# Algeria at the Brink

Author: William Lewis, Senior
Fellow

Note:

Conclusions

Background

Recommendations

European Perspectives

Within southern European capitals, quiet consultations
have been initiated to prepare contingency plans should the
government in Algiers collapse under Islamic radical
pressures. The betting at present is that such a denouement
is not imminent,  nor do the governments of France, Italy,
and Spain share the sentiment of Willy Claes, NATO's
Secretary-General, who publicly suggested in March that
radical Islam constitutes the biggest threat to the West,
taking over where communism has left off. (He has since
receded from this view.) Nevertheless, all three of these
NATO member states are fearful that a takeover of Algeria
by radical Islamic groups would have dire consequences:



- Widening conflict would produce massive refugee
  flows to France, Italy and Spain beyond the capacities
  of the three to absorb;
- Algeria, inevitably, would become a center for support
   of radical Islamic groups in Morocco, Tunisia and
   Egypt, attempting to destabilize these countries and,
   ultimately, adding to the already heavy economic and
   social burdens of southern Europe.

The French government has been divided in its
Algerian policy, with the foreign ministry urging a
negotiated settlement and the defense ministry supporting
the Algerian military. However, confidence in the latter
has eroded witness declining French economic aid and the
newly installed Chirac  presidency  may  tilt  policy  in
favor  of a negotiated settlement.  The primary challenge,
from the perspective of southern Europe's governments, is
to develop an appropriate strategy to cope with a looming
crisis laden with far-reaching consequences for their own
political and economic orders. To date, NATO's northern
European members have evinced little inclination to
fashion approaches to deal with Algeria's political
turbulence.

The preferred European outcome is a constructive
dialogue among contending Algerian factions leading to a
cease-fire and new elections to form a government of
national reconciliation. In the interim, Europeans condemn
ongoing violence and political extremism. As a prudent
measure, France, Italy and Spain have developed plans for
emergency evacuation of their nationals including
Algerians with dual citizen-ship in the case of
France which would number tens of thousands.
Reportedly, military preparations for evacuation are well
advanced. The last two major WEU defense
exercises  TRAMONTANA  in Spain this year and
 ARDENT  in 1994 in Italy included practice evacuations.
At present, the U.S. military is not directly involved in the
plans, but has been kept apprised.

Alignment of Forces

     The struggle for Algeria's political and cultural future
continues unabated, despite occasional attempts at dialogue
by the Algerian government and the FIS leadership.  For
a brief period in 1994, the President, General Lamine
Zeroual, appeared to signal a desire to enter into serious
discussions with the two FIS leaders Madani and Belhadj 
who were transferred from prison to  house arrest.   The
effort failed for several reasons: the senior military
leadership was unwilling to make major concessions to
jump-start talks; the Zeroual initiative was ill-received by
the majority of Algerian political parties and labor
organizations; the FIS leadership, for its part, suspected
the Zeroual approach was a deception intended to allow
the security services time to prepare for a major campaign
to eradicate the Islamic opposition.

The failed government-FIS dialogue, and mounting
casualties approaching 40,000 dead and wounded  over 
three  years  of conflict, led  eight Algerian groups to
meet in Rome early in January.  Their avowed purpose
was to establish a  National Contract,  a formula for
ending the crisis and establishing a democratic
government. The key participants were (1) the FIS main
line group; (2) FLN, which, through participation, was
apparently breaking with its military partner of 30 years;
and (3) the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS), which
claimed to represent Algeria's distinct Berber ethnic
population of 3 million located in the Kabylie-Aures
mountain regions. They pledged to:



- reject violence as a means of attaining or maintaining
 power;
- reject dictatorship;
- respect the changeover of power through universal
 suffrage;
- enforce the Army's non-intervention in political
 affairs;
- respect and promote human rights.

Of more than passing interest, the FIS, for the first
time, declared its commitment to democratic processes.  In
exchange, it received support for legal status as a political
party and release of its leadership from incarceration. The
FFS won recognition of the Berber language as a national
language on the same level as Arabic.  The sponsor of the
Rome dialogue, a Catholic religious order, indicated that
its purposes in organizing the talks were humanitarian and
designed to encourage an Algerian consensus leading to
participatory democracy.

The official response by the Algerian government has
been unreservedly negative. President Zeroual denounced
the meetings as blatant intervention in the country's
domestic affairs.  Moreover, the government noted that the
FIS militants have refused to eschew violence and have
actually stepped up their attacks.  The government, in
response, has intensified its program of arming local
militia groups for self-defense purposes.

In the period since the January talks in Rome, new
fissures and realignments of political forces have emerged
in Algeria. Within the military leadership, serious
differences reportedly have emerged on how to resolve the
continuing crisis, particularly on the advisability of holding
a presidential election later this year. President Zeroual has
reopened discussions with the (legal) parties and has been
told by many of them that talks are meaningless if the
(illegal) FIS is excluded. Some party chieftains, on the
other hand, demand disavowal of political violence by
Madani and Belhadj as a precondition for inclusion in the
government's dialogues. Still others believe that
presidential elections should be postponed pending general
suspension of hostilities and a national election to
determine the extent of popular support for each of the
parties.

Fissures have also emerged within the FIS. An
exceedingly militant faction, the Armed Islamic  Group
(GIA) now competes with the FIS Islamic Salvation Army
for primacy of position in attacking government forces.
The GIA has proved particularly brutal in killing teachers,
journalists, government officials, and foreign nationals.
Their excesses led Madani Merzak, the new commander of
the FIS Islamic Salvation Army, to publish a letter part of
which scolded the GIA for adventurism, anarchy and
revenge. Thus far, the GIA, largely led by young  wild
men  in their teens and early twenties, gives no evidence
of heeding this criticism. The imprisoned FIS leadership,
particularly Belhadj, appears unwilling at this juncture to
publicly condemn the GIA on the grounds that Algeria's
security forces are conducting their own terror
campaign an allegation validated by many impartial
observers.

Particularly disturbing has been the interruption of
government services in some critical areas.  With their
forces stretched, the military has armed local militias
which operate autonomously as vigilante groups. Many
Algerians have lost faith  that any single group can control
or achieve victory in the existing conflict. They note the
fragmentation of political and other groups which is
currently underway. They also note that, since 1992, the
military has appointed no fewer than three presidents and
four prime ministers each with a clear-cut agenda for
ending the conflict but none  have been successfully
implemented.

The Need for Constructive Engagement

The United States has a substantial interest in the
Algerian struggle. In the energy sector, Atlantic Richfield
is committed to a $1.5 billion plus contract for developing
oil fields. The potential financial rewards are significant.
Algeria today exports 1.1 million barrels of oil a day
together with more than 20 billion cubic meters of natural
gas a year, primarily to Europe. Yet, both potentials
remain largely unexplored. The United States and Western
Europe both have major stakes in assured access to these
resources, as does the Algerian government and its
population at large. Islamic radicals have attacked
Europeans engaged in export of oil and natural gas in an
effort to strangle the modern sector of the economy and to
bring the government down.

Algeria cannot and should not be weighed alone in
terms of commercial advantage to the United States. If
such criteria were to be applied, Algeria would not weigh
heavily on the scales of U.S. foreign policy concerns. But
the trauma being inflicted in Algeria is having a multiplier
effect: widening waves of angst through North Africa,
extending into southern Europe. An overhang of
interconnected issues impacts adversely on the political
equilibrium of the region. These issues extend well beyond
the former French-controlled territories of North Africa.
Involved are questions relating  to a revival  of traditional 
Islamic values  within communities in the  Greater Middle
East  and how an accommodation can be reached between
groups and individuals concerned with pursuit of religious
rather than secular goals or, more pointedly, whether humanitarian and democratic
values can be accommodated in societies dedicated to perpetuation of
traditional (sharia) precepts.

These dichotomies have generated a polarizing debate between those who
perceive Islamic resurgence as a threat to Western civilization and others who
believe such distinctions invalid. Those who contend that Islamic society
is sufficiently flexible to accommodate divergent viewpoints and has potentially
egalitarian traditions are challenged by those who perceive a rigidly totalitarian
strain that opposes secular strains of thought. Within this context, Algeria is
viewed as a major testing ground for these conflicted attitudes a testing ground
with major policy implications for the United States.