.

Belal Fadl characterizes Egypt as a state-sponsored nation of informers. Anna Jacobs explores the complexities of the Algerian political system. Yael Even-Or dismisses the claim that another intifada is in the making and situates the recent hostilities in a larger context of incitement.

Thomas Serres suggests that the recent police protests in Algeria demonstrate how Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s regime is “being inundated from all sides.” Fernando Carvajal reflects on the new power balance established by the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Nervana Mahmoud explores what makes Egypt’s liberals so seemingly illiberal.

Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière examines how Algeria’s elections will influence regional politics, especially those in Tunisia. The Turkish citizen journalism group "140journos" is trying to use technology to bring democracy back to Turkey, writes Burcu Baykurt for Jadaliyya. Maria Golia discusses the issue of fighting Hepatitis C in Egypt.  

In a recent article in African Arguments, Jonathan Hill, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and author of Nigeria Since Independence: Forever Fragile?, provides a thoughtful, if grim, analysis of the latest round of Boko Haram killings in northern Nigeria. He makes the important point that the recent murder of students while they slept at the agricultural college in Yobe state was only one in a series of assaults. He cites the raids on the secondary school in Mamudo in July, Dumba village in August, and Benisheik in September. He notes that these attacks took place during the state of emergency with a greatly augmented security presence that failed to prevent them. From these attacks, he concludes that “Boko Haram appears unbowed and its campaign undimmed.” He suggests this recent round of attacks may mark a new stage in Boko Haram’s evolution. Specifically, he suggests that the style, the victims, and the brutality of the attacks resemble al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) operations in Algeria. These similarities, he suggests, may indicate growing AQIM influence over Boko Haram. Hill characterizes this evolution as “devastating,” citing the degradation of education in the North, already the least literate part of the country, the likely spread of inter-communal tensions toward the south, and Southern impatience with the costs of the counter terrorism campaign. Hill’s stark bottom line: “That Nigeria is now a failed state is beyond question. Whether it can avoid breaking apart remains to be seen.” That conclusion, alone, is food for thought.

Zeinobia from the Egyptian Chronicles argues that Sisi is the new Pharaoh. Hamza Hamouchene asks, “Is Algeria an Anti-Imperialist State?” Nuray Mert gives her opinion on the reasons for lack of democracy in Turkey.

After the January 25 uprising, uninformed observers asked “Is Turkey the ‘model’ for Egypt?” or “Will Egypt follow Indonesia’s path?”  Comparisons are always useful in the effort to explain how the world works, but under the circumstances it seemed that people were flailing away looking for something, anything to make sense of a new vastly more complicated Middle East.  If Egypt was Turkey—which at the time looked more liberal and prosperous than it does now—then perhaps for the many challenges that lay ahead for Egyptians (and U.S. interests), all would end well. The military’s July 3rd intervention has provided another opportunity to play the Egypt analogy game.  This time there was, however, a doomsday quality to the discussion.  Instead of an Egyptian Copenhagen criteria or Reformasi on the Nile, Egypt is now Algeria. Specifically, Algeria of the 1990s when more than 100,000 people were killed in a brutal civil conflict. The problem is: Egypt is Egypt and if analysts want to gain some traction on what might happen there, they should pay attention to Egypt rather than reacquainting themselves with le Pouvoir, Abbas Madani, the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front, FIS), and Chadli Benjedid. Here is what happened in Algeria:  In mid-January 1992, the Algerian officer corps pushed President Chadli Benjedid from office and nullified the national legislative elections that would have given the FIS a parliamentary majority. Even before the balloting took place, the President indicated that in the event of an Islamist victory he would come to terms with the Front.  Although Chadli may have believed that cohabitation was the best way for him to survive politically, the military was clearly unnerved at the prospect of cooperation between the president and the FIS.  In his memoirs, Major General Khaled Nezzar, who was Minister of Defense, indicates that the officers had resolved not to allow the Front to attain a parliamentary majority and thus consummate a deal with Chadli. Observers tend to focus on the potential for a FIS majority in the National People’s Assembly as the threat to Algeria’s political order and a step toward the establishment as an Islamic state, but it was an apparent deal between the president and the FIS that was more relevant. Regardless of the FIS’s representation in the legislature, Algeria’s 1989 constitution vested the power to initiate constitutional changes with the presidency. Given Chadli’s flirtation with the FIS, the officers could not trust that he would be a firewall between the Front and the constitution so they struck before a second round of voting could begin. The army enjoyed the support of large segments of Algerian society including women’s groups, trade unions, and the secular-oriented Francophone elites.  In recalling the events of early 1992, Nezzar has written: “Certain leaders believed that halting the electoral process was a blow to the democratic process.  In reality it was precisely the contrary; stopping the elections assured the survival of the democratic process.” Some of this sounds vaguely familiar to contemporary events in Egypt, but it is what happened next in Algeria that has people in Washington all spun up:  The Algerian military’s intervention radicalized the political arena, setting off a chain of events that plunged the country into almost a decade of violence.  The FIS itself did not immediately take up arms against the Algerian state, but ultimately created the Islamic Salvation Army, fearing that the militancy of other groups might undermine the Front’s support.   Even after the military was able to bring the violence to relatively manageable levels through a 1999 amnesty, radical off-shoots of the FIS and other groups continued to wage war against the Algerian state.  For example, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which had broken from another extremist group called the Armed Islamic Group, became al Qa’ida of the Islamic Maghreb in 2007. One can certainly imagine the potential for radicalized politics in Egypt as a result of the military’s intervention, its crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, and the officers’ efforts to stabilize the Sinai. Yet one need not look 2,000 miles to the West for the scenario.  The insurrection in Algeria seems unlikely to be replicated in Egypt and it is not because as one Egyptian friend once told me, “We are the people of the valley, and they are the people of mountains and sand.”   Defense Minister Abdelfattah al Sisi may be applying significant pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood, but he does not seem to be the Egyptian analogue of Algeria’s eradicatuers—officers whose preferred policy was to wipe out the insurgency through force.  In keeping with a strategy they have employed since the January 25 uprising, the Egyptian military is more likely to try to manage the present conflict with the Brothers with a combination of arrests, some violence, and bare-knuckled negotiations. The officers and the Brothers may ultimately miscalculate, but again the best “model” for Egypt is Egypt.  The low-level violence of the 1990s during which extremist groups took up arms against the state while the Brotherhood agitated against a regime that used the violence to justify closing whatever “political space” that had existed may be in store for Egypt.  Certainly present political dynamics make “back to the future” a more likely outcome than an Algeria-like conflagration, even taking into account the major differences between the Egypt of 1992 and the Egypt of 2013. There is  no way of knowing for sure what will happen in Egypt.  And while comparing and contrasting cases are critical to understanding political phenomena, it is equally important to guard against facile analogy building because someone, somewhere wondered aloud if Egypt is Algeria.  It’s not; it is Egypt.

As the "Arab Spring" swept the fake republics of North Africa--Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt--Algeria seemed immune. Media reports dwelled on its stability (see this 2011 BBC and this 2012 Deutsche Welle story). The question now is whether that perception is correct. There was one burst of violence this year, the January 16 terrorist seizure of a natural gas facility that ultimately left at least 38 civilians and 29 terrorists dead after a four-day siege. But now there is more trouble: President Bouteflika appears to have had a stroke and has not been seen in public in over a month. The government claims he is recovering well, but there is no evidence to support that claim. As France 24 put it, "When he was appointed foreign minister in 1963 after Algeria won its independence from France, the 26-year-old Bouteflika cut a dashing, energetic picture as the world’s youngest foreign minister. Half-a-century later, the Algerian president is in frail health as he enters the final year of his third consecutive term in office." The country has long been run by the opaque group of military and intelligence officials known as "le pouvoir," but can that system really hold? The nation is rich due to gas revenues, but the people are poor: foreign reserves are said to be $200 billion, but there is widespread rural poverty and high unemployment. A persuasive analysis just published by the Atlantic Council is entitled "Algeria: A Powder Keg Ready To Explode?" Karim Mezran, the author and a senior fellow at the Council, says this: Algeria may be teetering on the brink of a crisis, with the three pillars of the regime’s stability—its powerful military, abundant revenues from hydrocarbons, and the façade of a democratic political system—beginning to crumble. First, the terrorist and security challenge is greater than it has been in years, as Algeria’s border with Mali reminds us. Second, "From a socioeconomic point of view, despite Algeria’s enormous wealth in oil and gas, the population suffers from poverty, unemployment, and citizen discontent." Then comes "a political crisis at the top of the state apparatus. The illness of Abdulaziz Bouteflika, President of Algeria since 1999, makes it highly unlikely that he will be able to run for another term with upcoming presidential elections in 2014. No clear procedure exists for the appointment of his successor, which leaves a vacuum at the pinnacle of political authority." As Mezran notes, "It is hard to predict the outcome of the myriad of tensions that are boiling in the country. It is possible that the Algerian people, still fatigued from the bloody civil war of the 1990’s and conscious of the repressive power of the state choose not to confront the regime in any sustained or systematic way." Right--perhaps. As we’ve seen across the region, things are often far less stable than they appear. A recent Carnegie study notes this: At first glance, Algeria gives the impression of a country that has succeeded in bypassing the turmoil of the Arab Awakening that has rocked the Middle East over the last two years. Social unrest appears to be largely under control. The country is enjoying a large current account surplus, a limited budget deficit, and very low external debt. Recent parliamentary elections were conducted without interruption and were officially open to participation by all political parties. But despite this reassuring veneer, many of the social, economic, and political challenges that triggered uprisings in neighboring North African countries fester just beneath the surface in Algeria. The author, Lahcen Achy, concludes starkly that: The clock is ticking. If the regime does not start down the road of managed political and economic reform soon, while it retains the cushion of high hydrocarbon rents, it will quickly become too late. Algeria is faced with a stark choice: reform now or collapse later. But Le Pouvoir has never been inclined toward such reforms, especially not at a moment of political uncertainty--Bouteflika apparently quite sick, and an election next year without him on the ballot for the first time since 1999. So Algeria is worth more attention than it is getting. Its immunity to change may be wearing thin.

In the fall of 1991, Robert A. Mortimer writing in the Middle East Journal declared, “Although the leaders of the post-independence generation feared that a pluralistic Algeria would be too unruly to govern, today’s political elite has moved beyond that position.” It was not to be, however. Just a few months after Mortimer’s article appeared, Algeria’s senior military commanders pushed President Chadli Bendjedid from office and nullified the results of the country’s first competitive national elections when it became clear that the Front Islamique du Salut would win an outright majority in the National Assembly. The civil conflict that followed the military’s intervention took the lives of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 Algerians, though some estimates go much higher. Mortimer was not alone in his optimism about Algeria in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The tone of much of the Western academic literature at the time expressed similar beliefs that Algeria was on the verge of a democratic breakthrough. Invariably, analysts cited the 1989 constitution, which was written in the wake of the nation-wide demonstrations and riots of late 1988, as prima facie evidence that Algeria would become the Arab world’s first “true democracy.” The constitution was similar in many ways to its 1963 and 1976 predecessors, but it contained three seemingly important departures: freedom of expression and assembly were explicitly guaranteed, the political monopoly of the Front Liberation Nationale—known commonly as the FLN—came to an end as Algerians were given the right to establish “associations of a political character,” and clauses giving the military a central role in “the development of the country” were excised. Yet when the officers stepped in on January 11, 1992, observers were left to wonder what had happened. In what was a foreshadowing of the lamentations of Middle East watchers almost exactly twenty years later they asked, “How did we get it so wrong?” Yet even though the soul-searching of 2011 asked the same question, the facts of the case were the exact opposite. Analysts did not expect democratic transitions in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia precisely because they spent the two decades since Algeria’s aborted transition exploring the durability of authoritarian systems in the Middle East. I have not worked on Algeria in any serious kind of way since 2007—I do my best to keep up through a variety of sources, especially the valuable work of The Moor Next Door—but I have been thinking about the country quite a bit lately.  From time-to-time, observers have asked: “Why not Algeria? How come there has not been an uprising there?” With all the change in the region, the ongoing brutal crackdown on the opposition in Bahrain, and the civil war in Syria, observers have tended to forget that there were demonstrations in Algeria that coincided with the month of popular protests that brought down Tunisia’s Zine al Abidine Ben Ali. It seems the revolutionary bandwagon that began in Sidi Bouzid and took off in Tahrir Square broke down before reaching Algiers. It is a fun side game to speculate why, but it is not a good analytic question, however. After all, revolutions are by their nature unpredictable. Still, in 2010 analysts might have had insight into the coming changes in the region if they had thought more about the way they were actually thinking about the region. That sounds rather meta, but it brings me back to why I have been pondering Algeria. I recently had an opportunity to listen to a discussion about Algerian politics. The Algeria watchers talked about an aging, ill, and out-of-touch president; a powerful, but shadowy intelligence chief; an autonomous military elite; and an unhappy population straining under a poorly performing economy, crumbling infrastructure, and the indifference of a brutal regime. (Does any of this sound familiar?) Against the backdrop of this dismal situation, however, analysts seem to have come to the conclusion that an uprising is unlikely due to the collective memory of the terrible violence during the 1990s. I’ll defer to the Algerianists and take their word for it, but there is something that is superficial about this. It is as if they actually don’t know why Algeria seems stable, but that is what they feel in their gut so they have settled on the civil insurrection of the 1990s as the explanatory variable. They are not saying that an uprising will not happen, but that the odds are against it. This is reminiscent of the late 2010 prevailing discourse about the Middle East that painted a picture of stable authoritarians, divided and weak oppositions, and an international environment that was indifferent at best to the promotion of democratic change. There were elements of truth to this analysis, but the most anyone could conclude about regimes in the region was that they were “stable for now,” which turned out to be true, until it wasn’t. Part of the problem prior to the uprisings and now with the analysis of Algeria—and Saudi Arabia, for that matter—is that observers tend to think in terms of “stability vs. instability” rather than “relative stability/instability.” It is probably better to ask ourselves, “Why does Algeria seem to be relatively more stable than other countries in the region?” There are a variety of ways to answer this question. It makes most sense to me to look at the way rulers rule: Do they have a compelling vision for society? What is their capacity for patronage? How much do they rely on coercion and force to maintain political control? The Algerians do not seem to have much in the way of vision, but rather a fair amount of money to buy political quiescence and a well-developed ability to repress. This mix does not indicate to me that Algeria is going to be stable in the long run. The money cannot buy everyone off and force is useful until people are no longer afraid. Admittedly, there is a subjective quality to this analysis. Someone else could look at the same set of facts and come to the opposite conclusion. The bottom line is that the field has engaged in analytic overshooting, for lack of a better phrase, since the late 1980s/early 1990s. Scholars have gone from irrational exuberance about Algeria’s more apparent than real democratic opening to believing that it is stable, even as the country confronts considerable political, economic, and social problems. Instead, analysts should be cognizant of the need not only to dig deeper to gain additional insight into the dynamics of a society they are studying, but also to develop new techniques for evaluating what they find. If not, the field is likely to be surprised…again.