Mali: Here we go again

by Sheldon Richman

January 28, 2013

In testimony before Senate and House committees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enthusiastically endorsed increased U.S. intervention in Africa. When government officials seem incapable of learning obvious lessons from the recent past, maybe their incentive is not to learn but to keep doing the same destructive things.

President Obama’s inaugural speech contained this line, which has gone quite overlooked: “America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe. And we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad.”

That’s a recipe for perpetual war and perpetual fiscal crisis.

The latest locale for American intervention is the west African country of Mali. Aside from whatever covert activity the U.S. government may be conducting there, the American role is said to consist of logistical support for France, Mali’s former colonial overlord, which has intervened militarily to defend a central corrupt government. (The deadly hostage-takings in Algeria may have been retaliation for France’s action.) As the New York Times reports, “The Pentagon is airlifting a French battalion to join the fight in Mali against Islamist militants, Pentagon and administration officials said.” Ominously, the Times adds, “The airlift expands the involvement of the United States in support of a NATO ally, but officials stressed that the American military footprint on the ground in Mali would remain small.” That is, there’s already an American footprint on the ground.

Such is how quagmires begin.

What’s going on in Mali that requires U.S. meddling? It’s a complicated and murky story that goes back to the repression of the separatist ethnic group, the Tuaregs, in northern Mali and, writes Jeremy Keenan, the Algerian government’s effort after Sept. 11, 2001, to concoct a “terrorist threat” to motivate the U.S. government to pay for modernization of its army. Seeing Africa as a rich source of oil, gas, and other resources, the Bush administration was happy to get involved in the region. (Got to keep the Chinese away.)

While the Obama administration sounds alarms about al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), reporter Patrick Cockburn notes that


Tuareg nationalist insurgency, not radical Islam, is at the heart of the crisis in Mali. What, for instance, are AQIM doing in northern Mali, which has never in the past been a bastion for fundamentalists? AQIM is in origin an Algerian movement that emerged from the civil war of the 1990s. Formed in 1998, its members moved to northern Mali in 2003, where the government saw it as a counterbalance to Tuareg separatists.…

The strange truth is that it was the Malian government which, over the last 10 years, tolerated AQIM in northern Mali and allowed it to operate, taking a share in the profits of its kidnapping and drug-running operations. International military aid for use against al-Qa’ida was diverted for use against the Tuareg.

A key precursor to the latest episode was the 2011 U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya, which overthrew the government of Muammar Qaddafi and provided a cornucopia of weapons. When the regime-change operation ended, well-armed Tuaregs, who had fought for Qaddafi, returned to northern Mali to pursue their separatist aims. After expelling the central government’s army, they declared independence last April, after a coup overthrew the government in Bamako. Tuaregs also live in neighbouring Algeria, Niger, Libya, and Burkina Faso, and a successful separatist movement in Mali could spread throughout the region, which those countries would abhor.

The Tuareg movement, Keenan writes, was co-opted by jihadists linked to the Algerian intelligence service, and these jihadists have imposed sharia law and have committed horrendous violence. Thus, he wrote, “Washington’s Global War on Terror has come home to roost for the peoples of the Sahara.”

These events now provide the excuse for the latest Western intervention. When will it end?

The lesson is clear: Internationalizing local, often ethnic, conflicts has consequences that furnish the pretext for further intervention. Inevitably, innocents are killed, while the American power elite pursues its geopolitical aims and the military-industrial complex prospers.

Moreover, intervention — once again on behalf of a corrupt and brutal government — makes enemies of those who would otherwise present no threat to the American people. Nothing helps jihadi recruitment like Western occupation.

As a cover for imperialism, the war on terror has worn thin.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/mali-here-we-go-again/

The Ugly Truth About Algeria

John R. Schindler | July 10, 2012

Despite not really being in the news, Algeria still appears in the Western media intermittently. As the Maghreb’s last dictatorship, the recent wave of regime change and democratization has passed this important country by, at least so far. Algeria is the key state in Northwest Africa—by virtue of its size, position, natural wealth and regional influence—yet has missed out on the trend that has overtaken so much of the Arab world for the past two years. It remains notable that Algeria’s bloody civil war, which began twenty years ago, never really ended. And now with the help of Al Qaeda, the conflict may be spreading across the Sahel region.

Events in Algeria have long been underreported in the U.S. and Western media (with the exception of France), and there is a general lack of understanding of what ails the country. Certainly the terrible fratricide there in the 1990s got little coverage in Western media, despite the fact that it probably claimed twice as many lives as the Bosnian conflict, which ran concurrently and received nonstop Western attention.

Algeria’s nightmare years of 1993–1997 were a focus of the international human-rights community, which correctly pointed out that the conduct of the government was hardly better than that of Islamist terrorists trying to take over the country. But since 9/11, the Algerian narrative has been subsumed into the West’s counterterrorism effort, to the extent it is reported at all. Enormous poverty, inequality, and the regime’s rapacious and brutal conduct get little attention from Western experts, who seem more interested in speculating about potential Al Qaeda attacks in the Maghreb.

The Real Story

The official story is straightforward. Two decades ago, the military-led junta, which had governed the country since independence from France in 1962, cancelled a democratic election that likely would have brought Islamists to power, and mujahidin took up arms against the secular regime. By 1993, the supremely violent Armed Islamic Group (GIA) emerged as the implacable foe of the regime and the local Al Qaeda affiliate. Although GIA was not the only Islamist resistance group in the country, it was unquestionably the bloodiest. It conducted brutal attacks not just in Algeria but in Europe as well, including a wave of bombings in Paris in the summer of 1995, remembered by terrorism gurus as Al Qaeda’s first attacks on the West. Failing to achieve victory, GIA fell into mass murder, slaughtering Algerian civilians by the hundreds, causing Al Qaeda to break ties with the group in early 1997. Largely killed off by the Algerian security forces, by 1998 the remnants of GIA had coalesced into the GSPC, a far smaller group which posed no serious threat to the regime and spent most of its time on kidnappings and robberies.

In 2006, after almost a decade hiatus, Al Qaeda reinitiated Algerian mujahidin into its ranks, renaming the local franchise Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). While AQIM has been more active in terrorism than the GSPC, it also seems more like an armed gang than a bona fide jihadist group. Over the last few years, AQIM’s reach has extended across the Maghreb and into the Sahel, leading some jihad-watchers to posit that it constitutes a threat to the region, a view shared by many in the U.S. government.

While this account is not entirely inaccurate, it leaves out so many important details as to be essentially false. Above all, it omits the role of the Algerian regime in counterterrorism, which has been effective at defeating the jihad even though its methods would make most Westerners shudder. The lead agency in the fight against the Algerian mujahidin has been the country’s military intelligence service, the feared DRS. With a reputation for ruthlessness and efficiency second to none in the Arab world, the DRS is arguably the world’s most effective intelligence service when it comes to fighting Al Qaeda; it is also probably the most cold-blooded. The DRS can be considered the backbone of the military-led junta. General Mohamed Mediene has headed the DRS since 1990, making him the longest-serving intelligence boss in world history—and few doubt that he is the most powerful man in the country.

Trained by the KGB and schooled in the hard fight for independence, Algerian spies have used tactics against homegrown extremists reminiscent of a sinister B-grade movie. Several high-ranking DRS officers have explained what they did to defeat the mujahidin, including violating human rights on an industrial scale, but hardly anyone outside France seems to have noticed.

Simply put, GIA was the creation of the DRS; using proven Soviet methods of penetration and provocation, the agency assembled it to discredit the extremists. Much of GIA’s leadership consisted of DRS agents, who drove the group into the dead end of mass murder, a ruthless tactic that thoroughly discredited GIA Islamists among nearly all Algerians. Most of its major operations were the handiwork of the DRS, including the 1995 wave of bombings in France. Some of the most notorious massacres of civilians were perpetrated by military special units masquerading as mujahidin, or by GIA squads under DRS control. Having driven GIA into the ground by the late 1990s, DRS has continued to infiltrate and influence Islamist groups in the country. To what extent the local Al Qaeda affiliate is secretly controlled by the military—as GIA and GSPC were—is an open question, but its recent record suggests that DRS influence over any Algerian extremist group is considerable.

U.S. Intel Failure?

These realities, understood by Algerians, are little known in the West, particularly in the United States. While French senior officials have hinted they have been wise to DRS games for many years, a similar understanding seems altogether lacking in the Pentagon or the U.S. intelligence community, which have partnered with Algeria in the fight against Al Qaeda since the 1990s. Whether they really are ignorant or simply do not want to know the sordid details is an open and important question.

To be fair to those inside the Beltway, outside “terrorism experts” are just as credulous about Algeria’s “official story,” and an entire subindustry has arisen in recent years that seeks to explain Algeria and its violent homegrown jihad without any reference to basic realities inside the country.

Yet Algeria’s neighbors, who fear the country’s outsized influence in Northwest Africa, are appropriately skeptical of the Algiers-created narrative that portrays AQIM as a major threat to regional stability. They reject the idea that extremists can be combated only by greater Algerian involvement in regional affairs that is implicitly supported by the United States. African officials are known to drop unsubtle hints that AQIM is not quite what it seems to be and ought to be viewed within the broader context of Algerian foreign policy. In one of the rare cases where such doubts were aired openly, Mali’s head of state security, who is charged with keeping Algerian mujahidin out of his country, told the press in June 2009 that “at the heart of AQIM is the DRS.” Shortly thereafter, he was shot dead at home by “unknown gunmen.”

U.S. interest in the Sahel has only grown in recent years, roughly in tandem with the alleged rise of AQIM in the region. It is no coincidence that the U.S. Army is aligning a combat brigade with U.S. Africa Command—which heretofore has had no combat units permanently assigned to it—and the Pentagon’s interest in the region is rising fast. “Terrorist elements around the world go to the areas they think has the least resistance,” explained army chief of staff General Ray Odierno, “and right now, you could argue that’s Africa.”

While Al Qaeda unquestionably has a great deal of interest in the Maghreb, and would surely like to see the Algerian junta fall and be replaced by a Salafi regime bent on rebuilding the imaginary caliphate, the chances of this outcome are virtually nil. DRS methods, plus the usual extremist tone-deafness, have successfully soured the vast majority of Algerians on the jihadist message. While most Algerians want an end to what they simply call le pouvoir (“the power”), the corrupt military elite that has run the country since France left in 1962, few pine for any sort of Islamist dictatorship.

Unsolved Mystery

Last weekend, Algeria celebrated fifty years of independence. But for most Algerians, buffeted by poverty, instability, corruption and war, there is little to celebrate. Mid-May parliamentary elections resulted in a surprising win for the junta, leading to accusations of fraud as well as despair for those hoping for change via the ballot box. It is clear that the military has no intention to bowing to any sort of peaceful regime change, but infighting among the elite may undo the system. When the junta falls, as someday it surely will, the change will rock those who have waged Algeria’s dirty war against terrorism. The effects on the junta’s foreign supporters, who have turned a blind eye to massive human-rights abuses in the name of counterterrorism, will be serious too.

It is time for the U.S. government to follow the lead of human-rights groups: Washington should start asking important questions about what Algiers has really been up to since 1992, and to what extent the junta and the DRS have been engaged in mass repression and state terrorism under the guise of fighting Al Qaeda—all possibly with U.S. assistance. The saga of Algeria over the last twenty years constitutes “one big murder mystery,” said one of the few writers in the Anglosphere to take notice. It’s time to get to the bottom of it.

John R. Schindler is professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College as well as chair of the Partnership for Peace’s Combating Terrorism Working Group. He is a former counterintelligence officer with the National Security Agency. The views expressed here are entirely his own.

Source: http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-ugly-truth-about-algeria-7146?page=2

Algeria's election was a fraud

If any hopes for democracy remained for the country, widespread election fraud have quashed them. Last Modified: 15 May 2012 19:05

Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia has described revolutions of Arab Spring as a 'plague' [EPA]

London, United Kingdom - The results of Algeria's May 10 legislative elections have been met with such fury by Algerians that some analysts believe that these will be the last elections held under the current regime. If there were any hopes for democracy still remaining in the country, these elections snuffed them out. Allegations of electoral fraud have been widespread since the government announced on May 11 that the turnout was 42.9 per cent, with the government's ruling parties winning an overwhelming majority of the votes. The Green Alliance of Islamist parties accused the government of "perpetrating widespread fraud". Similar allegations were made by the secular Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD). The Algerian National Front said it would challenge the results in the constitutional court over what party leader Moussa Touati called "blatant fraud", while Ali Laskri, leader of the opposition Socialist Front Forces (FFS), said that Thursday's vote "was riddled with irregularities". Abderrazak Mukri, a spokesman for the Alliance, said that the results given by the Interior Ministry differ dramatically from those seen by the Alliance's observers. He told reporters: "There is a process of fraud on a centralised level to change the results that is putting the country in danger. … We are not responsible for what could happen." Electoral fraud by Algeria's government is normal practice and expected. All elections since 1992, when the regime annulled Algeria's only truly democratic elections, have been rigged. What seems to have incensed Algerians about these latest elections is the scale and audacity of the fraud, both in the fabrication of the turnout figure and in the distribution of the votes. Fabrication When I forecast the election result on May 9, I said that the government would come up with a much higher turnout. The "official" figure is usually put about three times higher than the "real" turnout. I predicted that the real turnout on May 10 would be in the range of 10-15 per cent, and that the official turnout figure would be 46 per cent (in the range of 40-50 per cent). As it was, the turnout was given as 42.9 per cent. The government would like to have given a figure that could have been rounded up to "about half", hence my forecast of 46 per cent. However, going much higher than 42.9 per cent on such a low real turnout could well have triggered demonstrations and violence. Parliamentary elections in Algeria On the other hand, a figure below 40 per cent would be interpreted as an admission of failure. Thus, a figure in the lower 40s was deemed sufficiently low to avoid unrest, but sufficient to enable the government to claim "success" on the grounds that 42.9 per cent is an improvement on the 2007 turnout of 37 per cent. What was the "real" turnout? On the basis of the government's usual threefold inflation of turnout, the real turnout figure would be 14.3 per cent. In fact, as more information from observers on the ground becomes available, it looks as if a figure of around 15 per cent might be about right. Professor Abdulali Rezaki of Algiers University was quoted as saying that he thought 85 per cent of voters would boycott the elections, while the RCD said the real turnout "did not exceed 18 per cent". Reports from around the country indicate that the vast majority of Algerians stayed away from polling stations in response to the calls of the FIS, AQIM, RCD, the Rachad Movement and countless youth, human rights, trade unions and other civil society organisations - in addition to many prominent personalities - to abstain. For example, a Reuters reporter stood for 45 minutes outside a polling station in Bab El Oued (Algiers) without seeing a single voter enter. The agency also reported that election officers at two other polling stations in the capital had said that about ten per cent of those registered to vote had shown up by mid-afternoon. At Laghouat, on the northern fringe of the Sahara, where the interior ministry gave the turnout figure at 4pm as 38 per cent, local observers, who had been keeping a close watch on the town's polling stations, gave the figure at that time as five per cent. Similar reports have been coming in from all over the country. In addition to this abstention, there are reports that 20-22 per cent of ballot forms were blank or despoiled. I believe that most of these were cast by people who did not want to vote but felt frightened into doing so. If these blank votes are added to the abstention, then the real vote reduces to just 11-12 per cent. Doctoring vote distribution The government's second fraud was to doctor the distribution of votes between parties. With the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) - which would have won the annulled 1992 election - banned from participating in these elections, it was widely believed that other Islamist parties, headed by the "Green Alliance" of Bouguerra Soltani's Movement of Society Peace (MSP), the al-Nahda and al-Islaf parties and followed by Abdallah Djaballah's Front for Justice and Development (FJD), would garnish the largest share of votes. They would be followed by the government's Front de Liberation National (FLN), with the Rassemblement National Démocratique (RND) of the highly unpopular Prime Minister, Ahmed Ouyahia, unlikely to get more than one or two per cent of the vote. Unofficial figures released by the Alliance in mid-afternoon were in line with this prediction. The FLN was heading for about 100 seats in the new 462-seat Assembly, with the Green Alliance close behind. The official results, released the next day, were met with incredulity and anger. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's FLN had won 220, or 47.6 per cent, of the seats, a considerable improvement on its position in the outgoing National Assembly, while the RND came second with 69 seats (14.7 per cent), giving the two government parties a massive 62.3 per cent domination of the Assembly. The Islamist parties, in contrast, managed only 59 seats between them. The Alliance won 10.4 per cent of the vote and 48 seats, while the early front-runner, Abdallah Djaballah's FJD, won a paltry 1.5 per cent and seven seats. Even FLN supporters found these figures hard to believe. One reason for that is because the party had been in a state of intense internal fighting for the previous few months. Many of its offices had closed and most of its campaign rallies had been reduced or cancelled in the face of public resentment and disinterest. Many FLN members were of the view that the party was "finished" and that it would be lucky to pick up 20 per cent of the vote. In that light, 47.6 per cent seems beyond belief. They, too, know that this figure has been manipulated. The second reason for incredulity at the FLN vote is simply a matter of political demography. With 21,664,345 registered voters, the government's figures mean that 9.29 million people voted, a figure which not only defies observations at polling stations, but means that 4.42 million of them voted for the FLN. If we add in the RND, then it means that 5.79 million Algerians voted for the two ruling government parties, both of which are resented and hated by the vast majority of citizens. If we reduce this figure by 20 per cent to take account of the spoiled ballots, we are still left with 4.63 million Algerians voting for a government that they are desperately keen to replace. Such a figure makes no sense. The mechanics of fraud Finally, there is the overwhelming question of how such electoral fraud could have taken place when the country, according to the government's version of events, was awash with foreign observers. The obvious point is that it is absolutely impossible for some 500 foreign observers to keep an eye on 48,546 polling stations. Neither can opposition party observers cover this number of stations. The opportunity for ballot stuffing and other irregularities, especially in remote areas, is immense. In addition, the system of "vote par procuration", whereby an estimated 600,000 - 700,000 people, mostly in the police, gendarmerie, military and administrative services, can have their votes cast for them by a designated family relative, officer or official, allows for substantial multiple voting. Moreover, with the Algerian government refusing to make the electoral roll accessible to foreign observer missions, it is impossible for them to check such irregularities even if they had the resources to do so. Reactions from the government The government's reaction to these results has been one of arrogant triumphalism, encapsulated in El Moudjahid's headline: "If there's a winner on this Algerian Spring day, it's undoubtedly the people." It went on to say: "In their millions, Algerians projected a good image of democracy, proving to the world that they are not disconnected from political life." Is real change taking effect in Algeria? Horizons, another pro-government newspaper, said the vote showed an "appeased and reconciled Algeria ... diametrically opposed to those who wreak chaos and support interference". In the run-up to the election, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia described the so-called Arab Spring as a "plague", which, he said, had resulted in "the colonisation of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the partition of Sudan and the weakening of Egypt". Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia said that the "remarkable" turnout of 42.9 per cent confirmed Algeria's democratic credentials. He explained the large vote for the FLN as a sign that Algerians wanted the security of the government rather than "change", and that they had seen through "the false claims of the Islamists". Foreign reaction Algerians can draw little comfort from the reactions of Algeria's Western and Arab allies, whose support for Algeria since 1992 has been more about maintaining the present regime in power than encouraging democracy. The Arab League's 132-member observer mission said the election was "transparent, credible and well-organised", while the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation praised the "successful and democratic elections... held in an organised, transparent and peaceful manner". Neither recorded any irregularities. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hailed Algeria's elections as "a welcome step in Algeria's progress toward democratic reform", while Britain's Foreign Secretary, William Hague, congratulated the people of Algeria "on the conduct of the elections and the progress they represent". Jose Ignacio Salafranca, head of the EU observer mission said that the vote was satisfactory and that "citizens were, in general, able to truly exercise their right to vote". Based on these readings, Algerians clearly have nothing to worry about. Jeremy Keenan is a professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/201251482813133513.html

Is Algeria immune to the 'Arab Spring'?

As the old ruling party wins a new parliamentary majority, we ask if change has bypassed Algeria. Inside Story Last Modified: 14 May 2012 11:15 inShare14 Email Print Share Feedback

Algeria's ruling National Liberation Front won almost half of the 462 seats in the Algerian parliament in Thursday's parliamentary elections. "[In terms of] reforms I think the Algerian authorities have introduced these kinds of reforms not necessarily to implement a democratic transition but it was basically window-dressing …." - Youcef Bouandel, an international affairs professor at Qatar University But will this new majority for the old ruling party mean that Algeria is now immune to the 'Arab Spring'? While the National Liberation Front - which has ruled Algeria since independence from France in the early 1960s - won 220 seats, the National Democratic Rally came second with 68 seats in the National People's Assembly. The Green Alliance - which had been widely predicted to do well - secured 48 seats. That is just three-quarters of the number it won in the last elections in 2007 - bucking the trend that has seen religious parties gain power across North Africa after the 'Arab Spring'. The Green Alliance says the elections were rigged to keep it out of power in a country that has experienced decades of violence between radical groups and government security forces. But Western countries and international monitors have largely praised the vote as a step in the right direction. Hanafi Wajih, the head of the Arab League's observer mission, said: "The election was free and transparent and the Algerian people have expressed their choice without coercion." "Unfortunately the good Algeria for the West is a weak Algeria and having it weak is by sponsoring diplomatically, helping politically, supporting even militarily and by other means, this regime." - Mohamed Larbi Zitout, the former Algerian deputy ambassador to Libya Jose Ignacio Salafranca, the EU mission's monitor-in-chief, noted some shortcomings but said: "There were more transparency criteria than in previous elections." And Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, praised the vote and, in particular, the high number of women elected as "a welcome step in Algeria's progress toward democratic reform". Prior to the elections, the government had portrayed the parliamentary contest as Algeria's 'Spring' - inviting 500 international observers and promising that the vote would be the freest in 20 years. But has the spirit of change witnessed in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East bypassed Algeria? Will the ruling party's success now make it less likely to introduce change? And has the government, as the opposition insists, missed an unprecedented opportunity for a peaceful political transition to democracy? Joining Inside Story, with presenter Stephen Cole, to discuss these issues are: Mohamed Larbi Zitout, the former Algerian deputy ambassador to Libya; Youcef Bouandel, a professor of International Affairs at Qatar University; and Malek Serrai, an international economist and former economic adviser to the Algerian president and a former regional adviser on international finance and trade for the UN. "We dislike what happened in Libya and we refuse to follow because we had our problem in 1998 … we already lost 200,000 people [in the civil war] we cannot again go through this kind of problem. We are really looking for security and stability." Malek Serrai, an international economist ALGERIA ELECTION: The ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) party won 220 of 462 seats in parliament It is the country's first election since the Arab Spring swept the region An estimated 25,800 candidates competed for the parliamentary seats There were 44 parties, 21 of them newly created, who campaigned for seats Voters cast their ballots at more than 48,000 polling stations An alliance of conservative parties only won 66 seats in parliament Algeria's interior ministry reported a 42 per cent voter turnout Officials said the vote was the most transparent ever and Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president, described it as the dawn of a new era About 500 foreign election observers including from the EU, the African Union and the Arab League monitored the vote http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2012/05/201251465357500445.html