Algeria
Created | Updated Mar 20, 2002
I can't believe nobody else has written an entry on Algeria, so here goes:
Algeria is a country in North Africa, between Morocco and Tunisia, with about 30 million inhabitants. Most of them speak the local dialect of Arabic, and Arabic is the official language; about a fifth, mainly in Kabylie and the Aures, speak various dialects of Berber, and - conveniently for some travellers - most people also learn some French at school (though bear in mind, the same could be said of England... ) The country is mostly desert in the south, but most Algerians don't think of it that way because nobody much lives in the desert; north of the Atlas Mountains, it's all your usual Mediterranean climate, ie a lot like Greece or the south of France. The main towns are Algiers, Oran, and Constantine (Arabic al-Jaza'ir, Wahran, and Qasantina.) A bit less than half the people live in the countryside; the rest live in the cities, which are on the whole overcrowded and have soaring property prices. Officially, a third of the working-age population are unemployed - in reality, it's probably over half - and over a third of the population are under 18, which explains a lot of the problems the country faces; the economy is a shambles, as a result of the unbeatable combination of decades of state administration, a corrupt privatisation process, and a typically incompetent World Bank reforms plan. The country imports most of its food, despite extensive fertile land, and mainly exports oil and gas from the Sahara.
Politics:
The most salient fact for the traveller to bear in mind is: don't! The brutal conflict with armed Islamist groups who took to the hills when their election victory was denied in 1992 has mostly calmed down, except in certain areas, but their threat to kill all foreigners in the country still stands; there is also widespread rioting particularly in Kabylie, east of the capital, related partly to demands for official recognition of their Berber language, but mainly to the state of the economy and government.
In response to general dissatisfaction with President Chadli Bendjedid's incompetent rule, there was an election in 1992, which an Islamist party, the FIS (Front for Islamic Salvation) won; the military's reaction was to oust Chadli, cancel the elections and jail the party leaders (and anyone with a beard, the not entirely inaccurate joke goes.) Not being especially pleased with this, many FIS members took to the hills, forming an army known first as the MIA (Armed Islamic Movement), then later as the AIS (Army for Islamic Salvation); other radical Islamic groups which got no support from the elections also seized the opportunity, forming a shadowy organization with many factions known as the GIA, and the many criminals released from jail early in order to accomodate all the FIS members being jailed also often headed for the hills to set up what amounts to bandit gangs, hoping not to be noticed in the general unrest. The next few years' history is murky and violent. The military asked in a new president, Boudiaf, who had spent the past thirty years or so in exile, and was thus widely respected as being untarred by the regime's corruption; he was assassinated by one of his guards. No one claimed the credit for it; the military accused the Islamists, the Islamists accused the military. The generals who took power for the next two years are difficult to summarize; they are said to be divided into two rough factions, the "moderates", who have no particular commitment to secularism as long as they can keep their position, and sometimes consider negotiation, and "eradicationists", whose policy towards the Islamists is obvious, and who are supposed to consist mainly of colonial-era members of the French army; the country's newspapers side with one or the other depending on which general has most influence over their owners (or owns them.) The Islamist groups then began assassinating journalists, secularists, policemen, and foreigners in the country, provoking a second exodus (a large number of FIS supporters and other dissidents fled the country in 1992.)
By about '94, there were also a substantial number of brutal massacres of whole villages, almost certainly done by the GIA. Many of these massacres, including the largest, took place in villages which had voted overwhelmingly FIS; some have suggested that it was deliberately targeting FIS supporters for not being sufficiently fundamentalist, and certainly the AIS split with it about then. Most of these villages were located next to active army bases, which did nothing to defend them (officially, because the bases were insufficiently well armed; unofficially, on the grounds that the villagers were FIS supporters.) The AIS was increasingly marginalized over this period, and eventually declared a unilateral ceasefire; by now, it is essentially inactive. The GIA itself splintered over the issue - many of its members were shocked by the massacres, and accused their instigators of having been coopted by the military or of some other treachery - and was mostly reduced to the various isolated armies currently operating under various names and leaders (for instance, the GSPC, which was recently claimed to be an al-Qaeda affiliate), and the bandit gangs mentioned above.
After five years of military rule, a new round of elections were held, in which the FIS was not allowed to participate; Liamine Zeroual - the person the military appointed as president for most of the coup period, and who was administering the elections - won that one, for some reason. In 1999, another round of elections were held (same rules); this was won by the current president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, when all the other parties accused the authorities of planned fraud and decided to withdraw their candidates. This president appears to be a master of half-compromises that quiet the opposition groups without actually answering their demands; under his "Civil Harmony Act", most of the armed groups' members were allowed to surrender without penalties and return to civil life (which has not ended the fighting, but very much quietened it, thank God, despite not giving the armed groups any of their political demands), and his current efforts to declare Berber (Tamazight) a "national language" but not an official language, thus providing a symbolic victory for the Berber rioters without actually giving the language any place in the public sphere or answering their economic demands, seem calculated to repeat the trick with them. The biq question is how long he can maintain the balancing act without falling afoul of the military - who still retain the real power - for making too large concessions.
History:
Algerian recorded history starts over 2500 years ago with the arrival of the Phoenicians; they found the country inhabited already by Berbers, then known as Numidians or Gaetulians. Soon, the Berbers developed their own kingdoms in response to the threat of Rome and the weakness of Carthage, and Numidia developed a flourishing culture, with a lot of Phoenician contributions (including the library of Carthage, which they took back with them to stop the Romans from burning it) until its conquest by Rome soon after Carthage. Under the Romans, North Africa was forced to become mainly a place to grow grain to supply Rome's vast demand; however, several famous Latin writers, such as Apuleius and St Augustine, still emerged from Algeria at the time. After the Roman empire became Christian, the area became a stronghold of Donatism, a Christian "heresy" which opposed the incorporation of the religion into the state's power structures, and the compromises made with former apostates; St Augustine and Tertullian's main works were written against this doctrine. When the empire disintegrated, the area was taken by the Vandals.
(To be continued soon...)
Algeria is a country in North Africa, between Morocco and Tunisia, with about 30 million inhabitants. Most of them speak the local dialect of Arabic, and Arabic is the official language; about a fifth, mainly in Kabylie and the Aures, speak various dialects of Berber, and - conveniently for some travellers - most people also learn some French at school (though bear in mind, the same could be said of England... ) The country is mostly desert in the south, but most Algerians don't think of it that way because nobody much lives in the desert; north of the Atlas Mountains, it's all your usual Mediterranean climate, ie a lot like Greece or the south of France. The main towns are Algiers, Oran, and Constantine (Arabic al-Jaza'ir, Wahran, and Qasantina.) A bit less than half the people live in the countryside; the rest live in the cities, which are on the whole overcrowded and have soaring property prices. Officially, a third of the working-age population are unemployed - in reality, it's probably over half - and over a third of the population are under 18, which explains a lot of the problems the country faces; the economy is a shambles, as a result of the unbeatable combination of decades of state administration, a corrupt privatisation process, and a typically incompetent World Bank reforms plan. The country imports most of its food, despite extensive fertile land, and mainly exports oil and gas from the Sahara.
Politics:
The most salient fact for the traveller to bear in mind is: don't! The brutal conflict with armed Islamist groups who took to the hills when their election victory was denied in 1992 has mostly calmed down, except in certain areas, but their threat to kill all foreigners in the country still stands; there is also widespread rioting particularly in Kabylie, east of the capital, related partly to demands for official recognition of their Berber language, but mainly to the state of the economy and government.
In response to general dissatisfaction with President Chadli Bendjedid's incompetent rule, there was an election in 1992, which an Islamist party, the FIS (Front for Islamic Salvation) won; the military's reaction was to oust Chadli, cancel the elections and jail the party leaders (and anyone with a beard, the not entirely inaccurate joke goes.) Not being especially pleased with this, many FIS members took to the hills, forming an army known first as the MIA (Armed Islamic Movement), then later as the AIS (Army for Islamic Salvation); other radical Islamic groups which got no support from the elections also seized the opportunity, forming a shadowy organization with many factions known as the GIA, and the many criminals released from jail early in order to accomodate all the FIS members being jailed also often headed for the hills to set up what amounts to bandit gangs, hoping not to be noticed in the general unrest. The next few years' history is murky and violent. The military asked in a new president, Boudiaf, who had spent the past thirty years or so in exile, and was thus widely respected as being untarred by the regime's corruption; he was assassinated by one of his guards. No one claimed the credit for it; the military accused the Islamists, the Islamists accused the military. The generals who took power for the next two years are difficult to summarize; they are said to be divided into two rough factions, the "moderates", who have no particular commitment to secularism as long as they can keep their position, and sometimes consider negotiation, and "eradicationists", whose policy towards the Islamists is obvious, and who are supposed to consist mainly of colonial-era members of the French army; the country's newspapers side with one or the other depending on which general has most influence over their owners (or owns them.) The Islamist groups then began assassinating journalists, secularists, policemen, and foreigners in the country, provoking a second exodus (a large number of FIS supporters and other dissidents fled the country in 1992.)
By about '94, there were also a substantial number of brutal massacres of whole villages, almost certainly done by the GIA. Many of these massacres, including the largest, took place in villages which had voted overwhelmingly FIS; some have suggested that it was deliberately targeting FIS supporters for not being sufficiently fundamentalist, and certainly the AIS split with it about then. Most of these villages were located next to active army bases, which did nothing to defend them (officially, because the bases were insufficiently well armed; unofficially, on the grounds that the villagers were FIS supporters.) The AIS was increasingly marginalized over this period, and eventually declared a unilateral ceasefire; by now, it is essentially inactive. The GIA itself splintered over the issue - many of its members were shocked by the massacres, and accused their instigators of having been coopted by the military or of some other treachery - and was mostly reduced to the various isolated armies currently operating under various names and leaders (for instance, the GSPC, which was recently claimed to be an al-Qaeda affiliate), and the bandit gangs mentioned above.
After five years of military rule, a new round of elections were held, in which the FIS was not allowed to participate; Liamine Zeroual - the person the military appointed as president for most of the coup period, and who was administering the elections - won that one, for some reason. In 1999, another round of elections were held (same rules); this was won by the current president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, when all the other parties accused the authorities of planned fraud and decided to withdraw their candidates. This president appears to be a master of half-compromises that quiet the opposition groups without actually answering their demands; under his "Civil Harmony Act", most of the armed groups' members were allowed to surrender without penalties and return to civil life (which has not ended the fighting, but very much quietened it, thank God, despite not giving the armed groups any of their political demands), and his current efforts to declare Berber (Tamazight) a "national language" but not an official language, thus providing a symbolic victory for the Berber rioters without actually giving the language any place in the public sphere or answering their economic demands, seem calculated to repeat the trick with them. The biq question is how long he can maintain the balancing act without falling afoul of the military - who still retain the real power - for making too large concessions.
History:
Algerian recorded history starts over 2500 years ago with the arrival of the Phoenicians; they found the country inhabited already by Berbers, then known as Numidians or Gaetulians. Soon, the Berbers developed their own kingdoms in response to the threat of Rome and the weakness of Carthage, and Numidia developed a flourishing culture, with a lot of Phoenician contributions (including the library of Carthage, which they took back with them to stop the Romans from burning it) until its conquest by Rome soon after Carthage. Under the Romans, North Africa was forced to become mainly a place to grow grain to supply Rome's vast demand; however, several famous Latin writers, such as Apuleius and St Augustine, still emerged from Algeria at the time. After the Roman empire became Christian, the area became a stronghold of Donatism, a Christian "heresy" which opposed the incorporation of the religion into the state's power structures, and the compromises made with former apostates; St Augustine and Tertullian's main works were written against this doctrine. When the empire disintegrated, the area was taken by the Vandals.
(To be continued soon...)
